| Steven Plaut |
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Original articles on Israel and related issues written by Steven Plaut, a professor at an Israeli university. |
Thursday, December 31, 2009
THIS BLOG HAS MOVED TO http://www.zioncon.blogspot.com
The Left is Having Conniptions over Being Monitored and Exposed: http://counterpunch.com/makdisi10182007.html "Academic colleagues, get used to it," warned the pro-Israel activist Martin Kramer in March 2004. "Yes, you are being watched. Those obscure articles in campus newspapers are now available on the Internet, and they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you've also posted, will be scrutinized. Your Web sites will be visited late at night." Saturday, November 07, 2009
(due to some technical problems with my usual servor, I am moving my postings to operate from this new address - bear with me!) 1. Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu:
I wanted to write to you about that ship full of Iranian arms that the Israeli navy apprehended on its way to delivering them to the Hezb'Allah terrorists last week. The FRANCOP ship was carrying hundreds of tons of Iranian weapons of various types. Israel seized the arms and let the ship proceed to Beirut.
Mister Prime Minister, I really feel that Israel behaved improperly in this matter. After all, these weapons and bombs are Iranian and belong to Iran. They are properly the property of Tehran. Israel seized things that do not belong to it!
This is why I hereby appeal to you in the name of all decent and honest Israelis. The stolen property must be returned at once to its proper and legal owners. Israel must restore the bombs to Tehran, it must return all the explosives immediately to the Ayatollahs of Iran.
At once, I insist.
From a B-2 stealth bomber above the skies of Tehran!
Thank you for listening!
Prof. Steven Plaut University of Haifa
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3801479,00.html
Malicious leftist charges Certain camps in Israel were sorry to hear that Yaakov Teitel acted alone, or almost alone. They were disappointed to see that he looks a little crazy. They were dreaming of something bigger and more intelligent, so along with him it would be possible to convict an entire camp and a certain ideology. In the face of this disappointment, they pulled out the old and tired myths about the conspiracy of silence and quiet understanding between the law enforcement establishment and the settlers. All sorts of experts were wondering aloud why the Shin Bet needed 12 years to resolve two murders involving Arabs victims. These lamentations gave the impression that all murder cases in Israel are resolved quickly, while only investigations into right-wing crimes are conducted lazily. This impression was meant to paint the entire settlement enterprise in mafia-like colors. Therefore, it would be good to note that the community of Shvut Rachel, where Teitel resided, was named after a settler whose murderers were never captured. Rachela Druck, a mother of seven children, was murdered 18 years ago en route to a demonstration in Tel Aviv. Isaac Rofe from Jerusalem was shot to death along with her. Their relatives have not yet seen the murderers sitting at court. The case of Rachela Druck and Isaac Rofe also disproves the claim that the Shin Bet and police redoubled their efforts to nab Teitle only after he hurt Jews. Druck and Rofe were Jewish, yet nonetheless their case remains unresolved. The files can probably be found in the Shin Bet archive next to the unresolved murder cases of teenager Rami Haba from Elon Moreh (1987), Yair Mendelson from Dolev (1991), Ofra Felix from Alon Moreh (1995,) and several other such cases. To this day, we also don't know who murdered soldier Hadas Kadmi in the Carmel forest (1984) or who butchered Nava Elimelech, a child from Bat Yam, in 1982. At some point, investigators gave up, because this is the way of the world. Yet rightists never accused them of deliberate negligence. The Yesha Council also refrained from hinting that in the Shin Bet's view Jewish blood is cheaper than Arab blood. Such malicious accusations, if we're dealing with generalizations already, always come from the Left. By Jeffrey Goldberg Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, which is the leading American group advocating for an independent Palestine alongside Israel, has a new book out, "What's Wrong With the One-State Agenda?" which does a comprehensive job of demolishing the arguments made by those who think that Israel should be eliminated and replaced by a single state of Jews and Palestinians. He has performed an important service with this book by noting one overwhelming truth about this debate: Virtually no one in Israel wants a single-state between the river and the sea. It's useful to remember this salient fact when listening to the ostensibly reality-based arguments of the one-staters. 03/November /2009 Comparing Islamic anti-Semitism to Nazi Germany at its worst By Robert S. Wistrich Advertisement This murderous onslaught against German Jewry, cynically described by the Nazis as the "Night of Broken Glass" (Kristallnacht), was a major turning point on the road to the Final Solution of the so-called Jewish Question. ========= Jew-Hatred and Jihad The idea of using suicide pilots to obliterate the skyscrapers of Manhattan originated in 1940s Berlin. "In the latter stages of the war, I never saw Hitler so beside himself as when, as if in a delirium, he was picturing to himself and to us the downfall of New York in towers of flame," wrote Albert Speer in his diary. "He described the skyscrapers turning into huge burning torches and falling hither and thither, and the reflection of the disintegrating city in the dark sky." Not only Hitler's fantasy but also his plan of action foreshadowed September 11: He envisioned having kamikaze pilots fly light aircraft packed with explosives and with no landing gear into Manhattan skyscrapers. The drawings for the Daimler-Benz Amerikabomber from the spring of 1944 show giant four-engine planes with raised undercarriages for transporting small bombers. The bombers would be released shortly before the planes reached the East Coast, after which the mother plane would return to Europe. Hitler's rapture at the thought of Manhattan in flames indicates his underlying motive: not merely to fight a military adversary, but to kill all Jews everywhere. Possessed of the notion that the whole of the Second World War was a struggle against an imaginary Jewish enemy, he deemed "the USA a Jewish state" and New York the center of world Jewry. "Wall Street," as a popular book published in Munich in 1919 put it, "is, so to speak, the Military Headquarters of Judas. From there his threads radiate out across the entire world." From 1941 on, Hitler pushed to get the bombers into production, in order to "be able to teach the Jews a lesson in the form of terror attacks on American metropolises." Towards the end of the war this idea became an obsession. Sixty years later, it so happens, the assault on the World Trade Center was coordinated from Germany. Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian who piloted the plane that struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center; Marwan al--Shehhi, from the United Arab Emirates, who steered the plane into the South Tower; Ziad Jarrah, from Lebanon, who crashed United Airlines Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania; and their friends Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni, and the Moroccan student Mounir al-Motassedeq had formed an al Qaeda cell in Hamburg, where they held regular "Koran circle" meetings with sympathizers. What ideas propelled Atta and the others to act? Witnesses provided part of the answer at the world's first 9/11-related trial, the prosecution of al-Motassedeq, which took place in Hamburg between October 2002 and February 2003. One participant in the Koran circle meetings, Shahid Nickels, said Atta's Weltanschauung was based on a "National Socialist way of thinking." Atta was convinced that the Jews were striving for world domination and considered New York City the center of world Jewry, which was, in his opinion, Enemy No. 1. Fellow students who lived in Motassedeq's dormitory testified that he shared these views and waxed enthusiastic about a forthcoming "big action." One student quoted Motassedeq as saying, "The Jews will burn and in the end we will dance on their graves." Amazingly, neither the American media nor the international press took much notice of this testimony, largely refusing to report on Atta's and Motassedeq's explicit Jew-hatred. The above quotations come from the weekly Der Spiegel and from the detailed notes of the trial taken by journalist Michael Eggers, who attended every session and wrote about it for Reuters. If this had been the trial of a Ku Klux Klan member or someone from the far right such as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, reports of Nazi-like dreams of exterminating the Jews would probably have made the headlines. But in this case, involving attackers of Arab background, journalists apparently found the issue irrelevant. Moreover, this Jew-hatred was no quirk of the Hamburg cell. Osama bin Laden himself declared in 1998, "The enmity between us and the Jews goes back far in time and is deep rooted. There is no question that war between us is inevitable. . . . The Hour of Resurrection shall not come before Muslims fight Jews." Even the 9/11 Commission Report, the summation produced by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States in July 2004, falls short in this regard. Its chapter on "Bin Laden's worldview" makes no mention of his hatred of Jews. This silence is all the more surprising in that the commission quotes documents in which bin Laden unambiguously expresses his hatred of Jews. For example, in the "Letter to the American People" of November 2002, which the report repeatedly cites, bin Laden warns: "The Jews have taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense." Osama goes on: "Your law is the law of rich and wealthy people. . . . Behind them stand the Jews who control your policies, media and economy." Yet the report's authors inexplicably fail to see the significance of these words and the ideology behind them. The report also ignores the history of Islamism. It accords the entire pre-1945 period just five lines. Yet it is precisely this period that fostered the personal contacts and ideological affinities between early Islamism and late Nazism--the linkage between Jew-hatred and jihad. Despite common misconceptions, Islamism was born not during the 1960s but during the 1930s. Its rise was inspired not by the failure of Nasserism but by the rise of Nazism, and prior to 1951 all its campaigns were directed not against colonialism but against the Jews. It was the Organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, that established Islamism as a mass movement. The significance of the Brotherhood to Islamism is comparable to that of the Bolshevik party to communism: It was and remains to this day the ideological reference point and organizational core for all later Islamist groups, including al Qaeda and Hamas. It is true that British colonial policy produced Islamism, insofar as Islamism viewed itself as a resistance movement against "cultural modernity." The Islamists' solution was the call for a new order based on sharia. But the Brotherhood's jihad was not directed primarily against the British. Rather, it focused almost exclusively on Zionism and the Jews. Membership in the Brotherhood shot up from 800 to 200,000 between 1936 and 1938, according to the research of Abd Al-Fattah Muhammad El-Awaisi for his book The Muslim Brothers and the Palestine Question 1928-1947. In those two years the Brotherhood conducted only one major campaign in Egypt, and it was against Zionism and the Jews. This campaign, which established the Brotherhood as a mass movement, was set off by a rebellion in Palestine directed against Jewish immigration and initiated by the notorious grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al--Husseini. The Brotherhood organized mass demonstrations in Egyptian cities under the slogans "Down With the Jews!" and "Jews Get Out of Egypt and Palestine!" Leaflets called for a boycott of Jewish goods and Jewish shops, and the Brotherhood's newspaper, al-Nadhir, carried a regular column on "The Danger of the Jews of Egypt," which published the names and addresses of Jewish businessmen and allegedly Jewish newspaper publishers all over the world, attributing every evil, from communism to brothels, to the "Jewish danger." The Brotherhood's campaign against the Jews used not only Nazi-like tactics but also German funding. As the historian Brynjar Lia recounted in his monograph on the Brotherhood, "Documents seized in the flat of Wilhelm Stellbogen, the Director of the German News Agency affiliated to the German Legation in Cairo, show that prior to October 1939 the Muslim Brothers received subsidies from this organization. Stellbogen was instrumental in transferring these funds to the Brothers, which were considerably larger than the subsidies offered to other anti-British activists." At the same time, the Muslim Brotherhood was the first modern organization to propagate the archaic idea of a belligerent jihad and the longing for death. In 1938, Hassan al-Banna, the Brotherhood's charismatic founder, published his concept of jihad in an article entitled "The Industry of Death." He wrote: "To a nation that perfects the industry of death and which knows how to die nobly, God gives proud life in this world and eternal grace in the life to come." This slogan was enthusiastically taken up by the "Troops of God," as the Brothers called themselves. As their battalions marched down Cairo's boulevards in semi-fascist formation they would burst into song: "We are not afraid of death, we desire it. . . . Let us die to redeem the