Zionist Conspiracy

 

 

Shimon Peres writes a Letter to the Russian President

April 1, 2010

 

(forwarded to the world by Steven Plaut)

 

Dear Mr. President,

My heartfelt sympathies to you and the Russian for the Moscow this week.

But we must really speak about how to deal with the atrocities and protests, including the attacks on Moscow, by these misunderstood Islamic activists.  Mister President, I have a great deal of experience in dealing successfully with terrorism and this is why I wish to come to your assistance.

The first thing you must realize is that one can only make peace with one's enemies.  With one's friends there is no need to make peace.  There is no military solution to the problems of terrorism, and this is why you must seek a diplomatic solution.  "No Justice, No Peace," as they say.  You must invite the leaders of this Islamic activist organization to the Kremlin to meet with you and perhaps tour Red Square. You must learn to feel their pain and understand their needs.  You must offer to turn a third of your territory over to them so that these stateless Moslems can have their own state.  I have no doubt the Muslim world will applaud your efforts.

You must meet the demands of the Chechen protesters in full.  In addition, you must offer them Internet web services and five-star tourist hotels in exchange for their promising to abandon violence.  After all, that is how we turned Yasser Arafat into a peace partner!  You see, military force serves no role any more.  It is passé.  It is archaic.  Today, economic interests dominate the world and the Islamist activists of the earth will surely make peace in exchange for some profits from participating in global trade.

The attacks on the Moscow metro came because you have been insufficiently sensitive in understanding the needs of Chechen Moslems. You took their fundamentalist rhetoric at face value, whereas we in Israel know that all this rhetoric is empty and in fact these people simply want peace.  Sure, Moslem fundamentalists praise Hitler and celebrate atrocities, but what is it that they really want?  You must negotiate even while under armed attack; your conditioning negotiations on an end to violence is a no-win situation.  It will simply extend the bloodshed!

You have been trying to rule over others and failed to be sensitive to The Other. You have illegal settlements that you have yet to remove from the Caucasus and the Black Sea area.  You must put your own house in order, and eliminate inequality and injustice inside Russia, and then the terrorists will no longer target you.

The key is to build a New Middle Eurasia, one in which everyone is so busy with the important matter of development tourism and investments and hi-technology that they have no time to pursue violence.  The era of war is finished.

Moreover, if you strike at the perpetrators of the Moscow unrest/protests and their supporters, you will simply extend and enlarge the cycle of violence.  Your bombs will no doubt injure some innocent children and civilians alongside any terrorist activists you strike, and that will simply enrage the rest of the world and make the victims seek revenge. Your armed attacks against these militants and activists will cause them to hate the Russians and drive the separatists to embrace terrorism.  Moreover, if you refuse to negotiate with the Chechen separatists, then their leader will be toppled and a really violent militant and fanatic will take his place.  In that case, you will have lost the window of opportunity to make peace.  Begin by declaring a unilateral ceasefire!

Mister President, blessed is the peacemaker.  Remember Tolstoy.  The entire world will support you and congratulate you if you respond to these horrific attacks by disarming Russia and opening dialogue with the terror activists.  All we are saying is give peace a chance. Yitzhak Rabin would have approved. Yes, chaver, what you need is shalom, salaam, peace. You will be cheered and awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in recognition.  Do not allow yourself to be drawn into the gutter of violence. Violence never achieves anything.  History is no lesson.  History is the dead past.

End the cycle of violence. Show restraint. Forgo the juvenile impulse to avenge.

Follow my example! Provide the Chechen bombers with anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles, so that they can battle against the true radicals and fanatics. And they will do so with no ACLU or Supreme Court to restrain them.

Demonstrate your humanity by paying pensions to any widows and orphans of the terrorist who blew up the trains.

Mister President, the proof is in the pudding.  My own peace policies have eliminated war and bloodshed and terror from the Middle East.  We no longer have terrorists to deal with in the Levant, only peace partners.  If you follow in my footsteps, you can achieve the same lofty goals.

Peacefully yours,

Shimon Peres, Peacemaker-at-Large

 

 

 

1.  The latest PC Paganism:  "Transgendered" Passover:  http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/20844/

 

 

2.  Something for you to think about.  In Persian, the language of Iran, the word "Obama," pronounced closer to O-baw-ma, means "He is with us!"

 

3.  A Tale of Two Beggars:

http://www.jewishpressads.com/pageroute.do/38921

 

A Tale of Two Beggars

By: Steven Plaut

Date: Tuesday, April 14 2009

Once upon a time, somewhere in the steppes of Eastern Europe, in the Pale that contained many a Jewish village, there roamed two beggars. One of the hobos was a Jew, the other a gentile.

The two transients were friends and far too lazy to hold any job or do any real work. So they wondered carefree, aimlessly and uselessly from village to village, begging for food, sometimes collecting discarded things to sell, here and there stealing some eggs or fruits off farm trees. It was a hard life and they often found themselves on the brink of starvation.

One day, as the two were looking for someone from whom they could shnorr some food, they came upon a shtetl whose residents were all buzzing about, hurrying, scouring pots and pans, cleaning their homes and cooking.

The Jewish beggar suddenly realized it was but a few hours before Passover was to begin.

"We have extraordinary good luck today," he said to his comrade. "Tonight begins Passover, a Jewish holiday. Indeed, it is in many ways the happiest holiday of the year, with mountains of food and drink. So here is my plan. Let us come into the village just before evening. We will stand in the back of the synagogue. We will tell them that you and I are both Jewish wanderers, far from home, traveling to do some trading and seek our fortunes. And the local Jews will invite us to the most wonderful banquet of our lives!"

Just as the Jewish beggar had predicted, the plan went off like clockwork. The locals competed with one another to see who would have the honor of hosting one of the beggars at his own Passover Seder. After the evening prayers, the Jewish beggar went off to feast with one family, while his gentile friend, pretending to be Jewish, went off to dine and celebrate with another family.

The gentile beggar's mouth was already watering with the thought of the wonderful delicacies he was about to devour. His belly was grumbling with anticipation. But things were not going the way he had expected.

His hosts ushered him into a chair at a large table set with candles and many empty dishes.

In the center of the table he saw nothing but some pathetic hard-boiled eggs, a few leaves, and a single small shank bone of meat.

"This is for the entire assembly?" he thought. Then, instead of pouncing on the food, his host poured everyone a single tiny cup of wine.

Things just got worse. The hosts finished drinking their wine and offered everyone at the table a few small leaves to nibble. Not even enough to satisfy a rabbit! And they even insisted he dip these into an awful salty solution, which only made him more thirsty and desperate to drink some real grog. Then, to celebrate this "meal," they broke into song and laughter, which went on for a whole hour.

When he was expecting them to serve dessert, they handed him instead a piece of bread, but one unlike anything he had ever seen before. It was dry, evidently having been left out in the sun for a week, and barely resembled real bread. It was hard and it crackled when he chewed on it. Moreover, it was served plain, with no oil or molasses or fat.

"This is the feast my friend promised me?" the beggar said to himself. "This is the mountain of food these Jews eat to celebrate their happiest holiday?"

And just imagine his horror at what came next. Each of the people at the table was given the most bitter and disgusting glob of horseradish, something he would never ordinarily eat even if he were famished. They even blessed God when they swallowed that horrid-smelling and evil-tasting slop!

Convinced the "meal" was over, the beggar excused himself, saying he was needed elsewhere with great urgency, and left his hosts with an apology. In a rage, he wandered the streets of the village, looking for his Jewish friend and intending to thrash him and scream at him for his empty promise of a full stomach and a glorious meal.

Four hours later, he finally found his Jewish friend. The Jewish beggar was wandering through the alleys, shirt buttons popping, belly overfull, picking at his teeth and belching his pleasure. His gentile friend was so weak with hunger that he was unable even to pummel his friend. The Jewish beggar examined his starving comrade with surprise.

