Monday, October 14, 2013
The Continuing Damages Produced by Israel's Academic Fifth Column
1. This is an interesting article worth reading in full: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/an-israeli-soldiers-call-to-american-jews/ But note in particular this segment:
And during a presentation in Seattle, I spoke about my longing for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. When I was done, a woman in her 60's stood up and yelled at me, "You are worse than the Nazis. You are just like the Nazi youth!" A number of times I was repeatedly accused of being a killer, though I have never hurt anyone in my life. On other occasions, anti-Israel activists called me a rapist. The claims go beyond being absurd – in one case, a professor asked me if I knew how many Palestinians have been raped by IDF forces. I answered that as far as I knew, none. She triumphantly responded that I was right, because, she said, "You IDF soldiers don't rape Palestinians because Israelis are so racist and disgusted by them that you won't touch them."
As you know, this is the mischief of the Hebrew University and its awarding a special prize to a Masters thesis carried out under the supervision of Prof. Eyal Ben Ari, since then fired for raping his students, claiming that the absence of rape of Arab women proves that Israeli Jews are racists. More reasons why the Hebrew University is undeserving of your support.
2. Once again, an Israeli military hero and army officer smeared by Israeli leftists has been threatened with arrest in Europe. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4440561,00.html
Here is the full story:
Former Navy chief Marom detained at Heathrow
Ynet learns commander of Israeli Navy during Operation Cast Lead and raid on Gaza-bound Marmara ship held for questioning upon arrival in UK
Aviel Mengazi
Maj.-Gen. (res.) Eli Marom, who served as the commander of the Israeli Navy during Operation Cast Lead and during the raid on the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara vessel, was held for questioning at around noon Monday at London's Heathrow Airport upon his arrival in Britain, Ynet has learned.
Marom was held for a short time, during which he phoned the Justice Ministry in Israel.
The threat of being arrested in Europe has concerned senior Israeli military officers and politicians for a number of years now in light of lawsuits filed by pro-Palestinian organizations, although in most cases, at least in Britain, the measures taken against Israeli officials have been largely symbolic.
This threat appeared to have been reduced in 2011 when the UK amended its universal jurisdiction law, which allows private citizens to obtain arrest warrants for war crimes against foreigners visiting Britain. The law was amended to require the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions in case a warrant was issued.
The amendment made it possible for Tzipi Livni to visit London that same year despite an arrest warrant issued against her for her role in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. Livni served as foreign minister during the military operation in the Hamas -ruled territory.
In 2005, as he was landing in Britain for fundraising purposes, former IDF Central Command Chief Maj.-Gen. (res.) Doron Almog was informed by the Israeli ambassador in London about an arrest warrant against for alleged "war crimes" committed under his command in the Gaza Strip. Almog remained on the plane and flew back to Israel.
In another incident, Brig.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi, who in the past held command of the Gaza Division, was forced to avoid entering Britain and cancel his planned studies in the UK.
In May 2011, an additional incident occurred when the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's military secretary, Brig.-Gen. Yochanan Locker opted out of joining Netanyahu on a state visit to Britain – also because of his involvement in Operation Cast Lead , when he served as the head of the IAF's General Staff.
Former IDF Spokesperson Avi Benayahu revealed he had recently flown to Britain using a fake identity in wake of the de-legitimization campaign being waged against Israel.
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The incident involving Kochavi described above was caused by the campaign of defamation against the hero by Ben Gurion "University's" anti-Israel fanatic Neve Gordon. who had longed smeared Kochavi as a "war criminal." See http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=10510 . Here is yet another reason why Ben Gurion "University" is not entitled to your support. I suspect that all the other attempts at indicting Israeli officers as "war criminals" are similarly the direct result of defamation campaigns by Israeli anti-Israel leftists.
3. The following article is a bit long and appeared in "Jewish Magazine" more than 15 years ago. http://www.jewishmag.com/9mag/plaut/plaut.htm It is too long to reproduce in full here but I think you will find it still timely. In any case, here is but one segment, and if you find it interesting you can read the full piece at http://www.jewishmag.com/9mag/plaut/plaut.htm :
How Did Liberalism Become Judaism?
By Steven Plaut
Beyond simple persecution, the Diaspora Jews have long suffered from serious psychopathologies, and in particular a sort of assimilationist self-hatred. While the early Zionists were rebelling against the religious authorities in Eastern European communities, it became clear fairly quickly that Zionism was also a rebellion against the tendencies by many assimilationist Jews to advocate national self-destruction. The Jewish socialist and communist Left in Eastern Europe, but also many Jewish liberals elsewhere, promoted radical assimilationism, where Jews would cut themselves off altogether from their Jewish culture and roots and assimilate aggressively into the surrounding majority cultures of the Russians, Poles, Hungarians, etc….
