Posted 5/31/2004 02:19:00 PM

Subject: The Jewish "Theologian" from Waco

Slightly edited versions of these appear in the Spring 2004 issue of Middle East Quarterly:

Review of
Marc Ellis, ?Out of the Ashes: The Search for Jewish Identity in the Twenty-First Century,? Pluto Press, London, 2002
Reviewed by Steven Plaut

The first hint one has of the real orientation of this atrocious little book, which purports to be a theological re-examination of what it means to be Jewish after the Holocaust, is that the only people Ellis and his publisher could find to endorse the book on the jacket are members of the Terrorism Lobby: Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and their ilk. Not a single Jewish theologian. Nation, the Far Left anti-Jewish American political magazine, recently praised the book?s call for Israel to be eliminated, while expressing dislike for the fact that Ellis thinks religion still has some positive roles to play in the 21st century. Need we say more?
That is about as much a work in theology as is New Age drugs-and-Marxism Tikkun Magazine, a venue where Ellis feels right at home. Ellis is University Professor of American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University, a Baptist School in Waco, Texas. This is the same Waco we all recall as the home of some other peculiar forms of theology. Ellis has a long track record of using his Center there to proliferate leftist agitprop and Israel-bashing materials.
This poorly-written book, the latest in the series of Israel-bashing propaganda tirades published by Pluto Press, is little more than a vicious anti-Israel broadside. The only thing of value that Ellis thinks Jews should derive from their experiences during the Holocaust is an unambiguous denunciation of Israel and total support for the demands and agenda of the Palestinians.
For Ellis, Israel is the embodiment of all that is evil and all that is wrong with Judaism today. His concept of Israel is of a bunch of bullies riding about in helicopters and firing at poor innocent Palestinians for no reason at all (an image repeated ad nauseum in the book). Ellis? Israel is a belligerent selfish entity mistreating and enslaving the Palestinians as part of some sort of grand pursuit of the goals of the Jewish settlers in the ?Palestinian? territories. While I did not test it with a computerized word count, I would wager that the word ?bully? juxtaposed next to ?Israel? is the most common word combination in the entire screed. Ellis apparently has never heard of the Oslo ?peace process? and speaks about Israeli conquest and occupation of the Palestinians as being ?complete?, this a decade after Yitzhak Rabin and Bibi Netanyahu turned most of them over to the PLO?s tender rule.
Ellis makes it clear that he only feels comfortable with his fellow Jews when they are being victimized. When they stand up to defend themselves, they lose their Jewish soul and their legitimate right to exist. In his zeal to delegitimize Israel (he speaks blissfully of the ?post-Israel era?), he goes even further than the ?Rabbis? of Tikkun magazine, which Ellis lists as the greatest of ethical institutions in the Jewish world, and approaches the views of crackpot Norman Finkelstein. Like Finkelstein, Ellis thinks the Holocaust has been utilized by the Jews as a gimmick to grasp power and oppress the poor Arabs. The only real lesson Ellis wishes us to learn from the Holocaust is that Israelis are behaving like Nazis and that Jews who assist the Palestinians in achieving their aims are ethically equivalent to those few Germans who rescued Jews in World War II from the Gestapo.
According to Ellis, Israel?s original sin was to utilize the Holocaust as an excuse to occupy ?Palestinian? land. Israel?s existence is not justified by Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. The only ?massacres? of any Holocaust-relevance are those Israel perpetrates. Jenin and Deir Yassin (neither of which was in fact a massacre) are the moral equivalents of the Holocaust of the Jews, insist Ellis.
Ellis is openly contemptuous of any talk about Jews being in need of any national empowerment. Such things constitute ?Constantinian Judaism?, to use Ellis? term, which is nothing more than conscripting religion to serve the agenda of the militarist state and of those evil malicious ?settlers?. Jews can only fulfill their ethical role in history, which - Ellis is persuaded - is to promote socialism and leftist fads, if they are stateless and suffering. While crying his eyes out over the ?inhumane? treatment of the Palestinians, Ellis never finds time in his discussion of the theological implications of the Holocaust to discuss the mass murder of Jewish children by his Palestinians. Jews certainly have no right to ride around in helicopters to prevent such things.
Nor is he willing to acknowledge that any ?mistreatment? of Palestinians, such as assassinating their leading terrorists, might have anything at all to do with the atrocities committed by the Palestinians. In a book supposedly about the lessons of the Holocaust for the Jews, there is not a single word about the Nazi-like demonization of Jews by the PLO and its affiliates, nor the calls for genocide against Jews.
Ellis rejects even the political positions of Israel?s Far Left. He is contemptuous of claims that Ehud Barak?s offer to the Palestinians at Camp David II in 2000, in which Barak offered the PLO absolutely everything, was generous, not to mention suicidal. The offer did not come even close to what Ellis insists Israel must do, which is to cease to exist. Ellis is a passionate endorser of the ?One-State Solution,? also known as the Rwanda Solution, in which Israel will simply be eliminated as a Jewish state and will be enfolded within a larger Palestinian-dominated state that stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan river. This insists Ellis, is the ultimate realization of the Jewish ethic mission.
Ellis? explicit motivation for writing this book is that he got drubbed rather badly in a debate a few years back in New Zealand by Prof. Yossi Olmert, brother of the previous Mayor of Jerusalem. Olmert had the chutzpah to defeat Ellis mercilessly in argument. Hence Ellis opens his book by viciously stating that Olmert is the moral equivalent of Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin. He denounces Olmert as a bully because Olmert bested him in the debate. No doubt all of Israel also became a bully because it refuses to adopt the program for self-destruction advocated by this ?theologian? from Waco.

Review of David Grossman?s ?Death as a Way of Life: Ten Years After Oslo?, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, NY, 2003

Reviewed by Steven Plaut


Try to imagine that one of those many people in Britain who had lauded the Munich Accord as a great breakthrough for peace and who were certain Hitler would never violate it had decided to publish his old articles, singling praises for Munich ? printing them after World War II. Or imagine someone republishing his old Op-Eds from the late 1980s about how the Eastern European Soviet system was here to stay ? as a new book in 2003.

Well, if you can imagine such a thing, you have a pretty good picture of David Grossman?s new book. Grossman is one of the more extreme members of Israel?s Literary Left. He has published quite a few novels, and is regarded as a gifted writer of fiction. (Not by me, but then I am only an economist so what do I know about such things.) But Grossman also spends many a waking hour in turning out political agitprop and Far Leftist Op-Eds for the newspapers of Israel, the UK, Germany and France, including some of the worst Israel-bashing outfits.

Grossman suddenly has decided to collect some of these moldy Op-Eds and recycle them as this book, and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for some incomprehensible reason thought it could make them a few bucks. What we get are almost a score of Grossman?s silliest and worst-written Op-Eds. Even worse, these pieces have been so thoroughly belied and debunked by actual events that one would have expected anyone with a minimal sense of shame to have buried them in his clippings box and never again make public mention of them.

We have Grossman?s early pieces singing the praises of the Oslo ?peace process? and beatifying Yitzhak Rabin for his ?courage? in establishing the foundations for a Palestinian state. Grossman repeatedly celebrates the fact that Arafat has abandoned his ambitions to see Israel attacked and destroyed, and clearly has renounced the so-called Palestinian ?right of return?. Palestinians, insists Grossman, are downright embarrassed when they read the irredentist contents of the PLO?s ?Covenant?. Embarrassed indeed.

Hardly controlling his ecstasy at the Rabin-Arafat handshake, he gushes: ?I have always believed that when Israel agrees to grant this right (of self-determination) to the Palestinians, it will also win it for itself.? How inconvenient for Grossman that Israel spent the past decade granting such a ?right? and got 1300 murdered Israelis in exchange and nonstop war.

Grossman does not feel the slightest shudder when exhibiting for us all his political cluelessness. He reprints his old piece about the Palestinian boy Muhammed al-Durrah killed in a firefight started by the PLO, a piece attacking Israel and Ehud Barak. He neglects to mention anywhere that it has since been learned that the boy was in fact killed by PLO fire. Grossman reprints his appeals to Palestinian writers and intellectuals, ?ALL? of whom ? he insists ? seek peace with Israel (p.22), to condemn the violence. Grossman then sighs when they never do, but fails to contemplate the possibility that these folks just might be ENDORSING the jihadniks and murderers. While the Left?s ?concepts? turn out to have been completely wrong, one after the other, about absolutely everything in the era of the Oslo Euphoria, Grossman just gets irritable and insists Oslo collapsed because the Left was not stubborn enough and militant enough and extreme enough.

After predicting that Prime Minister Ehud Barak would never offer the Palestinians any land in one of the reprinted Op-Eds, Barak then offered the PLO virtually the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip, an immediate state, parts of pre-1967 Israel, financial tribute, and East Jerusalem with the Western Wall. Being progressive means never having to say you are sorry. The PLO then launches the ?Al-Aqsa Intifada? in response to Barak?s offer. Naturally, Grossman sees the collapse of Camp David II as somehow all Israel?s fault.

Now while Grossman is possibly the most extremist among Israel?s Literary Leftists, even HE dismisses out of hand any possibility of any Palestinian ?right of return? to pre-1967 Israel. But that is precisely the little detail over which Ehud Barak?s insane offer at Camp David failed! As my teenagers would say, Like Duh. Grossman never draws the conclusion from his own rejection of the PLO?s insistence on a ?Right of Return? that the PLO is seeking war and violence - not coexistence - always was, in spite of its posturing when Rabin was still around. Nor does he ever dwell on the meaning of those polls showing near-universal support among Palestinians for suicide bombings and atrocities against Jews. While throwing a couple of his pieces on the Holocaust into the volume, the only real lesson Grossman has learned from the Holocaust is how unwaveringly devoted today?s Far Left must remain to their delusions.

Grossman, who even today ?understands? why the Palestinians loath Israel (page 7), also ?understands? the PLO when it tries to smuggle in the Karin A ship of terror weapons (in another reprinted Op-Ed, p. 156), and unwaveringly believes that leftists never have to apologize for being wrong about just about everything they say or write. There is one redeeming aspect to this pathetic little book and that is its ability to serve as an interesting personal documentation of the delusions and fantasies of the Israeli Left, which directly produced the Olso Bloodbath.

In the only new part of the book, Grossman writes a bland preface in which he admits he is no journalist at all, and then explains how it is quite understandable that Arabs wish to follow aggressive, bellicose leaders. How embarrassing for Grossman that this was written shortly before the Iraqis took to slapping Saddam?s posters with their sandals.

Posted 5/31/2004 09:38:00 AM

1. The Case against Rachel Corrie:
http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=3735

2. I am as horrified at the murder of Yitzhak Rabin by Yigal Amir as
the next Israeli. I disagreed with just about everything Rabin did or
stood for, but political assassination is just about the worst crime
imaginable against a democracy. And yes I find all the nonsensical
conspiracvy theories about the assassination about as believable as
those crackpots screaming that the Mossad really knocked down the World
Trade Center Towers. But having noted all that, I find the
hypocrisy of the Left's new cause, preventing Amir from marrying, to be
among the more nauseating manifestations of Israeli Leftist fundamentalism
these days.

First, let us note that Palestinian terrorists and mass murderers
sitting in Israeli prison are permitted to marry and to have conjugal
visits. I do not know if Eichmann was married at the time of his trial,
but, if he was, he was probably allowed conjugal visits as well.

Second, the very same leftists who roll their eyes in horror every
time I suggest that Israel have capital punishment for Arab terrorists,
who insist that even mass-murdering terrorists have "human rights", and
deserve basic human respect, and who insist that terrorists'
fundamental "rights" deserve
consideration, THEY are the very ones leading the jihad to prevent Yigal
Amir from marrying his betrothed. Putting aside the question of taste in
his girlfriend's choice of fiance, and as horrid as Amir's crime was, let
us bear in mind that Amir murdered one human being. But the terrorists in
Israeli prison who are granted all those perqs - THEY murdered many
hundreds. And while we are on analogies, let us note that no one has
suggested that the Oslo Leftists whose policies produced the murders of
1400 Israelis be made to repent for their folly by barring their
chromosomes from the human gene pool. One might even say, 1400 Yitzhak
Rabins are their victims.

The other curious twist to the Amir court petition to be allowed to
marry his gal is that Amir has repeatedly spoken openly before TV cameras
and reporters in recent weeks, but never once did he give the smallest
indication that he believes any of the lunatic conspiracy "theories" of
UFOlogist and conspiracist Barry Chamish. I guess no one bothered to tell
Amir about Chamish's "theories" that Amir was really just a patsy who
fired blanks and that Shimon Peres in league with the CFR bogeyman were
REALLY behind the assassination of Rabin. Instead, Amir repeatedly
confirms for the TV cameras that, yes, he himself was the assassin of
Rabin, and he killed Rabin for this or that reason. Oh well, Chamish
still has the Zundelsite and the Holocaust Revisionists in his corner on
this.

3. Meanwhile, Israel's selective free speech rules, and the dual justice
system - under which one set of rules apply to leftists and Arab fascists
and another for everyone else, continues to hold. In recent weeks the
Arab Knesset Members have made a series of speeches and statements
in which they libeled Israeli soldiers and officers, compared them with
nazis, accused them of being murderers in cold blood, and so on. The
Israeli Chief of Staff complained before the Speaker of the Knesset about
these Knesset Members, and so now the Israeli mindless Left and its Arab
fascist allies are denouncing the general for anti-democratic behavior
bordering on planning a putsch.

So how many of the Knesset Members in question will now be brought up
on charges of incitement and support for terrorism and racism under
Israel's "anti-racism" law? That is right, grasshopper, not a one.
Charges of supporting racism and terrorism are reserved for really
dangerous people like Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzberg or the Kahanists.

Posted 5/30/2004 10:26:00 AM

1/ Yet another "political scientist" at Ben Gurion University making a
career out of trashing Israel and Jews:
http://www.amin.org/eng/sam_bahour/2004/may19.html

2. I thought this was cute:
A guide to academic newspeak
by a student at Harvard Divinity School, 1989


Gender
Radical feminism

Oppressors
White male heterosexuals

Bias
Basing scholarship on reason and evidence

Patriarchal models
Objectivity, logic, rational discourse, mathematics, science, the Bible,
the U.S. Constitution, family values, motherhood and apple pie

Politically aware
Politically far-left

Being divisive
Deviating from the beliefs of the politically aware (see politically
aware); synonymous with being hostile

Liberal arts education
Political indoctrination

Guilt
Feeling bad about your genes, but not about your actions

Women and men
The forces of good and evil in the dualism of gender (see gender)

Diversity
The gathering together of as large a group as possible of discontents,
deviants and social misfits while excluding, suppressing and bashing
conservatives, Republicans, evangelicals, adherents of historical
religions, serious students and anyone resistant to indoctrination

Sensitivity
Being deferential toward and extraordinarily circumspect around those
included in diversity while gratuitously attacking those excluded from
diversity (see diversity)

Greater diversity
Doing a better job of weeding out those excluded from diversity (see
diversity)

Being exclusive
Providing equal opportunity and equal protection under the law, regardless
of race or sex

Hermeneutics/Deconstructionism
Interpreting texts from the perspective of gender (see gender) with a
rationalization by anyone with a French name

Victims
All those not fitting the definition of oppressor (see oppressors) and
officially recognized far-left groups; does not include refugees from
leftist totalitarian countries, such as Vietnamese boat people, Cuban
immigrants, etc.

Sexism
The discrimination against and stereotyping of women or the failure to
discriminate against and stereotype men

Racism
The belief held by white oppressors (see oppressors) that their race is
superior to that of non-white victims (see Victims) or the failure to
apologize for one's own race if that race should be white; term is not
applicable to non-whites

Moderates
The Sandinistas, Castro, Lenin, Mao, Hillary Clinton and all those who are
politically aware (see politically aware)

Ultra-conservatives/the far right
All those to the right of moderates (see moderates)

Leftists
The empty set; exist only in the rhetoric of ultra-conservatives (see
ultra-conservatives)

Inclusive language
An ostentatious form of new speak which seeks to remove the generic use of
'man' and 'he' (along with common sense and eloquence) from the language,
e.g. "What are persons, that thou art mindful of her/him? and the child of
persons, that thou doest care for him/her?"

Censorship
A good thing when done by politically aware (see poltically unaware), e.g.
punishing owners of baseball teams for alleged comments made during
private conversations; a bad thing when done by ultra-conservatives (see
ultra-conservatives).

Iconoclasm
1. An activity self-righteously pursued by the politically aware; 2. an
activity considered criminal when the icons of the politically aware are
involved (see politically aware)

Iconoclast
One who can dish it out but can't take it

3. Interesting new student group: http://www.studentsforwar.org/

4. Stop Apologizing for Palestinian Dead and Injured!
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1085814354867&p=1006953079865

5. Silence of the Lamb Manure:
The Left--Strangely Silent About Iraq's WMD Discovery

Posted by Joe Mariani
Sunday, May 30, 2004


After spending more than a year attacking the Bush administration
daily for its supposed failure to produce the WMDs that
everyone--including the United Nations, as well as most leading
Democrats--believed Saddam had hidden, the left has suddenly gone
strangely silent on the subject. The ''mainstream'' media have been
tiptoeing around the discovery of a 155-mm mortar shell containing Sarin
gas in Iraq, the contents of which have been confirmed. The shell was
used as part of an improvised explosive device (IED) on a road near the
Baghdad International Airport, and exploded as it was being disarmed.

The shell contained three liters of Sarin--nearly a gallon. It was
a type of shell designed to mix chemical components during flight, which
was why the explosion didn't kill anyone (though two soldiers were treated
for exposure). Three liters of Sarin is enough, if the components are
mixed properly, to realistically kill hundreds, and potentially thousands.
A concentration of 100 milligrams of Sarin per cubic meter of air is
enough to constitute a lethal dose for half the people breathing it within
one minute.

This type of chemical warfare shell had never been declared by
Iraq--it was not even known that Iraq had ever made them. The 1999 UNSCOM
report on Iraq reported that thirty binary/Sarin shells were known to
exist, and stated that all had been accounted for. According to UNSCOM,
''Iraq developed a crude type of binary munition, whereby the final mixing
of the two precursors to the agent was done inside the munition just
before delivery.'' Someone actually had to physically pour the components
of the Sarin (or other type of G-series nerve agent) into the shells
before they could be fired. At least, that's how the ones we knew about
worked.

So, a previously-unknown type of artillery shell is found in Iraq,
containing an actual, verifiable chemical weapon. This is front page
news, right? Should we expect apologies from formerly doubting liberals?
Newspapers filled with retractions from prominent Democrats? Conciliatory
visits to President Bush from Jaques Chirac and Gerhardt Schroeder? Not
so fast. Remember: it's an election year. Liberals, Democrats,
terrorists, and appeasers all want President Bush to lose the election so
everyone can get back to business as usual. Terrorists want to get back to
their implacable war against Western civilization, and the others want to
get back to trying to placate them. The media, as long as we let them get
away with it, will only run stories that attack President Bush and
undermine support for him. In fact, liberals already have their spin on
this Sarin find ready to go. The vast majority of them--when you can get
them to admit that the Sarin and the shell are real--argue that it doesn't
matter for one of four ''reasons.''

A. The shell is old, from before the 1991 Gulf War, so it's not what we
were looking for.

Since the cease-fire that suspended the Gulf War depended on
Saddam's handing over to the United Nations ''[a]ll chemical and
biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and
components and all research, development, support, and manufacturing
facilities,'' this shell is precisely what we were looking for, especially
if it predates 1991. This shell and others like it are why the United
Nations passed 17 resolutions demanding that Saddam disarm. No matter how
old it was, it was still lethal. There is no statute of limitations on
weapons of mass destruction.

B. There is only one shell, not a stockpile, so it doesn't mean anything.

This one shell contained enough WMD material to potentially kill as
many people as died on 9/11, all by itself. Is it logical to assume that
this is the only one in existence--or just wishful thinking? The fact is
that we still don't know how much Sarin Iraq actually produced. ''At
first, Iraq told UNSCOM that it had produced an estimated 250 tons of
tabun and 812 tons of sarin. In 1995, Iraq changed its estimates and
reported it had produced only 210 tons of tabun and 790 tons of sarin.''
(Yes, that's tons.) At the very least, it tells us that we haven't nearly
finished looking for the WMDs that Saddam was supposed to surrender, and
didn't. Besides... a shell containing mustard gas was also found. Well,
maybe there were only two WMD shells in all of Iraq.

C. Just because Saddam had WMDs after all, it doesn't mean Bush didn't
lie about them.

As ridiculous as it sounds, this appears to be the instinctive,
defensive reaction of many liberals to this news. They so badly need to
believe that President Bush lied in order to legitimize their hatred of
him that they're capable of this sort of twisted reasoning. The rationale
seems to be that WMDs don't count if they aren't exactly where the CIA
told us they were, as if they couldn't be moved.

D. The terrorists didn't even know it was a chemical shell.

Well, they do now. And they know where they found it, too.

We need to redouble our efforts to stop the terrorists and find
Saddam's WMDs, before they're used to derail the new Iraqi government's
formation. The media's refusal to give this news the coverage it deserves
can only be due to a calculated attempt to reduce American support for our
efforts in Iraq, including that of tracking down Saddam's banned weapons.
The left's deliberate silence on this subject for the purpose of
influencing our election only helps our enemies.

------------

Joe Mariani is a computer consultant from Pennsylvania.

Posted 5/27/2004 04:13:00 PM

1. Spread the Word:

'Arabs for Israel' launch website
'Diversity should not be a virtue only in the USA'

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: May 24, 2004
5:00 p.m. Eastern

2004 WorldNetDaily.com
Recognizing Israel has little support in the world, Arabs and Muslims who
back the Jewish state are developing a new website, ArabsforIsrael.com.

Its developer, Middle East-born author Nonie Darwish, says "now is the
right time for Arabs and Muslims who believe in and support Israel to do
so."

"Israel has few friends at this point in history and I wish to convey to
every Israeli and Jew around the world, that there are Arabs and Muslims,
like us, who support them and wish for their well-being," says Dawish, a
U.S. citizen.


In its statement of principles, Arabs for Israel says it can support the
Jewish state and religion "and still treasure our Arab and Islamic
culture."

"There are many Jews and Israelis who freely express compassion and
support for the Palestinians," the website says. "It is time that we Arabs
express reciprocal compassion and support."

The group says Israel "is a legitimate state that is not a threat but an
asset in the Middle East."

Palestinians cannot move forward, Arabs for Israel says, because "of their
leadership, the Arab League and surrounding Arab and Muslim countries who
do not want to see Palestinians live in harmony with Israel."

"If Palestinians want democracy they can start practicing it now," the
group says. "We stand firmly against suicide/homicide terrorism as a form
of Jihad."

Emphasizing it is not anti-Islam, anti-Arab, confrontational or hateful,
the group says, "We cherish and acknowledge the beauty and contributions
of the Middle East culture, but recognize that the Arab/Muslim world is in
desperate need of constructive self-criticism and reform."

Darwish says last November she spoke at a lecture series at Carnegie
Mellon University called "Arabs for Israel," sponsored by the Young
Zionist Organization of America.

In a lecture entitled "An Egyptian's Journey from Anti-Semitism and
Ethnocentrism to Understanding and Support for Israel," Darwish told of
her childhood in Gaza in the 1950s where she witnessed rising terrorism
against Israel.

Darwish said she had to overcome years of indoctrination into hate and
anti-Semitism.

After her lecture, she said, an Egyptian student objected to her calling
the suicide mass murder of Israelis inside Israel by Palestinians
"terrorism."

"I told her there is no other name for it, and that there is nothing
honorable about it," Darwish said. "Terror is the behavior of desperate
people and Arabs are not and should not act desperate."

She advised another Muslim student, dressed in Islamic attire, "to put
aside the baggage we all came to the U.S. with and get to know a Jewish
student as a human being and fellow student."

"I commented that this is an educational institution in the free world and
this is their chance to learn about issues that are taboo in Arab
culture," Darwish said.

Reaction to the speech was mixed, she said, but she discovered "many Arab
students needed to hear a different message from a person of Arab origin
who supports Israel."

"I believe that many went home with something new to think about," Darwish
said. "Yes, it is OK to be Muslim and Arab and support Israel."

2. Terrorists Have No Geneva Rights

By JOHN YOO
May 26, 2004; Page A16

In light of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, critics are arguing that abuses
of Iraqi prisoners are being produced by a climate of disregard for the
laws of war. Human rights advocates, for example, claim that the
mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush's 2002
decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of POWs
under the Geneva Conventions. Critics, no doubt, will soon demand that
reforms include an extension of Geneva standards to interrogations at
Guantanamo Bay.

The effort to blur the lines between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib reflects a
deep misunderstanding about the different legal regimes that apply to Iraq
and the war against al Qaeda. It ignores the unique demands of the war on
terrorism and the advantages that a facility such as Guantanamo can
provide. It urges policy makers and the Supreme Court to make the mistake
of curing what could prove to be an isolated problem by disarming the
government of its principal weapon to stop future terrorist attacks.
Punishing abuse in Iraq should not return the U.S. to Sept. 10, 2001 in
the way it fights al Qaeda, while Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants
remain at large and continue to plan attacks.

It is important to recognize the differences between the war in Iraq and
the war on terrorism. The treatment of those detained at Abu Ghraib is
governed by the Geneva Conventions, which have been signed by both the
U.S. and Iraq. President Bush and his commanders announced early in the
conflict that the Conventions applied. Article 17 of the Third Geneva
Convention, which applies to prisoners of war clearly state that: "No
physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be
inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind
whatever." This provision would prohibit some interrogation methods that
could be used in American police stations.

One thing should remain clear. Physical abuse violates the Conventions.
The armed forces have long operated a system designed to investigate
violations of the laws of war, and ultimately to try and punish the
offenders. And it is important to let the military justice system run its
course. Article 5 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which governs the
treatment of civilians in occupied territories, states that if a civilian
"is definitely suspected of or engaged in activities hostile to the
security of the States, such individual person shall not be entitled to
claim such rights and privileges under the present Convention as would, if
exercised in favor of such individual person, be prejudicial to the
security of such State." To be sure, Art. 31 of the Fourth Convention
prohibits any "physical or moral coercion" of civilians "to obtain
information from them," and there is a clear prohibition of torture,
physical abuse, and denial of medical care, food, and shelter.
Nonetheless, Art. 5 makes clear that if an Iraqi civilian who is not a
member of the armed forces, has engaged in attacks on Coalition forces,
the Geneva Convention permits the use of more coercive interrogation
approaches to prevent future attacks.

A response to criminal action by individual soldiers should begin with the
military justice system, rather than efforts to impose a one-size-fits-all
policy to cover both Iraqi saboteurs and al Qaeda operatives. That is
because the conflict with al Qaeda is not governed by the Geneva
Conventions, which applies only to international conflicts between states
that have signed them. Al Qaeda is not a nation-state, and its members --
as they demonstrated so horrifically on Sept. 11, 2001 -- violate the very
core principle of the laws of war by targeting innocent civilians for
destruction. While Taliban fighters had an initial claim to protection
under the Conventions (since Afghanistan signed the treaties), they lost
POW status by failing to obey the standards of conduct for legal
combatants: wearing uniforms, a responsible command structure, and obeying
the laws of war.

As a result, interrogations of detainees captured in the war on terrorism
are not regulated under Geneva. This is not to condone torture, which is
still prohibited by the Torture Convention and federal criminal law.
Nonetheless, Congress's definition of torture in those laws -- the
infliction of severe mental or physical pain -- leaves room for
interrogation methods that go beyond polite conversation. Under the Geneva
Convention, for example, a POW is required only to provide name, rank, and
serial number and cannot receive any benefits for cooperating.

The reasons to deny Geneva status to terrorists extend beyond pure legal
obligation. The primary enforcer of the laws of war has been reciprocal
treatment: We obey the Geneva Conventions because our opponent does the
same with American POWs. That is impossible with al Qaeda. It has never
demonstrated any desire to provide humane treatment to captured Americans.
If anything, the murders of Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl declare al
Qaeda's intentions to kill even innocent civilian prisoners. Without
territory, it does not even have the resources to provide detention
facilities for prisoners, even if it were interested in holding captured
POWs.

It is also worth asking whether the strict limitations of Geneva make
sense in a war against terrorists. Al Qaeda operates by launching surprise
attacks on civilian targets with the goal of massive casualties. Our only
means for preventing future attacks, which could use WMDs, is by acquiring
information that allows for pre-emptive action. Once the attacks occur, as
we learned on Sept. 11, it is too late. It makes little sense to deprive
ourselves of an important, and legal, means to detect and prevent
terrorist attacks while we are still in the middle of a fight to the death
with al Qaeda. Applying different standards to al Qaeda does not abandon
Geneva, but only recognizes that the U.S. faces a stateless enemy never
contemplated by the Conventions.

This means that the U.S. can pursue different interrogation policies in
each location. In fact, Abu Ghraib highlights the benefits of Guantanamo.
We can guess that the unacceptable conduct of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib
resulted in part from the dangerous state of affairs on the ground in a
theater of war. American soldiers had to guard prisoners on the inside
while receiving mortar and weapons fire from the outside. By contrast,
Guantanamo is distant from any battlefield, making it far more secure. The
naval station's location means the military can base more personnel there
and devote more resources to training and supervision.

A decision by the Supreme Court to subject Guantanamo to judicial review
would eliminate these advantages. The Justices are currently considering a
case, argued last month, which seeks to extend the writ of habeas corpus
to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at Guantanamo. If the Court were to
extend its reach to the base, judges could begin managing conditions of
confinement, interrogation methods, and the use of information. Not only
would this call on the courts to make judgments and develop policies for
which they have no expertise, but the government will be encouraged to
keep its detention facilities in the theater of conflict. Judicial
over-confidence in intruding into war decisions could produce more Abu
Ghraibs in dangerous combat zones, and remove our most effective means of
preventing future terrorist attacks.