Muslims!" The death cult that became a hallmark of modern jihadism was laced with Jew-hatred from the very beginning. Moreover, this attitude sprang not only from European influences; it also drew directly on Islamic sources. First, Islamists considered, and still consider, Palestine an Islamic territory, Dar al-Islam, where Jews must not run a single village, let alone a state. At best, in their view, this land should be judenrein; at the very least, Jews there should be relegated to subservient status. Second, Islamists justify their aspiration to eliminate the Jews of Palestine by invoking the example of Muhammad, who in the 7th century not only expelled two Jewish tribes from Medina, but also beheaded the entire male population of a third Jewish tribe, before proceeding to sell all the women and children into slavery. Third, they find support and encouragement for their actions and plans in the anti-Jewish passages of the Koran. After World War II it became apparent that the center of global Jew-hatred was shifting from Nazi Germany to the Arab world. In November 1945, just half a year after the end of the Third Reich, the Muslim Brothers carried out the worst anti-Jewish pogroms in Egypt's history, when demonstrators penetrated the Jewish quarters of Cairo on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. They ransacked houses and shops, attacked non-Muslims, and torched the synagogues. Six people were killed, and some hundred more injured. A few weeks later the Islamists' newspapers "turned to a frontal attack against the Egyptian Jews, slandering them as Zionists, Communists, capitalists and bloodsuckers, as pimps and merchants of war, or in general, as subversive elements within all states and societies," as Gudrun Krämer wrote in her study The Jews in Egypt 1914-1952. In 1946, the Brotherhood made sure that Heinrich Himmler's friend Amin al-Husseini, the former grand mufti who was being sought as a war criminal by Britain and the United States, was granted asylum and a new lease on political life in Egypt. As leader of the Palestine National Movement, al-Husseini had been a close ally of both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Nazis. Based in Berlin from 1941 to 1945, he had directed the Muslim SS divisions in the Balkans and had been personally responsible for blocking negotiations late in the war that might have saved thousands of Jewish children from the gas chambers. All this was known in 1946. Nonetheless, Britain and the United States chose to forgo criminal prosecution of al-Husseini in order to avoid spoiling their relations with the Arab world. France, which was holding al-Husseini, deliberately let him get away. For many in the Arab world, what amounted to amnesty for this prominent Islamic authority who had spent the war years broadcasting Nazi propaganda from Berlin was a vindication of his actions. They started to view his Nazi past with pride, not shame, and Nazi criminals on the wanted list in Europe now flooded into the Arab world. Large print-runs of the most infamous libel of the Jews, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, were published in the following decades at the behest of two well-known former members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. Both the Muslim Brothers' unconditional solidarity with al-Husseini and their anti-Jewish riots mere months after Auschwitz show that the Brotherhood did not object, to say the least, to Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The consequences of this attitude, this blindness to the international impact of the Holocaust, continue to affect the course of the Arab-Jewish conflict today. How do Islamists explain international support for Israel in 1947? Ignoring the actual fate of the Jews during World War II, they revert to conspiracy theories, viewing the creation of the Jewish state as a Jewish-inspired attack by the United States and the Soviet Union on the Arab world. Accordingly, El-Awaisi writes, the Brotherhood "considered the whole United Nations intervention to be an international plot carried out by the Americans, the Russians and the British, under the influence of Zionism." The mad notion of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, suppressed in Germany since May 8, 1945, survived and flourished in the political culture of the Arab world. In particular, Nazi-like conspiracy thinking persisted and grew. An especially striking example of its continuing influence is the charter adopted in 1988 by the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, better known as Hamas. In this charter--which "sounds as if it were copied from the pages of Der Stürmer," as Sari Nusseibeh, former PLO representative in Jerusalem, has written--Hamas defines itself as "the spearhead and the avant-garde" of the struggle against "world Zionism." The Jews, the charter explains, "were behind the French Revolution [and] the Communist Revolution. . . . They were behind World War I . . . they were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. . . . There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it. . . . Their plan," states Article 32, "is embodied in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying." As in the 1930s and 1940s, the sheer absurdity of the claims makes it difficult for educated people to believe that anyone could take them seriously. Nonetheless, this notion of Jews as the root of all evil continues to inspire the mass murder of civilians in Israel and to motivate the joy with which Islamists greet those murders. "Hitler's Islamic heirs," as the historian Jehuda Bauer has called the Islamists, have replaced an anticolonialism aspiring to emancipation with a Jew-hatred aspiring to salvation through the annihilation of everyone "Jewish." It should not be surprising to find Osama bin Laden accusing "the Jews" of "taking hostage America and the West"--or to find Mohamed Atta's acquaintances attributing to him a Nazi worldview. What is truly surprising is that this Islamist hatred of Jews is often overlooked by Western analysts, political actors, and media. As noted above, the 9/11 Commission Report is a case in point. Instead of discussing the fact that Jew-hatred had reached epidemic proportions in the Islamic world well before September 11, the report gives the impression that Islamism originally arose in response to recent American and Western policies. This is first conveyed in a remark on the early days of Islamism, when, we are told, "Fundamentalists helped articulate anticolonial grievances," an idea that ignores crucial dimensions of the outlook of the Muslim Brotherhood of the 1930s. The stereotypical message that the West is responsible is repeated in the report's analysis of bin Laden's motives: "Bin Laden's grievance with the United States may have started in reaction to specific U.S. policies but it quickly became far deeper." The report gets the history wrong. The al Qaeda leader was first politicized not by "specific U.S. policies," but