"Some feast you promised me!" grumbled the non-Jewish beggar. And then he told the Jewish beggar what had happened, how his hosts had offered him a thimble of wine, less than a handful of pathetic leaves in brine, a stale piece of bread of some sort with nothing on it, and some horrid bitter glob.

"At that point I decided enough is enough," he explained, "and I got up and left."

The Jewish beggar could not control his laughter. "You do not understand," he said. "Those were simply the earliest preliminaries of the feast. You snatched hunger from out of the horn of plenty! Had you stuck things out for just a few more minutes, you would have been served the most sumptuous feast of your life, a meal for kings, food that would have sufficed you for a whole week of wanderings. But, you see, you abandoned hope only a few moments too soon. Because you were impatient, you spoiled everything."

* * *

The story of the two beggars is neither a fairy tale nor for children. The gentile beggar in the story, the one who spoiled everything because of his own ignorance and impatience, is the state of Israel.

Like the beggar who did not understand where he was or what was going on, the state of Israel was on the verge of entering the most wonderful, prosperous and liberated period of its existence in the early 1990s.

Had it listened to the Jewish beggar, all would have been well. Had it found patience and stamina to stick things out for just a little longer, it would have achieved its deepest desires and fulfilled its strongest yearnings.

By 1990, the first Palestinian intifada had been put down, suppressed by force of Israeli arms. The dimensions of Palestinian violence were dropping each month. It would likely have ended altogether had Israel used even more vigorous force against it.

In fact, Israelis who felt Israel should use greater force to end the violence outnumbered by perhaps four to one those saying less force should be used. It was a landslide consensus. Israelis were in no mood to appease or capitulate.

In 1990, Palestinian terrorists were so desperate for weapons that they were reduced to concocting zip guns out of household materials and Molotov cocktails far more likely to scorch the throwers than any targets.

The best the terrorists could do in most cases was toss rocks at Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip or in parts of the West Bank, a phenomenon unpleasant but not life-threatening, and one that certainly posed no existential threat to the survival of the state. Many sections of the West Bank were fairly tranquil, including Bethlehem and Jericho. Jews could walk or ride in security in many parts of the "occupied territories," as they could in all of Israel.

The leaders of the Palestinian terrorists were off in distant Tunis, with a few others in Damascus, places from which they could do little more than pout and bluster. The world - or at least the United States - had made its peace with the Israeli position that the PLO was not an acceptable partner in any Arab-Israeli peace talks. The most the Palestinians could hope for was a limited autonomy, with no role whatsoever for the PLO.

The number of Israelis who took seriously the notion that the Palestinians deserved their own state was relatively small. Israelis were willing to treat them as the Palestinian branch of the Arab people, entitled perhaps to control their own lives and conduct their own local affairs - but only on the condition that they would eschew further violence. This was also, in essence, the formula backed by the United States.

The Israeli economy in the early 1990s was booming, riding the crest of the high-tech revolution. The country was flooded with immigrants from the nations that had comprised the Soviet empire. The standard of living in Israel had reached the levels of the middle tier of Western European countries.

While many Israeli Arabs voted for anti-Zionist parties to show their solidarity with Israel's enemies, many others did not and voted for Zionist parties while maintaining cordial relations with Jews.

Into this relative tranquility burst the Oslo "peace process," led by the ignorant beggar who did not understand that the greatest of feasts was nigh.

Oslo was based on the proposition that economic interests and consumerism had replaced military power as the determinants of international relations in the post-modern world - that armies are obsolete, as is patriotism; that appeasement of fascist terrorists is the surest path to true peace; that Israeli self-abasement is the highest form of Jewish nationalism; that cowardice is the highest form of valor; that the best way to end war is to pretend it doesn't exist.

It sought to reduce tensions with the Palestinian Arabs, who had just been defeated in their intifada, by importing the PLO leadership from Tunis and Damascus into the "occupied territories" and then allowing it to build up an army in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, bankrolled and armed by Israel itself.

Like the beggar who snatched starvation from the jaws of plentitude, the Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres succeeded in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Peres and Rabin became convinced that the most promising path to a full and permanent peace with all of Israel's neighbors lay in Israeli capitulation to Arab demands and appeasement of the planet's worst Islamofascist terrorists.

They took to lecturing the country on how the utopian state of affairs they envisioned had not yet come about because Israelis were not strongly enough desirous of it.

The Oslo era was defined by a massive assault on Israeli pride, morale and confidence by its own leaders and intellectual elites. Israeli academics wrote books and articles castigating the country for its shortcomings, both real and imagined.

"New historians" and "post-Zionists" zealously set about the task of rewriting history texts and school curricula to debunk what they regarded as pernicious Israeli propaganda, promoting instead the Arab "narrative," beginning with the Original Sin of Israel's founding.

The Israeli media, heavily leftist on nearly every level, bludgeoned the country on a daily basis, promoting the Palestinian position in editorials, op-ed columns and even ostensibly objective news stories.

This self-flagellation produced a situation in which each and every atrocity committed by Arabs was greeted with calls from the Israeli chattering classes for further concessions and appeasements by Israel. Some, including tenured extremists at the universities, went so far as to justify and celebrate Arab acts of terror as necessary to force Israelis to come to their senses and make peace on terms favored by the extremists.

The Left promoted insubordination and mutiny by Israeli soldiers, with not a few leftists endorsing boycotts of Israel by overseas anti-Semites. The Israeli press adopted the practice of overseas Israel-bashers in referring to Palestinian terrorists and suicide bombers as "activists" and "militants."

In return for its endless goodwill gestures and masochistic eagerness to placate its enemies and world opinion, Israel got a campaign of Nazi-like hatred led by the Palestinian Authority, down to and including virulent Holocaust denial accompanied by Holocaust justification (never mind the contradiction).

* * *

For 18 years now, Israel's elites have been living in a make-believe world in which Jews are to blame for nearly everything and Arabs are merely expressing "frustration" at being "mistreated" for so many years by Jews.

And the psychological war mounted by Israel's elites against national pride, dignity and self-respect - indeed against national existence - has been accompanied by a set of diplomatic policies expressing little more than self-loathing - policies that in effect allow no act of Arab violence to go unrewarded.

The Oslo and post-Oslo eras will be known in history as the period when it became evident that a great many Israelis - and nearly all the Israeli elite - had lost the will to survive as a nation.

After centuries during which Jews maintained the most militant self-assurance even while being mistreated, despised and humiliated, here were the Israelis - possessing one of the great armies of the world and a record of achievement on a variety of fronts that put far older, larger and wealthier countries to shame - abandoning all pride and promoting self-humiliation and self-destruction.

An Israel no more than two generations removed from the Holocaust was willing to hold "peace talks" with people who denied there ever was a Holocaust and who insist that Jews use the blood of gentile children to make Passover matzos.

The nation that had fought against enormous odds and won spectacular battlefield victories was acquiescing in a "peace process" that involved unilateral gestures from Israel in exchange for Arabs continuing to make war against the Jews.

Israel's leaders chose to behave like the foolish beggar in the story who had no idea of what was going on, who let his hunger get the best of him, and who stormed out of the house in irritation, just before the delights of the feast were to begin in earnest.

Because of frustration that Palestinian guttersnipes were tossing rocks at Israeli troops, Israel swapped the stone-throwers for suicide bombers exterminating hundreds of Jewish children and other civilians in Jerusalem and Haifa.

And while the events of the past decade and a half have taken the shine off the visions offered by Rabin and Peres and all the others who brought us the Oslo disaster, make no mistake: the foolish beggar is still with us.

But where is the Jewish beggar - the one who understood the rituals of the Seder and knew his heritage, the one who had the wisdom to wait patiently and achieve the delightfully bloated belly of satisfaction and prosperity?

I search, but cannot find him anywhere. Can you tell me where he's gone?