Mr. Yoo, a law professor at Berkeley, is a scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute and a former Bush Justice Department official.

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108552765884721335,00.html

3. A Jewish Republican Speaks Out:
http://www.insightmag.com/news/2004/05/16/Politics/Rep-Cantor.Hits.AntiSemitism.By.Sen.Hollings-682987.shtml

4.
"Israel Can't Do Business With Terrorists:
Violence against civilians must be forcibly stopped, not forgiven".

BY EHUD OLMERT
WALL STREET JOURNAL

Monday, June 3, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT

State Department envoy William Burns's return to the Middle East promoting
the American-backed regional peace summit tragically coincides with the
resumption of the daily Palestinian suicide bombings. As Israeli civilians
are being murdered in cities all across the Jewish State, the Palestinian
leadership is once again damning these new peace initiatives to failure.
Terrorism is still part of their tactical plan.

Despite all the tough talk, well-wishing and demand for reform, Arafat's
entrenched Palestinian Authority regime is constitutionally unable and
morally unwilling to abandon its violent struggle against Israel.

The majority of the Israeli public had naively accepted the basic premises
of the Oslo Accords when they were signed in the fall of 1993 because we
received a guarantee that the Palestinian police and security forces would
put an end to terrorism and bring about a true peace. Yitzhak Rabin, then
prime minister, assured us that Arafat would personally order the arrest
of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders and eradicate their terrorist
infrastructure. Instead of Israeli troops carrying out dangerous patrols
in Ramallah, Jenin and Gaza, we were promised, the Palestinian forces
would do it for us. In those innocent Oslo days, many truly believed that
terrorism could be fought by proxy and we need merely give Arafat the
weapons to do it.

Over the next few years, that optimism began to dissipate. If anyone in
Israel still had faith in Arafat and his Palestinian security services by
October 2000, the Arab violence that commenced that month put it to rest
forever. The forces under Arafat's command became both the catalyst and
vanguard of the terrorist attacks. Arafat's Fatah Tanzim and Force 17
units were transformed into full-fledged terrorist groups, with their
members competing with Hamas to see how many Jews they could kill.

As the violence accelerated, and as more and more Israeli families were
being destroyed, the new line touted by both our allies and enemies was
that Arafat could not actually assert any influence over the terrorist
organizations. The 40,000 armed guerillas that were brought in from PLO
bases in Tunis, Syria and south Lebanon were now operating without any
restraints against Israel from the Palestinian territories.

The new American plan being presented calls for a reorganization of the
Palestinian security forces with the intention of placing them under a
unified command. The hope is that they will miraculously be transformed
into a law-abiding legion that will root out terrorists. Once again we
Israelis are being assured with a straight face that Arafat and his gunmen
will fight Hamas and Islamic Jihad for us. Israeli troops are currently
being restrained from entering Gaza, while Arafat's forces are supposedly
being given yet another makeover.
Hundreds of members of the Palestinian police forces have engaged in
terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, including American citizens,
during the last 21 months. Israeli security services and our military are
actively hunting these criminals and our Justice Ministry is busy filing
their indictments. Thousands of individuals with PA-authorized guns are
active members of the Fatah Tanzim terrorist group. And barely a day goes
by without another suicide bomber from the Tanzim destroying himself and
innocent bystanders in a public center.

The terrorist leaders and their activists cannot suddenly be forgiven or
pardoned just because a new political initiative is underway. Israel, like
every other Western state, has an obligation to continue to arrest and
prosecute those who sought to advance their unacceptable political goal by
targeting civilians. Justice dictates that there be no clemency for these
rogue police officials.

Many are placing their new hopes on Gaza preventive security service boss
Mohammed Dahlan. Mr. Dahlan, a rising star on the Palestinian stage, is
being presented as the man who can unify all of Arafat's security forces
and bring order to the PA. Word has it that he just returned from a trip
to Washington where he got high marks from the National Security Council.
(Mr. Dahlan denies ever going.) Either way, Mr. Dahlan is the man who has
presided over an ever-fortified terrorist network. Gaza, the home to Hamas
and Islamic Jihad, became a base for some of the most heinous terrorist
attacks unleashed against Israel.

On his watch, Mr. Dahlan permitted Gaza to become a safe haven for the
hundreds of fugitive terrorists fleeing Israeli forces. Among those being
sheltered is his childhood friend Mohammed Dief, a leading Hamas
mastermind with the blood of scores of Israelis on his hands. In the
meantime, Mr. Dahlan's district became the primary launching grounds for
the hundreds of Kessem missiles fired at Israel.

Mr. Dahlan's involvement in terrorism has not been confined to mere
nonfeasance but, rather, gross malfeasance as well. Mr. Dahlan, along with
his assistant Rashid Abu-Shabak, are the primary suspects in the terror
attack on an Israeli school bus in Kfar Darom in November 2000. The
bombing of the bus left half a dozen children maimed, and seriously
injured an American citizen, Rachel Asaroff. In response to this brutal
terror attack on Jewish school children, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak
dispatched Israeli planes to strafe Mr. Dahlan's Gaza headquarters.

In Israel, we are frequently lectured that we must do business with the
unsavory assortment of dictators, strongmen and criminals that surround
us. This, we are told, is the nature of the neighborhood we live in. As
mayor of Jerusalem, I have in my public duties the unfortunate experience
of sitting down with many individuals I do not necessarily like. But the
current thinking that Mr. Dahlan can bring reform and law enforcement to
the Palestinians is totally misguided. No democratic state should ever
allow itself to do business with those individuals who deliberately target
a school bus.

While the State Department and envoy Burns are to be admired for their
determination to forge a peace agreement on Israel's behalf, their
zealousness is beginning to chafe. Seeking a "regional conference at all
costs," and hanging hopes on a reorganized Palestinian security force
under the sole leadership of one who has himself been involved in serious
terrorist attacks sends an unacceptable message.

Criminals such as Mr. Dahlan and Arafat can never be reformed; they must
be eradicated by force.

Posted 5/25/2004 12:44:00 PM

1. Well the numbers are in. Remember how the media invented a mass
murder,
genocide, war crimes story regarding Jenin last year, after which it
turned out only 20 Palestinians people had been killed in the city
battle?

Well, Palestinian statistics are back. The media is whining about how
those insensitive Israelis destroyed "thousands" of Palestinian homes, and
put "thousands" of Palestinian families from Rafah on the streets.

It turns out, only 56 houses were demolished, all because they were being
used to threaten the movement of Israeli patrols along the border with
Egypt and to snipe at Israelis, and most of these housed those very same
ghouls who stole and defiled the body parts of the murdered Israeli
soldiers.

Meanwhile, San Francisco had its annual cinematic Nuremberg rally
recently. Here is an eyewitness report:

In his letter to J, Joseph Abdel Wahed notes the anti-Israel films
shown at the San Francisco International Film Festival and wonders why no
films depicting Israel in a positive light are programmed. This is due
entirely to leftist bias and is the status quo at all major film
festivals, here and abroad. Both in funding guidelines and in exhibition
decisions the film festival scene is dominated by politics. For instance,
the past success of Michael Moore's ''documentary'' (which is really a
mockumentary) ''Bowling For Columbine'', is a testament to the elevation
of propaganda knowingly passed off as truth.

To its credit, the recent Tiburon International Film Festival did
screen, ''The Road to Jenin'', a French/Israeli film, which depicts the
truth regarding the discredited ''massacre'' in Jenin. And also
''Shooting Conflicts'', an Israeli documentary about, among other things,
the friendship between an Israeli and Palestinian news journalist.
However, these films will not be seen at film festivals whose agenda
includes spreading Palestinian propaganda. Unfortunately that includes
the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.


2. Am I the only person around who suspects that Michael Moore is really
Michael Lerner? Why? Well, Moore is not only the most obnoxious Yahoo of
the Pseudo-Literate Far Left these days. He also LOOKS very much like
Michael Lerner. He keeps his head covered, like Lerner, in pretend
religiosity. They both hate Israel and they both hate America. They both
are convinced that the world should get rid of capitalism and replace it
with North Korean style socialist planning for equality. They both hate
Republicans. They both support Palestinian terror. They both hate white
non-Leftists. They both like to pretend they are politically
African-Americans. Has Lerner at last outright converted to voodoo
leftist paganism? WIll Moore's next film, Stupid White Jews, air at the
Tikkun ashram in San Francisco?

Meanwhile, here is Fred Barnes on the tub of leftist lard:

Michael Moore and Me
From the May 31, 2004 issue: An encounter with the Cannes man.
by Fred Barnes
05/31/2004, Volume 009, Issue 36





A FEW YEARS AGO Michael Moore, who's now promoting an anti-President Bush
movie entitled Fahrenheit 9/11, announced he'd gotten the goods on me,
indeed hung me out to dry on my own words. It was in his first bestselling
book, Stupid White Men. Moore wrote he'd once been "forced" to listen to
my comments on a TV chat show, The McLaughlin Group. I had whined "on and
on about the sorry state of American education," Moore said, and wound up
by bellowing: "These kids don't even know what The Iliad and The Odyssey
are!"

Moore's interest was piqued, so the next day he said he called me. "Fred,"
he quoted himself as saying, "tell me what The Iliad and The Odyssey are."
I started "hemming and hawing," Moore wrote. And then I said, according to
Moore: "Well, they're . . . uh . . . you know . . . uh . . . okay, fine,
you got me--I don't know what they're about. Happy now?" He'd smoked me
out as a fraud, or maybe worse.

The only problem is none of this is true. It never happened. Moore is a
liar. He made it up. It's a fabrication on two levels. One, I've never met
Moore or even talked to him on the phone. And, two, I read both The Iliad
and The Odyssey in my first year at the University of Virginia. Just for
the record, I'd learned what they were about even before college. Like
everyone else my age, I got my classical education from the big screen. I
saw the Iliad movie called Helen of Troy and while I forget the name of
the Odyssey film, I think it starred Kirk Douglas as Odysseus.

So why didn't I scream bloody murder when the book came out in 2001? I
didn't learn about the phony anecdote until it was brought to my attention
by Alan Wolfe, who was reviewing Moore's book for the New Republic. He
asked, by email, if the story were true. I said no, not a word of it, and
Wolfe quoted me as saying that. That was enough, I thought. After all, who
would take a shrill, lying lefty like Moore seriously?

More people than I thought. Moore's new movie attacking Bush was given a
20-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. Moore has
described the movie as breaking new ground and revealing new facts, but
the accounts by reviewers suggest it merely provides the standard
left-wing, conspiratorial critique of the president. Reviewer Lou Lumenick
of the New York Post, who gave Moore's previous movie Bowling for
Columbine four stars, said the anti-Bush film would be news only "if you
spent the last three years hiding in a cave in Afghanistan." Still, I
suppose it's not surprising they loved it in France.

In publicizing the movie, Moore has been up to his old dishonest tricks.
Just before the screening at Cannes, he charged that Disney had told him
"officially" the day before that it would not distribute Fahrenheit 9/11.
Moore said this was an attempt to kill the film. He indicated a newspaper
article had the correct explanation of Disney's decision: "According to
today's New York Times, it might 'endanger' millions of dollars of tax
breaks Disney receives from the state of Florida because the film will
'anger' the governor of Florida, Jeb Bush."

Later, in a CNN interview, Moore admitted he'd learned nearly a year ago
that Disney would not distribute the movie. By pretending he'd just gotten
word of this, Moore was involved in a cheap publicity stunt. And it wasn't
the New York Times that said, on its own, that Disney feared losing tax
breaks. It was Moore's agent who was quoted as saying that in the Times.
Disney denied its president Michael Eisner had told the agent of any such
fear. "We informed both the agency that represented the film and all of
our companies that we just didn't want to be in the middle of a
politically oriented film during an election year," Eisner told ABC News.

Where does this leave us? I think it's time for Moore to be held
accountable. In Stupid White Men, he has 18 pages of "Notes and Sources,"
but he offers no evidence for the sham interview with me--no date, no
transcript. How could he, since the interview never happened?

I have just the person to look into Moore's lies and distortions. Al
Franken has taken special interest in public liars, writing a bestseller
called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Al, the Moore case is now
in your court.


Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.


http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/127ujhuf.asp

Posted 5/25/2004 11:02:00 AM

1. Martin Peretz is the editor of the American Liberal magazine New
Republic

Martin Peretz on the Israeli Left:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0504/lonely_crowd.php3
(must read)

2. US university professor trying to keep the Klan off campus:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/05/21/university.klan.ap/index.html
Why not adopt his approach to keep the extremist Left off Israeli
campuses?

3. Brainwashing on Campus
By Marjorie Kehe
Christian Science Monitor | May 25, 2004


Ben Shapiro attended the University of California at Los Angeles and came
out dismayed by much of what he heard and saw. Professors there, he
laments, routinely spouted liberal propaganda and rarely had their biases
challenged. Conservative thinkers, on the contrary, Mr. Shapiro says, were
generally shrugged off as not too bright.
As a columnist for UCLA's student paper The Daily Bruin, he was able to
voice his outrage until, he claims, he was fired for his views.

Now - having already graduated from UCLA at 20 - Shapiro has written
Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth, alerting the
world to what Shapiro sees as the sorry state of U.S. higher education.

Some early readers have already disparaged Shapiro's book - published by a
conservative watchdog group - as an angry rant. But the young author is
clearly not alone in his views, and some suggest that the stir he is
creating is indeed a sign that something is amiss in US academe.

Freshly published - and without the support of a national advertising
campaign - "Brainwashed" has already jumped to No. 28 on Amazon.com's
bestseller list.

Of the about 50 reviews that quickly sprang up on the Amazon site, few
were neutral in tone. Several were derogatory, complaining that the book
contains "not a shred of fact" and directing a cry of "shame on you" at
its author. A few fellow UCLA students wrote that Shapiro's comments did
not tally with their experiences, and one commented that "'The Lord of the
Rings' comes across as more realistic."

But more embraced Shapiro's views, several saying their own college
experiences were very similar - that their conservative views were
discouraged rather than embraced by their unabashedly liberal college
professors.

Unfortunately, such claims are more than just rhetoric, says Greg
Lukianoff, director of legal and public advocacy for the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education in Philadelphia. In his view, censorship of
conservative views on college campuses is a growing problem that's hard to
ignore.

"I'm a liberal myself, but since taking this job I've been shocked," he
says.

Many U.S. colleges tend to be built on liberal values and are
uncomfortable with students who don't reflect those, he says. This has led
many to adopt "speech codes" that are intended to prevent discrimination
but sometimes end up repressing legitimate forms of free speech.

Mr. Lukianoff says he hears regular reports of campus newspapers airing
conservative viewpoints being destroyed before they can be read.
Conservative speakers are sometimes silenced. At Ithaca College in New
York, he says, when conservative students invited Bay Buchanan (sister of
arch-conservative Pat) to speak, fellow students tried to have them
arrested for harassment.

Similar complaints led to the Academic Bill of Rights, which was
introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives and some state
legislatures earlier this year. Conservative activist David Horowitz, who
wrote the bill, said it was intended to protect conservative academics
from discrimination on overwhelmingly liberal campuses.

While widely considered unlikely to pass, the bill has garnered support
from concerned conservatives such as Luann Wright, a San Diego educator
who worried that her son's college professors were promoting an overly
liberal agenda. She established a website - www.No indoctrination.org -
asking college students to share accounts of liberal indoctrination. More
than 100 have responded.

Shapiro complains of similar discrimination at UCLA. He says his
professors were moral relativists who shunned notions of good and evil and
taught students to regard religious and patriotic values with suspicion.

Of US professors in general, Shapiro makes sweeping - and many would say
absurd - charges that they promote atheism, absolute sexual freedom
(including pedophilia and statutory rape, which are crimes), and rampant
environmentalism to the point of urging the annihilation of the human
species.

However, the debate is not new, says Jonathan Knight, director of the
program in academic freedom and tenure at the American Association of
University Professors.

"Faculty are seen as more liberal than the general population," says Mr.
Knight. "They have described themselves that way at least since the
1960s."

He points to William F. Buckley Jr.'s God and Man at Yale, first published
in 1951, which covers similar ground.

And, asks Knight, if overly liberal college professors and administrators
have long indoctrinated students, "how do we explain then that (the U.S.)
is the way that it is" - fairly balanced between liberal and conservative
views?

One of the criticisms leveled against Shapiro is that despite disparaging
elite and Ivy League schools in his book, he will attend one this fall --
Harvard University Law School.

That fact makes it hard, says Knight, to accept either Shapiro's scorn for
elite universities -- or for the UCLA education that helped him gain
admission to America's most prestigious law school.

5. Ethics in the Arab Countries:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13509

6, Morality & realpolitik


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MAOZ AZARYAHU May. 25, 2004

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How just is the Arab-Palestinian insistence on the right of return?

For some, Shavuot is mainly about cheesecakes. For others, still familiar
with earlier Zionist traditions, it is the festival of the first fruits,
as once enacted in kibbutzim and in elementary schools. For many it
commemorates the giving of the law at Mount Sinai, at the center of which
are the Ten Commandments.

The divine provenance of the Law renders it absolute, unlike the laws
enacted by mortal humans. Yet beyond theology, the power of the
commandments lay in the way they formulated fundamental notions about
justice. Since law and its application is the quintessence of justice, and
in order for them to be interpreted as such, they should correspond with
an instinctive human understanding of justice and moral behavior.

Laws are the rules of the game. And applying the rules of the game is
essential for producing a sense of justice. It is all too human that many
who believe in the rules also assume that these rules mainly apply to
others. It seems that even if everyone sincerely pledges to apply the Ten
Commandments, or at least those which regulate human relationships, the
world will very much look the same.

The problem is in the formulation: "Thou shall not kill" - thou, not I.
The problem is that too often we encounter the premise that what applies
to others does not necessarily oblige me.

Such a selective understanding undermines the moral foundations of
justice. This becomes clearly evident in the case of the so-called right
of return, a powerful moral argument and the precondition for and epitome
of a "just peace" as demanded by Arabs and their enlightened allies.

Since the demand for a just peace is almost universally accepted, it seems
appropriate to scrutinize it.

How just is the Arab-Palestinian insistence on the right to return to the
villages and towns from which they fled or were forced to leave in
Israel's War of Independence?

As repeatedly emphasized by Arabs and their allies, the right of return
for Arab-Palestinian refugees of the 1948 War is about justice, and by
necessity about what is moral - and what is not.

Champions of the right of return claim to address not only the
humanitarian plight of displaced persons who lost their homes in the wake
of the war. They maintain that they intend to rectify wrongdoing, fight
evil, and restore the moral order that allegedly was so bluntly disturbed
by Israel's victory.

As the original sin of the Zionist state, Israel's refusal to accept the
Arab-Palestinian right of return is considered not only a violation of
basic human rights but also a fundamental moral flaw that undermines the
foundation of the Jewish state.

Yet the issue of justice, properly addressed, is very different from the
supposedly hyper-moral case presented by the Arabs and their allies.

TAKING INTO account the notion that every human transaction, be it between
individuals or groups, amounts to a game with specific rules, the issue of
justice is actually about the rules of the game and how these have been
formulated and upheld by players.

The game metaphor does not insinuate that a war - even a just war - is
just a game. War is a cruel matter: It leaves in its wake death and
destruction, loss and bereavement. It is, however, a game in the sense
that its conduct is subject to certain rules both players are well aware
of.

So addressed, the fundamental rule of the 1948 war was a strikingly simple
one: Winner takes all. The Arabs, who defied the right of the Jews for
self-determination, declared the annihilation of Jewish existence to be
their supreme objective. The Jews well understood what this meant in terms
of survival.

Much has been written about the Arab villages and towns that were erased
from the map in the wake of Israeli military victories. However, the
destroyed Arab villages and towns were not free-floating in a moral
vacuum. On the other side of the moral equation are the Jewish settlements
that disappeared from the map during the war. Since this side of the
equation is commonly absent from the discussion, some detailing seems
appropriate.

The list of Jewish settlements includes Beit Ha'arava, on the shore of the
Dead Sea and Atarot and Neve Ya'akov, north of Jerusalem; Kfar Darom, Yad
Mordechai and Nitzanim, which were on the route of the invading Egyptian
army; the four Etzion settlements south of Jerusalem (the residents of
Kibbutz Kfar Etzion were massacred, the survivors of the other settlements
were sent to captivity); the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem
that surrendered to the besieging forces of the Trans-Jordanian Arab
legion; Mishmar Hayarden, which was conquered by Syrian forces.

Some of these settlements were later restored, after Israeli forces
reoccupied them.

The fate of these 11 Jewish settlements demonstrates two very simple
things. One is what the rules of the game were, and how keen the Arabs
were on applying them whenever they could. Wherever an Arab army conquered
a Jewish settlement, this settlement ceased to exist.

Second is the magnitude of Jewish victory. The fact that many more Arab
villages and neighborhoods were erased than Jewish ones is only proof that
the Jews were winning the war, albeit, unlike their Arab counterparts,
they did not always stick to the rules the Arabs applied whenever they
could.

TO SUM UP: The rules of the 1948 war were clear to Arabs and Jews alike.
The Arabs were stricter than the Jews in applying ethnic cleansing, yet
had fewer opportunities to do so. However, it is the principle that
matters, and here the facts are unequivocal: Not one Jewish settlement
remained in Arab-controlled areas.

Furthermore: The persistent Arab demand for the right of return is morally
wrong because it amounts to changing the rules of the game - the same
rules Arabs determined at the onset of the war - after the game was over.

After 1948 the Arabs clearly demonstrated that their only concern was to
rectify their defeat by declaring that the rules of the game they had
applied were not valid. However, the rules of the game further applied to
the Jews. Their right of return was never an issue in the moral equation
formulated by the Arabs.

The right of return so vehemently demanded by Arabs is not a measure of
justice. It is just the opposite. Because changing the rules of the game
after defeat defies any notion of fairness. And without fairness, there is
no justice.

The writer is a geographer at Haifa University specializing in Zionist
culture and national memory.

This article can also be read at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1085455475373&p=1006953079865

7. Leftists for Terror:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1085023339573&p=1006953079897

8. The latest SLAPP suit? Convicted traitor Mordecai Vanunu just filed a
SLAPP suit against Israel's largest daily Yediot Ahronot and its
reporter/columnist Ron Ben Ishay, for "libeling" Vanunu. Vanunu is
represented by Far Leftist lawyer Avigdor Feldman, who often represents
Arab murderers of Jewish children.

Posted 5/24/2004 08:08:00 PM

Arutz-7 Israel National News, May 24, 2004
PA Terrorists Threaten Pop Star Madonna

10:24 May 24, '04 / 4 Sivan 5764



(IsraelNN.com) International Affairs Correspondent Michael Freund reported
today on new details that have emerged regarding rock star Madonna's
decision to cancel a planned series of concerts in Tel Aviv later this
year.

The UK daily The Sun reports that the pop superstar received a series of
"poison-pen letters" from Palestinian Authority-based Arab terrorists in
which they threatened to kill her and her two young children if she went
ahead with the concerts in Israel.

Though initially determined to go ahead with the performances, Madonna is
said to have changed her mind when the terrorists sent a series of letters
to her Los Angeles office mentioning specific details about her two young
children, seven-year old Lourdes and three-year old Rocco.

A source quoted by the paper said, "The notes were unbelievably scary.
Madonna is a strong woman but she freaked out when her kids were
mentioned."

"At first she was prepared to go on stage anyway and hire extra security,"
the source said. "But she was not ready to take chances with her kids
they are her whole world."

Additional letters sent by the terrorists mentioned several of Madonna's
closest aides as well. "It became clear that these people were not messing
around they even knew intimate details like who her personal staff are,"
the paper quotes the source as saying.

Madonna originally had scheduled three concerts in September in Tel Aviv
as part of her 2004 Re-Invention Tour, including a televised performance
on September 11 to commemorate the third anniversary of the attack on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

She has not performed in Israel since 1993.

2.
The Van Leer Institute is an extremist Far Left institute financed by
Jerusalem municipality. Take a look at
http://www.ngo-monitor.org/archives/humanitarianpolitics.htm
and also at http://www.ngo-monitor.org/archives/publications.htm

and then consider writing the Jerusalem Mayor about his support for these
people.
He can be reached at
Mr. Uri Lupolianski


Safra Square 1
tel 972-2- 6297717
fax 972-3 6296407
lpuri@jerusalem.muni.il

Posted 5/24/2004 02:03:00 PM

1. A Double Standard on Gaza

WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 24, 2004

Once again the otherwise fractured "international community" has come
together in one of those rare moments of unity, made possible only by the
time-honored ritual of condemning whatever policy Israel is currently
pursuing to protect its citizens from terrorism.

Last Wednesday, the United Nations Security Council criticized Israel's
demolition of homes in Gaza but failed to condemn the Palestinian terror
that brought about the offensive in the first place. The U.S. refused to
lend its support to such an unbalanced resolution but didn't use its veto
power to stop it.

The U.N.'s text must be considered a real showcase of even-handedness when
compared to the statement by the Irish foreign minister who currently
speaks for the European Union. Brian Cowen's comments came after an
Israeli shell accidentally hit Palestinian demonstrators. Mr. Cowen was so
eager to bash Israel that he didn't even bother to check Palestinian
casualty claims. "Initial reports suggest that at least 23 people, many of
them schoolchildren, were killed," he said. In reality, only eight
Palestinians died. Mr. Cowen went on to accuse Israel of "reckless
disregard for human life."

His words bear no resemblance to reality. Israel takes more care not to
harm Palestinian civilians than the Palestinian Authority, let alone
Hamas. In so doing, Israeli soldiers often risk their own lives, as the
death of 13 ground troops earlier this month shows. If Israel really had
such a "disregard" for Palestinians, it wouldn't send its young soldiers
in harm's way but bomb terrorist positions safely from the air.

In contrast to that, the death of Palestinian civilians caught in the
cross-fire appears to be part of the terrorists' strategy. The terrorists,
who deliberately hide among the general population, know that every
civilian death will be blamed on Israel, no matter what the circumstances
and no matter whether the bullet actually came from an Israeli rifle.

Mr. Cowen even had the gall to liken the demonstrators' death to a
Palestinian terrorist attack earlier this month, where members of Yasser
Arafat's Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades shot four children, aged 2 to 11, at
point blank range before the eyes of their eight-months-pregnant mother
before killing her too.

Neither these murders nor any other of the Palestinian terrorist attacks
have ever prompted a single U.N. resolution. As a matter of fact, the U.N.
Security Council has yet to convene to even discuss Palestinian terrorism.

The Israeli operation in Gaza is designed to root out the arms smuggling
in Rafah, which is at the border with Egypt. The whole area is honeycombed
with tunnels that surface in private homes, built often with the open
encouragement of the PA. Just recently, Arafat called on his people to
"terrorize the enemy." The terrorists also use the private houses as
hiding places to attack Israeli soldiers.

The problem wouldn't even exist if the PA fulfilled its obligation to
fight terror instead of colluding with it. Also, the smugglers wouldn't
have it so easy if Egypt, officially at peace with Israel, didn't turn a
blind eye to this problem. Maybe it's time Washington asks Cairo to remind
Americans why they are propping up President Hosni Mubarak's regime with
almost $2 billion a year.

Contrary to popular opinion, international law is on Israel's side. Art.
53 of the fourth Geneva Convention indeed prohibits the destruction of
private property by an occupying power. But Israel's critics as well as
the U.N. resolution fail to quote the text in its entirety. Such actions
are illegal, "except where such destruction is rendered absolutely
necessary by military operations."

Preventing terrorists from firing at Israelis from these houses and
putting an end to the smuggling of explosives and rockets appear to us to
be "absolutely necessary" operations. Particularly as Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon seems determined to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza.
It is the use of civilian structures by Palestinian terrorists for
military attacks which violates international law.

Those really concerned for Palestinian welfare should speak these truths
instead of criticizing Israel for trying to defend itself.

=======================

2. Worth re-posting: Why The Left Hates Israel

By Bruce S. Thornton

FrontPageMagazine

THE DISTASTE FOR ISRAEL EVIDENT in coverage of the current crisis is a
mystery to me. I'm not talking about the Arabs, who have their own obvious
reasons for hating Israel, not the least being that Israel is a living
reproach to Islamic civilization's inability to adapt to the modern world.
The weakness of Islam vis-?-vis a West it once terrified and dominated is
exposed daily by the strength and confidence and prosperity of a tiny
nation dwarfed by the population and resources and armies of its
adversaries.

I'm speaking rather about Israel's critics in Europe and the United
States, where the media's double standard in judging Israel, and their
failure to acknowledge the historical circumstances that have created the
current crisis and explain it, are so commonplace that it usually goes
unnoticed. It is testimony to the bizarre mental universe of many in the
Islamic world that an American media that has made the Palestinians their
pet victims "of color" instead continue to be seen as the puppets of some
Zionist conspiracy.

The answer to this disgust can't be that Israel is as uniquely oppressive
as it is claimed to be, setting aside for the moment the reasons why
Israel has to do what it does. Given the bloodshed, violence, ethnic
cleansing, seizure of territory, and genocidal rampages occurring daily
across the planet, Israel's offences, even if they were as horrible as
their enemies claim, are pretty small beer, and certainly not as
destructive as those of many Arab regimes in the Middle East.

For example, if seizing territory and interfering with national autonomy
and self-determination are such a crime, why isn't the international
community bombarding Syria, which controls Lebanon, with demands to end
the "illegal occupation" and withdraw its thousands of troops? Or if
killing Arabs justifies such criticism, why didn't we have marches in
solidarity with Saddam Hussein's Islamic victims, which must number in the
hundreds of thousands? Or if abusing Palestinians is the specific charge,
why aren't there movements to isolate Jordan, which has probably killed
more Palestinians than the Israelis have?