by the writings of Sayyid Qutb and the jihadist lectures of Abdullah Azzam. As a result, the commission's explanation of al Qaeda's appeal is one-sided: "As political, social, and economic problems created flammable societies, Bin Laden used Islam's most extreme fundamentalist traditions as his match." It is, of course, true that Islamists seek to exploit social problems for their own ends. But Islamism is not an ideology that ignites protest as it rubs up against social injustice. On the contrary, what provokes Islamist violence is any sign of modern development in the Muslim world: scientific inquiry, political or personal self-determination, economic progress, women's equality, freedom of expression in cinema and theater. The radicalization of Islam is less the consequence of poverty and lack of opportunity than their cause. The refusal to see this and to recognize the substance of Islamist ideology--the death cult, the hatred of Jews, and the profound hatred of freedom--leads back again and again to the mistaken "discovery" that the "root cause" of terrorism is U.S. policies. Ultimately, the refusal to recognize al Qaeda's true motives results in a reversal of responsibility: The more deadly the terrorism, the greater the American guilt. The appeal of this approach is related to the specious hope it holds out: If suicide terrorism has its roots in U.S. policy, then a change in U.S. policy can assuage terrorism and the fear it induces. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, benefits, since the bloodier its attacks, the greater the anger against . . . the United States. The same pattern explains the bizarre reaction to the Middle East conflict that is widespread in the West: The average observer, ignorant of the anti-Jewish content of the Hamas Charter, has to find some other explanation for terrorism against Jews, which must be--Israel. It is not the terrorists who are guilty, but their victims. Finding suicide terrorism incomprehensible, Westerners rationalize it as an act of despair that invites sympathy. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner. Here, too, following the principle of "the more barbaric the anti-Jewish terror, the greater the Israeli guilt," the bombers' victims become the scapegoat for global terrorism. The old stereotype of Jewish guilt is thus amplified in contemporary form--and only encourages the terrorists. A struggle against Islamism waged in ignorance of Islamist ideology weakens the West. The attribution of guilt to Israel and the United States adds fuel to the flames of Islamist propaganda and drives the wedge deeper into the Western camp rather than where it belongs--in the Muslim world. Such blindness is especially hazardous in the case of the Iranian nuclear program, whose danger arises from the unique ideological stew surrounding it: the mish-mash of Jew-hatred, Holocaust denial, and Shiite death-cult messianism that is the context for Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons and advanced missiles. Here the worst-case scenario is not an increase in suicide bombing attacks against individuals, but a perhaps suicidal nuclear attack on the Israeli state. Back in Munich in 1938, many believed they could resolve the Sudeten German problem with Hitler without considering how it fit into the Nazis' overall -strategy. In the same way today, in U.N. Security Council decisions and the positions of the Permanent Five, the technical aspects of Iran's nuclear program are often divorced from their ideological context. The problem is not that the Islamists hide their goals. The problem is that the West does not listen. Osama bin Laden's chief reproach of the Americans in his "Letter to the American People" is that they act as free citizens who make their own laws instead of accepting sharia. The same hatred of freedom can be found in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's letter to the American president: "Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems." Not to confront the ideological roots of Islamism--notably its well-documented connection to Nazi Jew-hatred--stymies any Western push for political, economic, and cultural modernization in the Muslim world. Yet only such modernization can split the majority of Muslims, who would benefit from social progress, from the Islamists, who are willing to die to prevent it. Without challenging the ideological roots of Islamism, it is impossible to confront the Muslim world with the real choices before it: Will it choose life and hope, or does it prefer the cult of death? Will it stand up for individual and social self-determination, or will it finally submit to the mullahs' program of Jew-hatred and jihad? Matthias Küntzel is a Hamburg-based political scientist and a research associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This essay includes material from his forthcoming book Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (Telos Press, November 2007). This article was translated from German by Colin Meade. Friday, November 06, 2009
1. Would you like to become a Palestinian? It is easy! Just declare
that you are a Palestinian. You will be in good company. Read about one of America's finest new Jihad at Fort Hood – by Robert Spencer Posted By Robert Spencer On November 6, 2009 @ 2:23 am In FrontPage | 7
Yet there was, and what's more, Major Hasan's motive was perfectly clear Nidal Malik Hasan was born in Virginia but didn't think of himself as an Center. He is a graduate of Virginia Tech and has a doctorate in psychiatry He was a staff psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for six So he identified himself as Palestinian and was a devout Muslim – so what? On May 20, 2009, a man giving his name as "NidalHasan" posted this defense
Maybe he just snapped, perhaps under the pressure of his imminent And Hasan's murderous rampage resembles one that five Muslim men in New That was a jihad plot. One of the plotters, Serdar Tatar, told an FBI Nidal Hasan's statements about Muslims rising up against the U.S. military -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- URL to article: URLs in this post: [1] According to NPR: [2] Washington Post: [3] a man giving his name as "NidalHasan" posted this defense of suicide