 

4.  The Two State Solution:  http://www.jewishjournal.org/index.php/story/community_forum/silly_talk/

 

5.  The Oslo Dayenu:

 

When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that Arafat would pursue peace.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that Hamas would be more of a threat to the PLO than to Israel.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that Arafat would fight the Hamas and Islamic Jihad "with no Supreme Court
or 'Betselem'" (in Rabin's immortal words).
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that terrorism would decrease.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that hostility to Jews in the Arab and the Western media would decrease.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that trade between Israel and Arab countries would flourish.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that the Palestinian Authority would be disarmed.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that the PLO would cooperate strategically with the Israel Defense Forces.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that there would be an economic peace dividend.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that Israeli Arabs would demonstrate increasing moderation due to the
"peace process".
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that the Hamas and Jihad would be persecuted and suppressed by the PLO.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that PLO arms would never again be used against Jews.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that the PLO leadership would speak in terms of peace with the Jews.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that the PLO would denounce and renounce anti-Semitism.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that the PLO would encourage normalization and daily peaceful commerce
between Arabs and Jews.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that the Palestinian Authority would be forced to spend all its energies
on resolving domestic social and economic problems.
But they were ever so wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that the Palestinian Authority would have so many internal troubles that
it would not have the time or ability to pursue confrontation with Israel.
G-d, but they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that the US would back Israel if the PLO reneged on its obligations or
displayed duplicity.
What a joke, they were so wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that the US would cease to pressure Israel to endanger its security and
fundamental interests.
But they were mega-wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that the Europeans would rush forward to support Israel.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that the Japanese and Saudis would pour money into regional investments,
including into Israel.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that the Egyptians would end all animosity towards Israel, Zionism and
Jews.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that the non-Arab Moslem countries would gush friendship for Israel.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that Arab military expenditure would drop significantly.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that Arab verbal threats against Israel would end.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that Nazi-like propaganda in Arab countries would end.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that the Israeli Left would lead the retreat from the Oslo experiment it
if proved to be not working.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that the Palestinian Authority would never behave as a tin cup Third-World
kleptocracy if granted power.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that Jews remaining in Moslem countries would see their treatment
dramatically improved.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that liberals and leftists around the world would congratulate Israel for
taking risks for peace and rush forward with goodwill and support.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that the majority of Palestinians would denounce all violence and terror.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that Israeli Arabs would exhibit moderation and increasing loyalty to the
state of Israel.
But they were wrong.
When they forced Israel to commit Oslo, the Israeli politicians assured us
that Palestinian chants of "Death to the Jews" and "Massacre the Jews"
would end.
But they were wrong.
Dayenu. Any one of these errors in judgment should have been enough to
end the career of a politician in a normal country, possibly even enough
to indict that politician and imprison him or her. But in Israel? The
politicians prepare for negotiations on the Saudi Plan and prepare for new
unilateral withdrawals from Judea and Samaria.
Dayenu.

 

 

 

Ernst Kirchweger was murdered in Vienna on March 31, 1965.  Almost 70 at the time, he had been a sailor in the Austro-Hungarian navy in World War I, and a Vienna socialist and then a communist after that.  He was stronly anti-Nazi and spent time in a concentration camp during World War II.   In 1965, he participated in a demonstration in Vienna against a notorious local anti-Semitic professor, one Taras Borodajkewycz.  During the demonstration, Kirchweger was attacked and brutalized by a Neo-Nazi thug named Gunther Kumel (with the umlauts, he spells it Günther Kümel).  Kirchweger (his last name means the weg of the church) died three days after the attack and Kumel spent ten months in prison for assault.  25,000 people attended Kirchweger's funeral.

 

So what became of the Nazi thug Gunther Kumel?   The answer is that the very same Kumel is now an active Holocaust Denier and Neo-Nazi crank, spreading his filth about the web.  Kumel  has published a few of his items in English, including  "The Myth of German Culpability," as well as web articles hailing Hitler as both a great leader and as a poor victim of persecution.  Kumel has been involved in some fire bombing incidents, and there are several entries that mention him and his violence in the German Wikipedia.

 

Three weeks ago, Kumel decided to make Rachel Corrie his personal cause.  Kumel writes sometimes for the American Neo-Nazi Holocaust Denial web site "Rense.com."  That site is run by shlock radio announcer Jeff Rense, who divides his time between Holocaust Denial and chasing UFOs.   The Rense.com web site is one of the major Neo-Nazi sites in the world.  It routinely carries articles insisting that no Jews were ever murdered at Auschwitz and that the Holocaust is all a hoax invented by Zionists.  The Rense site was until recently the favorite venue of Barry Chamish for publishing his own conspiracy pablum.  Rense features numerous ultra-anti-Semitic columnists, and it is interesting to note that many of these also write for the Far-Leftist pro-jihad Counterpunch web site.  Anti-Semites of a feather….  Rense especially loves Jewish Holocaust Deniers and he currently features British ex-Israeli crackpot, Holocaust-Denier Gilad Atzmon, on his site.

 

Three weeks ago, Kumel read about my article addressing the parents of Rachel Corrie and attacking them for their "law suit" against Israel.   He read this on a leftist Irish pro-jihad web site called Irish4Palestine.  He then crayoned his own article about this for Rense, and it ran on Rense.com, and included one of my email addresses.   I then got about 100 crank emails, most of them from subliterates insisting in misspelled pidgin that all Jews would soon be murdered and that Hitler had all the right ideas.  Kumel himself sent me 2 emails, and I responded by promising him that he would soon be sharing a cell with Ernst Zundel (the Neo-Nazi deported from Canada and now in German prison for Holocaust Denial).  Kumel stopped responding after that email.

 

Kumel's piece on Rense.com celebrating the Corrie parents and attacking me was picked up and reprinted on dozens of web sites of the Far Left, and of course also on many Arab web sites.

 

The crank emails were no worse than similar things I have been getting for many years.  The newsworthy parts of this tale include two main points:  1. the identity of a major central player in the Rachel Corrie lobby who happens to be a convicted Neo-Nazi murderer and a Hitler-worshipping crackpot;   and 2. the ease with which anti-Semitic ravings from UFO-obsessed Holocaust Denial web sites of the Nazi Right find their way onto so many leftist web sites and blogs.

 

   

 

1.  http://frontpagemag.com/2010/03/23/the-white-house-war-against-israel/

 

The White House War Against Israel

Posted By Edward Alexander On March 23, 2010 @

The decision of the Obama White House to pick a public fight with Israel over its interior ministry's fairly routine announcement of progress towards approval of the construction (some years from now) of apartments in northeast Jerusalem has by now been subjected to sharp and justified criticism for its disproportionality; its bad faith in reneging on signed agreements with Israel; its mean-spirited spitefulness; its dogged attachment to the exploded assumption that "settlements" are the cause of Arab intransigence; its desire to keep intact the possibility of an apartheid state of Palestine that would not accommodate a single Jew; and its entire indifference to the violence that its reckless statements could (and did) incite in Jerusalem.

But there is a more sinister aspect to the relentless expressions of "insult" and "offense" coming from Vice-President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and White House advisor David Axelrod. It is the invocation, undoubtedly originating in the Oval Office itself, of a long-recognized trope of anti-Semitism, a lethal mixture of the ancient blood libel and the modern conspiracy libel.

Already in July 2009, long before the current ruckus, President Obama told Jewish leaders at a White House meeting that he wanted to "change the way the Arabs see us" by putting "space" between the U. S. and Israel. More recently Biden, according to several reports, told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that

"What you're doing here [i.e., building houses for Jews in "settlements"] undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace."

In other words, Biden was accusing Israel of being responsible for the shedding of American blood, the loss of American lives. And as recently as March 16, General Petraeus testified that

"The conflict [between Israel and the Palestinians] foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U. S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U. S. partnerships with regimes in the Arab world….The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizbollah and Hamas."

Stripped of its euphemistic diplomatic language Petraeus's statement, too, echoes the White House's bold new offensive against Israel and its supporters: American diplomacy is crippled, the religion of perpetual outrage is being outraged, and American soldiers are at greater risk, mortal risk, because Israel is making Arabs angry. The language of Walt and Mearsheimer and the Anti-Israel Lobby now comes from Obama and his diplomats and generals.