And of course, what's ignored is that Israel's actions have all been
reactions to unceasing attempts to destroy it. Israel does what it does to
survive, rather than to create an empire or acquire more wealth for a
ruling elite or gain access to precious resources. Some in Israel may
dream of a return to the Biblical borders of David and Solomon's kingdom,
but most Israelis think about the West Bank and Gaza solely in terms of
security. Just compare the number of Israelis killed when Israel
controlled the West Bank to the number killed since the Palestinians have
controlled it, and you'll see their point.

Yet this necessary context for evaluating Israel's actions is usually
ignored or dismissed. Instead Israel is judged by some absolute standard
of behavior never applied to any Third-World country that's not to the
right of Attila the Hun. An obvious reason for this phenomenon is that
Israel is a Western society, and so it is held to the same utopian
expectations for behavior that all Western nations are subject to. That
critics strain out the Western gnat and swallow whole the Third-World
camels of oppression and violence is a continuing scandal.

I suspect that such critics are in reality ethnocentric chauvinists, and
believe the West is superior, more civilized and advanced, and so should
be held to a higher standard. Westerners, in other words, should know
better because they are better.

There's another dimension, though, to this unfair standard. Just imagine
for a moment that Israel was a communist country like Cuba. Do you think
they'd be the evil villains they've been made out to be? You can answer
that question by contemplating the relatively good press that Castro's
regime enjoys. Compared to the obsessive attention paid to every move
Israel makes in defending itself, we hear little outside of Miami about
human rights violations in Cuba, which serve to maintain an autocrat's
power rather than to prevent maniacs from blowing up children. Yet the
same "progressive" Americans who sneak into Castro's island to gape at the
socialist paradise join marches condemning Israeli "genocide."

So Israel is fair game because it's "capitalist," a client of the world's
Great Satan, the United States, the premier colonial and imperial
exploiter of the abused "other." We see here at work the same weird logic
that allows right-thinking leftists to shrug off Communism's 100 million
corpses at the same time they scream about the accidental killing of a
civilian. Not all people's lives, it seems, are equally precious--just
those playing the proper role in the Marxist historical operetta.

Israel is attacked, then, because it is a Western liberal democracy tarred
with the brush of all the West's crimes against humanity. But let's not
forget another obvious point--Israelis are Jews. A residual anti-Semitism
has lately joined up with guilt-fatigue, particularly in Europe. As the
generation responsible for the Holocaust dies off, I think we'll see more
and more Europeans simply getting sick of the whole thing, sick of the
guilt, the reminders of barbarity, the museums testifying to the insane
depths to which presumably civilized people can descend.


In short, they'll want to forget, and the existence of Israel itself, its
determination never again to be a despised and pitied victim, is a
constant irritating reminder that won't let them forget.

3. Anti-Americanism:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20040317.shtml


4. IDF blamed for ruining Gaza zoo
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1085281782242&p=1078397702269

5. Arab Anti-Semitism:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=7548

6. Leftists and "Humiliation":
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13508

7. More on the Ghouls:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13492

8. East Bay Pogroms:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13496

Posted 5/23/2004 10:14:00 AM

1. Better check your calender because it is NOT April 1. Yes, Ariel
Sharon is REALLY proposing that Israel now pay cash bonuses to all those
Rafiah denixens who stole human body parts of murdered Israeli soldiers -
in compensation for their homes being demolished to widen the open zone
separating Rafiah from the Egyptian border. Really!

It is all to make it a little harder for the savages to smuggle
high-powered explosives from Egypt into the Gaza Strip with which to mass
murder Jews. The Israeli army has been flattening the immediate border
vicinity for maybe a city block from the border fence. It has become
known as the "Philadelphia Corridor," named afer me because I am from
Philadelphia. The only difference is I would make the corridor a whole
lot wider, maybe even going all the way to Ashkelon.

Anyway, the idea is to
maintain visibility and make it harder for the PLO to build new tunnels.
Naturally the whole world is aghast, since the right of a Palestinian
fascist to an undemolished house hiding a smuggling tunnel always counts
for infinitely more than the rights of Jewish chiildren to ride buses and
sit in cafes without being blown to smithereens.

The houses in question are homes to those very same ghouls who rushed
from them to defile and steal the body parts of the soldiers who were
murdered in the very same corridor when the PLO planted a large anti-tank
mine there. Ariel Sharon is having one of his attacks of compassion, and
as you know, any time any politician is feeling compassionate it is time
for us all to run to the underground shelters out in the mountains and to
hide our wallets and womenfolk.

Now Compassionate and Caring Arik did not even propose that any
"compensation" to the Rafiah denizens whose houses were knocked down be
taken from the cash Israel hands over to the PLO every month. Putting
aside the absurdity of transferring any money at all to the PLO rather
than handing it to the PLO's victins, those resposnsible for making these
Rafiah people "homeless" are the leaders of the PLO, not Israel or the
Jews. So any cash compensation should be taken from THEIR pockets, and
not MINE! But implementing THAT as an expression of deep caring would
also involve an electrical cranium pulse or two, and that is clearly
beyond the capabilities of Caring Arik.

2. From Caring Arik to True Charity:

Thought for Shavuos week: Mr. Zeev Wolfson came in to work one
morning in his offices at the World Trade Center. Since it was shortly
before Rosh Hashana, the religious New Year, he prepared several envelopes
with checks to send to assorted charities and non-profit educational and
religious institutions in Israel. Upon second thought, he decided that
writing the checks themselves was not quite enough charity for the
Jewish month of Ellul and that it behooved him to walk in person to the
post office to send them off with his own hands, rather than just dump
them on a secretary desk. So he walked to the post office and just as he
finished mailing them, the planes hit the World Trade Center. And tzedaka
or charity once again saved a life. (True story)

3. Some good guys in the Bay Area, at last:
http://www.sfvoiceforisrael.org/photos.htm

4. Strip Teasers for the Left:
http://www.suntimes.com/output/elect/cst-nws-vote21.html

5. From the University of DUH!:
Withdrawal From Lebanon Led To Oslo War
17:00 May 20, '04 / 29 Iyar 5764

A recent Palestinian Media Watch production also concentrates on the results
of Israel's panicky withdrawal - namely, the Oslo War. Quotes are cited:
"In Hizbullah, we learned the Israeli mentality, and it became clear that
they are very cowardly... Israeli public opinion pressured its government
and forced it to retreat." - Hizbullah leader Sheikh Nasrallah, Oct. 2000

"We have to find the way to be rid of this Zionist enemy. The practical
solution came from Lebanon, in the merit of its courageous men... who
relied on undefeatable weapons: the will to fight, against those who are
afraid to fight and who love life." - Al Hayat al-Jadida, on Nov. 12, 2000

The film notes that just as Israel was concluding its retreat from
Lebanon, on May 24, 2000, Al Hayat al-Jadida published a cartoon depicting
an Israeli soldier being attacked by rockets on one side and an Arab boy
throwing rocks on the other, and the caption: "The Katyushas are behind
you, and the rocks are ahead of you; you can either retreat, or retreat."
A poster-sized photo of scared Israeli soldiers was included with the
daily paper.

Only two months after the withdrawal, Arafat made the decision to return
to violence, and two months later, at the end of Sept. 2000, the Oslo War
began. Palestinian spokesmen themselves emphasize that it was the
withdrawal from Lebanon that sparked the violence: The newspaper Al-Ayam,
for instance, wrote in Feb. 2004 that former Prime Minister Ehud Barak
"decided to act unilaterally, retreating in defeat from southern
Lebanon... The result was the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa intifada..."

6. More lessons for the Denizens of Duh!:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1085208931556&p=1006953079865

7. Defend the Philadelphians:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1085208931668&p=1006953079865

8. No, Poverty is NOT the Cause of Terror:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1085023337854&p=1006953079865

9. From the May 20 Late Show with David Letterman, the "Top Ten
Questions on the John Kerry Running Mate Application." Late Show home
page: www.cbs.com

10. "Do you support both sides of every issue?"

9. "Excluding horse, what animal do I most resemble?"

8. "Mind if I pretend you're John McCain?"

7. "Are you related to any Governors who can help rig an election?"

6. "In the vice presidential debate, will you make Cheney your bitch?"

5. "You're not going to trick me into starting a war to help out your oil
buddies, are you?"

4. "Which trait do you find more inspirational: My dour blandness or my
smug arrogance?"

3. "If chosen, would you be willing to change your name to Kenny?"

2. "Any black market botox connections?"

1. "Do you have my back if I pull a 'Clinton'?"



10. The Chomsky Legacy:
http://jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=1518

Posted 5/21/2004 06:47:00 PM

Shinui is the Seinfeldian Party of Israel. Why Seinfeldian? Well,
"Seinfeld" has oft been described as a show about nothing, while Shinui is
a political party about nothing. And now it is the environmentalist party
in favor of eliminating all but virtual nature preserves.

Let's step back a bit and fill in the blanks. Contemporary Shinui is
the brainchild of Israeli politician Avraham Poraz. Poraz had started out
as one of founders of an earlier party also known as Shinui, which combined
free-market economic ideas with general civic reform and dovish political
notions.

Later the bulk of the Old-Shinui stalwarts joined together with the
Marxists from the old kibbutz-based MAPAM party and Shulamit Aloni's "RATZ"
party (as in, I could give a "RATZ" ass) to form a new party of the Far
Left, Meretz. Poraz did not tag along, and there is argument as to whether
it was because of ideological scruples or simply that he was not offered a
slot high enough in the MERETZ totem pole. Instead, he stayed on as a
leftover Shinui backbencher in the parliament, where his main cause was
animal rights and the treatment of circus animals, with all the respect
their delicate self-esteem needed. His main parliamentary achievement was
that he shut down the Tel Aviv Dolphinarium as a way to protect the human
rights of the dolphins, evidently sent off as a result for processing into
Purina products.

Seeing political oblivion on the horizon, Poraz had an idea. He would
recruit loud-mouthed anti-Orthodox TV opinionist and newspaper
columnistTommy Lapid, who had been trying to be a leftist and rightist at
the same time, and they would re-engineer Shinui as an anti-religious party
that does not have a clear political position on anything else at
all. They would sign up rejects and failed leftovers from other parties of
the Right and Left, and run for the Knesset. And it worked like a charm.

Israelis vote against parties, not in favor of parties. Since Shinui
was Seinfeldian and represented nothing at all except Orthodox-baiting, it
picked up lots of votes from those disgusted with the Likud-Labor Party
version of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. And Shinui became the third largest
party in the parliament, a major cabinet player, and the kingmaker of
coalitions.

Shinui also did well in some of the local elections, often running
together with environmentalist groups as "Green" Parties. It currently
control the Haifa municipality and city council. I voted for them (to get
rid of Mitzna and his machine.)

Tommy Lapid is now official Shinui party Grand Wizard. But what of
Poraz? Well, it seems that the Theodore Herzl of the Seinfeldians in the
Knesset is now Minister of the Environment, one of the few positions it
makes a certain amount of sense in which to place a Shinui leader, given
its alliance with the environmentalist movement.

Which makes this week's outburst by Poraz all the more phenomenal.

Maariv May 21 cites Poraz as having given a talk this week in front of
an assembly of environmentalists and telling them that anyone in Israel who
feels the need to visit nature preserves can just, as far as Poraz is
concerned, go buy an air ticket and then visit them in other
countries. And, if not, he suggested that environmentalists just buy DVD
disks with lots of pictures of nature and open spaces in them. Really.

I have not had such a chuckle from him since his dolphinarium days....

Posted 5/21/2004 04:07:00 PM

1. I realize many of you only read my postings because of the valuable
information in them about rock and roll pop singers. Which is why I bring
you the following updates. Better than MTV, is I! Stevie G overtakes Ali
G.

First, the bovine singer Madonna will not be performing in Israel after
all. After becoming one of those Hollywood sorts taking pop "kabbala"
classes, Madonna considered doing a show in Israel, but has chickened out,
or - if you prefer - heifered out, saying Israel is just too dangerous to
spend there a weekend.

Ah but the really exciting MTV breaking news concerns Aviv Gefen.

SO let's back up a little. Who is Aviv Gefen? Gefen is a
punk-looking, borderline gothic freak, son of Yonatan Gefen, a vet from
the Tel Aviv 60s bohemian scene, long since relocated to New York whence
he writes articles for the little Israeli from the sophisticated Big Apple,
at least for readers of Maariv who - unlike me - do not use his page there
to line the kitty box.

Anyway, Gefen the younger almost went down in history as the
bloke who single-handedly and most
thoroughlly mocked and "dissed" Yitzhak Rabin. He had released a nasty
song that described Rabin as a drunkard and moron, just weeks before Rabin
had the chutzpah to get himself assassinated. Gefen then made a
remarkable metamorphosis. Gefen's most popular song at the time was a
lovely and sad song about a buddy of his who had died in a car crash.
Days after Rabin's murder, Gefen had rewritten the words to his song
entirely, making it a song mourning Rabin, to the annoyance of the family
of the dead friend about whom he had originally written it.

And so began the great mythos of
Aviv-Gefen-National-Official-Mourner-for-Rabin.

Suddenly Gefen is back in the news. Why? Well, ever since his new
gig as official Rabin eulogizer, he has been a typical punk leftist. And
this week (Maariv May 21) he announced that he regards all Jewish
"settlers" in the West Bank and Gaza to be "criminals". He had asked to
appear in that rally last week in Tel Aviv, the one the media decided had
150,000 souls crowded into the square which can at most hold 60,000, but
the organizers refused to grant him mike time. So instead he gave an
interview to Sheli Yachimovich, a far leftist TV talking head who endorsed
the Arab Stalinist Party Hadash in the last election. In the interview,
Gefen described settlers as functions of inverse Darwinian evolution (if
you have seen Gefen's photo, you will realize how deliciously ironic THAT
is). And that the "settlers" have converted God into real estate. (Huh?)

2. Holy Moses. The Left's idea of Moses, that is. And who does the
Left regard as Moses? Or at least one well-known shyster from the Far
Left?
Why, mass murdering nazi Marwan Barghouti, of course, Arafat's Goering.
Barghouti's lawyer, financed by the way by the New Israel Fund, is
Shammai Leibovitz, grandson of extremist leftist professor and philosopher
Yeshayahu Leibovitz, long since sent to the Great Taxidermist of the Sky.
Leibovitz the younger had given an interview last year in which he
announced that his client was a Palestinian Moses, the moral equivalent to
Moses. Barghouti just got himself convicted of mass murder and was
sentenced to five life sentences, which should last until th enext time
Ariel Sharon decided he wants to have a nice peace gesture and prisoner
exchange.

3. No longer simply anti-Semites!
Anti-Americanism at the LA Times:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13468

Posted 5/21/2004 01:56:00 PM

1. Leftist-Islamofascist Axis of Evil in Berkeley:
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/issues/2004-05-19/feature.html/1/index.html

2. Rutgers delays diploma for pie-throwing student


Published in the Home News Tribune 5/19/04
By SARAH GREENBLATT
STAFF WRITER
RUTGERS: Tomorrow, Rutgers will confer a record-setting 11,146
undergraduate and graduate degrees, but a diploma bearing the name Abe
Greenhouse will be missing.


A University College senior who has fulfilled the requirements for a
bachelor's degree, Greenhouse will not receive his diploma until Dec. 31.
The delay is the result of a disciplinary action Rutgers took after
Greenhouse threw a pie in the face of Israeli Cabinet minister Natan
Sharansky during a campus visit last fall, the student's lawyer said.

"His degree is being held until the end of the calendar year," attorney
Leon Grauer said. "It really hurts him economically and professionally."

Because of the delay, Greenhouse won't be able to tell prospective
employers that he has his degree until January, Grauer said.

Greenhouse, 26, also has been charged by Rutgers police with "tumultuous
behavior" that created a public inconvenience or alarm in the Sept. 18
incident.

A pro-Palestinian activist and leader of Central Jersey Jews Against the
Occupation, Greenhouse hit Sharansky squarely in the face with the pie
moments after the Israeli official entered a packed lecture hall to kick
off a series of events organized by Rutgers Hillel.

Sharansky -- after disappearing briefly to get cleaned up -- made light of
the incident, commenting on the "good cakes" available in New Jersey.

In the meantime, Israeli security guards attacked Greenhouse, breaking his
nose, knocking his teeth out of alignment and giving him a black eye and a
fat lip, for which he was treated at Robert Wood Johnson University
Hospital, according to court papers.

While Greenhouse declined to comment on the matter, Grauer said the
university overreacted to the incident.

"I don't know how, under any reading of the law, placing a pie in
someone's face can be deemed creating a public alarm," Grauer said. "If he
ran through a public assembly with a smoke bomb, he'd be creating a public
alarm. But this is a pie."

Grauer sought to bar the university from taking disciplinary action and
have the criminal charges dismissed, but state Superior Court Judge Mark
Epstein denied those motions.

"Mr. Greenhouse was not punished for anything he said," McCormick said in
an e-mail message. "He was disciplined for assaulting someone in the face
with a pie. Others within the community are criticizing the university
because, in their view, Mr. Greenhouse's punishment was too mild. To my
mind, the discipline issued was appropriate."

http://www.thnt.com/thnt/story/0,21282,966488,00.html

3. The Gaza Paradox

By MICHAEL B. OREN
May 21, 2004; Page A10

JERUSALEM -- The father of an Israeli soldier recently killed in Gaza
blamed his son's death on Ariel Sharon and his refusal to evacuate the
Strip. The same day, paradoxically, another grieving father whose son died
in the same battle denounced Sharon for his very willingness to withdraw.
These pained accusations followed a turbulent two weeks that began with
the murder of a pregnant Jewish woman and her four daughters by Gaza
gunmen on the same day Sharon's own party rejected his Gaza detachment
plan, and concluded with Palestinians brandishing the body parts of
Israelis soldiers killed in Gaza. The trauma of these events has riven
Israeli society between the two irreconcilable positions expressed by the
bereaved parents. The right believes that the best way to fight terror is
to maintain Israel's occupation of Gaza and the beleaguered Jewish
settlements there, while the left claims that terror will only end with
Israel's complete evacuation and the renewal of talks with the
Palestinians. Both sides, however, are tragically and disastrously wrong.

Threatened with destruction since its birth, Israel exists thanks to an
unwritten agreement between the State and its citizens. Israelis allow the
State to send them off to battle, and perhaps to die, but only when a
solid majority of them believe that their vital security is at stake. If
most Israelis consider a confrontation unnecessary or avoidable, they will
simply refuse to fight. Such is the situation in Gaza today where a
commanding majority of the population is no longer willing to risk their
-- or their children's -- lives defending 7,500 settlers from the million
Palestinians surrounding them. They do not regard Gaza as part of their
spiritual and historical homeland, nor see how Israel can remain within
the densely-populated Strip and retain its Jewish and democratic
character. By insisting on perpetuating the status quo in Gaza, then, the
right threatens to undermine the implicit pact that binds Israeli society
-- which enables the State to survive.

The left, on the other hand, holds that the recent deaths of 13 Israeli
soldiers in Gaza were a direct result of the government's settlement
policy and its refusal to seek Palestinian partners for peace. The 13,
however, died not defending settlements but destroying tunnels used to
smuggle explosives into Gaza, and the factories that produce Qassam
rockets. Those explosives killed 10 Israelis in a suicide-bomber attack on
the coastal city of Ashdod, and the rockets have struck Jewish towns and
villages outside of the Strip. Israel's withdrawal from Gaza will do
nothing to lessen these threats -- on the contrary, it will almost
certainly enhance them, enabling the Palestinians to acquire even deadlier
missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv.

Further escalation would result from resuming talks with Arafat and his
Palestinian Authority. Arafat, who publicly congratulated the Hamas
"martyrs" of Gaza and called for a million more like them to liberate
Jerusalem, has also stressed the need to drive Israel forcibly from Gaza
and deprive it of a peaceful pullout. Any attempt to grant the PA
responsibility for security in Gaza will likely repeat the experience of
Bethlehem, on the West Bank, where a similar experiment led to the last
two suicide bombings in Jerusalem and 18 Israeli dead. Both of the bombers
came from Bethlehem.

Clearly, Israel cannot remain in Gaza but neither can it negotiate a
phased withdrawal. The evacuation that the bulk of Israelis demand,
therefore, can only be accomplished unilaterally while acting to maintain
Israel's deterrence power. Israel will also have to reserve its freedom to
frustrate weapons smuggling into Gaza by land and by sea, and to strike at
terrorist targets inside the Strip. Though proposals have been raised for
deploying international peacekeepers in Gaza, such a force will surely
lack the mandate and the means for effectively rooting out terror, and
will probably serve to shield the Palestinians as they continue firing at
Israel. Someday a Palestinian leadership may emerge that is capable of
ensuring a quiet border, but until it does, there can be no substitute for
preserving Israel's ability to defend itself, by itself, from Gaza.

* * *
One can only sympathize with the anguish of fathers who have lost their
sons in Gaza -- I, too, have a son serving in the territories -- but that
compassion must not obscure Israel's course. At all costs, Israel must
avoid repeating its hasty retreat from Lebanon in May 2000, which
emboldened the Palestinians to launch their terror war four months later.
Rather, Israel must withdraw from Gaza but in a way that cannot be
interpreted as a victory by the Palestinians and that allows the IDF to
continue operating freely. The challenge Israel now faces in Gaza is thus
similar to America's in Iraq: how to pull out gradually, prudently, all
the while maintaining the message that terror will never go unpunished.

Mr. Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, is the author
of "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East"
(Oxford, 2002).

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108509423959017491,00.html

4. The Guilty Left: http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=3703

5. In the Mideast, lies are truth and vice versa:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13487

Posted 5/20/2004 01:15:00 PM

1. Israeli ambassador to Washington, Daniel Ayalon, claimed yesterday
that the refugees in the city of Rafah have been demolishing parts of their
homes there to receive compensations, completely ignoring the Israeli
occupying forces (IOF)'s massive invasion and demolitions there.

Ayalon claimed that "the Palestinians removed 30 rooftops in the Rafah
refugee camp so they can ask for compensations from the Palestinian
Authority or international relief organizations."

He also added that the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was
responsible for "releasing such propaganda through its publicity machine,
to show the world that Palestinians have incurred massive losses during
the operations in Rafah."

Ayalon was speaking in the aftermath of a meeting with the US Secretary of
State, Collin Powell, in which he was accompanying the Israeli Deputy
Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert.

2. "Peace Now" Under Investigation for Espionage:
http://www.israelbehindthenews.com/#research

Knesset Committee Conducts Investigation of Alleged Espionage Activities
of "Peace"

This week, the Israeli "Peace Now" organization revealed that it has been
conducting aerial surveillance of Israeli Jewish communities in Judea,
Jerusalem and Samaria, to determine the extent of settlement expansion. At
the same time, the Israeli Knesset Parliamentary Interior Committee held a
special session to discuss foreign government funding of Israeli left wing
movements

Documents shared with the Knesset Interior Committee confirmed that the
Peace Now organization received a budget in the amount of 50,000 Euros
from the government of Finland to conduct intelligence activity in the
Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria, the Golan , Gaza and Jerusalem.
Peace Now is a political organization in Israel with an IRS tax deductible
affiliate in the United States.

The Knesset Committee examined a Peace Now grant application to the
government of Finland, that indicated how Peace Now intended to use the
grant. This included regular bi-monthly ground surveys to be conducted
with the purpose of documenting the numbers of empty houses in settlements
and ongoing construction in settlements. This work engages tens of
volunteers, who travel around the West Bank in cars (armored if possible)
tracking developments. "Settlements" has come to be used in the press now
as a euphemism for Jewish communities and towns, no matter how big or
developed.

Also included was a provision for aerial photography: Twice a month a
light plane is rented in order to allow "settlement" watch staff to
ascertain the extent of ongoing physical expansion in existing
"settlements." Once a baseline survey is completed, subsequent surveys can
be used to measure expansion using GIS satellite positioning overlays. The
document stated that this "mechanism will yield tangible graphic and
quantitative data for the public."

Peace Now defined its objectives to the government of Finland in the
following manner:

"To monitor settlement developments on the ground, accurately and
reliably; To make this information available to the Israeli and
international publics; To advance the fulfillment of the Road Map."

Peace Now identifies the "target groups" for the government of Finland as
the "Israeli public, The Israeli political leadership, International
Diplomatic Corps and Israeli and international press."

Peace Now defined the "final result of the activities" for the government
of Finland as "Regular and reliable reports, in real time, disclosing the
situation of settlement construction; Regular and reliable reports, in
real times, monitoring the dismantlement of outposts and settlements
according to requirements of the Road Map; Contacts with diplomats,
leaders and press in order to convey reliable information on all aspect of
settlement issues."

Peace Now further informed the government of Finland that it would use the
$50,000 grant in the following manner: "$17,000 Coordinator, $13,000 Jeep,
$20,000 Aerial Surveys." Peace Now informed the government of Finland that
"funding is necessary to support the staff and rent the vehicles for
aerial photography.

Peace Now defineed itself for the government of Finland as an "educational
foundation". Peace Now indicated in that grant request that it also
received $100,000 from the Americans for Peace Now and 150,000 Euros from
"European Foundations" for its "settlement watch project."

A spokesperson for Peace Now indicated that the "European Foundations"
mentioned in their grant request to the Finnish government were actually
funds from the European Union. In other words, from other foreign European
governments, few of which have been favorable to Israel's plight in the
war On Terror. Far from being an indigenous Israeli organization, Peace
Now it is obvious actually acts as an agent for foreign governments.

The Israel Penal Code for Espionage was distributed to Knesset Interior
Committees. Clause 3 of that code defines "photography of sensitive areas
of Israel for any foreign power" as an act of espionage, punishable by ten
years imprisonment if convicted.

Dr. Yuri Stern, Chairman of the Knesset Interior Committee, announced that
he would ask his legal counsel to examine the matter and report back to
the committee if there were indeed grounds for application of the Israel
Penal Code's special clauses on espionage against Peace Now.

While the Knesset interior committee members from across the political
spectrum carefully listened and examined the documents relating to
allegations of felonious activity by Peace Now, the Peace Now lobbyist in
the Knesset, Behira Bardugo, screamed at Committee Chairman Dr. Stern and
accused the committee of not investigating those who financed the campaign
to defeat Ariel Sharon in the recent referendum campaign over the Prime
Minister's unilateral disengagement plan from Gaza.

When Stern explained that there is a difference between funding from a
private individual and funding that is received from a government, Bardugo
reacted with surprise, and simply said that there is no difference.

The Peace Now settlement expansion maps do not only wind up in the hands
of European governments and they do not only include the civilian
expansion. The Peace Now settlement expansion maps also include military
installations and the maps are featured in all PLO offices. Israeli army
bases have been attacked and Israeli soldiers killed. These are the sons
and daughters of Israel drafted to protect the country, not, for the most
part, even professional soldiers.

And how else can these maps become lethal?

One example will suffice: In late May, 2002 , a settlement watch group
organized by the "Christian Peace Makers Team" reported to its e-mail list
that it had successfully photographed the fence surrounding the Carmei
Tzur settlement. The CPT proudly reported that it had shown several
breaches in the fence. The next day, the CSM met with the Fateh (Arafat's
mainstream terror group) in Bethlehem. Two days later, late at night,
armed members of the Fateh infiltrated the Carmei Tzur settlement at the
precise breach that the CPT had photographed. The Fateh used that breach
to murder a civilian couple in their bed. The wife was eight months
pregnant.

The decision will now rest with Israel's legal system whether and how to
enforce the espionage clauses of the Israel Penal Code for those
organizations who choose to photograph the most sensitive landscapes of
Israel on the payroll and at the behest of foreign governments.

3. The Hebrew web site for the article on Jewish heritage in Gaza should
have been -
http://www.hazofe.co.il/web/katava6.asp?Modul=24&id=23678&Word=???&gilayon=1988&mador=
Sorry.

4. Uncle Tom (Friedman):
http://www.jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=3748

Posted 5/20/2004 11:39:00 AM

1. http://www.jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=3747
The Ghouls Of Palestine
By Steven Plaut

It was a week that began with barbarism and ended with boundless
stupidity.

First, a Palestinian terrorist murdered an entire family. David Hatuel
lost his pregnant wife and their four daughters, aged 2-11, when they were
murdered at point-blank range on the Kisufim entrance road into Gush Katif
in the Gaza Strip. Then, at a memorial service, PLO terrorists opened fire
on
the mourners. Just when it seemed the Palestinians could not possibly
exhibit
behavior more barbaric than that, out came masses of the savages to defile
and degrade the remains of Israeli soldiers murdered by a large bomb,
using
body parts of the dead for sport and then hiding the remains to prevent
the
families of the dead soldiers from giving them a decent burial.

The murdered soldiers were in an armored personnel carrier that was
hit by a large mine, composed of explosives smuggled into the Gaza Strip
through the many smuggling tunnels operating from Egypt. These are the
same tunnels that the dimwitted anarchists from Western universities come
to protect. (The now notorious Rachel Corrie, a radical student from
Washington State, died when she challenged an Israeli military bulldozer
operating against the tunnels to a game of Chicken.)

When the mine went off, it set off the ammunition inside the APC,
and six soldiers were literally blown to pieces. Their pieces were
scattered
about the burning remains of the vehicle. The Palestinian ghouls from the
houses nearby rushed to the scene to grab human organs as playthings and
souvenirs.

The next day, Israeli forces entered the area to recover the remains.
The Palestinians again opened fire. A second APC hit a mine and another
five soldiers were murdered. Finally, two more soldiers were murdered by
Palestinian snipers attempting to recover these bodies. Israel responded
by
bulldozing a few dozen homes of the ghouls who had participated in the
atrocity involving the stolen body parts, triggering the usual breathless
expressions of righteous outrage from the usual quarters. A group of
leftists
even petitioned Israels Supreme Court to order a halt to the demolition of
houses. After all, destroying the house of a ghoul is so insensitive.