As you know, the media outside Israel has for years signaled their support Until Teitel was apprehended. There is not a single news story in Israel He is clearly a killer and he may be mentally insane. Is he a terrorist? The other interesting thing is that there are countless Op-Eds in the The great amusement in this is that the very same people writing such Tel Aviv University - Uri Hadar (Dept of Psychology) claims the "vengeful" Israel's "attack on Gaza" the previous winter, Hadar told the audience, had Tel Aviv University Psych Prof Uri Hadar – Inventor of Blood Libels by Joel Amitai In 2005, the year Israel removed every last soldier and settler from Gaza During October 27-28, 2008, two months before Israel finally launched the Hadar is married to Mirjam Hadar, who cofounded the extremist New Profile Hadar didn't mention, of course, that a one-ton bomb was dropped (in 2002) But if in this case Prof. Hadar engaged in mendacity by omission, his Two months later the Gaza War (or Operation Cast Lead) broke out. It will The article describes the travails of the Israeli Jewish members of But on the Palestinian side it wasn't much better. Hadar and friends write: "Mostly, our attempts to express empathy, too, for our own suffering--that "…by and large, our Palestinian colleagues challenged Jewish hegemony in "Our listserve during this period also became a source of alternative "…We needed to confirm our humanity and morality through its appreciation It is not hard to see through the fog of verbiage here: Hadar and his Did this kindle any suspicion in the minds of Hadar and his friends' minds Now if Hadar writing elsewhere at least seemed to express a modicum of Israel's "attack on Gaza" the previous winter, Hadar told the audience, had A genocidal Nazi-like Holocaust being planned by the Jews! Nothing less, Joel Amitai is an independent researcher and filmmaker. Reach him at
Yoad Winter is a Linguistics and Mathematics expert who works with Winter specializes in what could be called Boolean semantics, combining Logic is an important part of Boolean algebra, used by Winter in his But when it comes to true or false values regarding Israel's right to exist Yoad Winter, now in the comfort and safety of the Netherlands, castigates Yoad Winter belongs to a growing crowd of anti-Israel Israelis living "We, a group of Israelis living in the Netherlands, call on you to publicly The bulk of the "700 people killed" (ultimately 1,300 claimed by the UN by In addition, obviously 700,000 Arabs were not living without water, nor one Over 1,300 Israeli trucks transported humanitarian aid to the civilians of Yoad Winter and his friends were kind enough to acknowledge that missiles "These must be brought to an end through a real and viable long-term While still at the Technion, Yoad Winter signed a petition (initiated in Never mind that Israeli college students have been the victims of Yoad Winter surely knows that Hamas is part of the student government at
The Lost Boys By RICHARD WHITMIRE (wall st journal) And yet, when looking to America's future—trying to spot the future Economists at both the Department of Education and the College Board agree In theory, the surge in the number of educated women should make up for Why males don't seem to "get" the importance of a college education is a Too many boys arrive at their senior year of high school lacking both the All this explains why colleges have been putting a thumb on the scale to The Commission on Civil Rights cited an example written about in U.S. News It would be patriotic to report that this discrimination against women is The case to abolish male gender preferences is problematic. Most of those In truth, these gender preferences are a sideshow. The real issue is the —Mr. Whitmire is the author of the forthcoming book "Why Boys Fail." Wednesday, November 04, 2009
1. Israel’s Left is hysterical. Led by Haaretz, it is having conniptions over the fact that the Minister of Education from the Likud declined to appoint a leftist professor from Tel Aviv University to head a ministry panel to design new school programs in the "Culture and Legacy of Israel." The professor is Ron Margolin, who teaches comparative religion. The minister preferred Prof. Benjamin Ish-Shalom, founder of the Beit Morasha Jewish studies center in Jerusalem. Margolin had been a deputy to bimbo Yuli Tamir when she had run the ministry (she is best remembered for introducing “Nakba studies” into the schools to mourn Israel’s existence and also for denouncing those who oppose “female circumcision” in the Third World). Margolin, a groupie of Martin Buber, had proposed eliminating a lot of Jewish content from school studies about Judaism. See this: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/990769.html The Haaretz hysteria may be read here: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1125711.html
Now why is this story so amusing? For one, the director of the ministry of education under Minister Saar is now Shimshon Shoshani, a Meretz person. Second, here we have Haaretz whining that someone is barred from a governmental appointment supposedly because he is a leftist. But Haaretz, which censors and bars writers from appearing in its own newspaper if they are not far Leftists, has never had a word to say about the many departments at Israeli universities in which no non-leftists are permitted to teach.
And besides, since when is not appointing a leftist to a post some sort of crime? Since when is political power a leftist entitlement?
2. In recent days the headlines in Israel have been filled with news about grizzly murders. It is important to keep these stories in perspective. As horrific as they are, Israel is still a relative-low-crime safe place to live.
The first of the stories involves the murder of an entire family of Jews in Rishon, 6 people over 3 generations, including 2 small children. The victims had immigrated form the old USSR. The murderer was a non-Jew who had entered Israel somehow under the Law of Return. He was a serial criminal back in Russia and after he arrived Russia had asked Israel to extradite him to face criminal charges. Stupidly, Israel refused. Israel sometimes refuses to extradite criminals when there is any suspicion that anti-Semitic motives could lie behind the prosecution overseas, but this obviously was not the case. The murderer killed them because the father of the family had fired him from a job as a waiter. The killer was an alcoholic and drug user. Bizarrely, he had earlier been employed as a security guard to protect a media moghul in Israel who was being threatened by the late comic Dudu Topaz, who committed suicide after being arrested.
In the aftermath of the mass murder, suddenly there is a transient media posturing by some politicians to adopt capital punishment in Israel, but “only when children have been murdered.” Here is a better idea: Israel needs wholesale capital punishment for terrorists, regardless of the age of their victims, and it should also be applied to criminal murderers and violent rapists and maybe also traitors.
Anyway, the other gruesome story involves a deranged American immigrant named Jack Teitel. As you no doubt already know, Teitel went on a spree of killings and attempted killings. He is suspected of placing the bomb outside Sternhell’s home and now is accused of having murdered two Israeli policemen. Teitel is religious and lived in the West Bank.
Israel’s McCarthyist Left is having a field day with this. You see, they are screaming in totalitarian unison, Right-wingers and religious people are all murderers! An Op-Ed in YNET by a leftie called openly for suppression of the freedom of speech of religious people and demanded that all Orthodox be collectively regarded as criminal.