Among the critiques of Obama's new strategy, only that of Martin Peretz in The New Republic has suggested its unsavory provenance: "Someone at breakfast this morning suggested to me that Obama is like Colonel Lindbergh." But this is far too vague, and Peretz does not amplify it. Lindbergh made very few public statements against Jews, and even his diaries say little more than that "We must limit…the Jewish influence." Peretz's breakfast companion would have provided this once ardent Obama supporter a far better precedent for Obama's view of Israel and American Jewry in Lindbergh's good friend Henry Ford, who never tired of arguing that Jews manipulate diplomacy to cause wars in which Christians die to enrich Jews. Or perhaps Patrick Buchanan, who in September 1990 began to argue that "there are only two groups…beating the drums for war in the Middle East: the Israeli defense ministry and its amen corner in the U. W."

Better yet, given the passionate Europhilia of President Obama, might have been to liken the White House's unsavory new strategy against Israel to that of English anti-Semites who during the Boer War always asked why the British government was fighting a "war of gold" against the Boers on behalf of Jewish magnates, and during World War I declared (in 1916) that "If Lord Kitchener is dead, the Unseen Hand [then shorthand for the Jewish Conspiracy] killed him," and in 1939 insisted that "the Jews" (in Germany and England) were to blame for the anticipated war.

Those 1939 accusers of the Jews were, of course, the most ardent supporters of Chamberlain's policy of appeasement towards Adolf Hitler. That policy could not have been far from the minds of Israelis who heard Biden's ludicrous March 11 boast (as little believed in Jerusalem as in New York) that "The United States is determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, period." Now that the umbrellas are again going up, this time in Washington, the expedient of blaming Jews for the violence that has been and will be unleashed against them has moved from the streets of London into the Oval office.

Edward Alexander's most recent book is Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe: A Literary Friendship. ^[1]

 

 

2.  Obama's Legacy and the Iranian Bomb

Neville Chamberlain was remembered for appeasing Germany, not his progressive social programs.

By ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ

The gravest threat faced by the world today is a nuclear-armed Iran. Of all the nations capable of producing nuclear weapons, Iran is the only one that might use them to attack an enemy.

There are several ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons. The first is by dropping an atomic bomb on Israel, as its leaders have repeatedly threatened to do. Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president of Iran, boasted in 2004 that an Iranian attack would kill as many as five million Jews. Mr. Rafsanjani estimated that even if Israel retaliated with its own nuclear bombs, Iran would probably lose about 15 million people, which he said would be a small "sacrifice" of the billion Muslims in the world.

 

The second way in which Iran could use nuclear weapons would be to hand them off to its surrogates, Hezbollah or Hamas. A third way would be for a terrorist group, such as al Qaeda, to get its hands on Iranian nuclear material. It could do so with the consent of Iran or by working with rogue elements within the Iranian regime.

Finally, Iran could use its nuclear weapons without ever detonating a bomb. By constantly threatening Israel with nuclear annihilation, it could engender so much fear among Israelis as to incite mass immigration, a brain drain, or a significant decline in people moving to Israel.

These are the specific ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons, primarily against the Jewish state. But there are other ways in which a nuclear-armed Iran would endanger the world. First, it would cause an arms race in which every nation in the Middle East would seek to obtain nuclear weapons.

Second, it would almost certainly provoke Israel into engaging in either a pre-emptive or retaliatory attack, thus inflaming the entire region or inciting further attacks against Israel by Hezbollah and Hamas.

Third, it would provide Iran with a nuclear umbrella under which it could accelerate its efforts at regional hegemony. Had Iraq operated under a nuclear umbrella when it invaded Kuwait in 1990, Saddam Hussein's forces would still be in Kuwait.

Fourth, it would embolden the most radical elements in the Middle East to continue their war of words and deeds against the United States and its allies.

And finally, it would inevitably unleash the law of unintended consequences: Simply put, nobody knows the extent of the harm a nuclear-armed Iran could produce.

In these respects, allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons is somewhat analogous to the decision by the victors of World War I to allow Nazi Germany to rearm during the 1930s. Even the Nazis were surprised at this complacency. Joseph Goebbels expected the French and British to prevent the Nazis from rebuilding Germany's war machine.

In 1940, Goebbels told a group of German journalists that if he had been the French premier when Hitler came to power he would have said, "The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!"

But, Goebbels continued, "they didn't do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they started the war!"

Most people today are not aware that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain helped restore Great Britain's financial stability during the Great Depression and also passed legislation to extend unemployment benefits, pay pensions to retired workers and otherwise help those hit hard by the slumping economy. But history does remember his failure to confront Hitler. That is Chamberlain's enduring legacy.

So too will Iran's construction of nuclear weapons, if it manages to do so in the next few years, become President Barack Obama's enduring legacy. Regardless of his passage of health-care reform and regardless of whether he restores jobs and helps the economy recover, Mr. Obama will be remembered for allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. History will not treat kindly any leader who allows so much power to be accumulated by the world's first suicide nation—a nation whose leaders have not only expressed but, during the Iran-Iraq war, demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice millions of their own people to an apocalyptic mission of destruction.

If Iran were to become a nuclear power, there would be plenty of blame to go around. A National Intelligence Report, issued on President George W. Bush's watch, distorted the truth by suggestion that Iran had ended its quest for nuclear weapons. It also withheld the fact that U.S. intelligence had discovered a nuclear facility near Qum, Iran, that could be used only for the production of nuclear weapons. Chamberlain, too, was not entirely to blame for Hitler's initial triumphs. He became prime minister after his predecessors allowed Germany to rearm. Nevertheless, it is Chamberlain who has come to symbolize the failure to prevent Hitler's ascendancy. So too will Mr. Obama come to symbolize the failure of the West if Iran acquires nuclear weapons on his watch.

Mr. Dershowitz is a law professor at Harvard. His latest book is "The Case for Moral Clarity" (Camera, 2009).

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

 

 

3.  More leftwing fascism – this time in Canada:  http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20100323/coulter_canada_100323/20100323?hub=TopStoriesV2

Coulter speech cancelled over fears of violence

See also http://frontpagemag.com/2010/03/24/ann-coulter-hits-back/

 

 

 

4.  A special Passover message from Tikkun Magazine:

 

This Year Make Your Passover Seder a Multi-Galactic One

 

 

Important Passover Message from Mikey Lerner and the Entire Staff of Tikkun Magazine, the Jewish New Age pro-LSD Magazine:

A few years back, Tikkun's Rabbi Arthur Woodstock issued a call to make it a multicultural Passover Seder that year: in other words, a mix of Judaism and PC paganism.

 

 

Rabbi Woodstock, above

 

Well, this year Tikkun magazine has issued a new call for all Jews: You all should make yours a Multi-Galactic Seder!!!!

 

Yes, this is the year to invite assorted beings from other planets to your spacey politically-correct Seder, to prove your devotion to multi-galactic understanding and stamping out speciesism, along with SUVs. The guests will join in and participate in the many traditional Tikkunesque Passover traditions.

 

First, the Seder begins with the washing of the hands, or, in the case of visitors from Vulcan, the tentacles. Then the guests dine on lamb's legs made from vegan tofu. The Seder ends with the munching of traditional holiday Tikkun macaroons, made out of matzos flour and hashish.   Served on recyclable dinner bowls.

 

Now to help make your Tikkun Passover multi-galactic Seder complete, "Rabbis" Arthur Woodstock and Michael of Meaning have rewritten the Passover song "Who knows One?"

 

 

Here is how the new version will go:

 

Who knows One? I know One!
One is the greatest rabbi of all time, the great Rebbe Jerry Garcia, Shlit"a.

 

Who knows Two? I know Two!
Two is Rabbi Cheech and Rabbi Chong, who seem to write most of the articles for Tikkun magazine. (Alternative version - Two is Two States for Two Peoples: the Jordanian "people" and the Palestinian "people.")