Meanwhile, the Israeli media, under the near total hegemony of the
Left, are proclaiming that 150,000 people showed up for the rally last
Saturday night that called for unilateral Israeli self-annihilation. This
in a
square that can at most hold 60,000. (The 150,000 whopper is actually
small
potatoes for the the Israeli media, which in 1982 fabricated the even more
ludicrous figure of 400,000 for a rally against the incursion into
Lebanon.)

The participants were those Israelis who still insist that detachment
from reality is the best path toward achieving peace. The fact that Oslo
thinking and the approach promoted by the Left have produced nothing but
carnage for that past 12 years is absolutely no reason to abandon them.
The
banner of the rally was "The Majority Decides -- but of course that was
not
meant to refer to the 60 percent majority who voted against any Israeli
withdrawal from Gaza in the recent Likud referendum. Perhaps it meant the
majority of Israeli journalists.

Almost perfectly timed to coincide with the leftist rally for
capitulation, Yasir Arafat gave a Naqba Day address in which he openly
urged Palestinians to engage in mass terror against the Jews. "Find what
strength you have to terrorize your enemy and the enemy of God," he said.
This is the creature -- and along with him the ghouls who played
hide-and-seek with Israeli body parts -- with whom the rally participants
wish
to discuss peace and to whom they wish to make new appeasement as
goodwill gestures.

But hold on to your shtreimels, because there are even greater
political surprises now emerging. In recent months the Israeli Left has
all but
abandoned the slogan of "Land for Peace," since it is evident to all
earthlings
outside the U.S. State Department and the Israeli Labor Party that Israel
cannot buy peace by appeasing the Arabs with land. Instead, the new slogan
of the Israeli Left is "Land for Nothing." You think Im joshing? I wish I
were!

Consider the letter in Haaretz (May 16) from Amiram Goldblum, a
professor of pharmacy at Hebrew University. Goldblum is one of the
founders of and true believers in Peace Now, the protest movement
responsible for the kind of thinking that has led to 1,400 Israelis
murdered
and tens of thousands wounded and traumatized in the years since Oslo. In
his letter Goldblum insists that "Land for Peace" is passe, because it
implies
that, until the PLO is prepared to make peace, Israel should hold on to
the
"occupied" lands.

Instead, Goldblum suggests that Israel withdraw unilaterally from all
the "occupied lands" whether the PLO wants peace or not, just because it
is
the nice thing to do. After Israel returns to its pre-1967 lines
(Auschwitz
borders, as the late Abba Eban called them), Israeli leaders, writes
Goldblum, can then ask the PLO for talks -- I guess to discuss whether any
Jews should be permitted to remain in the illegal settlement of Tel Aviv
or
the occupied territory known as Haifa.

Of all the emotional moments over the past few days, I found the
most moving to have been a simple old archive tape, broadcast on the TV
news, of a mother singing to her son.

Among those murdered in the second attack on the APC in Gaza last
week was one Lior Vishinski. He had been trained in tunnel warfare, that
horrific fighting of the sort that left many a Vietnam veteran an
emotional
vegetable. Lior`s job was to stop the smuggling of explosives into Gaza
from
Egypt, and ironically he himself fell victim to a large mine composed of
just
such smuggled explosives.

Lior was the son of two actors from Israel`s bohemian Tel Aviv
theater set. The divorced parents are hardly right-wingers and are not
Orthodox. Indeed, like the leftist father of Nick Berg, the Jew from
Philadelphia murdered in Iraq, Liors own father tastelessly attempted to
exploit the death of his son to make political capital and promote the
political
agenda of the Left.

Be that as it may, the evening after Lior was murdered, Israels
Channel Two broadcast an old tape from its archive. In it was Lior,
several
years younger, sitting on a stage next to his beautiful mother. She was
singing
to him a song. It was a lovely religious song, even though she is
evidently not
observant. Smiling at her son, she sang the stanza, apparently to an old
Yiddish melody, with words from the daily prayer book: "There are some
things whose amount has no defined quantity, and these include acts of
compassion, where a man eats from the fruits in this world yet enjoys the
full
`principal` in the next world."

She sang the verse over and over, smiling and watching her son. Who
was murdered last week by Palestinian savages.

Steven Plaut is a professor at Haifa University. His book The Scout
is available at Amazon.com. He can be contacted at
steven_plaut@yahoo.com

2. Letter in the Jewish Press, May 13, 04:

Neturei Karta`s Objective

On what planet does Rabbi Shiah T. Director live? He seems to be
totally oblivious of what Neturei Karta stands for (Letters, April 30).

Rabbi Director accuses Steven Plaut of having a sick mind (for
writing an op-ed critical of Neturei Karta). But can there be a sicker
mind than one that defends Neturei Karta, the Arab-loving, Jew-hating
sect that condones suicide bombings in Israel?

If anyone finds the latter statement hard to believe, I refer you to
a press release issued by Neturei Karta International on Dec. 15, 2002
announcing that "The Rabbinical leaders of Neturei Karta have
announced that they will be among those welcoming the Syrian
President to London.

The press release, referring to suicide bombings in Israel, says the
following: "President Assad has expressed his understanding of the
pain and suffering and the sense of loss.... Which leads the Palestinian
youth to give up their lives with regularity...."

Neturei Karta continues, "The root question is, why is this
happening? In point of fact, it is a reaction to a century-old policy of
illegitimate colonization, and indifference to Palestinian national
rights by the Zionist movement. Our Torah commands us that we be-
have with justice to all men.

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. The true face of Neturei
Karta.

The Jewish Press does not have enough pages for me to quote all the
disgusting and seditious Neturei Karta press releases.

Rabbi Director (he is more suited to be Director of the Damascus
PLO office than a rabbi) states that "Neturei Karta does not favor the
obliteration of the State of Israel." Let him wake up and visit the vari-

ous Neturei Karta websites and see for himself. He will find that the
destruction of the state of Israel is the number one priority of Neturei
Karta. Not only that, but they even inserted a special prayer into their
prayer books that calls for the destruction of Israel. Mind boggling.

Bernard Black
New York, NY

3. Rav Dov Lior, Shelita, Chief Rabbi of Kiryat Arba - Hebron, is the
ONLY living Rabbi who passed with full marks, 100/100, ALL his Torah exams in
yeshiva until he became a Dayan.

http://www.maarivintl.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=printArticle&articleID=7626
Settler Rabbi: Killing "innocent people" in war is allowed if saves lives

Rabbi Dov Lior, chairman of the settler's rabbinical council ruled that
killing civilians during warfare is permitted if it will save lives.
Uri Glickman

The IDF are allowed to hurt so-called "innocent civilians" during warfare,
Chairman of the Yesha rabbinical council (Judea, Samaria and Gaza Strip),
Rabbi Dov Lior, said in a Halachic (Jewish law) ruling made public
Wednesday.

"The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them.
This is the real moral behind Israel's Torah and we must not feel guilty
due to foreign morals," Lior said.

Sources close to the Rabbi explained that Lior made the remarks Tuesday
night and they had nothing to do with Wednesday's events in Gaza. The IDF
is allowed to use all means at its disposal to defeat terrorism "even if
it means 'innocent' people are killed", the sources said.

The religious community did not publicly condemn Rabbi Lior's ruling but
warned against its implications. "It is a dangerous step that could test
all religious IDF commanders taking part in the current fighting", sources
in the Yesha community told Maariv.
=========================================================================
http://www.israelnn.com/news.php3?id=62734
State of War Justified Hitting the Enemy
23:41 May 19, '04 / 28 Iyar 5764

(IsraelNN.com) Rabbi Dov Lior, who heads the Yesha Rabbinical Forum,
announced earlier that in a state of war, the IDF may target the enemy
even though it involves hitting "innocent citizens". Rabbi Lior pointed
out our Torah teaches us the importance of protecting the lives of our
soldiers and citizens, and the true morality of the Torah, adding we must
not feel guilt due to the morality of the non-Jews.

4. News from the Islamic Republic of Berkeley:
http://www.calpatriot.org/article.php?articleID=69

5. And just suppose all them po' civilians had really been killed by
Palestinian explosives?
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=62692

6. Ascociated Press Arafatologies:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13467

7. Pseudo-journalism at the LA Times:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13465

8. Rare common sense about human rights in time of war from a moderate
leftist:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1084935864823&p=1006953079865

9. Israel's Bolshevik Economy:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1085023336125&p=1006953079865

Posted 5/19/2004 11:29:00 AM

1.
One of the reasons why Israel's Left continues to exercise hegemony over
the country even while the Likud is nominally in charge is that teh Likud
has a long history of pandering to, rewarding, and appointing leftists to
office. Think I am kidding? Well, consider the new Attorney General,
Mani Mazuz, appointed by Sharon. Mazuz is not only a leftist but he
recently came out in SUPPORT of insurrection, law-breaking, and mutiny in
the army by leftist soldiers, organized by leftists who believe that other
leftists should be excused from the inconvenience of obeying the law as
long as the country is not following the policies endorsed by Israel's
communist party.

Mazuz described such mutiny as "a positive moral phenomenon, manifesting
caring for the law and social involvement." Strangely he does not regard
Jews living in settlements the government has not formally recognized as
similar social caring and patriotism.

Globes editor Mati Golan blasts Mazuz for this, in his column of May 14,
04.

2. Anti-Semitic Conspiracies:
http://nationalreview.com/rubin/rubin200405180836.asp

Posted 5/19/2004 10:49:00 AM

1. As part of the propaganda juggernaut designed to panic Israelis into
withdrawing from the Gaza Strip with their tails between their legs as a
reward for Palestinian barbarism, and as part of the campaign to make Gaza
judenrein and expel its settlers, the Left - and by that, these days I also
mean the Likud - has been blustering about how Gaza was "never Jewish
land", never had Jews living in it, is not at all part of the Jews'
national heritage, and so on. For example, the Israeli Minister of
Defense Shaul Mofaz recently declared that "Gaza is not at all Jewish
heritage."

Oh really?

Well, let's put aside for the moment all those stories about Jews
spending time in Gaza in the Bible, from King David to Samson. Let's talk
about historically unassailable evidence of Gaza being actual documentable
Jewish homeland, long before the Gush Katif settlements were set up. It
turns out that Gaza had a thriving Jewish community until the Jews were
ethnically cleansed from Gaza in the 1948-9 war. From now on, when you
hear the mindless Left blabbing about how "ethnic cleansing" took place in
the Israeli War of Independence, you will understand that the only ethnic
cleansing that took place was of Jews expelled from Gaza (and the West
Bank), and later of Jews from all the Arab countries. For strange reasons,
the Left has never heard about any of those ethnic cleansings.

The Gaza Jewish community had as its Rabbi staring in 1906 one Rabbi
Nissim Ohana, born in Algeria and trained as a Rabbi in Jerusalem, who also
served later as an important Rabbi in Alexandria, Egypt, in Malta, in New
York, in Cairo (where he was Chief Rabbi of Egypt), and in Haifa (where he
was Sephardic Chief Rabbi in the 50s). This past weekend the Israeli
religious newspaper Hazofe devoted an article to Rabbi Ohana and to the
Jews living in Gaza in the first half of the 20th century. Rabbi Ohana
was on warm cordial terms with the Moslem Mufti of Gaza, the article
reports, and the two wrote a book together.

There is one other curious detail worth knowing about this famous Rabbi
of Gaza. I am married to his granddaughter. The Rabbi is one of the
figures discussed in my book, The Scout
(http://161.58.167.199/shop/indi_scout.htm ) . So when Mofaz states that
Jews have no heritage to preserve in Gaza, let him speak for
himself. Unlike so many of the fascist terrorists currently filling the
Gaza Strip, my family can legitimately claim Gaza as our homeland.

The (Hebrew only) article on Jews in Gaza is at
http://www.hazofe.co.il/web/print3.asp?id=23678&kod=

Someone else who notes that Jews long lived in Gaza:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1084857510960&p=1006953079865

2. The Temple Mount:
http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=3693

3. The obscenity of leftists using their murdered children to score
political points:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=7477

4. Yeah sure, when he NEEDS
us: http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/18/bush.aipac.ap/index.html

5. Whom does Powell think he's
kidding?
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1084857510957&p=1006953079865

6. Academic Free Speech ... Not!:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13441

7. So what if Saddam had WND - the Left could not care:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13438

Posted 5/18/2004 09:14:00 PM

Subject: Free Speech - One, Leftist Suppression of Free Speech - Nil



And Down Comes Crashing Yet Another Leftist SLAPP Harassment Suit
By Steven Plaut


SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation.
SLAPP suits are anti-democratic harassment "libel" suits filed by people to
suppress the free speech of their critics. In Israel, leftist extremists
have filed a rash of these harassment suits in recent years as a tactic to
silence those who criticize them. This is as good a proof as any about
how fundamentally anti-democratic leftists really are. For background
information on SLAPP tactics, see http://www.gjs.net/web-slap.htm . In
many parts of the United States there are severe penalties against those
who use SLAPP suits as a harassment tool.

Today one of the most important SLAPP suits by a leftist extremist was
defeated. Several others have been defeated in recent months in Israeli
courts. The case decided today is a fascinating one, and it illustrates an
important victory of democratic free speech over leftist extremists and
their totalitarian campaign to silence criticism of the Left through misuse
of the courts.

Michael Barizon is better known as "B. Michael", which is how he signs
his columns in "Yediot Ahronot", Israel's largest daily newspaper. Like so
many of his fellow columnists, B. Michael is a leftist extremist. There is
a tossup over whether he or Sylvia Keshet is the most fanatic leftist sat
Yediot, and a few others there can give them a run for their money. B.
Michael has a very long history of publishing craven, libelous material
about Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, and about others of whom
the Far Left disapproves. In a typical rant, B. Michael described settlers
as "evil people, corrupt and pampered over decades with feelings of
mastery, madness, and welfare support." You get the idea. It goes from
bad to worse after that.

Anyway, a columnist at the small religious Israeli daily newspaper
"Hatzofe", Chana Eisenman, took a dislike to some of B. Michael's more
outrageous rantings. In July 2003 she wrote her own column strongly
criticizing B. Michael. She accused him of using Goebbels-like propaganda
tactics (her terminology). She accused B. Michael of being one of the
world's great anti-Semites. She accused B. Michael of granting his
blessings to the rivers of blood being produced by the Palestinian
Authority, "blood for which Satan has invented no adequate vengeance".

Now as you know, the Left always believes in free speech for itself
(alone), no matter how foul and libelous its own ravings, but no one must
be allowed to criticize the Left. Sauce for the goose is definitely not
sauce for the lemming. Anyone who dares to do so should be sued for libel
or worse. Just ask Neve Gordon, the leftist extremist at Ben Gurion
University trying to sue me in an extraordinarily similar SLAPP suit to
that of B. Michael (see
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11497
). That is right, B. Michael filed a libel suit against Chana Eisenman.

In his suit, B. Michael claimed his "good name" had been damaged by
the remarks about him published by Chana Eisenman. He protested his
outrage that she had said he was using nazi-like propaganda tactics and
that he is an anti-Semite. Chana Eisenman and her lawyers insisted that
B. Michael was simply trying to recruit the courts as an instrument to
suppress her free speech and her right to criticize his outrageous
articles. They insisted she had simply spoken the truth about him. They
pointed out that in his columns, B. Michael openly endorses law breaking by
the Left for political purposes and libels the settlers. Even though she
herself lives on the wrong side of the Green Line (that is, like me, she
lives inside pre-1967 Israel and not in the "occupied territories"), she
took personal offense at B. Michael's libelous attacks on all Jews living
on the other side of the Green Line. And that is why she decided to attack
B. Michael's views and behavior in her column.

The suit was heard before Jerusalem Magistrate's Court. Earlier
today, the judge decided against B. Michael. Even if the statements by
Chana Eisenman could be considered libelous, said the judge - who evidently
believed some were, they were entirely protected speech because they were
denunciations and attacks on the articles by B. Michael that were
themselves libelous. The judge emphasized that B. Michael's own articles
are clearly libelous and so he is estopped from suing for libel someone
else who attacks those articles, especially when the articles criticizing
him were direct reactions to what he himself had written. In addition, B.
Michael is a columnist and so is a public figure and is clearly not
protected against journalistic attacks on his ideas and writings, even if
the denunciations of him are in harsh language. The judge stated that the
mere identification of a writer with those who have been libeled by a
plaintiff, even if the defendant was not explicitly a victim of the
plaintiff's libel, is enough to establish "lack of malice" and so free
expression remains a legitimate basis for the defendant's own
defense. The judge pointed out that the harsher and more outrageous are
the comments of a plaintiff that are attacked by a defendant, the easier it
is for the defendant to claim a free speech defense, even for harsh
language of his/her own.

Finally, the Jerusalem magistrate cited rulings by the Chief Justice in
Israel in which the latter established that public figures, especially
those with direct access themselves to the media, are by and large barred
from suing on grounds that their "good name" has been tarnished.

Now for those who have been following my own adventures in the realm of
leftist utilization of the courts as an anti-democratic harassment tactic,
you will see oodles of parallels between this suit and the malicious SLAPP
suit I am currently fighting. In that, leftist extremist Neve Gordon, a
lecturer in political science at Ben Gurion University, filed a SLAPP suit
in Nazareth court (hoping the suit would be assigned an Arab judge ? for
background, see
http://jewishvoiceandopinion.com/?x=0401P1A&t=Zionist%20Professor%20Sued%20for%20Views%20in%20Israel
). Like B. Michael's suit against Eisenman, Gordon claimed I called him an
anti-Semite, which I did and which he is. Gordon also claimed I called him
a Holocaust Denier; in fact I called him an admirer of Holocaust-Denier
Norman Finkelstein, not quite the same thing. (Gordon had written an
article comparing Norman Finkelstein, widely regarded as a Holocaust
Denier, anti-Semite, and fraud, to the Prophets in the Bible from a moral
point of view.) Gordon also was unhappy that I referred to the "human
shields" who protected Arafat and the murderers in his headquarters in
Ramallah, people whom Gordon joined in an illegal "protest" designed to
interfere with Israeli military operations, as "Judenrat wanna-bes."

Like B. Michael, Gordon endorses law breaking by leftists, and unlike
B. Michael, Gordon has engaged in some of it himself. Like Eisenman's
criticisms of Michael, everything I ever wrote about Gordon concerned his
own political views expressed in his own articles. Like Michael, Gordon is
a public figure and writes columns for dozens of anti-Semitic magazines and
web sites all over the world (some of his articles are published in
neo-nazi and Holocaust Denial web sites). Like B. Michael, Gordon's own
articles are fever swamps of libel. He libels just about everyone he
writes about, from his own army commander (a private citizen and not a
public figure) to Ehud Barak and Bibi Netanyahu. He also libels Israel,
declaring it a fascist, terrorist, apartheid state. By today's court
ruling, even if there were anything libelous in anything I had ever wrote
about Gordon, and there decidedly is not, it would all be protected speech
in light of his own vile writings, which are far worse even than those of
B. Michael.

Stay tuned, courtroom lovers?.

Posted 5/17/2004 08:05:00 PM

1. Defend Gay Rights by Annihilating the PLO:
http://www.365gay.com/newscon04/05/051604ukDemo.htm
Gays Attacked At Palestinian Protest
by Peter Moore
365Gay.com Newscenter
London

Posted: May 16, 2004 4:37 pm. ET

(London) Members of two British gay rights groups were attacked when they
attempted to participate in a demonstration for Palestinian rights.

OutRage and Queer Youth Alliance went to the protest march at Trafalgar
Square to show their support for people of Palestine. But they also urged
the Palestinian Authority to halt the arrest, torture and murder of
homosexuals.

As soon as they arrived at the square members of the two groups were
surrounded by an angry, screaming mob of Islamic fundamentalists, Anglican
clergymen, members of the Socialist Workers Party, the Stop the War
Coalition, and officials from the protest organizers, the Palestine
Solidarity Campaign (PSC).

They variously attacked the gay activists as racists, Zionists, CIA and
MI5 agents, supporters of the Sharon government and accused the gays of
dividing the Free Palestine movement.

PSC organisers asked the gay activists to stand at the back of the
demonstration, and when they refused blocked their placards with their own
banners and shouted down the gay campaigners as they tried to speak to
journalists and other protesters.

Most people at the Palestine protest expressed no hostility towards
OutRage! and the Queer Youth Alliance. Some expressed positive support.

In the end, the gay groups were allowed to march in the demonstration.
The two groups carried placards reading: "Israel: stop persecuting
Palestine! Palestine: stop persecuting queers!"

We call on the PLO and Palestinian Authority to condemn homophobia, uphold
queer human rights, and to order an immediate end to the abuse of lesbian
and gay Palestinians", said OutRage! protester, Brett Lock.

"Having experienced the pain of homophobia, we deplore the suffering
inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli government.

Another protester, Peter Tatchell, said: "Gay Palestinians live in fear of
arrest, detention without trial, torture and execution at the hands of
Palestinian police and security services. They also risk abduction and
so-called honor killing by vengeful family members and vigilante mobs, as
well as punishment beatings and murder by Palestinian political groups
such as Hamas and Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement".

365Gay.comr 2004

2. The prince of pseudo-journalism:
WATCHING ISRAEL'S MEDIA: Pseudo-journalism
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
YISRAEL MEDAD & ELI POLLAK May. 15, 2004

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

John S. Carroll, editor of The Los Angeles Times, spoke on May 6 to a
group of University of Oregon students.

"The media industry has been infested," he said, "by the rise of
pseudo-journalists who go against journalism's long tradition to serve the
public with accurate information. They view their audience as something to
be manipulated."

Carroll referred to these journalists as a "breed" who mislead while
claiming to inform and who have strayed from the legacy of respect and
care for media consumers. We welcome him, then, to the media scene here in
Israel.

Dan Margalit is an elite member of Israel's media. A journalist since
1960, when he worked at Haolam Hazeh, he was a member of the editorial
board of Haaretz and is currently a commentator for Ma'ariv.

On television, he hosted the Erev Hadash afternoon news program for the
Educational TV Network, was the founding moderator of Popolitika on
Channel 1, then moved to Channel 2, taking with him Amnon Dankner and
Tommy Lapid; he went back to Channel 1 and now appears on Channel 10 with
Politika Plus.

In the years following the Oslo Accords, Margalit's Popolitika program was
heavily biased in the accord's favor. Nonetheless, he was also moderator
of the famous Netanyahu-Peres debate preceding the 1996 elections, a
debate seen by many as pivotal in the downfall of then prime minister
Shimon Peres.

Most recently he was the moderator of the TV Channel 10 Begin-Olmert
debate on the Gaza withdrawal plan.

He earned an MA in Jewish history and penned an autobiography entitled
Those I Have Seen. In his book, Margalit describes how he crossed the line
from journalism to political involvement when he supported Moshe Dayan for
premier.

It was Margalit's revelation of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin's secret bank
account in 1976 that led to the collapse of the government quite a
journalistic feather-in-his-cap.
As reported recently in the Makor Rishon weekly, our colleague Moshe
Kovarsky, a member of Israel's Media Watch's executive, recently
researched Margalit's professionalism and found him wanting. Reviewing his
articles in Ma'ariv over the past four months, Kovarsky found Margalit
prophesized falsely, assumed no responsibility for his failures,
moralized, and fudged the facts.

For example, on January 2, Margalit commented on Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon's Herzliya speech: "This whole disengagement plan will turn out to
be nothing more than an insignificant footnote."

On January 23, Margalit wrote in frustration: "In comparison to the regime
Sharon has forged, George Orwell's 1984 seems an innocent republic. He
demanded: "Go, Sharon, for the sake of God go!"

TEN DAYS later, Sharon announced his plan for a unilateral withdrawal from
Gaza and the dismantlement of all Jewish communities in the Strip. On
February 3, Margalit heard the beating wings of history and conveniently
ignored his own demand that Sharon leave office.

He wrote: "One must hope Sharon will pursue this approach he declared in
the Likud Knesset faction." Hello? What happened to 1984?

Another fortnight passed and Margalit was derisive of the Likud's
ideological position. On February 13, he had this to say: "Likud Central
committee members are willing to push and shove to enter the Knesset's
Finance Committee session their minds are on the economy, not the
integrity of the homeland."
On March 12, he informed us that "the day before yesterday it became known
that Sharon is leaving Ariel outside the separation fence." That quickly
proved wrong.

A week later, on March 19, he addressed Israel's negotiations with the
United States and knew that "Israel has never before conducted such a
disorganized negotiations effort," a statement he would retract a month
later, when he praised Sharon's campaign to obtain presidential approval.

Following the Ahmed Yassin elimination, Margalit saw nothing but dark
clouds ahead. On March 26, he wrote: "A public figure will be murdered or
kidnapped; buildings will collapse in Tel Aviv and Buenos Aires, and
planes will be hijacked and blown up."
So far as we are aware, this has not materialized.

While wary of a mega-terror operation, Margalit was very confident of the
Likud poll outcome. Writing on April 20, he knew that "the Likud's popular
poll has already been decided not just decided but with a mighty
majority."

Waking up to the reality of the impending loss, Margalit, in a column
published two days before the poll, became borderline hysterical: "A no to
disengagement means an internal breakup, a step toward a split in the
kingdom, even to the extent of mass legitimization of army service
refusal."

He then informed us that "voting against will bring us apartheid."

Margalit's colored writing makes him eligible for successful nomination as
a member of the Israeli pseudo-journalists' club.

Yisrael Medad and Prof. Eli Pollak are vice- chairman and chairman of
Israel's Media Watch (www.imw.org.il)

This article can also be read at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1084599617018&p=1006953079865

3. More on Islamofascist Barbarism:
http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=3676

4. Anti-Zionism is anti-semitism

Behind much criticism of Israel is a thinly veiled hatred of Jews

Emanuele Ottolenghi
Saturday November 29, 2003
The Guardian

Is there a link between the way Israel's case is presented and
anti-semitism? Israel's advocates protest that behind criticisms of Israel
there sometimes lurks a more sinister agenda, dangerously bordering on
anti-semitism. Critics vehemently disagree. In their view, public attacks
on Israel are neither misplaced nor the source of anti-Jewish sentiment:
Israel's behaviour is reprehensible and so are those Jews who defend it.
Jewish defenders of Israel are then depicted by their critics as seeking
an excuse to justify Israel, projecting Jewish paranoia and displaying a
"typical" Jewish trait of "sticking together", even in defending the
morally indefensible. Israel's advocates deserve the hostility they get,
the argument goes; it is they who should engage in soul-searching.

There is no doubt that recent anti-semitism is linked to the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict. And it is equally without doubt that Israeli
policies sometimes deserve criticism. There is nothing wrong, or even
remotely anti-semitic, in disapproving of Israeli policies. Nevertheless,
this debate - with its insistence that there is a distinction between
anti-semitism and anti-Zionism - misses the crucial point of contention.
Israel's advocates do not want to gag critics by brandishing the bogeyman
of anti-semitism: rather, they are concerned about the form the criticism
takes.

If Israel's critics are truly opposed to anti-semitism, they should not
repeat traditional anti-semitic themes under the anti-Israel banner. When
such themes - the Jewish conspiracy to rule the world, linking Jews with
money and media, the hooked-nose stingy Jew, the blood libel, disparaging
use of Jewish symbols, or traditional Christian anti-Jewish imagery - are
used to describe Israel's actions, concern should be voiced. Labour MP Tam
Dalyell decried the influence of "a Jewish cabal" on British foreign
policy-making; an Italian cartoonist last year depicted the Israeli siege
of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as an attempt to kill Jesus
"again". Is it necessary to evoke the Jewish conspiracy or depict Israelis
as Christ-killers to denounce Israeli policies?

The fact that accusations of anti-semitism are dismissed as paranoia, even
when anti-semitic imagery is at work, is a subterfuge. Israel deserves to
be judged by the same standards adopted for others, not by the standards
of utopia. Singling out Israel for an impossibly high standard not applied
to any other country begs the question: why such different treatment?

Despite piqued disclaimers, some of Israel's critics use anti-semitic
stereotypes. In fact, their disclaimers frequently offer a mask of
respectability to otherwise socially unacceptable anti-semitism. Many
equate Israel to Nazism, claiming that "yesterday's victims are today's
perpetrators": last year, Louis de Bernires wrote in the Independent that
"Israel has been adopting tactics which are reminiscent of the Nazis".
This equation between victims and murderers denies the Holocaust. Worse
still, it provides its retroactive justification: if Jews turned out to be
so evil, perhaps they deserved what they got. Others speak of Zionist
conspiracies to dominate the media, manipulate American foreign policy,
rule the world and oppress the Arabs. By describing Israel as the root of
all evil, they provide the linguistic mandate and the moral justification
to destroy it. And by using anti-semitic instruments to achieve this goal,
they give away their true anti-semitic face.
There is of course the open question of whether this applies to
anti-Zionism. It is one thing to object to the consequences of Zionism, to
suggest that the historical cost of its realisation was too high, or to
claim that Jews are better off as a scattered, stateless minority. This is
a serious argument, based on interests, moral claims, and an
interpretation of history. But this is not anti-Zionism. To oppose Zionism
in its essence and to refuse to accept its political offspring, Israel, as
a legitimate entity, entails more. Zionism comprises a belief that Jews
are a nation, and as such are entitled to self-determination as all other
nations are.

It could be suggested that nationalism is a pernicious force. In which
case one should oppose Palestinian nationalism as well. It could even be
argued that though both claims are true and noble, it would have been
better to pursue Jewish national rights elsewhere. But negating Zionism,
by claiming that Zionism equals racism, goes further and denies the Jews
the right to identify, understand and imagine themselves - and
consequently behave as - a nation. Anti-Zionists deny Jews a right that
they all too readily bestow on others, first of all Palestinians.