Every crime by a religious rightist, and Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir come to mind, extends the hegemony over the country by the Leftist Ascendancy by a decade!
The third murder was of Shabtai Kalmanovich, who had been a KGB spy in Israel. Notice the Left is not screaming that this makes all leftists suspect as traitors and spies. In any case, Kalmanovich was gunned down in what looks like a gangland shooting in Moscow this week. He evidently was involved in mob activities. Some rumors say he may have been a double agent informing on the KGB.
3. Italy takes action against its Holocaust Deniers and anti-Semitic faculty members: http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=6094 How come Ben Gurion University refuses to do so?
4. Where do anti-Semitic pseudo-historians at Tel Aviv University come from? See the answer: http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=6125
5. Palestine's Missing Critics - Where's the outrage for Ramallah's atrocities? Monday, November 2, 2009 As of 11:19 PM The Wall Street Journal Europe Edition OPINION EUROPE NOVEMBER 2, 2009, 4:19 P.M. ET http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703932904574511043050416578.html 6. Since early November is the silly time in Israel, where all the conspiracy nuts come forth, we repost to you: Cain was a Patsy Obviously doctored scene taken from Genesis surveillance tape! We have received incredible breaking news. A team of people claiming to be investigative reporters based in Florida, Ohio, and Jerusalem have announced that they have discovered that Cain was a patsy and that he did not in fact murder Abel. Numerous pieces of evidence have been brought together in order to derive this conclusion, they insist. And the inconsistencies in the official report in Genesis about the developments on the day of the assassination must mean that Cain was innocent and had been set up as a patsy by a nefarious conspiracy. First, they insist, Cain did not in fact stab Abel with an actual knife but rather used a fake rubber knife from a gimmick shop that was picked up in Chinatown. That explains why there were reports that a passerby down the road was thought to have yelled "Rubber Knife! Rubber Knife!" Second, in the surveillance tapes near the exit from the Garden of Eden, Cain's arm appears to be unnaturally long, suggesting some sort of conspiracy was at play. Third, the very fact that Cain admitted that he murdered Abel when questioned about it proves that he was set up and a victim of a conspiracy. The fact that Cain later continued to plead guilty and that everyone else in his family agreed that he was guilty just shows how broad the real conspiracy was! You see, Abel - even after being elected - may have been having second thoughts about his own policies regarding sacrifices and a sinister conspiracy wanted to prevent Abel from changing the menu. So Cain was a convenient scapegoat. There are so many inconsistencies in the official report of the Abel murder, insist the investigators and promoters of the Alternative Theory of the Abel Assassination, the one that challenges the accuracy of the report in Genesis. Why didn't anyone call 911 or even 101 to get emergency medical help? Why was the palm tree near Cain seen in the surveillance tape as having branches that moved strangely and in an unexplained manner? And just how many wounds did Abel have? Initial reports said 12 stab wounds, and later it was claimed in the official commission of investigation that there were only 11! But what about the unexplained extra hole in Abel's shirt, cleverly disguised to look like a cigarette burn? And why did Eve not try to give Abel CPR (not to be confused with CFR!)? What exactly was Eve REALLY doing when the murder took place? And how come we have not been shown all the CAT scan images of Abel's corpse? Meanwhile, there are growing demands for a re-opening of the investigation on web sites around the world that otherwise investigate the 9-11 attacks on the US, UFO abductions, and the Holocaust Hoax invented by Zionists. Several self-proclaimed "journalists" are demanding that Abel's complete set of medical records be published at once. They also claim that the surveillance tapes near the Garden of Eden exit have been doctored to make it appear that Cain was the murderer. A popular singer has just come out in favor of releasing Cain from prison so that the real murderer can be identified. The conspiracy theorists claim that anyone who rejects their arguments about Cain's innocence must be a paid agent of the forces of darkness and the Council on Foreign Relations. We will keep you updated on all new developments in this major breaking story!
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
A university in Norway is calling for worldwide boycotts of Israel. Meanwhile the president and the rector of the University of Haifa have taken to the airwaves to denounce that initiative. See this: http://newmedia-eng.haifa.ac.il/?p=1415 The only problem? He has done nothing about the members of the faculty at the University of Haifa who are themselves calling for a worldwide boycott of Israel! Some of these are listed here: http://livefromoccupiedpalestine.blogspot.com/2009/01/israeli-citizens-call-for-boycott-of.html These University of Haifa leftist anti-Zionists were calling for such a boycott against Israel and against Israeli universities even before the recent call for such a boycott issues by anti-Israel extremist Neve Gordon from Ben Gurion University. Want to let the heads of the University know what you think of this “inconsistency”? Write to University of Haifa: President of the University of Haifa Prof. Aaron Ben-Ze’ev University of Haifa Mt Carmel, 31905 Haifa Israel Tel: 972-4-8240101 Fax: 972-4-8240281 E-mail: abenzeev@univ.haifa.ac.il Rector of the University of Haifa Prof. Yossi Ben-Artzi University of Haifa Mt Carmel, 31905 Haifa Israel Tel: 972-4-8240405 Fax: 972-4-8342101 Email: yossib@univ.haifa.ac.il Chairman of the Board of Governors Mr. Leon Charney Law Office of Leon H. Charney Broadway 1441 New York, NY 10018 Phone: 212-819-0994 E-mail: charney@lhcharney.com University "Friends of" Offices Outside Israel are listed here: http://www.haifa.ac.il/html/html_eng/friends.htm
Sunday, November 01, 2009