 

Who knows Three? I know Three!
Three is the number of square meters Israel should be left with after adopting policies advocated by Tikkun.

 

Who knows Four? I know Four!
Four is the number of the greatest sages of Torah learning of all time, according to Tikkun: Rabbis John, Paul, George and Ringo.

 

Who knows Five? I know Five!
Five is the five genders officially proclaimed by Hillary (back when Lerner was her temporary guru of Meaning) at the International Wymmyn's Conference in Beijing, fully endorsed by Tikkun.

 

Who knows Six? I know Six!
Six is the SIX-TIES, my Heavy Tikkun Dudes!

 

Who knows Seven? I know Seven!
Seven is the seven basic nutritional groups required to make you a happy and healthy progressive, namely: cannabis, marijuana, hashish, pot, weed, grass, and dope.

 

Who knows Eight? I know Eight!
Eight is the number of people who really read Tikkun magazine.

 

Who knows nine? I know nine!
Nine is the number of people on earth who actually regard Mikey Lerner as a rabbi.

 

Who knows ten? I know ten!
Ten is the median IQ score for Tikkun readers.

 

Who knows eleven? I know eleven!
Eleven is the number of the Eleventh Commandment: "Thou Shalt Be Hip and Trendy!"

 

Who knows twelve? I know twelve!
Twelve is the number of times Michael Lerner can say "loving and caring" in one minute (the lowest number of times, that is).

 

Who knows thirteen? I know thirteen!
Thirteen is the number of sentences from the entire Bible that Tikkun editors have actually read.

 

5.  Forgive my nostalgia break – it is exactly 15 years since this appeared, reprinted here as your last-minute chametz:

 

http://www.jewishmag.co.il/11MAG/OPINION/opinion.htm

 

 

Jerkwater, Gaza  (Spring 1995)

By Steven Plaut

"Fare thee well, O Gaza, for we are parting;

Fare thee well, O Gaza, and let's not see one another any more."

The words are from one of the more popular songs heard on Israeli radio these days, with "Oriental" melody and instrumentation. The song is screaming out in high decibels from the ghetto-blaster in the room of the regular soldiers next door in the barracks. The scene is an Israeli Defense Forces base deep inside the Strip. No, not Sunset, but Gaza. In semi-tropical Gaza in February of one of Israel's worst winter droughts, it has been raining nonstop since our troupe of reservists checked in to the base for a 22-day tour of duty, here amidst the sand dunes along the Gaza Coast.

Gaza, land of the Philistines, land of the HAMAS Islamic terrorists, land of the soon-to-be implemented Israel-PLO autonomy plan. We can see Egypt off in the distance. Gaza, a thorn in the side of the Jews throughout history, never quite liberated from the Philistines during the First Temple, firmly subdued and held only by Alexander Yanai of the Hasmonean dynasty established by the Maccabees, the territory in which Palestinian terrorism was reborn in the 1950s under Egyptian sponsorship, and where it has been thriving under the intifada. If this is "occupied territory," I suppose I am an "occupier," but have been called worse things. The base has an army name, but within hours I have renamed it in my own mind Camp Jerkwater, and the name sticks.

Jerkwater bears little resemblance to the "fire-bases" of the Vietnam movie genre, and might more properly be called a "water-base". It serves the navy, sits just a few meters from the Gazan shore of the Mediterranean Sea, and we are being drenched by torrential rains apparently sent by the angry Philistine god Dagon. North of here is Gaza City, a cesspool of Islamic fanaticism and violence, the city in which the chained and blinded Samson brought the house down upon his Philistine tormentors. We are near the Gush Katif settlements, a collection of Jewish farming settlements populated mostly by Orthodox Jews from the center of Israel and immigrants. Just over yonder behind the dunes sits one of the Strip's seamier refugee camps. A few weeks ago one of the camp's leading citizens knocked on the door of a Jewish citrus grower north of Tel Aviv, asking for help in getting his car started. As soon as the helpful grower was under the hood, our kindly neighbor stabbed him to death.

The Strip is home to some 800,000 Palestinian Arabs, most of whom would like nothing better than to see us and our ilk buried deep beneath the sand and mud of Camp Jerkwater. The northern two­thirds of the Strip are covered with citrus orchards stretching in all directions, now lush and green from the rains. The southern third, home to Jerkwater, is mostly desolate sand dunes. Everywhere one looks there are PLO flags waving eerily from almost every Arab dwelling; the Israeli policy since the Rabin-Arafat handshake has been to allow them to fly freely.

The Strip is filled with squalid refugee camps and slums, although there are also middle-class and wealthy neighborhoods, filled with luxurious housing the average Israeli can only dream of, reflecting the wealth that some Gazans have accumulated from commercial activities under the years of Israeli "occupation." The Strip is also home and base to the Muslim terrorist movements, HAMAS and the Islamic Jihad, and of course to every imaginable faction of the PLO. Among the smiling neighbors of Jerkwater are most of those 400 Muslim extremists that Prime Minister Rabin so thoughtfully returned to their homes from their hilltop of deportation in Lebanon a few weeks ago, just in time to make us feel welcome. Now they are our neighbors, doubtless engaged in nothing but the most wholesome of civic activities.

Jerkwater is a mound of sand and dirt with a few barracks. We reservists have the honor of serving as guards for the station and its indigenous inhabitants, a group of young men and women doing their mandatory army service, the "regulars" or "Sadirniks." They are 19 and 20. Reservists are Israeli men who have finished their regular service and continue to spend quality time away from their homes and families in military service, up to the age of 50. The reservists or Miluimniks sent to guard Olde Jerkwater are mostly recent dischargees in their 20s. I am nearly twice their age, and the oldest jerk in Jerkwater, eight years older than the commanding officer.

As these things go, Jerkwater is considered to be a relatively soft reserve assignment. It is quiet and the surrounding countryside is beautiful and tropical, the sea switching intermittently from stormy to delightful. There is a reef just to the left, on which swimmers can sun in the summer. Air Force fighters roar overhead throughout the day; they must bank and turn here or else, in less than a minute, they will be in Egyptian air space.

If one ignored the geography and politics, it could be a hill anywhere along the Central California coast. The flora is the same. Jerkwater is covered with the long-finger-leaf succulent seen all over the Monterrey Peninsula, sprinkled with pokerweed, cactus, and centered around a few eucalyptus trees. In some ways the surroundings look like a photo from a tourist brochure: countless palm and date trees, flocks of sheep and goats tended by Bedouin shepherds and shepherdesses, the occasional camel or donkey cart. The nights are filled with the croakings of millions of Gazan frogs, enjoying the puddles and pools formed by the recent unusually-hard rains. When the sea is calm, it fills with fishing boats, some actually run by Gazan smugglers.

The food in the navy is considered edible, relatively speaking. We sleep in real barracks, although unheated and my room has no glass in the window. We have real-albeit-unheated showers with real hot water. By contrast, the infantry who fill the Strip consider the navy soldiers to be pampered sissies, who actually need food, toilets and hot water to function. On the other hand, some of the more elite units - like the paratroopers - look down their noses at the infantry because they actually need sleep.

The navy is also considered a relatively civilized branch of the military. The soldiers are well-behaved, and even follow orders, well - sort of, after a fashion, Israeli-style. Things could be far worse, mind you. It does not go below freezing, so frost is not a problem like it was during basic training. We also have real bathrooms with real ceramic fixtures. This in contrast with those Third-World facilities eight years earlier in my cheery basic training bootcamp outside Nablus, originally built by the Jordanians before 1967, in which advanced motor coordination and well-toned thigh muscles are required in order to perform one's duty in the correct military stance. Yet another important life-skill Princeton grad school failed to teach! Ah yes, basic training, in which one eats, sleeps and showers with one's rifle. Which makes the squatting all the more challenging. The memory will never fade of the unfortunate colleague who made a wrong movement in the dark of the latrine, only to discover his rifle fallen into the netherworld below, and then having to clean the thing.