Were you outraged when Golda Meir claimed there were no Palestinians? You
should be equally outraged at the insinuation that Jews are not a nation.
Those who denounce Zionism sometimes explain Israel's policies as a
product of its Jewish essence. In their view, not only should Israel act
differently, it should cease being a Jewish state. Anti-Zionists are
prepared to treat Jews equally and fight anti-semitic prejudice only if
Jews give up their distinctiveness as a nation: Jews as a nation deserve
no sympathy and no rights, Jews as individuals are worthy of both.
Supporters of this view love Jews, but not when Jews assert their national
rights. Jews condemning Israel and rejecting Zionism earn their praise.
Denouncing Israel becomes a passport to full integration. Noam Chomsky and
his imitators are the new heroes, their Jewish pride and identity
expressed solely through their shame for Israel's existence. Zionist Jews
earn no respect, sympathy or protection. It is their expression of Jewish
identity through identification with Israel that is under attack.

The argument that it is Israel's behaviour, and Jewish support for it,
that invite prejudice sounds hollow at best and sinister at worst. That
argument means that sympathy for Jews is conditional on the political
views they espouse. This is hardly an expression of tolerance. It singles
Jews out. It is anti-semitism.

Zionism reversed Jewish historical passivity to persecution and asserted
the Jewish right to self-determination and independent survival. This is
why anti-Zionists see it as a perversion of Jewish humanism. Zionism
entails the difficulty of dealing with sometimes impossible moral
dilemmas, which traditional Jewish passivity in the wake of historical
persecution had never faced. By negating Zionism, the anti-semite is
arguing that the Jew must always be the victim, for victims do no wrong
and deserve our sympathy and support.

Israel errs like all other nations: it is normal. What anti-Zionists find
so obscene is that Israel is neither martyr nor saint. Their outrage
refuses legitimacy to a people's national liberation movement. Israel's
stubborn refusal to comply with the invitation to commit national suicide
and thereby regain a supposedly lost moral ground draws condemnation. Jews
now have the right to self-determination, and that is what the anti-semite
dislikes so much.

ú Emanuele Ottolenghi is the Leone Ginzburg Fellow in Israel Studies at
the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and the Middle East Centre
at St Antony's College, Oxford
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0%2C3604%2C1095694%2C00.html

5. More fabrications from Herr Chomsky:

Another Chomsky Fabrication

"After the Six-Day War, Israel reportedly blocked a Red Cross rescue
operation for five days, while thousands of Egyptian soldiers died in
the Sinai desert (London Times, 15, June 1967; cited in Who Are the
Terrorists?, Institute for Palestine Studies, Beirut, 1972...)"


- Noam Chomsky, Peace in the Middle East? (Fontana, 1975), p182.


"Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Tel
Aviv are investigating the possibility of using helicopters for
dropping water and emergency rations to the stranded Egyptians...


"An official of the ICRC said today that they were 'very deeply
concerned' with the plight of the Egyptians in the fierce summer heat,
even if their numbers might not be so great as was earlier reported.
Estimates are now tending towards hundreds rather than thousands, but
no approximate total is yet available...


"Hundreds of Israeli lorries, in a vast rescue operation, were today
collecting the remnants of the Egyptian Army in Sinai and carrying the
rescued soldiers to the Suez Canal, where Egyptians took them over into
Egypt, authoritative sources said here tonight.


"The Israel Air Force is to launch an operation tomorrow to recover
soldiers still roaming about in the Sinai desert. Colonel Mosche
Perlmann, the spokesman for General Dayan, the Defence Minister, said
that Red Cross representatives would take part.


"Colonel Perlmann estimated that some 6,000 Egyptians had succeeded in
reaching the canal across the desert during the past two days."


- "Desert Drive to Rescue Egyptians," The Times, London, June 15, 1967.


Chomsky's source contradicts him at every point: the Red Cross was
operating from Israel; thousands of Egyptian soldiers could not have
died since only hundreds were stranded; Israel sent hundreds of troops
to rescue the Egyptians; and Israel was planning a further rescue
operation in coordination with the Red Cross.

Posted 5/16/2004 09:10:00 AM

1. The Hebrew word "Kerry" has some interesting meanings, as is apparent
from this week's Torah portion. "Kerry" means to behave as if there is no
morality nor reasoned order in the universe, from the root word for
"randomness".

Interestingly, Kerry also has Gaelic connotations. Within Ireland,
people tell jokes about the foolishness of those who come from County
Kerry, kind of like blond jokes or Canadian jokes about those from
Newfoundland. Like, "You heard about the farmer from Kerry who had a pet
zebra he namd 'Spot'??"

2. The Israeli media, under the near-totalitarian hegemony of the Left,
is proclaiming that 150,000 people showed up for the rally last night for
unilateral Israeli self-annihilation, this held in a square that can at
most hold 60,000. This is the same square in which the media invented the
mythical 400,000 number for the rally in 1982 against the incursion that
year into Lebanon, a fantasy so enormous that it no doubt belongs right up
there with the claims that 10% of humans are gay or that the Council on
Foreign Relations knocked down the World Trade Towers. In any case, an
Israeli leftist-media
estimate of 150,000, repeated ad nauseum by the world media always anxious
to report on Israelis determined to destroy Israel, could mean as many as
30,000 people showed up for Woodstock-on-the-Yarkon, some of them
actually voting age. The banner of the
rally by the way was "The Majority Determines" and I will give you a
hint - they did NOT mean the 60% majority in the recent referendum. They
meant the majority of Israeli journalists.

Meanwhile, the Israeli Left has all but abandoned the slogan of "Land
for Peace", since it is evident to all earthlings that Israel cannot buy
peace by appeasing the Arabs with land. Instead, the new slogan is "Land
for Nothing". You think I am joshing you?

Well, consider the letter in today's Haaretz by Prof. Amiram Goldblum,
a professor of pharmacy at the Hebrew University. Goldblum is one of the
founders and one of the last great believers in "Peace Now", the protest
movement directly responsible for the 1400 Oslo murders of Israelis. You
may also recall Goldblum as the bloke who was campaigning to have Israel
bar evangelical Christian tourists from entering the country, evidently
because he feared they were too pro-Israel.

Anyway, Comrade Goldblum has a letter in today's Far-Leftist Haaretz,
in which he insists that "Land for Peace" is passe, and it implies that
until the PLO is prepared to make peace Israel should hold on to the
"occupied" lands. Instead, Goldblum - in the name of Peace Now
(and war right after) - insists Israel should withdraw
unilaterally from all the "occupied lands" whether or not the PLO wants
peace, whether or not it would lead to increased or decreased terror, just
because it is the nice thing to do. Think I am kidding?

3. Nice piece: http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=3671

4. Also this: http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=3656

Posted 5/15/2004 09:12:00 PM

1. Anyone notice that in Colin Powell's speech this evening, he made it
clear that any withdrawal of "settlements" by Israel from the Gaza Strip
would be a positive first stage towards the complete removal of all
"settlements" everywhere, presumably including neighborhoods of Jerusalm
regarded by Powell as "settlements"? Remember how the Likud lemmings were
trying to sell the "disengagement plan" as a way to take the heat off
Israel regarding the West Bank, by tossing to the US a bone in the form of
a judenrein Gaza Strip?

2. National Public Radio endorses murder of children:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13385

3. Noam Chomsky - the Professor who helped make possible the Cambodian
geoncide.
Noam Chomsky's Scheme to "Divest" and destroy Israel:
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V122/N25/col25dersh.25c.html

4. While the Israeli Mindless Left congregates in the Tel Aviv Square,
the one that holds at most 60,000 people and so the media alsways claim the
Left produces crowds of 100,000 or more, Arafat Calls for Terror:

Arafat urges Palestinians to 'terrorize' enemy
Embattled leader marks anniversary of Israel's establishment

MSNBC News Services
Updated: 7:23 a.m. ET May 15, 2004RAMALLAH, West Bank - Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat urged his people Saturday to "terrorize your enemy," as he
bitterly marked the 56-year anniversary of the establishment of Israel.
advertisement

Meantime, Israeli helicopters hit Islamic Jihad targets in the Gaza Strip
after attacks led by the Palestinian militant group killed 13 soldiers and
dealt the Middle Easts mightiest army its worst blow in two years.

In a speech broadcast live on Palestinian television, Arafat repeatedly
called on his people to be steadfast in their struggle against Israeli
occupation.

He ended the speech with a quote from the Koran. "Find what strength you
have to terrorize your enemy and the enemy of God," he said.

The phrase in the Koran refers to Muslims' wars against pagans. It is
followed by a phrase saying "if they want peace, then let's have peace."

Arafat, whom Israel accuses of supporting militant groups, did not appear
to be calling for new attacks on Israel. The passage in the Koran refers
to the early Muslims' wars against pagans and is frequently invoked by
Islamic leaders today to encourage strength in times of conflict.

Arafat spoke as Palestinians marked what they refer to as the
"catastrophe" of Israel's independence on May 15, 1948.

Islamic Jihad leader escapes missile strike
Earlier on Saturday, Islamic Jihad said helicopter missiles struck a Gaza
City seminary housing its leader Mohammed al-Hindis office but that he was
safely in hiding. The premises of a pro-Jihad charity were also attacked.
Israel called both targets militant fronts.

In Rafah, a Gaza refugee camp, an Israeli helicopter razed an Islamic
Jihad bomb laboratory, the army said. Palestinian witnesses described the
target as the home of a local group commander who escaped, while a woman
bystander was wounded.

Israel lost 13 soldiers to Gaza City and Rafah ambushes this week claimed
by Islamic Jihad and kindred militant group Hamas as coups in a
three-and-a-half-year Palestinian revolt.

Israeli forces quit Rafah on Saturday after scouring the camp for the
remains of their troops who were killed.

Polls showed deepening support in Israel for Prime Minister Ariel Sharons
Gaza pullout plan, now stalled by hard-liners in his own rightist party,
as this weeks losses reminded Israelis of the high cost of the
hard-to-defend Gaza settlements.

The Gaza clashes also raised concern among Israeli top brass that
Palestinians have adopted tactics Hezbollah fighters used to hound Israel
from its south Lebanon occupation zone in 2000.

Sworn to Israels destruction, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have carried out
suicide bombings that have killed hundreds of Israelis. Israel has
assassinated many of their leaders.

Vows of revenge
Israel killed 28 Palestinians, including civilians, during four days of
fierce fighting in the Gaza Strip.

In Rafah, witnesses said Israeli bulldozers had razed scores of homes, and
that a Palestinian was crushed in the rubble.

The army said it demolished homes used as shooting positions by militants
who killed seven of its troops. One building had collapsed during an
exchange of fire with gunmen holed up inside, it said.

Medics said 14 people were hurt in Saturdays air strikes.

We will respond to the cowardly attempt on the life of our leader by
punishing the Zionist enemies, Islamic Jihad official Khader Habib told
Reuters, describing the seminary strike as an attempt to assassinate
Hindi. There will be an earthquake-like response that will shatter the
Zionist entity.

Israeli security sources said Hindi -- a 50-year-old physician who has
lived underground for his own safety in recent months -- had not been
targeted. But one source called him the unquestioned head of Islamic
Jihads terrorist operations.

The source said the seminary was a front for Islamic Jihad and the other
group hit on Saturday was involved in recruiting suicide bombers with
funding from Hezbollah and Iran.

On Friday, militants shot dead two soldiers in Rafah while troops were
destroying dozens of buildings along a nearby Gaza-Egypt border corridor
that Israel controls and plans to widen by demolishing numerous homes.

An army statement said a soldier had helped a Palestinian woman carry bags
into her apartment and was shot dead by snipers outside the building. When
a rescue team arrived, militants shot at them as well, killing another
soldier, the army said.

Islamic Jihad and Hamas ambushed Israeli vehicles in Gaza City and Rafah
on Tuesday and Wednesday, killing 11 soldiers inside.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
(see also http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/427699.html)

5. Must read:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1084510308405&p=1006953079897

Posted 5/13/2004 09:58:00 PM

1. Sorry for sending the previous message with typos. Here is the
corrected version I had meant to send:

Of all the emotional moments over the past few days, the most moving
was a simple old tape, broadcast on the news, of a mother singing to her
son.

Over the past two days, eleven Israeli soldiers were murdered by the
Palestinian terrorists. In the first event, the Palestinian nazis pounced
on the body parts of the murdered soldiers who had just been blown to
pieces by a large mine, desecrating the bodies of the dead in the most
barbarous, ghoulish, uncivilized manner the world has seen since World War
II, and then hiding the body parts so that the families of the dead could
not even mourn them while giving them a proper burial. In the second
attack, another APC was blown up and five more young men murdered.

Among those murdered in the second attack on the APC was Lior
Vishinski. He was trained in tunnel warfare, that horrific fighting in
tunnels of the sort that left many a Vietnam vet an emotional vegetable.
Lior's job was to stop the smuggling of explosives into Gaza from Egypt,
and ironically he himself fell victim to a large mine composed of just
such smuggled explosives.

Lior was the son of two actors from Israel's bohemian Tel Aviv
theater set. They are loyal Labor Party members and pro-Oslo, and indeed
Lior's father utilized the tragedy to promote his own leftist agenda of
unilateral surrender by Israel in Gaza. Be that as it may, Channel
Two this evening broadcast an old tape from its archive. In it was Lior,
several years younger, sitting on a stage next to his beautiful mother,
who was singing to him a song. It was a lovely religious song, even
though the parents are not observant. Smiling at her son, she sang the
stanza over and over, apparently to an old Yiddish melody, with words from
the daily prayer book: "There are some things whose amount has no defined
quantity, and these include acts of compassion (Gimilut Hassidim), where a
man eats of the fruits in this world yet enjoys the full 'principal' in
the next world." And she sang the verse over and over, smiling and
watching her son.

Who was murdered yesterday by the Palestinian nazis.


2. Bernard Lewis is brilliant as always:
Iraq, India, Palestine

By BERNARD LEWIS
May 12, 2004; Page A14

The U.S. turn to the United Nations for help in Iraq raises two questions,
one of perception, the other of substance.

There can be no doubt that this appeal, in the context of the events in
Fallujah, will be perceived in many circles in the Middle East -- and not
only in the Middle East -- as signifying fear and flight, in other words,
as the beginning of a scuttle. It is now clear that what happened in
Fallujah in March was a carefully staged replay of what happened in
Somalia in October 1993, when American soldiers were seized, lynched,
dismembered and dragged through the streets.

This was intended to achieve the same result -- a precipitous American
departure. The line that Americans are degenerate, soft and pampered --
"hit them and they will run" -- has been a major theme of Islamic
terrorists for some time now. It was temporarily silenced by the campaigns
in Afghanistan and Iraq, but then revived by what was seen as public
dithering and wavering. The turn to the U.N. will be perceived, or at
least presented, as final and conclusive evidence of their view of
America, and may well serve as the starting point of a new wave of
terrorist action against Americans, reaching far beyond Iraq and perhaps
even as far as these shores. One is reminded of Ehud Barak's decision to
withdraw the Israeli forces from Lebanon. The decision was right and
indeed long overdue, but the manner of the withdrawal was disastrous, and
led directly to the current Intifada. I remember a conversation in an Arab
country at the time, when I was told triumphantly: "The Israelis have
become soft and pampered, like their American patrons. Our Lebanese
brothers have shown us the way." Perceptions, even if inaccurate, are
powerful and important, and may at times be self-fulfilling.

The second point is one of substance. The record of the U.N. in dealing
with conflicts is not encouraging -- neither in terms of fairness, nor of
efficacy. Its record on human rights is even worse -- hardly surprising,
since the members of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights include such
practitioners of human rights as Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Zimbabwe.
In dealing with conflicts, as a European observer once remarked, its
purpose seems to be conservation rather than resolution.

* * *
A case in point: In 1947 the British Empire in India was partitioned into
two states, India and Pakistan. There was a bitter military struggle, and
an estimated 10 million refugees were displaced. Despite continuing
friction, some sort of accommodation was reached between the two states
and the refugees were resettled. No outside power or organization was
involved.

In the following year, 1948, the British-mandated territory of Palestine
was partitioned -- in terms of area and numbers, a triviality compared
with India. Yet that conflict continues, and the 750,000 Arab refugees
from Israel and their millions of descendants remain refugees, in camps
maintained and staffed by the U.N. Except for Jordan, no Arab state has
been willing to grant citizenship to the Palestinian refugees or to their
locally born descendants, or even to allow them the rights of resident
aliens. They are now entering their fifth generation as stateless refugee
aliens. The whole operation is maintained and sustained by a massive
apparatus of U.N. officials, some of whom have spent virtually their whole
careers on this issue. What progress has been made on the Arab-Israel
problem -- the resettlement in Israel of Jewish refugees from the
Arab-held parts of mandatory Palestine and from Arab countries, the
Egyptian and Jordanian peace agreements -- was achieved outside the
framework of the U.N. One shudders to think what might have been the fate
of the Indian subcontinent if the U.N. had been involved in its partition.

The question of substance is of course of far greater importance in the
long term. The question of perception is immediate, but could have
long-term consequences.

Mr. Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, is the author of "From Babel
to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East," just out from Oxford.

3. Nice web site: http://www.crisisisrael.com

Posted 5/13/2004 09:32:00 PM

Of all the emotional moments over the past few days, the most moving
was a simple an old tap, broadcast on the news, of a mother singing to her
son.

Over the past two days, eleven Israeli soldiers were murdered by the
Palestinian terrorists. In the first event, the Palestinian nazis pounced
on the body parts of the murdered soldiers who had just been blown to
pieces by a large mine, desecrating the bodies of the dead in the most
barbarous, ghoulish, uncivilized manner the world has seen since World War
II, and then hiding the body parts so that the families of the dead could
not even mourn them while giving them a proper burial. In the second
attack, another APC was blown up and five more young men murdered.

Among those murdered in the second attack on the APC was Lior
Vishinski. He was trained in tunnel warfare, that horrific fighting in
tunnels of the sort that left many a Vietnam vet an emotional vegetable.
Lior's job was to stop the smuggling of explosives into Gaza from Egypt,
and ironically he himself fell victim to a large mine composed of just
such smuggled explosives.

Lior was the son of two actors from Israel's bohemian Tel Aviv
theater set. They are loyal Labor Party members and pro-Oslo, and indeed
Lior's father utilized the tragedy to promote his own leftist agenda of
unilateral surrender by Israel in Gaza. Be that as it may, the Channel
Two this evening broadcast an old tape from its archive. In it was Lior,
several years younger, sitting on a stage next to his beautiful mother,
who was singing to him a song. It was a lovely religious song, even
though the parents are not observant. Smiling at her son, she sang the
stanza over and over, apparently to an old Yiddish melody, with words from
the daily prayer book: "There are some things whose amount has no defined
quantity, and these include acts of compassion (Gimilut Hassidim), where a
man eats of the fruits in this world yet enjoys the full 'principal' in
the next world." And she sang the verse over and over, smiling and
watching her son.

Who was murdered yesterday by the Palestinian nazis ysterday.

Posted 5/12/2004 09:11:00 AM

1. America's "Divestment" Bigots:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1084251780700&p=1006953079865
Pushing 'divestment' on US campuses


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EDWARD ALEXANDER May. 11, 2004

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In September 2002 Harvard president Lawrence Summers charged that at
Harvard and universities across America, faculty-initiated petitions were
calling "for the university to single out Israel among all nations as the
lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university's
endowment to be invested."

In August 2003 Judith Butler, a professor at UC Berkeley and signatory to
nearly every anti-Israel petition, including the divestment one
circulating on American campuses, published a rebuttal of Summers called
"No, it's not anti-Semitic" in the London Review of Books.

Summers had chivalrously gone out of his way to say that "Serious and
thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic
in their effect, if not their intent"; to annihilate this distinction was
a primary aim of Butler's counterattack.

Using the tu quoque (you too) argument she called Summers's accusations "a
blow against academic freedom, in effect, if not intent." His words have
had "a chilling effect on political discourse."
Apparently the chill had not taken hold at Harvard itself, which would in
November play host to Oxford's Tom Paulin, famous for urging that Jews in
Judea and Samaria "should be shot dead."

Butler perfunctorily assented to Summers's recommendation that
anti-Semitism be condemned, but seemed incapable either of recognizing it
in such to her mild "public criticisms" as economic warfare against
Israel, or calls for its dismantling, or assaults on Zionism itself, or
opposing any effort Israel might make to defend itself against suicide
bombers.

She saw no difference between Jews intentionally murdered by suicide
bombers and Arabs accidentally killed by Israeli efforts to repel would-be
murderers.

Butler asserted that nobody examining the divestment petitions could take
them as condoning anti-Semitism. "We are asked to conjure a listener who
attributes an intention to the speaker: So-and-so has made a public
statement against the Israeli occupation, and this must mean that
so-and-so hates Jews."

But Summers was perfectly correct in stating that one need not "hate Jews"
in order to perform actions or utter words that are "anti-Semitic in their
effect if not their intent."

Take a well-known case: When Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, he harbored no
hatred of Jews or intention to harm them. He said of Fagin: "He's such an
out and outer I don't know what to make of him."
The reason for Dickens' puzzlement was that he did not indeed "make"
Fagin, and therefore didn't know what to make of him. Fagin was ready-made
for Dickens by the folklore of Christendom, which had fixed the Jew in the
role of Christ-killer, agent of Satan, inheritor of Judas, thief, fence,
corrupter of the young; to which list of attributes Butler and her
comrades now add "Zionist imperialist and occupier."

Has Oliver Twist often been anti-Semitic in effect? Of course or does
Butler think it is for their concern over the homeless in Victorian
England that Arab publishers keep cheap translations of the book in print?

Her ultimate use of the tu quoque strategy is to make Summers himself
guilty of what he attacks. Why? Because he assumes that Jews can only be
victims. Apparently the hundreds murdered and the thousands mutilated by
Arab terrorists between September 2000 and the time Butler published her
essay were not sufficient to meet her stringent requirements for (Jewish)
victim status.

But if Israelis are not the victims of Palestinian aggression, why is
getting on a bus in Jerusalem or going to a cafe in Haifa a form of
Russian roulette, far more dangerous than prancing about as a "human
shield" for Yasser Arafat?

WHAT BUTLER'S essay leaves out is even more blatant than what it includes.
It omits history altogether, torturing a text and omitting context.

Did it never occur to Butler that the divestment effort is the latest
installment of the 50-year-old Arab economic boycott of Israel?
Equally egregious is the omission of context that is compulsory for those
who have made the "Palestinian cause" the cornerstone of campus
liberalism.

The "occupation" which they bemoan did not precede and cause Arab hatred
and violence; it was Arab hatred and violence that led in June 1967 as in
April 2002 to occupation.

But the crucial omission from Butler's essay by somebody who has
relentlessly insisted on the political implications of language is the
political implications of the language of advocates of divestment.

The Harvard/MIT divestment petition that Butler champions was promoted at
MIT by Noam Chomsky, a person who would be rendered almost speechless on
the subject of Israel if deprived of the epithet "Nazi." It was promoted
at Harvard by professors calling Israel the "pariah" state.

Butler was herself one of the "first signatories" of a July 28, 2003 "Stop
the Wall" petition that uses the Israeli-Nazi equation beloved of nearly
all denigrators of the Zionist enterprise in asserting that "concrete,
barbed wire and electronic fortifications whose precedents... belong to
the totalitarian tradition" were transforming the Israel "defense forces"
and indeed "Israeli citizens themselves into a people of camp wardens."

So it would seem that, to quote Butler, "Language plays an important role
in shaping and attuning our... understanding of social and political
realities," except when it happens to be the anti-Semitic language that
demonizes Israel as the devil's experiment station, black as Gehenna and
the pit of Hell.

The writer is professor of English at the University of Washington in
Seattle.

2. The Left's Peace Partners: http://israelnn.com/news.php3?id=62241

3. Nick Berg was Jewish:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=7346

4. Boycott the Hollywood Left: http://www.pabaah.com/

5. Do Not Apologize!
The Curse of Pan-Arabia

By FOUAD AJAMI (Ajami is a brilliant Arab professor)
May 12, 2004; Page A14

Consider a tale of three cities: In Fallujah, there are the beginnings of
wisdom, a recognition, after the bravado, that the insurgents cannot win
in the face of a great military power. In Najaf, the clerical
establishment and the shopkeepers have called on the Mahdi Army of Muqtada
al-Sadr to quit their city, and to "pursue another way." It is in
Washington where the lines are breaking, and where the faith in the gains
that coalition soldiers have secured in Iraq at such a terrible price
appears to have cracked. We have been doing Iraq by improvisation, we are
now "dumping stock," just as our fortunes in that hard land may be taking
a turn for the better. We pledged to give Iraqis a chance at a new
political life. We now appear to be consigning them yet again to the same
Arab malignancies that drove us to Iraq in the first place.

We have stumbled in Abu Ghraib. But the logic of Abu Ghraib isn't the
logic of the Iraq war. We should be able to know the Arab world as it is.
We should see through the motives of those in Cairo and Amman and Ramallah
and Jeddah, now outraged by Abu Ghraib, who looked away from the terrors
of Iraq under the Baathists. Our account is with the Iraqi people: It is
their country we liberated, and it is their trust that a few depraved men
and women, on the margins of a noble military expedition, have violated.
We ought to give the Iraqis the best thing we can do now, reeling as we
are under the impact of Abu Ghraib -- give them the example of our courts
and the transparency of our public life. What we should not be doing is to
seek absolution in other Arab lands.

Take this scene from last week, which smacks of the confusion -- and panic
-- of our policies in the aftermath of a cruel April: President Bush
apologizing to King Abdullah II of Jordan for the scandal at Abu Ghraib.
Peculiar, that apology -- owed to Iraq's people, yet forwarded to Jordan.
We are still held captive by Pan-Arab politics. We struck into Iraq to
free that country from the curse of the Arabism that played havoc with its
politics from its very inception as a nation-state. We had thought, or
implied, or let Iraqis think, that a new political order would emerge,
that the Pan-Arab vocation that had been Iraq's poison would be no more.

The Arabs had let down Iraq, averted their gaze from the mass graves and
the terrors inflicted on Kurdistan and the south, and on the Shiite holy
cities of Najaf and Karbala and their seminarians and scholars. Jordan in
particular had shown no great sensitivity toward Iraq's suffering. This
was a dark spot in the record of a Hashemite dynasty otherwise known for
its prudence and mercy. It was a concession that the Hashemite court gave
to Jordan's "street," to the Palestinians in refugee camps and to the
swanky districts of Amman alike. Jordan in the 1980s was the one country
where Saddam Hussein was a mythic hero: the crowd identified itself with
his Pan-Arab dreams, and thrilled to his cruelty and historical
revisionism. This is why the late king, Hussein, broke with his American
ties -- as well as with his fellow Arab monarchs -- after the invasion of
Kuwait. His son did better in this war; he noted the price that Jordan
paid in the intervening decade. He took America's side, and let the crowd
know that a price would be paid for riding with Saddam. But no apology was
owed to him for Abu Ghraib. He was no more due an apology for what took
place than were the rulers in Kathmandu.

But this was of a piece with our broader retreat of late. We have
dispatched the way of Iraqis an envoy of the U.N., Lakhdar Brahimi, an
Algerian of Pan-Arab orientation, with past service in the League of Arab
States. It stood to reason (American reason, uninformed as to the terrible
complications of Arab life) that Mr. Brahimi, "an Arab," would better
understand Iraq's ways than Paul Bremer. But nothing in Mr. Brahimi's
curriculum vitae gives him the tools, or the sympathy, to understand the
life of Iraq's Shiite seminaries; nothing he did in his years of service
in the Arab league exhibited concern for the cruelties visited on the
Kurds in the 1980s. Mr. Brahimi hails from the very same political class
that has wrecked the Arab world. He has partaken of the ways of that
class: populism, anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, and a preference for the
centralized state. He came from the apex of the Algerian system of power
that turned that country into a charnel house, inflicted on it a
long-running war between the secular powers-that-be and the Islamists, and
a tradition of hostility by the Arab power-holders toward the country's
Berbers. No messenger more inappropriate could have been found if the aim
was to introduce Iraqis to the ways of pluralism.

Mr. Brahimi owes us no loyalty. His prescription of a "technocratic
government" for Iraq -- which the Bush administration embraced only to
retreat from, by latest accounts -- is a cunning assault on the
independent political life of Iraq. The Algerian seeks to return Iraq to
the Pan-Arab councils of power. His entire policy seeks nothing less than
a rout of the gains which the Kurds and the Shiites have secured after the
fall of the Tikriti-Baathist edifice. The Shiites have seen through his
scheme. A history of disinheritance has given them the knowledge they need
to recognize those who bear them ill will. American power may not be
obligated -- and should not be -- to deliver the Shiites a new dominion in
Iraq. But we can't once more consign them to the mercy of their enemies in
the Arab world. At any rate, it is too late in the hour for such a policy,
for the genie is out of the bottle and the Shiites will fight back. Gone
is their old timidity and quietism. Their rejection of Mr. Brahimi's
diplomacy is now laid out for everyone to see.

For his part, Mr. Brahimi knew that the Americans were eager to dump, and
he rightly bet on the innocence (other, less charitable terms could be
used) of those in the Bush administration now calling the shots on Iraq.
They were unburdened by any deep knowledge of the country, and Mr. Brahimi
offered the false promise of pacifying Iraq in the run-up to our
presidential elections. His technocracy is, in truth, but a cover for the
restoration of the old edifice of power. Fallujah gave him running room;
its fight for a lost, unjust dominion, was his diplomatic tool. His
prescription, he let it be known, would calm the tempest in that sullen
place. The Marines were fighting to bring that town to order. The Marines
were not Mr. Brahimi's people: Their fight, and their sacrifices, he
dismissed as a "collective punishment" of a civilian population. Mr.
Brahimi should know a thing or two about collective punishment. His native
Algeria has provided enough lessons in what really constitutes the
indiscriminate punishment of populations that come in the way of military
power.