There emerged a new form of Jewish assimilationism, the "Liberalism-as-Judaism" form of pseudo-Judaism. Especially in the United States, this "school of thought" held that Judaism was nothing more nor less than the American liberal political agenda, including the advocacy - in the name of Judaism and "Prophetic Ethics" - of liberal fashionable political ideas. The beginnings of this were in the New Deal era, when American Jewish support for Franklin D. Roosevelt was nearly unanimous. It continued after World War II.
The "Liberalism as Judaism" School argued that all of Judaism and Jewish tradition could be boiled down into a search for civil "justice" and secular "freedom". Since it was axiomatic, in the eyes of Jewish liberals, that the liberal political agenda was synonymous with justice, freedom, and righteousness and that the opponents of liberalism were evil and unjust, "Judaism" itself could be conscripted in the cause of promoting liberal partisanship.
In the era when liberalism meant civil rights, anti-poverty programs, basic social welfare "Safety Net" programs, etc., that is from the 1930s through the 1960s, such a set of axioms seemed plausible to a great many. By aligning themselves with the forces of progress and enlightenment, Jews would promote their own acceptance and reputation, at least among the thinking progressive majority of Americans.
They would join the "good" Americans in their struggle for a better society. It would be a society in which Jews were appreciated and honored as comrades in arms in the battle for freedom, a society of general tolerance in which Jews would be amongst those tolerated.
Numerous institutions developed in the American Jewish community devoted to the new "Liberalism as Judaism" orthodoxy. The raison d'etre of the many Jewish Community Relations Councils was first and foremost to pursue the liberal political agenda, to conscript organized Jewry behind liberal social programs and civil rights. The community "federations" also pursued liberal causes, and often operated as the Jewish analogue to Christian charity groups, funding general community hospitals and social services. The Jewish weeklies that formed the main communications network of American Jews, generally owned and published by the "federations", were invariably liberal.
The "defense organizations," such as Bnai Brith, American Jewish Congress, and the American Jewish Committee, originally founded in large part in order to battle against anti-Semitism, joined the struggle for
Liberalism and often devoted the bulk of their resources and energies to the promotion of liberal causes. Large parts of the Reform and Conservative synagogue movements, and to a much smaller extent some Orthodox as well, jumped on to the "Liberalism as Judaism" bandwagon. Many Reform and Conservative Rabbis devoted their weekly synagogue sermons to the advocacy of liberal causes. "Social action" committees abounded in synagogues and other Jewish community institutions, where "social action" meant only one thing - the liberal political agenda.
From the start, there were of course problems with the formula of "Liberalism as Judaism," that is, with the assertion that the essence of Judaism is nothing other than moral sentiments that may be conscripted in support of liberal ideological fads. The first problem was that if one accepts this assertion literally, there is no reason at all for anyone to remain Jewish. Surely, Jewish tradition speaks nobly and highly of the search for justice and peace, but so does virtually every other religious or non-religious humanist tradition. After all, like that famous old advertisement for eating Levy's Rye Bread, you don't have to be Jewish to be a liberal. There were plenty of folks advocating liberal causes and civil rights who ate pork, prayed in churches or not at all, celebrated Christmas, etc. So if the whole point of Judaism was thought to be to inspire liberalism and devotion to "social justice", Judaism was superfluous. There were far easier ways to express and advocate liberalism and social justice.
Thus what had begun as a mass public relations scam and as a sort of play-acting by insecure Western Jews seeking a method for making themselves appear more acceptable to the non-Jewish majorities surrounding them quickly metamorphosed into an avenue for assimilation. For the new generations of Jews growing up in Western freedom and tolerance, there was little if any reason to retain their Jewishness. As secularism and higher education spread, approaching universality for Jews, religiosity diminished in general among the educated classes in which Jews were concentrated. Once national identity and ritualistic observance were abandoned, there was little - if anything - to motivate retention of Jewish identity, whether religious or secular. The result was rampant assimilation. By the 1970s large segments of the non-Orthodox Jewish community in America (and to a somewhat smaller extent the non-Orthodox in other Western countries) had for all intents and purposes assimilated and ceased to be [performing] Jews. They no longer regarded themselves as Jewish in any meaningful way. They had no formal ties with any Jewish institution, religious, cultural, political, nationalist or otherwise.
This was especially notable among the young Jews in America. Intermarriage rates crossed the 50% barrier. Jews whose Jewishness plays some dominant role in their self-definition and life are a small fraction of that number. Assimilated American Jews do not define themselves as Jewish in a purely religious or national sense. With astronomical intermarriage rates, complete assimilation for the non-Orthodox is now simply a matter of time, and sufficient time has already transpired to have eliminated much of American Jewry altogether. So the "party line" or public relations formula for Western Jews has long been that they are nothing more than a religious minority, having jettisoned claims to constituting a Jewish "nationality" or ethnic-nation.