Our duties are actually quite simple. Guard Jerkwater. Just guard. Well, that and occasionally riding shotgun on convoys racing around the Strip. The night we arrive the commander spells out our duties. Back in the center of Israel the army has a tough job, he explains. It has to locate the terrorists. We are blessed with a far simpler assignment. Here we do not have to search for the terrorists because we know exactly where they are. He then traces out a 360-degree circle around himself.

Jerkwater lives within its own bubble. There is death and terror just beyond the perimeter, with shootings and Molotov cocktails part of the daily routine of the Gaza Strip. The current joke is that the Gaza Pizza Hut is so popular because on the way home one gets a free cocktail. Rocks are hurled at soldiers and civilians, rocks that can maim and kill. The son of a colleague just had his cheek bones shattered by a rock and nearly lost an eye.

There are dangers in unexpected places. Four months earlier two hitchhiking Gaza soldiers hopped into the back seat of a car with yellow Israeli plates just down the road, driven by two men with yarmulkes and Orthodox side curls. The two men were HAMAS terrorists in disguise, who murdered the two soldiers at point-blank range with a pistol from the front seat. One of the soldiers was a navy reservist heading back from Camp Jerkwater, home to his wife and child. The HAMAS ringleader responsible, one Mohammed Shahin, will be killed in a firefight with the army in Khan Yunis four days after I am discharged from Jerkwater.

Once within the barbed wire, the main features of life are the cold and the boredom. We do day and night watches and patrols, each lasting four grueling hours. The time passes at an excruciatingly slow pace.

In one sense I have lucked out. I am serving with Don, a childhood buddy from Philadelphia who grew up with me in the Habonim youth movement. Doing reserves with a childhood chum is the army equivalent of hitting the lotto. We pass the time gossiping and reminiscing, and when that gets boring, we try to recreate dialog from TV reruns, tell jokes, and so on. The young Sadirniks refer to us as the elders of Zion, pitying us in our dotage. In drab green uniforms (No, Private Benjamin, they DON''T come in other colors) we look like large middle-aged olives.

Army life changes one's personality. Upon arrival, one starts to yawn, complain and ask when do we eat. There is a dinner gong that is rung when chow is served. Slowly we become Pavlovian experimentees, and by the third day start to drool when the gong sounds. Life starts to resemble a dog food commercial, as the happy puppies run to the kitchen in response to the ringing. Canaan is being caninized, and not just in food. Around the perimeter, there are kennels that have been brought in. Some army camps have begun to use German shepherds to supplement the guard teams, and Jerkwater is next in line. By the end of the first week, I find myself experiencing an irresistible desire to crawl inside one of the kennels and go to sleep. The ultimate insult, a university professor doing a dog's military job.

The commander is a reservist like ourselves, who moved as a youth with his family from Brazil to a kibbutz. He and two more of the reservists are accountants. He answers field telephones with the greeting, "Internal Revenue Service." I suggest as a battle plan that if the HAMAS attacks the station, we send out the accountants and really screw up their books. That should teach them. The commander likes to pretend we are in a five-star hotel. Passing by some rainy night he yells at the guards, "Hey guys, let's go downstairs and sit in the lobby!", or "Where is that damn concierge with the espressos?"

The Master Sergeant is the camp nudnik. His age, height and weight are each exactly 24. When not guarding, he fills our lives with deep meaning by sending us off to clean the latrine, pick up orange peels and cigarette butts, and so on. I suggest short-sheeting his bed as in summer camp, but Don thinks he is too short to notice. He likes to assign people to tables and seats in the mess hall, which I find infuriating, but Don shrugs and notes that every classy restaurant has its own Maitre D'. One day someone bursts into the mess hall yelling where is the medic, the Master Sarge feels ill. The whole room erupts with the chant, "E - NE - MA!! E - NE - MA!!"

It is hard for one who has never experienced it to imagine the cold of tropical Gaza in February, especially at night. The ferocious winds seem to be blowing from all directions at once, but especially from off the sea. I curse the rain, until a dry weekend produces blinding sandstorms, far worse. The long 2:00 to 6:00 AM watch is the hardest. I wear the thermal underwear my brother has sent from New England, over which sits the uniform, on top of that a sweater, then the bullet-proof flak vest, then the goose-down ski coat from California, covered by the army winter coat and the ammunition belt, holding ammunition clips in its pouches and Sugar Waffles in other pockets designed to hold hand grenades. And I am still freezing.

Sugar Waffles are the great military secret of the Israeli Defense Forces. Wafers that come in lemon, chocolate and vanilla flavors. Without them the army would collapse. They are everywhere. Occasionally, infantry mudrats come by the gate begging for handouts. The commander climbs up to the guardtower to make sure I am not dozing. I pass him a Sugar Waffle. He nibbles in British twit manner with pinkie raised, and says, "Delightful! Did you make it yourself?"

A long afternoon in the guardtower. I watch through the field binoculars as a pretty teenage shepherdess cajoles her goats. Fearless birds wander into the tower, standing a meter away from me, staring. In exchange for Sugar Waffle crumbs they come even closer. The shepherdess has approached our perimeter too closely with her flock, and is being shooed away by a guard, then walks away muttering curses.

Down beneath the watchtower a jeep has come inside the perimeter, carrying a surveying crew, mapping out the area just to the north of the station for a new infantry camp. The crew is headed by a young lieutenant, exuding competence and confidence, barking orders to a crew of four soldiers who scamper obediently up and down sand dunes, moving about the surveying equipment. The lieutenant is Ethiopian, the other soldiers are "white". Snapshot of Israel in the 1990s.

It is Friday morning, the Muslim Sabbath. It is the last week of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. I am on the bus heading back to Jerkwater after spending nearly 20 hours at home on a short furlough. The bus radio is reporting a large demonstration of "greens" and animal rights nuts protesting the conditions under which the dolphins are kept in the Tel Aviv Dolphinarium. The dolphins eat well, sleep whole nights, spend the day playing, and in general have it much better than does your faithful reservist at Jerkwater. Suddenly the radio blasts a news flash: there has been a massacre in the Machpelah shrine of Hebron perpetrated by one Baruch (nee Benjy) Goldstein, an ex-American and fanatic member of one of the splinter movements of followers of the late "Rabbi" Meir Kahane. The passengers are shocked, none more than me. The mass murder - it will later become evident that he murdered 29 people, which is actually a mini-atrocity by Middle East standards - is sickening enough, but the bastard had to do it five days into my own winter holiday in Gaza. Can there have been a less appetizing time to be in Gaza since the Philistine Goliath stalked the territory three thousand years ago?

Back in Jerkwater, the station is on heightened alert, and will remain so for weeks. In all directions but the sea there are ugly clouds of thick black smoke rising from the Palestinian towns and refugee camps, from burning automobile tires and occasional burning automobiles. From time to time automatic gunfire is heard in the distance, and occasionally an explosion. The sights and sounds are surrealistic, as if on a drive-in movie screen viewed from inside the perimeter. Gaza is under curfew and sealed off, meaning all the terrorists have to stay out of Israel and in here in the Strip with us.

In the evening I am dozing when the camp siren goes off. The entire base scrambles to battle positions. The loudspeaker tells us this is not a drill but a real alert. Groggily I climb into the fortified trench, banging my knee in my half-awake rush. My helmet is on my arm, as there is not a single one in the entire base that fits my head. Don yells at me to prepare photon torpedoes and phasers. A short while later the alert is canceled and I limp out of the position, the only wounded victim of the HAMAS for that evening. For the next week similar alerts and scrambles will help us pass the time.