In the scales of military power, the Arabs have not been brilliant in
modern times. But there is cunning aplenty in their world, and an unerring
eye for the follies of great foreign powers. The Arabs can read through
President Bush's stepping back from his support for Ariel Sharon's plan
for withdrawal from Gaza. There are amends to be made for Abu Ghraib, and
those are owed the people of Iraq. Yet here we are paying the Palestinians
with Iraqi coin. The Palestinians will not be grateful for our
concessions; and they are to be forgiven the only conclusion they will
draw. Those concessions have already been taken as the compromises of an
America now in the throes of self-flagellation.

We can't have this peculiar mix of imperial reach, coupled with such
obtuseness. It is odd, and defective in the extreme, that President Bush
chose the official daily of the Egyptian regime, Al-Ahram, for yet another
interview, another expression of contrition over Abu Ghraib. In the
anti-Americanism of Egypt (of Al-Ahram itself), the protestations of our
virtue are of no value. In our uncertainty, we now walk into the selective
rage of the Egyptians, a popular hostility tethered to the policies of a
regime eager to see us fail in Iraq -- a regime afraid that the Iraqis may
yet steal a march on Egypt into modernity. Cairo has no standing in Iraq.
Why not take representatives of a budding Iraqi publication into the
sanctuary of the Oval Office and offer a statement of contrition by our
leader?

Our goals in Iraq are being diluted by the day. There has been naivete on
our part, to be sure, and no small measure of hubris. We haven't always
read Iraq right, but if we abdicate the burden and the responsibility --
and the possibilities -- that came with this war, our entire effort will
come to grief. In Najaf on May 7, in a Friday sermon made from the shrine
of Imam Ali -- Shiism's most revered pulpit -- Sheikh Sadr-al-din Qabanji,
a respected cleric with ties to Ayatollah Ali Sistani, called on the Mahdi
Army of Muqtada al-Sadr to quit the city. "Listen to the advice of the
ulema," he said, using the term for the recognized men of religion. "Come,
let us together find another way, go back to your homes and provinces."
The defense of Najaf, he said, belonged to its people, and the bands of
young "Sadrists" were told to return to the slums of Baghdad. We haven't
stilled Iraq's furies, and our gains there have been made with
heartbreaking losses. But in the midst of our anguish over Abu Ghraib, and
in our eagerness to placate an Arab world that has managed to convince us
of its rage over the scandal, we should stay true to what took us into
Iraq, and to the gains that may yet be salvaged.

Mr. Ajami, of Johns Hopkins, is the author of "The Dream Palace of the
Arabs" (Vintage, 1999).

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108431652940408675,00.html

6. The new Affirmative Action - Learn me better:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=7313

Posted 5/11/2004 06:11:00 PM

1. It has not taken long for Ariel Sharon's pusillanimous "deal" with the
Hizbollah to produce major repercussions and to undermine Israeli national
security in the most serious manner.

You will recall that Sharon ordered the release of some 450 terrorists
from Israeli prison as a "payment" to the Hizbollah to release the corpses
of three Israeli POWs, whom the Hizbollah had murdered in cold blood. It
was predicted in this corner that this would serve as precedent for the
PLO and its affiliates to follow the example of the Hizbollah, and that
Sharon's cowardice would serve as an invitation to other terrorists top
murder Israelis and then hold their bodies as extortion. Sharon's Likud
amen chorus approved the cowardly deal, sighing that there was "just no
choice", the same sigh heard every time Israel does something
astronomically stupid and for which there is not the slightest excuse.

The correctness of that earlier prediction came home with a vengeance
today in the Gaza Strip. An Israeli Armored Personnel Carrier was blown
up today when it ran over a large mine placed in the road by Palestinian
terrorists, and then the explosion set off additional explosions from the
ammunition inside the APC. Six Israeli soldiers were literally blown to
pieces. Ah, but then the "pieces" have now become the subject of
Palestinian sport and extortion, thanks to Ariel Sharon's cowardice and
appeasement of the Hizbollah.

News reports are saying that Palestinian ghouls ran to the scene and
seized body parts of the Israeli dead, playing games with them
(http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1084251772855
and http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/426159.html ). The body parts are
now being hidden and held by the terrorists as a form of extortion, to
extract from Sharon new "concessions" directly modeled on those made to
the Hizbollah for the return of the bodies of the murdered POWs. News
reports are saying that the body parts are being held by terrorists from
the Islamic Jihad and Hamas, although the Fatah, under the direct personal
command and control of Arafat, also claims it is holding body parts. Let
us recall that these are the very same terrorists whose corpses have never
been dumped by Israel into anonymous landfills wrapped in pork skins lest
this offend the delicate sensitivities of the Palestinian hordes and the
Israeli leftist do-gooders and bleeding hearts whose emotions would be
upset by this.

2. Meanwhile in the University of Duh:

Steinitz: IDF caution is costing us lives
Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Dr. Yuval Steinitz
(Likud) said that IDF caution in targeting armed Palestinians hiding among
unarmed civilians is costing Israeli lives, Army Radio reported.
Steinitz also said that Tuesday's operation has no bearing on the need to
disengage.
"Although I personally support disengagement, with several reservations,
withdrawal from Gaza will not stop attacks on Tel Aviv and Ashkelon," he
said.
"We will still need to continue our battle against terror infrastructures,
including operations like today's," Steinitz added.
This article can also be read at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1084251775756&p=1078027574121


3. Finally, from the funny farm:
Animal rights compares farms to death camps

Associated Press May. 11, 2004

Animal rights activists unveiled a campaign Tuesday that compares the
conditions of livestock to those of Holocaust-era concentration camps,
defying a ban on the event in Trafalgar Square by city officials.
The Greater London Authority had refused a display permit for the
"Holocaust on your plate" campaign by the People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals because of the exhibit's graphic nature.
The campaign features 6-by-10 foot panels displaying photographs such as
the herding of cattle onto trains beside the Nazi transportation of
holocaust victims; a sick, emaciated cow next to a starving man; and baby
pigs in a cage beside children behind barbed wire.
It has been criticized by Jewish community leaders in the United States
and Europe, who have accused PETA of mining the Holocaust for shock value
and denigrating the memories of Holocaust victims.
In Germany, the Jewish community won a court order in March preventing the
exhibit from being displayed in Stuttgart.
Organizers said their goal is to depict the brutality of the industrial
farm industry and encourage a diet free of animal products.
This article can also be read at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1084251776394&p=1078113566627

Posted 5/11/2004 11:16:00 AM

1. Letters published on Maariv web site:
"I have no problem with calling on private donors to cease funding places
like BGU with a long and dirty record of Israel hate mongering. I object
vehemently to the State of Israel using my tax money to fund professors at
any Israeli university who consistently spew hatred and lies about Israel.
With our taxes I and others pay these teachers salaries I should be able
to expect to expect both academic fairness and freedom from them, not just
anti Semitism and neo Nazi rhetoric and lies." Ken Besig, Kiryat Arba
Israel
and
A. Ness, Canada(2004-05-08 02:02:38.89 EST)
Mazel Tov for Education Minister Limor Livnat and her courage to stay
away from the Ben-Gurion University. This stance by her is proper and I
commend her 100 percent. Does Israel not have enough enemies that it needs
it's own Isaraeli academics to be so Anti Israel in their comments and
writings. Freedom of expression does not mean someone should endager or
vilify their own country's policies especially during wartime.

2. Academic Pluralism and Free Speech
http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=3653

3. Israeli Art - In the Eye of the Beholder
by Ariel Natan Pasko
May 10, 2004

If you've wondered lately what's wrong with Israel, just look at the
recent winner of the prestigious 2004 Israel Prize for sculpture. It was
the proverbial "bad boy" of the Israeli art world, Yigal Tumarkin. He was
recognized for his long career and "diverse artistic vocabulary." The
Prize Committee called his work, "a central contribution to Israeli art."
The judges who decided to grant him the prize wrote, "Tumarkin's
monumental works are exhibited at many sites in Israel." The prize is
always awarded on Israeli Independence Day.

Presumably, long years of work, juvenile style and wide distribution alone
entitle him to the prize. As an article in an Israeli newspaper -
reviewing the prize offer - commented recently, "Tumarkin already deserved
the prize 30 years ago due to his innovation and audacity in the Israeli
art scene."

But not everyone agrees. Three petitions to Israel's Supreme Court were
filed against awarding Tumarkin the prize, but were ultimately turned
down. National Religious Party Member of Knesset Shaul Yahalom - one of
the petitioners - called Tumarkin, an "embarrassment to the nation," and
unfit to become a recipient of the prestigious prize.

"It is unreasonable that a man, as an artist and as a sculptor, whose
actions bordered on criminal activity, who acted violently towards his
family, disrespected people and the values of the Jewish people, and made
racist and anti-Semitic remarks, will receive in a democratic Jewish state
the Israel Prize," MK Yahalom wrote in his petition to the court.

After the Supreme Court announcement that Tumarkin could be awarded the
Israel Prize for Sculpture, Shas Party head MK Eli Yishai said, "The
Supreme Court approved, through its decision this morning, the honoring of
a man who, by his expressions, intentionally and inexplicably runs
roughshod over sectors of society, with the exception of [those holding]
his racist worldview." Referring to Yigal Tumarkin as an "artist of
racism," MK Yishai then called on President Moshe Katzav to avoid shaking
Tumarkin's hand at the Israel Prize ceremony.

Some of his most famous, or should I say infamous, pieces include a pig
wearing tefilin (phylacteries worn by Jewish men during prayer), and a
lithograph of an aerial view of Jerusalem's Old City, with a huge
thumbprint superimposed over it. Written in pen on the top is, "From June
1967 Jerusalem started to turn ugly. Why? It's a fact."

How profound!

As for the "praying pig", back in January 1998, Israeli artist Tatiana
Susskin received a two-year prison sentence for drawing a picture
depicting the founder of Islam, Muhammad, as a pig. The court considered
it an act of racial incitement against Islam and the Arabs. But in Israel,
putting a pig - the most disgusting animal by Jewish standards - in
tefilin - Jewish ritual objects - isn't incitement, it isn't criminal,
it's "art" and worthy of a prize.

These themes of degrading the Jewish religion, and all that Jews hold
dear, such as Jerusalem, run throughout Tumarkin's work. Among his other
"famous" works are Hu Halach Basadot - He Walked in the Fields - from
1967, a bronze statue of a torn figure whose innards are exposed and pants
are rolled up. It symbolizes the complete opposite of post-Six Day War
Israeli self-confidence, and the joy of victory.

Evidently, he likes to disgust.

His troubled personal background is evident in his work and public
statements. Tumarkin was born in Germany in 1933 to a Jewish mother and
Christian father. His father, Martin Helburg, was an actor. While Tumarkin
and his mother fled Nazi Germany to the Palestine Mandate during the
pre-state period, Tumarkin's father became a culture officer in the Nazi
SS during World War II. Tumarkin spent the 1950s in Europe, mostly Paris
and Berlin. He broke the post-Holocaust Israeli taboo of moving back to
Germany. When Tumarkin found out about his father's death during a
newspaper interview in 1966, he told the reporter that he had no feelings
toward his parents, and was sorry that he did not drop his sister when she
was a baby. Outrageous statements like this have helped gain him the
spotlight throughout his career.

Tumarkin returned to Israel from Europe in 1960 to exhibit his works at
Jerusalem's Bezalel Museum, the predecessor to the Israel Museum. He
exhibited polyester reliefs for the first time in Israel and was hailed as
an innovator. The pieces that he created - with screws, forks, junk and
bottles - and his combination of painting and sculpture were considered
unique and thought-provoking at the time in Israel. In the 1960s and
1970s, he was considered to have personified the spirit of modern art,
according to many art critics. He became very "prolific", throwing
together combinations of junk and giving them offensive interpretations.

In 1992, a comprehensive retrospective of his works was held at the Tel
Aviv Museum. Tumarkin, who is very prolific, exhibited a great number of
pieces, 120 sculptures and about 150 prints. But Tumarkin has been
criticized for shallowness. He has made a name for himself, some say,
thanks to works that are considered innovative only to those who don't
know about the history of art. He puts out art in a mechanized way. Yet,
the cultural supremacy that he radiates, as one of the leading
representatives of European art in the Middle East, allows him to bully
the Israeli art world. Tumarkin frequently attacks other artists and has
been known to send scathing letters to critics. He's been involved in
several court cases and has also been known to threaten lawsuits to shut
up criticism of his work.

Although he has received many prizes and critical acclaim, and has
exhibited in Israel's major museums, Tumarkin claims to be persecuted by
the establishment, and has never missed an opportunity to say so, even
while accepting the prize. It is no secret that Tumarkin wanted to receive
the Israel Prize. In an interview that appeared in Yediot Aharonot in
1997, he said, "The Israel Prize is important to me for one reason, to say
what I am now saying from their stage. When I see the Rafi Lavies and the
Moshe Gershunis [other Israeli artists], how they sit there so full of
themselves, of their art, so politically correct, then either I am too
young, or I will die as someone who throws rocks at windows."

One only need listen to him, to ask, who really is "full of himself"?

Since the 1980s, Tumarkin hasn't gained his reputation for works of art,
but for his habit of lashing out at religious Jews, right-wingers,
Sepharadim, whoever he dislikes. He once said that he wished he had gunned
down Israeli politicians on the Right (specifically, Raphael Eitan and
Rechavam Ze'evi). Tumarkin has also remarked that his "true contribution
will be the taking of a submachine gun instead of pen and pencil, and
killing the religious settlers on the West Bank."

When Shas MK Eli Yishai reminded the public of Tumarkin's slurs against
Sepharadim, Tumarkin shot back that; "Moroccan Jews are indeed crybabies"
and "ought to stop burdening us with so many poor children."

In a November 1988 interview with Tel Aviv Magazine, Tumarkin said, "When
you see the Haredim [ultra-Orthodox Jews] you can understand why there was
a Holocaust." And in response to criticism, he wrote in Hadashot later,
"The outward strangeness of the Jew and the pretentiousness of the notion
that God chose us... caused violent surrounding cultures to clash... with
this arrogant minority.... The image of the cunning, ambitious scoundrel,
lending money at exorbitant interest, turned the bent, hook-nosed bearded
Jew into the enemy of civilization... which didn't help belatedly
enlightened Jews."

Look who's calling other Jews, "arrogant and ambitious"?

He's been known to comment that "the Jewish Holocaust wasn't the only
holocaust." Imagine what Israel's response would have been if an
international artist had expressed similar sentiments? Yet Yad Vashem in
1998 almost gave him the Zussman Prize, until there was a public outcry
and they retracted the offer.

How is it that they would consider giving it to him in the first place?

But this is the sickness of the cultural elites in Israel today. One only
has to be disgusting, perverse, degrade all that is holy and beautiful,
and have the artistic talent of a four-year-old to get noticed. Become
self-promoting, attack the competition, cry foul, attack Haredim and
"settlers", and they drown you in accolades.

Israeli art is in the eye of the beholder - good taste is not!

4. To hell with "Palestinians":
http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire050902.asp
by Jihn Derbyshire

Why Dont I Care About the Palestinians?
The options, as I see them.

hy don't I care about the Palestinians? It is, of course, wrong of me not
to care. It can't be much fun being a Palestinian. You, or your parents,
or your grandparents, ran for their lives in the 1948 war. You and/or
they, plus a couple of generations of uncles, aunts, siblings, and cousins
have been huddled in some squalid refugee camp ever since, living off
UNRWA handouts. ("UNRWA," by the way, stands for "U.S. taxpayer." But you
knew that!) There is no economy worth participating in. Your leaders won a
fragmented, halfway sort of autonomy for you at Oslo; but it didn't work,
you're not sure why. Nothing really got any better, and now the Israelis
have smashed it all up anyway. The other Arabs all hate you (a
little-known factor of Middle East political life, but one attested by my
colleague David Pryce-Jones, who knows the Arabs better than anyone).
Things look bad, and you are sunk in despair. Shouldn't I feel sorry for
you?

Sure, I personally favor Israel in this conflict. That's my right as a
freethinking person. I'm a Christian, though, aren't I? Shouldn't I have
some Christian compassion to spare for the poor suffering Palestinians?
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, etc., etc.

Well, I suppose I should, but to be honest about it, I don't. Why not? Why
don't I care about the Palestinians? The answer is NOT any of the
following.

I like taking showers with Jews.
Palestinians have dark skin and I'm a racist.
My name was originally Derbstein.
My British blood is boiling with shame over the lost empire.
I am a lackey of, or am trying to ingratiate myself with, the Jews who run
the U.S. media.
I am a cruel, hard-hearted bigot.

The answer isn't exactly compassion fatigue, either. That's pretty close,
though. I am aware of a certain level of compassion fatigue in regard to
the world at large, and it spills over into the Palestinian issue.

The other day I had the depressing experience of reading, one right after
the other, Stephen Kotkin's wonderfully titled "Trashcanistan" in the
April 15th New Republic, then Helen Epstein's "Mozambique: In Search of
the Hidden Cause of AIDS" in the May 9th New York Review of Books. The
first of these was a long portmanteau review of six books about the fates
of various components of the old U.S.S.R. in the years since the thing
fell apart. The second tries to discover why a sleepy rural area of
Mozambique, populated by courteous folk practicing a traditional way of
life, has high levels of AIDS.

Kotkin's account of the ex-Soviet colonies Ukraine, Moldova, the central
Asian and Caucasian republics, etc. is hair-raising. Principal features
of the landscape here are utter economic collapse, "gangland violence
among state ministers," rising Islamofascism and the flight of large
sectors of the population. (One-third of the able-bodied workforce of
Moldova has fled. I have just been reading another report about that
wretched country. Sample quote: "Experts estimate that since the fall of
the Soviet Union between 200,000 and 400,000 women have been sold into
prostitution perhaps up to 10 percent of the female population.") Kotkin
writes beautifully about this appalling situation, which stretches across
the entire southern and western marches of the old U.S.S.R., illuminating
his account with memorable one-liners like: "Ukraine has gotten its state
and is eating it, too."

Helen Epstein's piece on Mozambique tells of a state of affairs just as
awful. The fundamental problem, she discovers, is that: "These people are
so poor ... that sex has become part of their economy. In some cases, it's
practically the only currency they have." The men go away for months on
end to work in the South African mines where, of course, they console
themselves with prostitutes. The women left behind survive as best they
can, often by becoming the mistresses of the few local men who can
actually afford to eat. Why are they all so poor? Because Mozambique has
been wrecked by corruption, tribal war and stupid economics.

What a world! You can only read a certain amount of this stuff before you
start to avert your eyes. What on earth can anyone hope to do about all
this? All the simple explanations for the horrors that stain a large part
of our planet have been used up. We now know that it's not the fault of
colonialism, or neo-colonialism, or capitalism, or socialism. It's just
the way these places are. They can't handle modernity, for some cultural
reason we don't understand and can't do anything about.

That's the context in which I see the Palestinians. The Palestinians are
Arabs; and the Arabs, whatever their medieval achievements (as best I can
understand, they were mainly achievements of transmission "Arabic"
numerals, for example, came from India) are politically hopeless. Who can
dispute this? Look at the last 50-odd years, since the colonial powers
left. What have the Arabs accomplished? What have they built? Where in the
Arab world is there a trace or a spark of democracy? Of constitutionalism?
Of laws independent of the ruler's whim? Of free inquiry? Of open public
debate? Where in your house is there any article stamped "Made in Syria?"
Arabs can be individually very charming and capable, and perform very well
in free societies like the U.S.A. There are at least two recent Nobel
prizes with Arab names attached. Collectively, though, as nations, the
Arabs are no-hopers.

All of this applies to the Palestinians. I spent some of my formative
years in Hong Kong, a barren piece of rock with zero natural resources,
under foreign occupation, chock-full of refugees from the Mao tyranny. The
people there weren't lounging in UNRWA camps or making suicide runs at the
governor's mansion. They were trading, building, speculating,
manufacturing, working with the result that Hong Kong is now a glittering
modern city filled with well-dressed, well-educated, well-fed people,
proud of what they have accomplished together, and with a higher standard
of living than Britain herself. If, following the Oslo accords or for
that matter, in the 20 years of Jordanian occupation the Palestinians had
taken that route, had set aside their fantasies of revenge and massacre,
and concentrated on building up something worth having, I might have
respect for them. As it is, I don't.

The only halfway sympathetic thing I can find to say about the
Palestinians is that UNRWA has surely been part of the problem. If you go
to the UNRWA website, you will see how proud they are of having fed,
clothed, sheltered, educated and cared for the Palestinian refugees of
1948... and their children... and their grandchildren. The number of
people UNRWA cares for has gone from 600,000 in 1948 to nearly four
million today. Now, I understand that the prime impulse of bureaucracies,
especially welfare bureaucracies, is the consolidation and expansion of
their turf, and a steady increase in the number of their "clients"; but
this is ridiculous. The good people of Hong Kong should go down on their
knees every night and thank God that there was no UNRWA in the colony in
1949. So, come to think of it, should the German and East European
refugees who flooded into Western Europe after WWII. (I have seen the
number 14 million somewhere the Sudeten Germans alone numbered three
million. Where are the festering camps? Where are the suicide bombers?)

Even if their lives had not been poisoned by the ministrations of a huge
welfare bureaucracy, though, I doubt the Palestinians would have got their
act together. None of the other Arabs have. Everywhere you look around the
Arab world you see squalor, despotism, cruelty, and hopelessness. The best
they have been able to manage, politically speaking, has been the
Latin-American style one-party kleptocracies of Egypt and Jordan. Those
are the peaks of Arab political achievement under independence, under
government by their own people. The norm is just gangsterism, with thugs
like Assad, Qaddafi, or Saddam in charge. It doesn't seem to be anything
to do with religion: the secular states (Iraq, Syria) are just as horrible
as the religious ones like Saudi Arabia. These people are hopeless. We are
all supposed to support the notion of a Palestinian state. Why? We know
perfectly well what it would be like. Why should we wish for another
gangster-satrapy to be added to the Arab roll of shame, busy manufacturing
terrorists to come here and slaughter Americans in their offices? I don't
want to see a Palestinian state. I think I'd be crazy to want that.

What, actually, are the possible futures for the Palestinians? I think the
following list is exhaustive.

1. An independent state, under Arafat or someone just as thuggish.
2. Military occupation by Israel.
3. Re-incorporation into a Jordanian-Palestinian nation.
4. Some sort of U.N. trusteeship.
5. Expulsion from the West Bank and Gaza, those territories then
incorporated into Israel.

Number 1 is what we are all supposed to want. As I have already indicated,
I don't want it, and I can't see why anyone else would, either. Except
Palestinians, I suppose: If they yearn to be ruled by amoral hoodlums (as,
according to polls, they apparently do), I suppose they have some
theoretical right to see their wishes fulfilled but why should the rest
of us allow it to happen, given the dangers to us? Number 2 might work for
a time, but the Israelis would eventually get fed up with it, and then
we'd move on to one of the other options. Number 3 would get us back to
the pseudo-stability of pre-1967, but is deeply unpopular with Jordanians
and look what happened in 1967! Number 4 undoubtedly has the UNRWA
bureaucrats drooling, but as with number 1, it's hard to see what's in it
for the rest of us. Aren't we handing over enough of our money in welfare
payments to our own people?

Which leaves us with number 5: expulsion. I am starting to think that this
might be the best option. I'm not the only one, either. Here is Dick
Armey, Republican leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, talking to
Chris Matthews on Hardball:

MATTHEWS: Well, just to repeat, you believe that the Palestinians who are
now living on the West Bank should get out of there?

Rep. ARMEY: Yes.

When I say "the best option," I don't mean "best for the Palestinians". I
don't think they have any good options. Being Arabs, they are incapable of
constructing a rational polity, so their future is probably hopeless
whatever happens. Their options are the ones I listed above: to be ruled
by gangsters, or Israelis, or Jordanians, or welfare bureaucrats. Or to go
live somewhere else, under the gentle rule of their brother Arabs. Would
expulsion be hard on the Palestinians? I suppose it would. Would it be any
harder than options 1 thru 4? I doubt it. Do I really give a flying
falafel one way or the other? No, not really.


Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor

5. Shilling for the Campus Left:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13336

6. Apologies for the Wierd Spelling of Weird in previous posting

Posted 5/10/2004 05:24:00 PM

1. Being a hopelessly politically incorrect type, I have never been able
to work up a whole lot of humane understanding and empathy for
"trans-sexuals". In fact, I am not convinced there even is such a
critter, other than mentally ill people who cross-dress.

SO what about "inter-sexuals" or hermaphrodites? Curiously, there
is considerably more debate in the Talmud than would meet my own personal
tastes about the "inter-sexuals", those possessing some physical features
of both men and women, or those whose sexual organs are not clearly
belonging to either-or at birth. I guess like Michael Jackson. The
"inter-sexuals" appear to be one of
the great unrecognized sexual minority groups whom the PC Left has yet to
adopt.

Until now. I have no doubt the "Inter-Sexuals" will now become the new
progressive cause of the Left, after today's headline:

http://www.maarivintl.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=7156

IDF foils suicide bombing planned for this evening

Unusual twist: female would-be bomber, who refers to herself as "Ahmed",
is apparently hermaphroditic (intersexual); detained by soldiers near
Nablus.
Uri Glikman and Marwan Athamna

IDF forces have foiled a suicide bombing planned for a central Israel city
this evening after arresting the would-be bomber. The story has been
released for publication today (Monday).

The foiled attack featured one highly unusual twist: the would-be female
suicide bomber, who commonly wears men's clothes and refers to herself as
"Ahmed" is apparently hermaphroditic (a condition where both male and
female reproductive organs and secondary sexual characteristics are
present in the same individual).

The 32 year old female terrorist, Amel Jumaah, is a resident of the Askar
refugee camp north of Nablus. IDF soldiers entered the camp early Monday
morning, arrested "Ahmed" and searched her house but did not find the
explosive device intended for the attack.

The woman's family contacted Palestinian Preventive Security and reported
that the device was at home. Security forces arrived on the scene and blew
up the device, which was hidden in a washing machine.

Later on in the day IDF forces reentered the camp, surrounded the house,
and arrested the terrorist's younger brother, 15 year-old Jamal, and a
neighbor of the same age. The two were taken in for questioning.
2. Kabbalah Hucksters:
Sex Offender Becomes 'Kabbalah Coach'
By Steven I. Weiss
May 7, 2004

A convicted sex offender in Los Angeles has used an assumed name to market
himself as a rabbi and Kabbalah instructor.

Michael Ozair, who pleaded no contest to oral copulation of a 14-year-old
girl in 2002, had until earlier this week been advertising himself as
Rabbi Michael Ezra, the "Kabbalah Coach."

The KabbalahCoach.com Web site, registered to Ozair, describes a kabbalah
coach as, "a spiritual guide and life coach combined. A person who has the
metaphysical tools to see what lies beyond the physical in your soul's
journey while having the expertise to help you identify, map out and
accomplish your life's mission."

The site contains numerous quotations endorsing Ozair's work from a
diverse list of individuals, including actress Tatum O'Neal and Pir Zia
Inayat Khan, president of the Sufi Order International.

Ozair's 2002 sentence, according to the Los Angeles District Attorney's
Office, was for 5 years of felony probation, with 1 year in county jail.
In addition, he was required to register as a sex offender and receive
treatment. The D.A.'s office was unable to provide information confirming
Ozair's registration as a sex offender. The office did tell the Forward
that advertising under an assumed name would not represent a violation of
Ozair's probation.

In a phone interview with the Forward, Ozair said that he has not been
instructing minors as part of his Kabbalah coaching. Asked if he intended
to do so, Ozair replied: "Absolutely not."

Ozair said that he sees no problem with his providing kabbalah services to
adults. "If there's adults," he said, "there's no problem."

Shortly after Ozair's interview with the Forward, the KabbalahCoach Web
site was changed, with the instructor now being identified as Rabbi
Michael Ezra Ozair.

Ozair was initially charged two years ago with "three counts of lewd acts
on a child and one count of oral copulation of a child under 16,"
according to the D.A.'s press release at that time. The press release
noted that the Ozair was, "suspected of sexually assaulting the victim in
1997," and that Ozair had taught at two area schools and acted as a rabbi
in several area synagogues.

Marvin Komorsky, executive director of the Beth Jacob Congregation, which
describes itself as "Centrist Orthodox," said that Ozair had led one of
the synagogue's prayer services in 2002, but had been asked to leave
before his arrest. According to Komorsky, Ozair "was not paid by the
synagogue" and "his leaving the synagogue had nothing to do with his
arrest," but was simply a matter of dissatisfaction with the kabbalistic
focus of his teaching.

Ozair's use of an assumed name was discovered by Internet users who saw
his Kabbalah Coach photo and thought that they noticed a similarity to a
picture of Ezra posted on TheAwarenessCenter.org, a Web site that
maintains profiles of abusive rabbis.

Ozair said that all of the endorsements on his Web site from celebrities
and religious figures "are all old quotes" from before his arrest and
subsequent decision to refer to himself as Michael Ezra. Asked if those
endorsees were familiar with his arrest or knew of his Kabbalah coaching
activities, he said, "I'm not in touch with anybody now."

Ozair's credentials have come under question in the past. When he was
arrested, the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles reported that his Web
site stated that "his rabbinical training was at Kol Yaacov Torah Center
in Monsey, N.Y." The Jewish Journal reported that administrators at Kol
Yaacov said that "he applied to the school and visited it in August 1997,
but never enrolled." An administrator at Kol Yaacov confirmed this version
of events for the Forward through a secretary.

The Kabbalah Coach Web site claims that Ezra received ordination from "R'
Yehoshua Reich, a member of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel," but the
Israeli-based rabbi could not be reached .

The University of Judaism, a Los Angeles-based institution that offers
Jewish studies courses, confirmed that it had awarded Ozair a masters
degree in education and a bachelor's degree in religious studies from the
University of Judaism.


3. CELEBRATING JEWISH DIVERSITY

Q: How many Orthodox rabbis does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Change?

Q: How many Conservative rabbis does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Some members of the Committee on Law & Standards say it takes a minyan,
except what makes a minyan nobody can agree on. Some say the minyan can be
made up of men and women, some say only men, some say men OR women. There
was no majority, so the issue remains subject to the decision of the
synagogue leader.