1. This is “Rabin Week” in Israel. As during every year at this time, two things in particular are taking place. The first is the emergence from their caves of the Rabin conspiracist nuts. These are Israel’s equivalent of the so-called “911 Truth” conspiracists in the US, a movement of conspiracy nuts who claim that the Jews and/or the Republicans actually knocked down the WTC towers and not poor bin Laden. The Rabin conspiracy nuts promote the “theory” fabricated by the deranged UFO fruitcake Barry Chamish, now busy doing speaking gigs for Jews-for-Jesus centers in the US. While the Rabin conspiracism seems to be slowly dying out, it nevertheless makes an appearance in early November, along with the Russian storks heading south. Even a handful of professors from the Right continue to push it for reasons I cannot fathom or explain. The Israel National News (Arutz 7) web site also continues to undercut its own credibility with the conspiracy nonsense. At the same time, Israel’s anti-democratic Left, led by the Labor Party and Meretz along with their satellites, attempts to revive each fall the McCarthyist campaign it operated against freedom of speech in the 1990s. It claimed and claims that the exercise of freedom of speech by non-Leftists acts as a clear and present danger of violence, with Rabin’s death being “proof,” and so freedom of speech for non-Leftists must be suppressed. The Israeli Leftist Media, which are almost all of them, echoe the hostility to freedom of speech with McCarthyist obsession and insist that everyone on the Right, especially Netanyahu, share collective guilt in Rabin’s death. At the same time Rabin himself is converted by the media into a demigod in a sort of cult of personality. The real Rabin was a bungling and deluded incompetent whose policies produced 2000 Oslo deaths and put Israel’s very survival into jeopardy. Try to say that anywhere in the Israeli mainstream media! You could get arrested for shouting it on a street corner or printing it on your tee shirt! While there is lots of commentary in the Israeli media, I wanted to bring two piece in particular to your attention. The first is an Op-Ed by Yitzhak Klein that appears in today’s Jerusalem Post and is reprinted below in full. The second was an interesting article by Hagai Segel that appeared in Hebrew (only) in the Makor Rishon weekend magazine. It is a bit too long to translate in full but let me give you a brief synopsis of it: Segel begins by saying that in a sense the Left has a point when it says that all the political violence in Israel comes from the Right, aimed at the Left. He lists the icons of “Rightist violence” the Left loves to wave: Rabin himself, the Peace Now protester killed by a grenade tossed by a Rightist many years back, a knife attack in 1967 on communist leader Meir Vilner , and possibly a Rightist was behind the bomb left at Prof. Ze’ev Sternhell’s home last spring. (There are plenty of examples of political violence from israel’s Left, including the weekly attacks on soldiers in the West Bank town of Bil’in. These are NOT listed by Segel because he wants to set up a sort of straw man --- SP) Segel then goes on to argue that the whole comparison is misleading. The fringes of the Right produce violence because the Right is barred from power, barred from access to the mainstream media, and continuously demonized and delegitimized by the media. The Left is all in favor of law and order and calm peaceful political stability because it exercises control over Israeli policy and hegemony over the media. Those in power always favor law and order and stability, argues Segel in a sort of Marxism-turned-on-its-head. Leftist policies are of course always implemented in Israel, even when the Likud is in power. So the Left can sit back and behave peacefully because it is sure of getting its way. The real challenge, argues Segel, is for people to behave themselves, to obey the law and exercise restraint, to rsist political violence, when they are barred from power, smeared daily in the media, demonized and taunted, and even attacked by the police and army such as in the eviction of the entire Jewish population from the Gaza Strip. He cites a sociologist from the Hebrew University who predicted serious political violence BEFORE Rabin was assassinated. The sociologist attributed it to the isolation and powerless of the Right. The same sociologist remarked that if the Left were ever really to be barred from power and stripped of its control over the media and over national policy, it would take no time at all for the Left to turn violent. Israel’s Left has never undergone its own delegitimization, its own “Oslo,” its own expulsion a la Gush Katif. The Left has never been barred from the media, in fact it continues to exercise hegemony over them. Leftists can sit back in their easy chair and sip whiskey and watch their ideology being implemented. *** I think Segel is on to something. I am also on record for saying that the frivolous and arbitrary criminalization of the “Kahanists” in Israel was not only anti-democratic but likely to trigger violence. (Kahanists enjoy freedom of speech in the US and in Europe.) People who are barred from exercising freedom of speech and of protest turn to violence. 2. Our day of mourning... and hatred Oct. 31, 2009 Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room... The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. In George Orwell's dystopia, formal public ceremonies are devoted to the inculcation of hatred. The object of this hatred is the classic "enemy" that is a feature of every totalitarian society, legions of faceless and anonymous traitors who threaten society on all sides and whom it is an obligation to hate. In totalitarian societies, the cultivation of hatred serves important political objectives. Totalitarian society requires subjects who subordinate their lives to the demands of the regime, who submerge their personalities within its logic. This is achieved by deliberately inflaming their basest passions. The tragedy of totalitarian culture however is not that it finds the cultivation of hatred useful, but that hatred genuinely reflects the spiritual life of rulers and ruled alike. The true purpose for which hatred is cultivated is to create a society in which the human virtues of pity, compassion and decency are suppressed. This can happen only in a society in which such virtues have already been undermined. Totalitarian societies may pay lip service to the highest ideals, but in practice they dehumanize themselves by dehumanizing their enemies, who possess no rights and to whom no justice is due. Such a society can fall into a barbarism darker than that of any society of primitives. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were characterized by public ceremonies devoted, formally or informally, to the cultivation of hatred. By contrast, the State of Israel at its foundation set aside a day for remembering the victims of the Holocaust, and many individuals continue to cherish antipathy for Germany, but nobody ever contemplated a day devoted, formally or informally, to the hatred of Germans. That rightly would have been considered sick, a mark of Cain on the forehead of our society. No day devoted to the deliberate inculcation of hatred was established in Israel until 1996. SINCE ITS establishment, those who arrogated to themselves the right to determine the nature of Yitzhak Rabin's memorial day have devoted it to inculcating hatred against a particular community within Israeli society. Last year, repeating a frequent theme, President Shimon Peres admonished the national-religious community for not joining in the commemoration of Rabin. How ironic. On this day, members of that community are expected to have no voice, other than the voice that those who despise them would put into their mouths. Like Jews in medieval Europe herded into churches on Christmas, their role is to confess in public the crime of unbelief in Rabin's agenda, and to affirm that unbelief is equivalent to culpability. This of course serves a particular political agenda. But the real tragedy of Rabin's memorial day is that it has become the occasion for legitimizing a culture of hatred. This culture invokes a community of public enemies, treats them as collectively guilty and makes it easier to rationalize the denial of their fundamental rights. The way Rabin's memorial day is celebrated admits a breath of totalitarian culture into our public life. Politically motivated hatred has practical political consequences. The hatred which finds its expression on Rabin's memorial day had such consequences four years ago, during disengagement, which violated the fundamental rights of hapless Israeli citizens and traduced Israel's civil compact. It matters little what "security" arguments were deployed by those who legitimated this policy, or that the arguments turned out - indeed were known at the time - to be baseless. At root, the policy was motivated by causeless hatred, as some of its advocates have since acknowledged. The victims of disengagement are the objects of sympathy today, but not yet, as they should be, of repentance. It has become habitual for those who have appropriated Rabin's memorial day to blame the spiritual ills of Israeli society on "the occupation." That is too easy and facile an explanation. Surely these people are inured against that particular source of spiritual contamination. Those who tolerate or encourage an element of totalitarian culture in the celebration of Rabin's memorial day ought to make the day an occasion for what they are ever eager to urge upon others - heshbon nefesh, taking a critical, reflective retrospective of one's soul. The writer heads the Israel Policy Center. 3. So anyone want to serve as bookie on this and take in bets? Will the J Street asslibs (assimilationist liberals) speak about against this bigotry? Will the Tikkun editors denounce this racist intolerance? Will Meretz and Peace Now demand serious action and a crackdown? How about the Religious Action Center of the Reform synagogue movement, for whom defending the dignity of non-white minorities is the highest form of Judaism? . Remember the bloody pro-Hamas Sheikh Raad Salah, the Israeli Arab Islamofascist terrorist who was hosted at the University of Haifa last spring while the university ordered guards to prevent any Jewish students from entering the lecture hall. There the Sheikh called on Arab students to become suicide bombers. Well, a few days ago the Sheikh did something new. He denounced Ethiopian Jews using an epithet “Kushi” that is considered derogatory. (Yeah, it appears in the Bible as a term for black folks but, like “colored,” it depends on how it is used and in what tone.) Anyhow, he screamed something like who are those damned “Kushi” Ethiopians (meaning soldiers and police) to tell US Moslems who can go up on to the Temple Mount. The source in Hebrew can be read here: http://tlv100.walla.co.il/?w=/1/1585108 4. Saturday, October 31, 2009
http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/41215
Out With The Occupiers! By: Steven Plaut Date: Wednesday, October 28 2009
But on what basis do they say the Arabs have a legitimate claim to that It must be emphasized here that even the thousand-year Arab claim is not It is true that Arabs once exercised sovereignty over parts or all of After the rise of Islam, Palestine was indeed part of a larger Arab In any case, why does the fact that Palestine once belonged to a larger Why do anti-Zionists insist a thousand-year claim by Arabs who But that argument can of course be turned around on The other claim by anti-Zionists is that Jews have no rights to the land The claim would be nonsensical even if we were to ignore that fact that If it does, then it goes without saying that the Americans and Canadians For that matter, Mexicans of Spanish ancestry also need to leave. The But that is just a beginning. The Spanish will be called on to leave the The Australians and New Zealanders will have to end their occupations of It goes without saying the French will lose almost all their lands to That leaves the Arabs. First, all of northern Africa, from Mauritania to Iraq will be returned to the Assyrians and Chaldeans. Southern Arabia will The Palestinian Arabs will of course have to return the lands they are And right after all this, Israel will be most happy to implement the road
Radicals In The Land Of Canaan: Zionism's Forgotten 'Young Hebrews' Date: Wednesday, October 28 2009
The Canaanites were mostly either native-born Sabras or immigrants of the Ratosh was an early follower of Jabotinsky and Revisionist Zionism but had After leaving the Irgun, Ratosh went to Paris. It was during this time Canaanism was to be totally secular. The Canaanist program was for "no (This idea of separating Judaism from the Jewish state is alive and well Most Canaanists were born in Europe, but younger members such as Ornan, They were all radicals. Kenan, Tammuz and Peled had been Communists, then Archeological discoveries, including that of old inscriptions, helped lay One might think a movement that desired nothing more than to resituate But even a potential connection between Canaanism and Sephardim had to As Rejwan recalls, "the Canaanites fiercely opposed the idea of Pan-Jewish In 1957 Amir began publishing Keshet, a cultural quarterly. In the 1960s Gurevitch died soon after and Sohar ran for Knesset for a tax policy To what degree is today's radical left in Israel influenced by the ideas On a fundamental level, this evolution of Canaanism was only logical. The story of Matti Peled should suffice to demonstrate the problematic On September 4, 1997, Peled's granddaughter Smadar was blown up by a She compared the terrorist to Israeli soldiers at security checkpoints and Meanwhile, Peled's son Miko, who lives in San Diego, is a supporter of the There can be no greater testament to the failure of Canaanism than Miko Seth Frantzman is a columnist for the Jerusalem Post. His front-page essay
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