The HAMAS and their PLO comrades are out for blood. Arafat's Fatah representatives in the "occupied territories" are calling for "revenge," not against the depraved perpetrator - who is dead - but against any Jew anywhere. Arabs are attacking synagogues throughout Europe, and shoot up a van full of Hasidim on the Brooklyn Bridge. Palestinians, enraged by the desecration of the holy shrine, respond by desecration of a holy shrine, heaving rocks from the Temple Mount down upon praying Jews by the Western Wall. Rabin responds pusillanimously, ordering the Wall and its prayer grounds to be evacuated, a move without precedent, caving in to Arab violence and savagery.

It is the golden opportunity for Arafat to exhibit for all his new Israel-bestowed badge of Statesmanship. It is the chance of a lifetime for Arafat to distance himself and his movement from terrorism and bloodlust, to exhibit political maturity and leadership. He could call for patience and avoidance of violence, valiantly demanding that Arabs refrain from "revenge" against individual Jews who had nothing to do with the Hebron massacre, insisting that it would be unjust to regard the Jewish people as responsible for the acts of a single lunatic, pointing out that the Arabs themselves had performed an endless series of similar massacres for which they owed penance, including numerous attacks on worshippers in synagogues (those in Istanbul and Paris come to mind), a massacre of Jews in Hebron in 1929 with twice the carnage as Goldstein's, and of course countless murders of their own Arab brethren, at least 30 murders during the intifada for each victim of Goldstein. Arafat could point out that the decades of massacres and terrorism by Arabs had been performed not by lone fanatics but at the direct command of the Palestinian "leadership".

Alas, Arafat wanted to hear nothing of statesmanship, but was reverting to form - indeed to caricature, and the "New Middle East" of Peres, Beilin and Rabin was looking more and more like the familiar bloody old one. Arafat accused the Israeli army of carrying out the massacre at government orders, screamed for revenge and blood, ordered his followers to revert to terror. This is the "moderate" in whose hands the Israeli government intends to trust the fate of the country? And for good measure, when Muslims bomb a church near Beirut a few days later, killing 10 and injuring 60, an event the media marks with instantaneous amnesia, the PLO adds its voice to those of Syria and its Lebanese puppets accusing Israel of perpetrating that deed as well. Arab moderation is not looking too well.

The violence is not restricted to the "territories." There are Arabs rioting in Jaffa and Nazareth and in the Bedouin town of Rahat outside Beer Sheba. The Bedouins serve in the Israeli army and are usually considered as loyal and moderate as Israel could wish. A Bedouin youth dies in the riots, and is buried in a coffin draped with a PLO flag, this - not in the West Bank or Gaza - but in the Israeli heartland. Israeli Arabs attack soldiers and police with rocks and knives. The hatred in their faces, after two generations of citizenship and democratic education, matches anything that can be seen here in Gaza.

Despite the media myth concerning the "brutality" of the Israeli army as it "suppresses" the Palestinians, the foremost concern of the military seems to be to avoid shooting rioting Arabs, no matter what the provocation. At least once a day - and sometimes more - we drill the Procedures for Opening Fire (POF), a long list of instructions and prohibitions designed for dealing with rioters, attackers, and suspicious persons, starting with warnings and ending with shooting into the air and then - where there is no choice - at an attacker's legs or car tires. The POF is so unwieldy that more than one soldier has suggested in earnest that a lawyer be assigned to every army unit. It is not unusual for soldiers to be placed in jeopardy because of fears of prosecution for violating the POF. If we drilled shooting the way we drill the POF, we would all be crack marksmen.

One theory as to why Palestinian violence has escalated so is based on their awareness of the POF constraints under which Israeli soldiers operate. Where else can rioters throw rocks at soldiers and police with near impunity? Certainly not in Los Angeles, as the scores dead in the riots there demonstrated. One of the reservists proffers his own preferred alternative POF: any bugger approaching him in a threatening manner gets wasted and then he hires himself an expensive lawyer.

The days go by and Jerkwater is beginning to lose its rustic country charm. The sun has come out and the day has warmed. Jerkwater is bedecked in its springtime holiday outfit, with wildflowers springing up from the sands, drenched by the recent rains. Large sand lizards come out, sunning themselves on rocks and alongside the fortified positions. They bob their heads up and down in a form of sexual provocation, although it really doesn't do much for me.

Outside, the world might be going mad, but inside the perimeter the hours go by painstakingly and in slow motion. Boredom and sleep-deprivation are the main features of army life. Don and I try to fight off the boredom by calling one another Trapper and Hawkeye. It doesn't work.

It is my 43rd birthday today, and I have celebrated by pulling the very worst guard duty possible, the double-whammy. It begins with a 6:00 to 10:00 PM night shift, followed by a 2:00 to 6:00 AM shift; in between the two shifts one can sleep for maybe ten or twenty seconds. In the morning I have also been selected for the honor of riding shotgun on one of the convoys. By Murphy's Law, I conjecture, a convoy on my birthday should get attacked by rock-throwers. Don and I survived the 60's together. If they throw rocks at us, he notes, at least this will give a new meaning to the expression "getting stoned for your birthday."

When guarding or convoying, we are supposed to carry no identification papers except for an army ID card, used if taken prisoner. One of the reservists finds this amusing, saying that after all it would be one thing for the HAMAS to take him prisoner, but absolutely unforgivable if the bastards used his credit cards.

Gaza is filled with eccentrics and the bizarre. On Sabbath, the settlers, mostly religious, go for long strolls, oblivious to any dangers. Among them is a group of Burmese, members of a tribe from the jungles of East Asia who believe they are descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel, who converted and live as Orthodox Jews in Gaza._ One sees them all over the Strip. The men sport yarmulkes and the fringes from their tzitziyot dangle down their sides. Two walk by on Saturday and point at us up on Jerkwater, probably saying to one another, that's funny - they don't look Jewish.

The radio reports that some sharks were sighted off the Gazan coast. Perhaps they have smelled our mess hall. Eron, one of the Sadirniks, who has grown up in a secular home but has now become very religious, has just come back from a furlough and is looking low. I am very scared and worried, he explains. Well, I think we are okay, I try to reassure him; surely the army has things under control. He looks at me as if I am from Mars. Who the hell is talking about that nonsense, he says indignantly, I am worried about the Rebbe. The Lubavicher Rabbi in Brooklyn is close to death.

There is a bungalow colony just across a field from Jerkwater, mostly empty, a remnant of better times in Gaza from before the intifada, with a few Burmese in residence. Late at night I hear loud singing, apparently from some folk troupe, slow bluegrass and old folksongs.

"In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines,

And you shiver when the cold winds blow."

No pines in Gaza. Dates, palms, tamarisks, eucalyptus, but no pines. I join in the chorus, calling out across the field but they cannot hear. A folk troupe here? In Gaza? Their impresario must have gone berserk.

The radio is my salvation. It takes an unbearable watch and turns it into something merely unpleasant. We are prohibited from reading while on watch, and dozing off is the surest path to a military prison.

Today is International Women's Day, and an Israeli feminist is telling how Israeli women's groups want to build a battered women's shelter in Gaza. The treatment of women in Arab society is about as bad as it can get. Seems that the Palestinian "feminists" have always been far too busy running around the world attending women's conferences in which they bash Israel and so never got around to setting up a battered women's center. Hence the Israeli feminists are taking the initiative.

On another channel a radio call-in quiz show is in progress. The announcer gives out the clues. Here is the first caller, one Abdul Karin from the Nassurat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. His guess is that the clues refer to Dr. Yosef Burg, one of Israel's founders and a cabinet minister for decades. Karin knows Burg's political and personal history down flat. The announcer asks him if there are a lot of people in the refugee camp who listen to the quiz show, and Karin assures her it is very popular. His knowledge of Burg is impeccable, but alas the guess is wrong and the clues refer to someone else.

The BBC reports that the American State Department is urging all Americans to stay out of the West Bank and Gaza, and even avoid Nazareth. I repeat this to the commander and ask him if it is okay if I go home. He roars with laughter, and he tells me a joke as quid pro quo. A penguin wanders into the army camp and befriends a soldier who walks about with her hand-in-flipper. The commander tells him to take the penguin to the zoo. Next day the commander sees them together and asks what happened. I took her, says the soldier, and tonight I'll take her to the movies.