Q: How many Reform rabbis does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None, anyone can change it whenever they want to.

Q: How many Hasidic Rebbes does it take to change a light bulb?
A: What is a light bulb?

Q: How many Reconstructionist Jews does it take to change a light bulb?
A: What is a Reconstructionist Jew?

Q: How many Jewish Renewal rabbis does it take to change a light bulb?
A: If the rabbi leading the process is sufficiently skilled in channeling
spiritual energy, the light bulb will be relit by itself. However, the
bulb must be an eco-kosher bulb that is not going to be lit from nuclear
powered electricity and have been made from a company that was in any way
responsible for the poisoning of the Hudson River. And during the paradigm
shift between the changing of the bulb, one must document the experience
for the up and coming book called "The Jew in the Lightbulb".

Q: How many Shlomo Carlebach hassidim does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Gevaldt, the light just went out, it must be a heavenly sign from Above
that we all really need to get much closer this time, sing a good niggun
or two, mamash open our hearts to this gevaldt Ishbitz torah, tell a Baal
Shem Tov story and then later maybe somebody from the chevre can change
the bulb at 2 in the morning.

Q: How many Lubavitchers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None, it never died.

Q: How many Breslover Hassidim does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None, because there will never be another one that will burn as
brightly as the first.

Q: How many Kabbalah Center Jews does it take to change a light bulb?
A: As many as it would take to raise the $5000 bulb that was carefully
selected by Rabbi Philip Berg based on its inherent
ability to drawn down the Supernal Light into a Vessel astrologically
appropriate for that particular Center as well as financially appropriate
for their account.

Q: How many congregants in any one synagogue does it take to change a
bulb?
A: CHANGE! You vant we should CHANGE the light bulb? My grandmother is
the one who donated that light bulb!


Q: How many Jews does it take to change a light bulb?
A: 50. One to change the bulb, 13 to discuss it and give contradictory
advice to the person changing the bulb, and 36 to live elsewhere, start
their own community, act mentshlich and not mention the previous bulb to
anyone.

Posted 5/10/2004 11:23:00 AM

1.
The Affaire Grinberg continues to make waves and arouse fury in Israel.
Just to refresh your memory, a couple of weeks back a leftist extremist
from Ben Gurion University (where else?) named Lev Grinberg, a political
sociologist - whatever that is, published an article in a Belgian
newspaper calling on Europe and everyone else to end Israeli sovereignty
by imposing on Israel a settlement that would be rejected by the majority
of voters, but one that he and 2% others among Israelis would endorse.
He then denounced Israel for engaging in symbolic genocide when Israel
recycled the Sheikh Yassin, the head of the Hamas who had ordered murders
of hundreds of Israeli civilians, a great many of them children.

Since then the Israeli media, not exactly bastions of the Israeli
Right, have been uncharacteristically enraged at Grinberg. It is not as
if there is a shortage of anti-Semitism in Europe these days, in need of
calls by Ben Gurion University extremists against Israel perpetrating
genocide. Anyway, Grinberg himself has been trying to minimize the media
flack against himself through creative deconstructionism of his own words,
engaging in the usual post-modernist gibberish about how words just dont
mean what they say.

Meanwhile, the Israeli Left has been screaming that any criticism at
all of Grinberg represents McCarthyism and assaults on academic freedom.
Grinberg has been insisting that by symbolic genocide, what he was REALLY
trying to say is that when Israel killed Yassin, Yassin was a national
symbol of Palestinian nationhood, and so offing Yassin was symbolic
genocide of the Palestinian nation.

Now think about that for a nanosecond or two. If killing Yassin was
symbolic genocide, then just what would Grinberg have called it if some
group of Jewish partisans in 1943 had actually been successful in
assassinating Hitler? I mean, after all, Hitler was also a national
symbol. The answer is that this would also have to be symbolic genocide
by Jews of Germany, in Grinbergs scholarly opinion.

The latest leftist to chirp in about how criticism of Grinberg is
suppression of free speech and academic freedom is Zeev Segal. He writes
an Op-Ed in Haaretz today (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/425449.html
) bewailing Limor Livnats criticism of Grinberg. Segal is a lawyer who
teaches in the Department of Policy Studies (not the law school) at Tel
Aviv University. Segal is aghast that anyone should threaten academic
freedom and pluralism in academic opinion by criticizing Comrade Grinberg.

One little problem though. There are some serious questions about how
honestly Segal himself believes in free speech and academic pluralism.
Let me tell you a little anecdote:

About 10 year sago, I got a call from this same Zeev Segal. At the
time I was writing a lot against attempts to introduce affirmative action
into Israel in any form, and I was especially opposed to the most common
forms of affirmative action, namely dumbing down standards, arbitrary
ethnic and gender discrimination, and fashionable quotas. Segal was
organizing a panel discussion on affirmative action for Tel Aviv
University students and asked if I would take part. I agreed. The panel
discussion was not just a random campus event, but rather a course event
and attendance was REQUIRED for students in the Department of Policy
Studies.

When I got there, I discovered that the panel discussion was not to be
a serious debate at all. Instead it was a session in leftist
indoctrination. For two and a quarter hours, the students were subject to
harangues from six different people, every single one of them supporting
affirmative action quotas and lowered standards, including a couple of
feminists and some other leftist activists and professors. At the end of
two and a quarter hours of one-sided indoctrination, Segal introduced me
to the assembly and announced that I would be allowed three minutes to
present the OTHER side of the affirmative action debate. Segals
introduction words and tone made it clear I was there only as a form of
comic distraction. Two feminists in the audience started screaming that I
should not be allowed to speak even for three minutes. I went to the
podium, announced that the rules of the debate did not appeal to me and so
I was relinquishing my three minutes. I then left the hall, and about a
dozen students ran after me to shake my hand.

I mention all this because I think it helps put into context the
sudden devotion by the same Zeev Segal to academic pluralism, and to fair
and balanced free speech on campus.

2. That "insignificant Israeli minority":
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article3386.html

3. Human Rights Orwellism:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1083998350154&p=1006953079865

4. Those Iraqi Pictures:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/calthomas/ct20040505.shtml

5. Mass Murder Chic:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13318

5. The Columbia University Madrassa:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13308

6. New Saudi Nonsense:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13315

Posted 5/09/2004 01:56:00 PM

1. Tenured Extremism
By Jonathan Calt Harris
New York Sun
May 4, 2004
http://daily.nysun.com/standard/ShowStoryTemplate.aspPath=NYS/2004/05/04&ID=Ar01100&Section=
Editorial_and_Opinion


"The Jews are not a nation....The Jewish state is a racist state that does
not have a right to exist." One might expect these comments to have been
uttered by a neo-Nazi or a militant Islamic leader.

Sadly, these words were uttered by an instructor of Middle East studies at
one of America's most prestigious universities in the course of delivering
a lecture at Oxford University.

In title, Joseph A. Massad is an assistant professor of modern Arab
politics and intellectual history in the Department of Middle East and
Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. In practice, he is
one of the most vitriolic voices in academia.

A self-described "Palestinian Jordanian," Mr. Massad teaches courses on
the Arab-Israeli conflict, Islam, and modern intellectual thought. As
assistant editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, he writes frequently
on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Zionism, and Palestini an nationalism. But
since his appointment to Columbia in 1999, Mr. Massad has swiftly
established himself as one of the university's most controversial faculty
members.

The Columbia Conservative Alumni Association, for example, lists him among
"Columbia's Worst Faculty." He finds the West to blame for virtually every
ill he perceives in the Arab/Muslim world.

Poverty? It results from "the racist and barbaric policies of the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank." An absence of democracy
in the Arab/Muslim world? It's the fault of America. In fact, in a review
of Bassam Tibi's "Political Islam and the New World Disorder," Mr. Massad
attacks Mr. Tibi's assertion that the Islamists are even in part
responsible for the democracy deficit: "Tibi blames the Islamists, rather
than the ruling autocratic elites and their patron, the United States, for
the lack of democracy in the Arab and Muslim countries."

The 1991 Gulf War? Mr. Massad's view of it i s limited to "the fact that
US
forces strafed the retreating Iraqi soldiers on the Basra-Kuwait highway
after their withdrawal from Kuwait,savagelymurdering in the process
thousands of Iraqis."

Nowhere does he mention that American forces were responding to Iraq's
unprovoked invasion of Kuwait, saving Kuwaitis from Iraqi oppression, or
that Iraqi troops were well treated after they surrendered.

And what does Mr. Massad think of militant Islam? When not deriding the
existence of the "so-called Islamic `threat,'" Mr. Massad faults the
American government for its creation. Thus, he reduces the October 24,
1983 suicide bombing in Beirut, in which 241 American Marines were killed,
to the consequences of "US imperialist aggression."

Mr. Massad goes yet further to apologize for militant Islam. He challenges
the argument that Islamists oppose democratic reform, but without
providing examples.

In response to a study which found that the vas t majority of terrorist
attacks against Jews and Israelis in the 1940s and 1950s was the work of
the Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Massad contests without supporting evidence:
"Many other groups held views of Jews similar to those of the Muslim
Brothers and could very well have been the perpetrators of these attacks."

To him, the Holocaust is not a searing event of world history but rather
something that is put in quotes or with a small "h." Indeed, he sees "the
holocaust" as a self-serving rewrite of history invented for
propagandistic reasons. "Israeli demands that Palestinians recognize the
holocaust are not about the holocaust at all, but rather about the other
part of the package, namely recognizing and submitting to Israel's 'right
to exist' as a colonial-settler racist state," said Mr. Massad."The
Palestinian people should continue to resist this Zionist package deal."

Mr. Massad declared this Holocaust refusal of the Palestinians, "the only
re maining obstacle to a complete Zionist victory, one that seeks to be
sealed by Zionism's rewriting of both Palestinian and Jewish history."
Moreover, in his view, Israel resembles Nazi Germany. Mr. Massad writes of
"stark" similarities between Nazi prisons and those Israeli prisons used
to detain "the children and young men of the stones and Molotoy [sic]
cocktails."

Mr. Massad indiscriminately cites statistics from anti-Israel
organizations
like the "Unified National Leadership of the Uprising" that "thousands of
women have miscarried as result of [the Israeli Defense Force's use of]
poison gas
and tear gas grenades." Instead of offering corroborating evidence, Mr.
Massad seizes on this anti-Israel political organization's spurious claims
to establish his thesis that Israel is a ruthless totalitarian regime.

According to Mr. Massad, Jews seek world domination - or at least
domination of America. "From the infamous czarist Protocols of the Elders
of Zio n to genocidal Nazi propaganda, Jews as a `power-hungry' people was
a notion that was part and parcel of the anti-Semitic lexicon of hate.
Today's Israeli Jewish supremacists seem to agree with the anti-Semites
asserting that if Jews do not control the entire world, at least they
control America," he said.

As evidence for a Jewish conspiracy, Mr. Massad quotes an American rabbi
who expresses gratitude that American Jews have now become "full partners
in the decision-making at all levels" of government, and who explains his
surprise that a receptionist at the State Department speaks "perfect
Israeli Hebrew."

Jews are responsible for anti-Semitism, according to Mr. Massad. He blames
anti-Semitism on what he calls, "complicity between Zionism and
anti-Semitism."

Terrorism against Israel is desirable, Mr. Massad says. "It is only by
making the costs of Jewish supremacy too high that Israeli Jews will give
it up." Mr. Massad makes clear that the "resistance o f Palestinians"
should not be restricted to military targets but should also include
"civil institutions." In keeping with this analysis, he hails terrorists
who target Israeli civilians within Israel's 1967 borders as
"anti-colonial resistors."

All Jews are evil, according to Mr. Massad. He defines "Jewish
supremacists" as those Jews "not confined to Mr. Sharon and the Israeli
Jewish rightwing which is anyway a majority in Jewish Israel, but also to
liberal and leftist Jews." Regardless of political views, then, every Jew
is what Mr. Massad calls a "supremacist."

Israel is racist, in Mr. Massad's view. This is Mr. Massad's conclusion
from
its not supporting an unqualified "right of return" of Palestinians to
Israel.
Mr. Massad rejects out of hand Israel's fears of being overrun
demographically by an unfettered Palestinian right to immigrate,
portraying this as another extension of "Jewish supremacy."

In sum, Mr. Massad's views - his denial of th e existence of the Jewish
people, his belittling of the Holocaust, his charges of "Jewish supremacy
" and racism, his conspiracy theories about Jewish dominance, and his
calls for terrorist strikes against Israeli civilians - all smell of rank
anti Semitism.

In April 2002, Mr. Massad delivered a public lecture at a Columbia sit-in.
During the lecture, he denigrated Israel as "a Jewish supremacist and
racist state" and declared, "Every racist state should be destroyed."

He gave a similar talk at Oxford University in March 2002, where he
proclaimed, "the Jews are not a nation" and a "Jewish state is a racist
state that does not have the right to exist."

Mr. Massad claims that his students' evaluations of his classes are "full
of
support" for him, but a review of those comments reveals something quite
different - clear condemnation for his relentless bias against America,
Israel, and Jews.

Columbia University student evaluations of Mr . Massad, available at
"Culpa" (http://culpa.info) ,raise serious questions about his method of
presentation. They suggest that as the instructor of even survey courses,
he actively sought to corral his students into adopting his own vitriolic
views of Israel. "This course should have been called, `Why Palestinians
Hate Israel,'" wrote one student. "There was a massive and frustrating
bias to the material presented in class," said another. Yet another
student asked, "Can you imagine if a psychology professor declared that he
was only going to teach the `Nurture' theory and assume that he was
correct and therefore the `Nature' side of the argument would be
disregarded? Massad should be embarrassed about how he teaches (not to
mention Columbia)."

Whatever the purported subject matter of his courses - from comparative
literature to ancient Greek philosophy - Mr. Massad takes the opportunity
to launch into anti-American harangues. "You'll spend most classes wonder
ing how an apoplectic rant about US foreign policy that relates only
vaguely to Plato or Aristotle is supposed to represent the `core' of your
Columbia education," a 2002 student said.

Mr. Massad has labeled the critics of his work the "thought police," but
if
his own students are to be believed, it is he who acts as the "thought
police" in the classroom.

Mr. Massad is soon up for tenure review. Should this once distinguished
university stoop to provide a permanent forum for his views, it would
signify a truly stunning oversight. Regardless of format, audience, or
purported subject matter, Mr. Massad consistently and almost
single-mindedly advances a stridently anti-Western and anti-Jewish
diatribe.

He knows no distinction between a classroom lecture and advocacy at a
public demonstration. Thus, as Martin Kramer noted, "There is no
difference between what Joseph Massad teaches and what he preaches."

Indeed, for Mr. Massad, a fair presentat ion is neither offered nor
sought.
His opinion constitutes the whole of instruction, and methodology is
merely an advocate's hammer. Whether bending evidence to support a theory
or cudgeling dissent, Mr. Massad's record discloses a belief that the end
justifies the means, and the end is pure ideology.

2. Kerry has a "Jewish Problem" says the New Republic:
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=H4Ycy6qI3ZaRZs0idvzDOs==

3. Chamishite-like Theories among the Arabs:
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/stalinsky200405060835.asp

4. Gonen's Ghost:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13293

Posted 5/07/2004 02:19:00 PM

Article in Makor Rishon on the Campus Capers:
Joel Fishman
Mekor Rishon
7 May 2004

Lev Grinberg and the Meaning of Symbolic Genocide

Professor Lev Grinberg, Director of the Hubert Humphrey Center for
Public Affairs at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, published of an
article entitled, Symbolic Genocide, in the Belgian daily newspaper, La
Libre Belgique of 29 March 2004 in which accused Israel of perpetrating
symbolic genocide, against the Palestinian people. After reading some
extracts of this article in translation, Education Minister Limor Livnat
declared that Ben Gurion University can no longer serve as Lev Grinbergs
academic home and communicated her position to the Universitys President,
Professor Braverman. In its lead editorial of 25 April 2004, Haaretz,
took a position that the Ministers intervention was outrageous, and that
if Greenberg had committed the crime of incitement, he should be
challenged in court, but basically, this professors academic freedom
deserved to be respected.

Rather than enter directly into a discussion of the public debate
in Israel, our first step will be to give some of the original French text
of the article in La Libre Belgique. We shall then place these statements
into context and fill in some of the missing the missing steps of the
authors reasoning process. The articles first paragraph gives a
reasonable idea of Grinbergs views:

The murder of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin is part of a general policy carried out
by the government of the State of Israel
which could be described as symbolic genocide. Incapable of getting
beyond the trauma of the Shoah and the insecurity that it caused, the
Jewish people, supreme victim of genocide, is currently inflicting a
symbolic genocide on the Palestinian people. Because the world will not
permit a total elimination, it is a partial annihilation that is going on.
As a child of the Jewish people, and as an Israeli citizen, I condemn this
abominable act and appeal to the international community to save Israel
from itself; specifically, I exhort the European community to intervene in
a direct and forceful manner to stop this blood bath. The complex ties
between the Jewish people and Europe have not yet been severed, and it is
time to act; not because Europe should exorcize its guilt, but indeed
because it is also responsible for the future of the world.

The above is just the first paragraph, but in this compact
statement Grinberg has managed to include quite a few different thoughts:

1. The Government of Israel has a policy of perpetrating symbolic
genocide against the Palestinian people;
2. Israel suffers from the collective trauma of the Holocaust and, as
a result, is behaving psychotically, which means that, having reached a
state of collective insanity, this country is no longer responsible for
its actions;
3. Having once been the victim, Israel is perpetrating the same crime
against the Palestinians. Todays Israel is behaving in a manner similar
to that of Nazi Germany;
4. Israel would carry out a full program of annihilation but is
prevented from doing so, because the world will not permit it, which means
that Israels intentions are basically criminal (and that the Jewish State
is criminal);
5. Because of its collective psychotic condition that results in
irresponsible behavior and criminality, the world and particularly Europe
must intervene, for its own good and to save Israel from itself. (Later in
the text Grinberg recommends that such intervention be of the U.N. -- but
not of the Americans).

Despite Grinbergs carefully formulated terminology, the term symbolic
genocide, or the real thing does not apply to Israel. The main reason why
Ginbergs accusation lacks merit is that the Palestinians target Israeli
civilians, while Israel in the exercise of its legitimate right of
self-defense does not target Palestinian civilians. One may observe that
Grinberg has actually reversed the role of the criminal and the victim,
portraying Israeli society as being sick and attributing to it genocidal
intent which does not exist, but may be clearly identified on the other
side.

As Alan Dershowitz wrote, all the casualties of terrorist attacks are
victims of murder in the first degree. Nothing that the Israelis have
ever done can match the Palestinian targeting of civilians in murderous
and even genocidal intent. To make his point, Dershowitz quoted Phyllis
Chesler who wrote: Israeli female fatalities far outnumbered Palestinian
female fatalities by either 3 to 1 or 4 to 1. Israeli women and girls
constituted almost 40 percent of the Israeli noncombatants killed by
Palestinians. Of the Palestinian deaths over 95 percent were male. In
other words, Palestinians purposefully went after women, children, and
other unarmed civilians and Israelis fought against armed male soldiers
who were attacking them. When one considers the Palestinian culture of
suicide and death that makes human bombs out of young people, one is
confronted with a real example of collective insanity. There is no
comparison between Israel and the Jewish people with this society, and it
is a disservice to give the other side equal moral status by resorting to
a discussion of the cycle of violence and the use of such terminology as
tribal vengeance. Further, Israel has preserved its justice system in time
of war, while the Palestinians have totally failed in this respect.

Grinberg negates and trivializes the unique experience of the Holocaust
which is part of the collective Jewish heritage. And by implication, he
compares the Israelis with the Nazis. Although Grinberg began with a
discussion of symbolic genocide, he has explicitly and without
qualification made the accusation of criminal intent: that is, that given
the opportunity, Israel would commit real genocide against the
Palestinians. This means, that regardless of scale, symbolic or not, the
full weight of the accusation is there. Actually, this accusation seems to
be rather popular. Alan Dershowitz reported that Jose Saramago in March
2002 characterized Israeli efforts to defend its citizens against
terrorism as a crime comparable to Auschwitz. When Saramago was pressed
about Where the gas chambers are? he responded, Not here yet.
Similarly, the Telegraph (UK) of 28 April 2002 reported Prof. Martin van
Creveld had predicted that, with the outbreak of war in Iraq, Israel would
seize the opportunity to expel two million Palestinians. (The charge in
this case is not genocide but ethnic cleansing.) In both cases, criminal
intent is assumed. The accusation of the reversal of roles: of the victim
becoming the aggressor is also not original. It has appeared before in
Belgium. In his article, Anti-Semitic motives in Belgian anti-Israel
Propaganda, Joel Kotek wrote, It is worthwhile noting the words of
Simon-Pierre Nothombin the daily Brussels-based Le Soir of 18 December
2001: How can such a talented and perceptive people as the Jews, who
experienced so many atrocities and pain in flesh, blood, and spirit,
accept today that its government and army inflict upon others who are not
guilty of anything, precisely what they suffered themselves? Grinberg
seems to have quite a bit of company who appear to follow the same line.
One might have expected something just a bit more original from a person
who has declared himself a child of the Jewish people and committed
himself to the pursuit of justice in this noisy and public act.

The next issue that must be addressed is the intent of such statements in
the light of the current conflict. Our enemy is waging a guerilla war
against the State, with the objective of bringing about its collapse by
isolating it internationally, fomenting internal divisions, destroying its
morale, and sabotaging the economy. In this form of conflict, which is
fought primarily on the political level, a central objective is to destroy
Israels legitimacy and reattribute it to the Palestinians. To achieve
this goal one must undermine any justification for the continued existence
of the Jewish State. In this context, this article, written by a high
level civil servant and published abroad, represents a particularly
valuable asset for the other side in the propaganda war against Israel,
because this political act undermines the consensus of support for Israel.
(Further, a quick look at the web would reveals a strange coincidence:
that the Palestinian Authority would very much welcome outside
intervention, particularly of the UN.)

Haaretz has viewed the situation from a narrowly defined legal position,
as to whether or not Grinbergs words consist of incitement. They may or
they may not. There is more at stake here then freedom of speech, because
Grinberg has in effect committed a political act of some consequence. He
wrote, Because the world will not permit a total elimination, it is a
partial annihilation which is going on. The important issue here is the
basic and fundamental assault on the legitimacy of the State which this
accusation contains, because, if the State is criminal, its authority
cannot be legitimate, and it then becomes a moral duty to oppose that
illegitimate authority. This is the dangerous and harmful message that
Professor Grinberg has propagated.

2. Nice piece on the AB:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1083726868818&p=1006953079865

3. Hyper-dumb regarding ethnic profiling:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13279

4. Why THEY hate America:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13284

5. The Dumbest President in US History:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13265

6. The Campus Commotion makes headlines:
http://www.maarivintl.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=7049

7. The Modern "Hep Hep Hep:


The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!
http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage6.asp

Posted 5/05/2004 10:04:00 PM

Over the past few weeks, a debate of sort has been going on in the NY
Jewish Press, the largest English-language Jewish newspaper in the world.
Thought it might interest you:

The original article over which they are debating appears at
http://www.jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=3628

More Dissent On Capital Punishment


Neither Ethical Nor Moral

I was somewhat disturbed, if not surprised, to
read Steven Plaut`s defense of capital punishment
(Preserving Human Dignity Through Capital
Punishment, Jewish Press, April 9).

Mr. Plaut claims that there is an enormous
amount of evidence proving capital punishment is
an effective deterrent. I would like to know how he
came to this conclusion, especially since he so
brazenly dismisses the views of most legal scholars
that it is not an effective deterrent without citing a
single source for his contention. An article
discussing several inquiries into the question of
deterrence published in the University of
Pittsburgh Law Review in 1999 (see 60 U. Pitt L.
Rev 321) found no empirical evidence to support
the deterrence theory and no difference in the
homicide rate between states that have the death
penalty and states that do not. Given Mr. Plaut`s
penchant for bashing left-wing opinions as lacking
empirical evidence, it is strange that he would offer
a claim of his own that is completely devoid of it.

It is particularly naive to argue that capital
punishment could deter terrorism, and completely
illogical to argue that it could deter suicide
terrorists. Islamic fanatics are clearly willing to die
to perpetrate atrocities. Why on earth would they
be frightened of the death penalty if they already
value death over life? Deterrence depends on the
perpetrator valuing life over death.

Mr. Plaut does what many conservatives have
been doing now that the theory of deterrence has
largely been disproved; he claims the death penalty
is moral. Perhaps it is. But the moral death
penalty, particularly as discussed in the Torah and
Gemara, assumes a compassionate criminal justice
system staffed by wise elders using the death
penalty sparingly and putting someone to death
only after a very high bar is met regarding
witnesses and testimony.

The Gemara says that a court that executes a
man once in seventy years is cruel. In my view, the
Jewish approach to the death penalty shows a
concern for evidentiary standards and due process
that far exceeds what we find in the Unites States.
Were these the values of the U.S. justice system, I
would consider supporting the death penalty in
extreme cases though I fail to see why it is
implicitly any more moral and ethical than life
imprisonment. Must we define morality solely in
terms of extracting maximum retributive
vengeance?

The death penalty in the United States is not
administered in a way that is ethical or moral. Mr.
Plaut claims, totally incorrectly and again with
absolutely no source, that there is no serious
evidence that an innocent person has ever been put
to death in the U.S. Does Ethel Rosenberg ring a
bell? Sacco and Venzetti? DNA evidence has
exonerated many defendants on death row. Only
an ignoramus would fail to draw the obvious
conclusion: before DNA evidence was available,
innocent people were put to death. Mr. Plaut seems
totally ignorant of these facts. (His bizarre
argument that other government agencies and
activities kill people is beside the point. Those
deaths are unintended and accidental. The death
penalty is administered purposefully.)

Defendants can be convicted on as little as the
testimony of one witness in a circumstantial case.
Defense counsel is often incompetent, overworked,
and underpaid. And though Mr. Plaut may dismiss
this as more political correctness, those put to
death are overwhelmingly poor and
disproportionately minority; there is evidence that
shows that a minority defendant is significantly
more likely than a white person to be sentenced to
death for committing the same crime. This state of
affairs cannot be described as moral or ethical
under any reasonable definition of either term.

Mr. Plaut is entitled to make a moral case for
the death penalty. He is not, however, entitled to
ignore the facts or to arrogantly dismiss all those
who disagree with him as politically correct, or,
worse, as people who place the rights of murderers
above those of victims.

Michael Brenner
(an unemployed law school grad from Fordham University; he has his own
leftist blog at http://mlbrenner.blogspot.com/ )

Steven Plaut Responds: Remarkably, Mr.
Brenner denies that killing terrorists could deter
terror, this just one week after the massive
counterattack against terrorists in Fallujah, Iraq
by Allied forces, which reduced terrorist activity
there enormously.

So Mr. Brenner thinks that "legal scholars"
have proved that capital punishment does not deter
crime, does he? The only problem is that this is not
at all an issue that "legal scholars" can call even
if they were all really in accord with Mr. Brenner,
which they are most decidedly not any more so
than legal scholars can decide whether radiology is
an effective medical treatment or whether program
trading causes stock market crashes.

The issue requires not judicial pontificating
but careful statistical analysis, of which very few
legal scholars are capable. Mr. Brenner instead
offers self-righteous posturing and appeals to lay
intuition. As it turns out, the statistical evidence is
overwhelmingly in support of the finding that
capital punishment is an extremely effective
deterrent. Here is just the tip of the statistical
iceberg of evidence:

1. "Does Capital Punishment Have a Deterrent
Effect? New Evidence from Postmoratorium Panel
Data," American Law and Economics Review V5
N2 2003 (344-376), probably the best study to date.

2. "Getting Off Death Row: Commuted
Sentences and the Deterrent Effect of Capital
Punishment," Journal of Law and Economics,
Volume 46, Number 2, October 2003.

3. Capital Punishment and the Deterrence
Hypothesis: Some New Insights and Empirical
Evidence, December 2001, Eastern Economic
Journal, forthcoming, by Zhiqiang Liu
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.
cfm?abstract_id=352681.

4. Murders of Passion, Execution Delays and
the Deterrence of Capital Punishment, March
2003, at http://people.clemson.edu/ jshephe.

5. "State Executions, Deterrence and the
Incidence of Murder," Paul R. Zimmerman, March
3. 2003, Social Science Research Network.

6. Dezhbakhsh, Hashem and Shepherd,
Joanna, "The Deterrent Effect of Capital
Punishment: Evidence from a `Judicial
Experiment`" (Aug 19, 2003). Emory University
Economics Working Paper No. 03-14.

7. "Pardons, Executions and Homicide," H.
Naci Mocan and R. Kaj Gottings, Journal of Law
and Economics, forthcoming.

As for suicide bombers "preferring life over
death" in Mr. Brenner`s words, that is about as
good an argument as any for executing, jailing, or
expelling the family members of dead suicide
bombers, in order to deter future attacks. Mr.
Brenner thinks the death penalty can be moral only
if courts are staffed by infallible saints and
prophets. Nonsense. Judaism does not restrict
authority to saints but grants authority to
real-world, fallible, human court justices.

How does Mr. Brenner know the American
courts do not adjudicate correctly in capital cases
with justice? Because he does not like their rulings!
Some legal evidence that is. And did he really
assert in his letter that Ethel Rosenberg was
innocent, or are my old eyes playing tricks on me?
The fact that a few innocent people on death row in
the U.S. were exonerated before they were executed
proves, if anything, that the American system works
quite well.

As to the arguments presented by Ms.
Levinson, It would be presumptuous of me to
represent myself as a Talmudic authority, and in
any case I do not believe that the issue of capital
punishment in the United States or in Israel can be
reduced to a comparison of competing citations
from the Talmud.

