Saturday, January 08, 2011

Assuage, Pollard, and Fashionable Transparency

1. Thought of the Day:

SO let me see if I have this straight.

Julian Assuage releases hundreds of thousands of classified
intelligence documents, available now to the worst enemies of the
United States and the West. Wanted for rape too, Assuage has supplied
terrorists and totalitarians of all stripes with countless useful
pieces of critical intelligence. Assuage is being hailed by the
liberals and the chattering classes and by much of the media as a
hero. They demand that he be defended and not prosecuted.
Transparency is the highest of all values.

Jonathan Pollard leaked a few hundred documents to an ally of the
United States. Not to th egeneral public. HE has been in prison for
25 years. No one in the liberal media is calling for his release.

Maybe if Pollard had leaked hundreds of thousands of documents to
America's worst enemies instead of a few hundred to America's closet
ally then he would be free?


Thought Two: Related to the above. Liberals, bleeding hearts and
leftists always insist that they favor disclosure and transparency.
In everything. Especially in government and politics. The public
has the right to know everything and have full information about
everything.

Except for the sources of funding of Israeli leftist extremist groups.
A Knesset measure demanding that this information be made public and
available is fascism and racism.

2. You need to read the American media to understand the truth about
Israeli internal politics:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/256533/israel-s-enemies-within-mona-charen?sms_ss=twitter&at_xt=4d274ec95c5554d2,0


MONA CHAREN

JANUARY 7, 2011 12:00 A.M.
Israel's Enemies Within
A worrying minority is undermining the Jewish state's self-confidence.

The late Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan coined a pithy test for whether a
country is free or not. Take a look at the newspapers, he suggested:
"If all the news is good, you're not in a free country. If all the
news is bad, you are." A corollary to Moynihan's test could apply
today: If a nation is beset by concern about human-rights violations
and injustice within its borders, it is a free country. If it concerns
itself only with the supposed human-rights violations of other
nations, it is not.
In this sense, Israel is just like the United States and other open
societies. A free press and an independent judiciary, along with civic
organizations, political activists, and professors, are watchful for
any perceived deviation from the nation's high standards.
But it is different for Israel. It alone among the world's 195 nations
is the target of a delegitimization campaign. This intellectual and
moral assault is distinct from criticism of Israeli actions (which is
always welcome in a free society). The delegitimization effort asserts
not that Israel behaves badly, or that it should refrain from this or
that activity, but that it has no right to exist at all and/or that
the Jewish people do not exist. Long the position of the Arab states
and the Palestinians, the denial of Israel's essential legitimacy has
spread over the course of the last decade to include a number of
governments and non-governmental organizations, and, perhaps most
significantly, a non-trivial number of writers and intellectuals.
It's also different for Israel because national morale is far more
important for Israelis than for others. If significant numbers of
Canadians or Poles become disillusioned with their countries, well,
it's not healthy or desirable (nor would it demonstrate clear thinking
about the alternatives), but it's not a threat to national existence.
But because Israel is in persistent physical as well as ideological
danger, an extraordinarily high degree of courage and commitment is
required of each Israeli, starting with, but by no means limited to,
extended service in the nation's armed forces.
Israel is the Middle East's only democracy and the only country in the
region that respects human rights — period. So it's remarkable to see
the degree to which elements within Israel itself have joined the
delegitimization campaign. Like professors in the U.S., the
overwhelming majority of academics in Israel (at least in the social
sciences and humanities) are left-wing. It is not a matter of
indifference that American professors are so tendentious. But in
Israel, adopting leftist intellectual fashions means swallowing ideas
that spell the destruction of the state. A study of political science
syllabi in Israel's five universities, for example, found that about
80 percent of the course material took a "post-Zionist" or
anti-nationalist position.
Neve Gordon, a professor at Ben Gurion University of Beer-Sheva, has
led international efforts to boycott the Jewish state. Rachel Giora, a
professor at Tel Aviv University, actively encourages international
divestment campaigns. Shlomo Sand, the son of Holocaust survivors and
a professor at Tel Aviv University (and Berkeley), proclaims that
"there is no Jewish people and no justification for a Jewish state."
Meirav Michaeli, the leading announcer on the Army radio channel, has
urged Israelis to resist the draft. Israeli professors have cheered
the idea of issuing international arrest warrants for leading Israeli
politicians and army officers — though none has so far volunteered to
renounce his own salary as a contribution to international sanctions.
Israeli organizations like the New Israel Fund have financed groups
that participated in the libelous "Goldstone Report" about the 2009
Gaza operation, and helped distribute disturbing films in Israel like
Paradise Now (2005), which offered a highly sympathetic fictional
portrayal of two Palestinian suicide bombers. To be clear: Israelis
helped to promote a film the message of which was that Israel was so
profoundly evil that even mass murder could be justified against it.
The corrosive effect of this sustained assault on Israel's soul is
obvious. Today, around the nation, a popular bit of graffiti sourly
satirizes Theodore Herzl's famous phrase inspiring Jews to believe in
their state. Regarding Israel, the wall art proclaims, "We don't need
it. We don't want it." The percentage of young Israelis resisting the
draft was 18 percent in 1991 and is estimated to be 25 percent today.
The number of emigrants continues to rise.
There is pushback. Im Tirtzu, a group begun by four army officers
after the inconclusive and, many believed, incompetent war with
Hezbollah in 2006, is attempting to reinvigorate Israeli self-respect
and confidence on a number of fronts — though facing a stiff headwind
from Israeli media, academia, and civil society. The disillusioned are
far from a majority, but they are a worrying minority, and in this, as
in everything else, Israel has little room for error.
— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2011 Creators
Syndicate, Inc.


3. Anti-Semitic Jihad Jews:
http://www.fringegroups.com/2011/01/jews-who-hate-israel.html
and http://wernercohn.com/Prolegomena%20to%20the%20Study%20of%20Jews%20Who%20Hate%20Israel.htm






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