Exactly one week has passed since the massacre in Hebron. It is early Friday morning. I have lucked out and got a weekend furlough, good until Sunday morning. The sun has just come up and it will be a warm sunny day. At 7:00 AM I am outside the perimeter awaiting the bus, carrying my laundry, my M-16 and two or three clips of bullets. There is a mist over the palms that makes the surroundings of the camp look like the African Savannah. The birds are singing. The hothouses that belong to the Gush Katif settlements, bursting with winter vegetables, begin about 200 meters away and stretch off into the distance. The quintessence of calm and tranquility.

The tranquility is an illusion. There are three terrorists hiding in the bushes somewhere nearby. In exactly half an hour, at 7:30 AM, they will enter one of these hothouses and attack two settlers with knives and machetes. One of the settlers will be seriously hurt, but will draw a pistol and kill one attacker and wound another. In two hours I will hear the first report of the attack on the bus radio while riding north.

Jerkwater is undergoing suburbanization. The infantry are building a position just to the north. It is completed in a single day, consisting of some tents, a large flag on a flagpole, a water tower and some barbed wire.

Coming back to the camp, the bus passes by a Peace Now demonstration near the checkpoint at the old green line, with signs that say "I am Not Afraid of Peace." Of course no one in Israel is afraid of peace, just of "peace." Next to the checkpoint is a large lot where Gazan farmers bring their produce and sell it to Israeli "smugglers" who then transport the food into Israel, defying all the efforts of Israel's official agricultural cartels to keep the food out and to keep Israeli food prices high.

It is a cold night and the rains are returning. The mess hall served dubious hotdogs today, and - let me tell you - they definitely did not answer to any higher authority. I try to invent new bedtime stories I will tell the kids after I get home: more adventures in Chocolate Land, the land where everything is made of chocolate and where any nasty driver who honks his car at children will have it gobbled it by them.

The radio once again sustains me. Steven Spielberg is in Israel for the screening of his movie on the Holocaust, and Spielberg talks of exploring his Jewish roots. I know of a good place where he can do some exploring, just by taking over for me here on my 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM patrol. The Voice of America, broadcasting out of Rhodes, is playing Texas Swing. The voice of Bob Wills wails on about his San Antonio Rose, deep in the heart of Texas, deep in the bowels of Gaza. I stomp about to the music trying to keep warm.

There have been two shootings in recent days near the checkpoint closest to Jerkwater. And at the Erez checkpoint at the northern tip of the Strip, an alert reservist stops a car with Israeli yellow plates, sees something suspicious, and slips a bullet into the chamber of his semiautomatic. The car tries to make a break for it, but the reservist is too fast. When the shooting stops, there are two dead bodies in the car. One is Ibrahim Salaneh, a leader of the HAMAS' military wing with the blood of at least seven murdered Jews on his hands and that of God knows how many Palestinians. The press releases a news report of an attempt on Rabin's life when he visited Khan Yunis two months back. A bomb was tossed at him but failed to explode. Khan Yunis is a short bicycle ride away from Jerkwater.

The Israeli government has just made the two splinter factions of followers of Kahane illegal, declaring them terrorist organizations, and has suspended habeas corpus for their leaders, arresting them on sight. Rabin and company are trying to curry favor with Arafat and save the negotiations. They are even seriously considering Arafat's demand that an armed international militia be stationed in the West Bank and Gaza - to protect Arabs from the Jews. I wonder if they will also endorse a militia to protect Japanese trawlers from attacks by whales, and protect Newfoundland fur traders from attacks by baby seals. If the "peace process" is so fragile that a single atrocity can jeopardize it and cause the Arabs to revert to xenophobia and blood libel, is it really worthwhile pursuing and taking risks for?

The Kahanists have not actually committed any crime, at least none for which evidence presentable in court exists. Their transgression seems to be that they refused to denounce Goldstein's massacre, and a few even expressed approval. It is a dubious decision for a democracy, where freedom of speech is supposed to be protected even for fanatics and extremists, as long as they engage in no criminal actions. "Betselem" and other politically-correct Israeli leftist civil liberties groups, darlings of the media and ever anxious to defend Palestinians and denounce the government on the weight of allegations by Arabs, suddenly have nothing to say about the denial of due process for the Kahanists. Betselem claims they do not have the resources needed to defend the civil liberties of the settlers.

The Kahanists are being banned for their views, not their actions. They are no more fanatical than the National Front parties in Western Europe, and have perhaps a hundredth of the relative electoral strengths of the European extremists. In an earlier dubious decision the Knesset prohibited the Kahanists from running in elections. In both decisions, the American State Department cheered approval, despite the fact that the Kahanists operate legally in the United States and Israel's actions would be considered violations of the First Amendment if they were taken in America.

The banning of the Kahanists also looks curious in light of the fact that the PLO-surrogate Arab parties not only continue to operate in Israel openly, but are de facto coalition partners of Rabin's minority government. Last year an Arab Communist Party Member of the Knesset openly called upon Gazans to escalate violence and attack Jews, stating, "Rocks are Insufficient." Abdul-Wahab Daroushe, Parliamentary leader of the Arab Democratic Party and an undisguised PLO stand-in, sent letters of support to Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. Daroushe is visiting Syria, where his first stop is to lay a wreath on the graves of Syrian soldiers who died trying to destroy Israel. Daroushe, a resident of the Galilee, tells a press conference that he cannot abide being referred to as an Israeli Arab, and insists he is a Palestinian.

Uzi Baram, a cabinet minister, calls on the government to make Hebron judenrein, echoing similar calls from the Israeli left. Israel should atone for the Goldstein massacre by ethnically cleansing Hebron. The Israeli doves and some American Jewish liberal organizations have long argued against Jews moving into West Bank areas populated by Arabs, even into Jerusalem suburbs, expressing understanding and sympathy for the position that Arabs feel "violated" and "offended" by having Jews moving into their neighborhoods. The same folks would be the first ones out on the barricades if anyone expressed "understanding" for Southern white rednecks in the US who felt "offended" and "violated" when blacks move into their neighborhoods.

Like the Arab world, the Israeli left is assigning collective guilt and demanding collective punishment of the settlers, very few of whom are Kahanists, punishments never meted out to Palestinians, even after the worst provocations. As one example, three years ago Arab villagers in the West Bank town of Beita attacked a group of hiking Jewish schoolchildren in a pogrom. In the melee, one Jewish girl was killed. The Israeli government never considered a response based on depopulation of Beita, the solution being proposed now for the Jewish settlers of Hebron.

The proposals for depopulation are based on the alleged sympathy felt by the Hebron settlers for Goldstein's atrocity. But only three years have passed since the Palestinians were dancing on the rooftops as Saddam Hussein aimed Scuds at Tel Aviv, and the Palestinian leadership was urging Saddam to dump chemical and biological weapons on the Israeli population. Israel's response at the time to Palestinian calls for genocide was to provide them with free gas masks.

From the watchtower of Jerkwater one looks out over the red tile roofs of the Ganei Tal settlement. This morning a passing car opened up automatic rifle fire at the guards at the gate of the settlement; they emerged with scratches. Drive-by shootings - just like in Los Angeles.

With the world outside the perimeter filled with madness, the insanity of army life is starting to seem normal and sensible. A hawk has landed in the field opposite the watchtower, munching on something. Through the field binoculars I can see it is a chocolate pudding container, a scrap stolen from the scraps upon which our infantry neighbors subsist. Seagulls are bobbing on the gentle swell of the sea. The warm sun makes it harder and harder to keep my eyes open. My kingdom for a nap. Never mind the violence and terror out beyond the dunes. Forget the politicians. I can make my peace with the filth, the food, the cold. Just sleep. Like in the old Song of the Valley of the pioneers: "Rest comes to the weary, and slumber to the toiler." Let me close my eyes. Let me curl up in fetal position. Just for an hour or two.