Brenner Vs. Plaut: One More Round On Capital Punishment

Steven Plaut`s response to my argument
against capital punishment (Letters, April 30) can
be boiled down to two main points. The first is that
the views of legal scholars on the death penalty,
including those who have performed empirical
studies, are irrelevant because, according to him,
legal scholars are incapable of empirical analysis.
The second is that I am simply unhappy with the
decisions made by sentencing judges.

There are at least three major problems with
Mr. Plaut`s response. The first is that the school of
economic analysis of the death penalty he cites,
fathered by economist Isaac Ehrlich in 1975, has
not held up over time and has been widely
criticized for faulty statistical analysis. (See
http://www.justiceblind.com/death/ sorensen.html)
No one appears to question the viability of
Ehrlich`s methods, but as the Sorensen article
makes clear, Ehrlich`s conclusions have not held up
and are not, at any rate, widely accepted. Mr.
Plaut`s claim that the evidence is overwhelming
thus remains unproven.

Deterrence is difficult to analyze because so
many other factors have to be isolated. Crime is
cyclical; the homicide rate rises and falls for many
reasons. Indeed, the fact that there is no death
penalty in Europe, where the homicide rate is a
small fraction of the U.S. homicide rate, strongly
supports the theory that the death penalty makes
little if any difference. And as I pointed out in my
last letter, most legal scholars believe that the
deterrence argument is unproven, which is why
death penalty advocates have turned to moral
arguments.

Whether the death penalty is or is not a
deterrent is not the only question a death penalty
advocate must answer. The real question is not
how many lives the death penalty saves, but how
many more lives it saves than life imprisonment
and whether there are other ways of reducing
homicides without resorting to the death penalty.
Plaut must additionally prove that it is a better
deterrent than the alternatives, such as life im-
prisonment. And on top of that, given the great
cost of trying death penalty cases (and that cost
will be high whether there are extensive appeals or
not), he must prove that the cost of bringing these
cases does not wipe out any deterrent effect the
death penalty might have by diverting resources
that might be better used elsewhere. These
questions are all apropos because the death
penalty is irreversible and has a tainted past here
in the U.S., which is why we must examine it with
such close scrutiny.

Deterrence proponents argue that not
executing inmates is tantamount to condemning
future victims to death. This is misleading and, to
my mind, immoral. We do not punish criminals to
prevent a hypothetical future crime. We punish
criminals because they are guilty. Taken to its
logical conclusion, deterrence theory suggests that
we ought to punish innocent people if it can be
proven that such punishment deters later crimes
and saves more lives. It`s the old torture-a-child
question: Would you torture an innocent child to
save the world? Deterrence absolutists would
answer affirmatively. Would the wise rebbeim of
the Talmud? I think the answer is no.

Plaut himself shows a brazen willingness to
punish or kill innocents if it will deter criminals, as
he makes clear by arguing that families of suicide
bombers should be jailed or executed if it will help
stop suicide bombings. Is the imagination of death
penalty advocates so limited that they assume that
the eight or so murders purportedly deterred by a
state homicide (as the death penalty is officially
called on a death certificate) cannot be avoided in
any other way? How about better police work or
reducing poverty or a better system of public
education? All of these correlate with reduced
homicide rates. Yet I suspect Mr. Plaut is not about
to call for them before and after he flips the switch.

Mr. Plaut argues that the fact that people on
death row have been exonerated proves the
American system works and that my argument is
based solely on my personal opinion of judicial
rulings. Neither argument holds water. Mr. Plaut,
like many of his allies in the law and economics
movement, has criticized the long appeals process
that is often a part of American application of the
death penalty. He cannot now argue in favor of it
as proof that the American system works. And he
again refuses to draw the rational and logical
conclusion, which is that if DNA evidence (evidence
which has come to light largely through the work of
non-governmental organizations like Barry
Scheck`s Innocence Project, and not the judicial
system) has resulted in the exoneration of so many
defendants, there are doubtless many others
innocents who were killed in pre-DNA era.

Ethel Rosenberg`s case is an example of the
due process violations which befall those
disadvantaged in society. I could just as well have
used Ruben Carter, the boxer who was exonerated
after being on death row for triple homicide. (Mr.
Plaut ignored my other example of Sacco and
Vanzetti, which is applicable both as an example of
killing the innocent and a conviction based on
political association and national origin.) The
generally accepted view is that Ethel Rosenberg
was at most an unwitting accomplice, certainly not
deserving of the death penalty. And anyone who
knows anything about the case knows it was a
travesty, presided over by a cowardly judge who
was more concerned with proving his patriotism
than in conducting a fair trial and prosecutors who
broke rule after rule. The Rosenbergs` trial was
more about the Rosenbergs` Judaism and
affiliation with the Communist Party than about
whether they had committed any crime. That
pernicious attitudes toward blacks and Hispanics
influence some verdicts today is undeniable. All of
this is to bring out a simple point: even the best
justice system is human and fallible. In every
instance besides the death penalty, these mistakes
can be remedied. With the death penalty, however,
there is no going back.

One final, but very important point: Plaut`s
reference to Falluja is a very dangerous one. The
death penalty is a criminal justice concept, not a
military concept. I cannot stress enough the
importance of keeping war and criminal justice
separate. It is important for our sanity and
extraordinarily important for Israel`s hasbara. The
killings of Yassin, Rantisi, and other terrorists are
legally and morally defensible only on grounds that
they were combatants in war, and indeed, I and
much more learned people such as Alan
Dershowitz have gone to considerable lengths in
other fora to defend them on that basis. In war,
many things, including the unintentional killing of
civilians, are permitted that we would not
countenance as part of a just criminal system.

Michael Brenner
New York, NY

(Editors Note: Mr. Brenner is a graduating
Fordham Law student currently looking for a job.
He can be reached at mbrenner@fordham.edu.)

Steven Plaut Responds:

1. If capital punishment could save a
thousand innocent lives through deterring murder
in exchange for every innocent man mistakenly sent
to execution, Mr. Brenner would oppose capital
punishment and condemn those one thousand
innocent people to death. In fact, of course, there is
no evidence at all that even one innocent person is
executed for every thousand innocent people saved
through deterring their murderers.

There are some people who were convicted in
the U.S. and sent to death row who were later
exonerated on technicalities or because courts ruled
that prosecutors had failed to make air-tight cases,
but that is not quite the same as arguing that
innocent people are executed. And even if such
people should be regarded as truly "innocent", their
exoneration before they were executed shows, if
anything, that the system of capital punishment in
those states that have it works quite well. Brenner
insists it is immoral to have executions that
"prevent a hypothetical future crime", but thinks it
is fine and dandy to ban them in order to save
hypothetical future innocents wrongly convicted.

2. I am at a loss to understand why Mr.
Brenner, who thinks that imaginary risks of
executing an innocent person should necessitate
eliminating capital punishment, does not also insist
that the risk of condemning an innocent man to life
in prison should not rule out all imprisonment.
After all, the years of life an innocent person loses
in prison are as irreplaceable and their loss as
irreversible as under the death penalty itself.

I am also at a loss to understand why Mr.
Brenner thinks that an imaginary risk of executing
an innocent person through error or mistake is any
worse than the real risk of producing real deaths of
real innocent people through the government`s
operating of turnpikes and mail trucks or its
approving risky medicines or operating air traffic
controls. Why not rule all those things out because
innocent people are inadvertently killed as a direct
result of their operations?

3. Mr. Brenner dismisses mountains of actual
statistical evidence from social science that the
death penalty indeed deters murder on the basis of
an article by Jon Sorensen, whose pedigree is that
he teaches at Fitchburg State College. The Ehrlich
piece cited by Mr. Brenner is 30 years old. The more
recent evidence is unambiguously in favor of capital
punishment`s deterrence value. I got my statistical
training as a PhD student at Princeton and have
published many scholarly articles using statistics
and developing new statistical methodologies. What
sort of statistical training does Mr. Brenner have?

4. Mr. Brenner notes correctly that murder
rates vary for many reasons. Legal scholars have no
idea what those reasons are, and social science
criminologists have only a very limited idea. If
Europe indeed has less violent crime than does the
U.S., it is not because it has foresworn the death
penalty but because it has fewer violent criminals.
None of this changes the fact that capital
punishment does deter and is moral.

5. Mr. Brenner should evaluate Ruben Carter`s
"innocence" based on what the jury of his peers
found once he got his retrial and not on a Bob
Dylan song. There is no evidence that the
Rosenbergs were convicted because they were Jews.
They were convicted because they were guilty.

6. Mr. Brenner seems to think that the "due
process rights" of the followers of Shiekh Yassin
and Rantisi should come ahead of the rights of my
children to ride buses without being mass
murdered. This from someone who would not
torture a single child to prevent a Holocaust.

7. In his earlier letter, Mr. Brenner recalled
the Talmud declaration that a Sanhedrin that
executes one person every 70 years is called a "cruel
Sanhedrin." If we adjust for the differences in
population size, I am not sure that the rate of
executions in the U.S. is much higher than that
noted for 4th century rural Israel. Be that as it may,
the Sanhedrin courts were adjudicating Jewish
farmers and not Islamofascist terrorists or mass
murderers or street gangbangers with automatic
assault weapons. Perhaps what the world can really
use now are a lot more "cruel Sanhedrins."

8. Mr. Brenner keeps declaring "Mr. Plaut
must prove...". Well, Mr. Plaut need not prove
anything. All that is needed is to allow voters, in
either the U.S. or Israel, to have their own say on
the question and we shall see how unpersuasive Mr.
Brenner`s arguments are.

Posted 5/05/2004 11:40:00 AM

1. Haaretz", the far-leftist Israeli daily now suing Ehud Olmert because
he says they have political agendas like that of the Hamas, ran an
editorial today denouncing the pathetic minority dictating national policy
to Israel. It included:
"Once again (in th ereferendum this week) it became evident that the
settlers set the agenda for the
State of Israel. While they are a small minority, they are highly
motivated, well organized with a firm ideology and enormous financial
resources - some directly from government ministries - and driven with a
messianic passion and readiness for sacrifice, including life.
Nothing stands up against them. There is no parliament or
extra-parliamentary movement that forms a counter-balance to the settlers.
... And all this happened when a majority of the public actually favors a
withdrawal from Gaza and supports reaching a peace agreement with the
Palestinians, even if it means far-reaching concessions."

SO to help you along, we have prepared a lexicon of terminology to be used
by all those trying to read Haaretz:

Term Translation

Pathetic insignificant minority Those with a 60% to 39% majority in a
poll

Majority The 15% of Israeli Jews who still
support Beilin-style "peace plans"

Messianic delusions Those who do not agree with Haaretz

Clear Majority Haaretz readers, who form a 6% market
share of Israeli newspaper readers.

Free Speech and Pluralism Running a newspaper in which only
leftists are allowed to express themselves.

Balanced journalism One "Right-wing" or anti-Left Op-Ed
for each 150 leftist articles and columns.

Free speech Filing a malicious harassment SLAPP
suit against Ehud Olmert for his denouncing the extremist ideological
agenda of Haaretz publishers.

Rule of Law The right of leftists to disobey laws
when they feel like it.

Proper Democracy Leftists organizing insurrection and
mutiny among Israeli soldiers as long as the government does not adopt
those policies advocated by the communist party.

Moderates: Members of the Stalinist Hadash Party.


2. Diplomats for Terrorism:
The Arabists and the Anti-"Zionist"
By Joel Mowbray
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 5, 2004


Reflecting the perverse logic that has guided the U.S. State Department
for decades, sixty former diplomats have written an open letter to
President Bush denouncing the currentadministrations unabashed support for
the sole democracy in the Middle East: Israel.

The hyperbolic screed, released this week, is chock-full of gross
overstatements and pure myth.

Yet far more important and what the media will almost surely overlook is
the stench of bias emanating from almost all of the signers, particularly
from the man who organized the effort, former Ambassador Andrew Killgore,
who served in Qatar from 1977-1980.

The two-page letter follows the same basic script that has been used by
the U.S. Foreign Service more or less since Israel achieved its
independence in 1948: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the core of
the problems in the Middle East.

Blame for the trouble in the entire region of which Israel holds less
than one percent of the territory and less than two percent of the
population is pinned on Sharons extra-judicial assassinations, Israels
Berlin Wall-like barrier, (and) its harsh military measures in occupied
territories.

Never mind that the extra-judicial assassinations are of terrorist
masterminds responsible for the mass slaughter of both innocent Israelis
and brainwashed young Palestinians. Or that Israels security fence is the
furthest thing from a Berlin Wall-like barrier.

The letter also dabbles in fiction, stating, By closing the door to
negotiations with Palestinians and the possibility of a Palestinian state,
you have proved that the U.S. is not an evenhanded peace partner.

George W. Bush was the first U.S. president to endorse formally the goal
of a Palestinian state, albeit one with leaders free from terrorist ties.
Standing firm with Sharons plan to combat terrorist leaders in no way
conflicts with his explicit desire for a Palestinian state.

Israel is obviously imperfect and hardly beyond reproach, but the moral
compass of these statesmen is seriously skewed.

Almost none has ever given more than lip service to the idea of condemning
suicide bombings, and many of them have made their golden years truly
golden indeed, courtesy of the deep pockets of the Arab nations in which
they formerly were stationed.

As noxious as the track records of many of the former diplomats may be,
perhaps none is as toxic as that of the man who spearheaded the whole
effort, former Ambassador Andrew Killgore. A quick inspection of his
history shows that he should be the last person giving lessons on
evenhandedness.

Killgore may or may not be an anti-Semite, but he certainly could be
mistaken for one. That is a strong statement, to be sure, but it seems a
fair assessment after spending some time at the website for the Washington
Report on Middle East Affairs, of which he is the co-founder and
publisher.

The sites front page keeps a counter only of foreign aid money given to
Israel. It calls for ending all military aid to Israel, though there is no
similar call for ending the exact same level of aid given each year to
Egypt for the same purpose, an arrangement that has existed since the Camp
David Accords in 1978.

Killgore's website also has a Neocon Corner, where he and others castigate
one Jew or another for their sinister loyalties to Israel. (One execption
was a hit piece on Dick Cheney.) Typical is a recent column on Richard
Perle, former head of the Defense Policy Board. In the course of 800
words, Killgore refers to Perle as: a fervent Zionist, a dyed-in-the-wool
Israel-Firster, part of the Zionist lobby, always active in Zionist
organizations, the Prince of Darkness, and a Zionist ideologue.

On its webpage listing 27 charitable organizations are several with which
no reasonable group would affiliate. Many are well-known for their radical
Islamist agendas, and two in particular should have raised red flags: the
United Palestinian Appeal and the Kinder USA, both charitable
organizations who share leadership with the Holy Land Foundation, which

Given Killgores clear biases, it is tempting to use the old line about the
kettle and the pot. More apt, however, would be the analogy, Said the
desert to the grain of sand.


3. Nice Pieces on the Referendum:
http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=3628
and also http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13264

4, Remember Tom Lehrer's old "National Brotherhood Week"? Well, now we
have national campus comfort week:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13233

5. P.A. Radio Praises "Heroic Attack" On "Settler-Terrorists"
18:07 May 04, '04 / 13 Iyar 5764


Several hours after the murderous attack on a pregnant woman and her
four daughters, PA radio praised the terrorists as "heroic martyrs," and
their heinous crime as one of "heroic martyrdom."


Several hours after the murderous attack on the Hatuel family of Katif -
leaving David Hatuel bereft of his entire family: his pregnant wife and
four daughters - PA radio praised the murderous terrorists as "heroic
martyrs," and their heinous crime as one of "heroic martyrdom." In its
report the next morning, the PA radio referred to the Jewish residents of
Gaza as "settlers" and "terrorists" in light of their plans to build a new
neighborhood in N'vei Dekalim. The radio mentioned that the victims of the
Sunday attack were "settlers," neglecting to note that they were a
pregnant woman and four little girls who were shot to death at point-blank
range. So reports Dr. Michael Widlanski of Hebrew University.

Posted 5/05/2004 02:27:00 AM

Well the official ballot count is in. The "disengagement plan"
was shot down by 60% to 39%, a 21% margin in favor of the opponents. As
far as I know, I was the only person around who publicly issued a
prediction before the vote that the plan would lose by a double-digit
margin, and even I did not dare suggest it would be by over 20%.

For the past 12 years Israel has been dominated by the doctrine of "We
will do the democratic thing no matter what those damn voters think", also
known as the Robert Mugabe school of democratic thought. Every single
time voters were allowed to express their opinion on the Oslo "peace
process" and its strategy of trying to appease our way to peace, the
voters of Israel rejected it by large margins. The politicians proceeded
to implement the appeasements anyway. Every single time Israeli voters
have been asked, they favored dealing with the PLO through achieving
military victory over it, through annihilating it and its terrorists.
They favored dealing with the enemy through fighting him, not appeasing
him.

Days before this referendum, Ariel Sharon was announcing that the Likud
voters could go get stuffed because he would implement his appeasement
plan whether they liked it or not. After all he had given George Bush
his word. Then when it looked like the referendum would go down with a
small loss, Sharon announced that, since it was only Likud members voting,
he would take a small margin of loss as a sign that the public endorsed
him. Such Mugabism evidently enraged the Likud rank and file. Witness
the final vote numbers.

The continued domination of Mugabism in Israel is evident in other ways as
well. The Left has long been arguing that leftists should be exempt from
having to obey the laws of the country as long as the government is not
implementing the policies advocated by the most-extremist 5% of the
voters, and that soldiers should be encouraged to mutiny when national
policies are not those advocated by Israel's communist party.

Shimon Peres dismissed the referendum as irrelevant, saying that no
minority should be allowed to dictate to Israel its choices. Yup, a 60%
to 39% majority in the poll is an insignificant minority in the "mind" of
the man who once insisted that, when Oslo was implemented, he was far more
concerned about the danger from the infiltration of cable television into
Israel than he was about the danger of infiltration of Palestinian
terrorists. Other people, like Jerusalem Post columnist Yosef Goell, are
joining in the call for more Mugabian democracy in Israel (see his
insisting that in spite of the referendum the "majority" will yet prevail
at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1083468527580&p=1006953079865
).

Incidentally, since I am on a roll with getting one prediction in a row
correct, let me venture another. Yes, of course the referendum yesterday
was not representative because it was only Likud members voting. But if
a national referendum will now be held on the same "plan", it will ALSO
lose. Remember where you heard it predicted first.

What will be? Well, I will tell you what now SHOULD be. The Likud should
immediately split into to separate parties. Likud-Aleph and Likud-Bet.
Likud-Aleph would consist of all those party apparatchiks who wish the
Likud to serve as the Other-Labor-Party and compete with the Left in terms
of developing appeasement plans. It would include all those party
functionaries who believe in nothing except keeping a cushy party job or
public service slot, and the people who regard the Likud as their
alternative to gainful employment. All the others, who actually believe
in Israel, Zionism, and peace through victory would form Likud-Bet. Such
a split should have taken place years ago. After such a split, the
Israeli voter would at long last have a real ballot choice.

Posted 5/05/2004 02:27:00 AM

1. In the past year or two, there has been a rash in Israel of malicious
and frivolous SLAPP suits filed against critics of leftists by the radical
Leftists. SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation
and a SLAPP suit is an anti-democratic harassment "libel suit" designed to
suppress the freedom of speech of one's critics. In many parts of the US
there are severe penalties against people who file them. In Israel they
are a growing guerilla tactic of leftist extremists opposed to freedom of
speech.

In the past year or so, several SLAPP suits were dismissed by
Israeli courts and the general case trend seems to be towards better
protected free speech. In a recent one, a far-leftist anti-Zionist
professor who filed a suit
against a newspaper reporter at Haaretz for comments on himself he did
like, and against Haaretz itself, when it printed an article saying that
this professor, Moshe Zimmerman of the Hebrew University, regularly
compares Israel to Nazi Germany at the same time that
the German government has been financing his own research. Zimmerman lost
and was ordered to pay 75,000 NIS in damages. Another professor also had
his colleagues with a SLAPP suit but it was tossed out of court and he was
hit for damages.

Currently Judy Balint Lash, a non-leftist Israeli columnist
(originally American) is being harassed by some members of Rachel Corrie's
International Solidarity Movement of pro-terrorists because they do not
like being criticized by her. And of course I myself am being harassed in
a malicious SLAPP suit by Neve Gordon from Ben Gurion University because I
dared criticize his political writings and public political activities,
criticism that is free speech under any democracy. (Incidently, since
some people asked: Gordon maliciously filed his SLAPP suit in Nazareth
district court because he wanted an Arab judge to hear the case. Gordon
evidently feared that any Jewish judge would read Gordon's own libelous
and extremist writings, in which he declares Israel is a fascist,
terrorist, apartheid state and in which he praises Norman Finkelstein
(widely seen as a Holocaust Denier and neonazi) as the ethical
equivalent of Biblical Prophets, and feared such a Jewish judge would toss
out his suit and maybe indict him for other things besides. My own lawyer
filed a motion last year
with the Israeli Supreme Court to move the trial to a different court.
The motion was rejected by the Chief Justice.
If you know anything about who the Israeli Chief Justice is, this might
not surprise you.)

But one of the most interesting twists to leftist SLAPP guerilla
harassment has to do with the new suit filed against Ehud Olmert. Olmert
used to be the Mayor of Jerusalem and is an old-time Likud honcho. He
used to be militant and anti-Oslo, but this past year has postured to the
Left, and was pushing unilateral Israeli appeasements of the PLO long
before Sharon proposed his own "disengagement" plan.

Olmert is just the latest in a long line of Likud leaders who think
that if they shift Left they can get the Left and its captive media to
like them. It never works.

Olmert enraged the Left's main organ of communication, Haaretz, and
its publishers, the Schocken family. Actually the Schockens own not only
far-Leftist Haaretz, with its pathetic 6% Israeli market share, but also a
string of local weeklies, including Jerusalem's "Kol Hair", the main
Jerusalem weekly. Seems that two years back, Olmert dared criticize the
political positions of Kol Hair and of Haaretz. Actually what he said was
that the local newspaper was promoting the political position of the Hamas
and was anti-Israel and identifies with the Hamas, and also with the
"tanzim" (PLO militia). Olmert made the remarks in front of a Knesset
parliamentary committee, evidently in the Knesset building. Olmert was
mayor of Jerusalem at the time. The Schockens were not amused.

The Schocken publishing house, together with the ex-editor of the local
newspaper, have filed suit against Olmert for "defaming" their newspaper,
claiming it was causing them serious financial damages (I, for one, would
love to see them try to prove it.) Olmert and the Schockens have had
other battles, with each side in the past suing the other for libel.
All this involving anewspaper that regular protests its devotion to
free speech. Not sure what became of those suits but I suspect they were
tossed. This time the Schockens are demanding 500,000 NIS.

My prediction is that the Schocken SLAPP suit against Olmert will go
the way of others and will be defeated, with serious embarassment for the
newspaper pretending to be that of the "thinking Israeli". Haaretz' idea
of pluralism is to run one anti-leftist opinion column for every 150
columns and articles promoting the leftist agenda.

2. What academic diversity?
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13242

3. What "abuse" of Iraqis?
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13240
and also
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13239

4. Green Terrorism:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13159

Posted 5/02/2004 10:13:00 PM

1. Sunday Evening, 10 PM Israel time:

The referendum polling booths are closed and all three Israeli TV
stations are declaring on th ebasis of samplings of voters at poll
stations that not only was the Sharon-Bush "Gaza Disengagement Plan"
rejected, but all three stations are saying that I have won my bet, and
that the vote gap in favor of those rejecting the "plan" is
indeed double-digits, just
as I predicted would be the case in these postings last week. Actually
the vote spread in favor
of those rejecting the plan is between 12% and 22%, depending on
which TV station poll you wish to accept, but they are ALL double digits.
The final numbers will take a day or two.

You realize what this means? It means that all you suckers who took me
up on my bet on whether the gap would be double digits now owe me a
felafel, and I mean it should have extra tehinna sauce!

2. It is one of those things I usually keep to myself, like my third
nipple, but it turns out I grew up in the Habonim socialist-Zionist youth
movement, loosely tied to the Israeli Labor Party, and which is named
"Hanoar Ha'Oved Ve'Halomed" inside Israel (the "working and studying
youth"). I parted company with the movement ideologically around the time
I started shaving on a regular basis. No, silly, my face.

I think it was shortly after
Woodstock. In any case, back then Habonim was still a militantly Zionist
organization, whereas it has morphed into a further-Left organization
that is not always clearly distinct from things like Meretz and Tikkun.

Be that as it may, I ordinarily do not spend a lot of time pondering
my old youth movement, other than trying to recall the names of some of
the better-looking young women I hung around back in the Johnson
and Nixon Administrations. But I must say that for the first time in
decades, I was really quite proud of my old alma mater. The same
organization decided to "celebrate" the May 1 Hammer and Sickle Day (yes,
groan, Israeli youth movements still "celebrate" that day) by
bashing "anarchists" and kicking their butt. Here is a report on the
affair from an anti-Semitic "anarchist" web site:

http://www.ainfos.ca/ainfos24315.html

Israel, Tel Aviv, Violence against the anarchists in the first of May
rally

Stewards and members of the "Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed" [learning and
working youth - national/Zionist socialists youth movement
associated with the Labor Party] attacked the anarchists and tried to
prevent them from entering the rally.
Today, there was a first of May event and a rally at the Tel Aviv museum
square - organized by a joint first of May comity of the "Hashomer
Hatsair", "Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed",
"Hadash" [the communist party front] "Tseirey Yahad" and others.
Stewards and other members of the "Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed" tried to
prevent from joining the assembly a group of anarchists (which
included activists from the Anarchists Against The Wall initiative, the
"Maavak Ehad" anarchist collective, and others). They attacked
the anarchists and asked the police force on duty to keep them out.
They announced that the entrance of the anarchist activists is forbidden.

The anarchist who arrived with black and red&black flags and a flier with
the heading of "The First Of May is Ours" told in advance they intend to
distribute leaflets and carry their flags. At first, the police and the
stewards of
the "Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed" prevented their entrance. Later, after the
intervention of the lawyer Gabi Lasky, the general secretary of the
"Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed", and Tamar Gojanski
- the ex-parliament member of the Stalinist Hadash party, which headed the
comity that organized the assembly, the entrance of the anarchists to the
square was allowed.

After the anarchists enter, the stewards of the "Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed"
tried again and again to confiscate the fliers in spite of repeated talks
with the general secretary of the "Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed".

At the end of the rally, when the other participants of the demo started
to sing Israel's national/Zionist anthem, Ha'Tikva, the anarchists seat
down on the ground and shout "Zionism is
Racism!" (and joined the singing of the Internationale).
Participants in the demo, all of them from the Hano'ar Ha'Oved Ve'Halomed,
started to beat and kick the anarchists, and tried to break the camera
that documented their violent actions.

Posted 5/02/2004 11:03:00 AM

The Associates of Herr Zundel
By Steven Plaut

Ernst Zundel is a Germany-born nazi, Holocaust Denier, and
anti-Semite. He makes his living by selling nazi military paraphernalia.
He moved to Canada from Germany when he was 19. In 1978, a Canadian
Broadcasting Company journalist revealed that - using his middle names -
Christof Friedrich, Zundel had become Canada's leading pro-Nazi and
Holocaust-denial propagandist. Once exposed, Zundel continued his efforts
under his conventional name. The principal outlet for Zundel's early
activities was his Toronto-based company, Samisdat Publishers, Ltd., which
produced Zundel originals (like The Hitler We Loved and Why) and
Holocaust-denial "classics", (including The Hoax of the Twentieth Century,
by Arthur Butz; A Straight Look at the Third Reich and The Six Million
Swindle, by Austin App; and Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald: The Greatest
Fraud in History, by Richard Harwood. He produces books and articles with
other anti-Jewish libels. He is also a white supremacist. For his full
bio by the Anti-Defamation League, see
http://www.adl.org/learn/Ext_US/zundel.asp?xpicked=2&item=zundel. (Some
of the material below is taken from that site.) "Ernst Zundel epitomizes
and sanctions the worst form of Holocaust denial," contends Bernie Farber,
a spokesman for the Canadian Jewish Congress
(http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040306/ZUNDEL06/TPComment/TopStories).

Zundel was arrested numerous times in Canada, is today wanted for
criminal activity in Germany, and currently lives in Tennessee. He is
fixated on U.F.O.'s, believing them to be Nazi secret weapons based
somewhere in Antarctica. In 1985, Zundel was charged under Section 177 of
the Criminal Code of Canada for "knowingly publishing false news." Among
those testifying for the prosecution at the trial were Holocaust
survivors, a history professor and even a banker -- since Zundel had
claimed that an international conspiracy existed among Freemasons,
Communists, international financiers, and Zionists. Speaking for the
defense were such leading Holocaust deniers as Sweden's Ditlieb Felderer,
France's Robert Faurisson (a close associate of Noam Chomsky, the
professor of Cambodia genocide) and Canada's James Keegstra, all of whom
have been convicted in their own countries under hate crimes laws for
their Holocaust-denial activities. To win, prosecutors had the
distasteful task of "proving" that the Holocaust had occurred and the
difficult task of proving that Zundel had knowingly lied when he wrote
that it had not. Zundel was convicted on February 26, 1985, of publishing
false news about the Holocaust. He was sentenced to fifteen months in
jail, and three years probation, during which he was prohibited from
publishing on the subject.

Zundel did not serve his sentence. In January 1987, the Ontario
Court of Appeals overturned the 1985 conviction, citing procedural errors
during the trial. In June 1987, a new trial was granted. Also testifying
for Zundel was David Irving, the British convicted Holocaust Denier. On
November 13, 1988, Zundel was convicted and sentenced to a nine-month jail
term. When an appeals court upheld the conviction, Zundel reported to
Toronto's Don Jail on February 5, 1990, wearing a striped "concentration
camp" costume labeled "Political Prisoner Ernst Zundel." After spending a
week in jail, he was released on $10,000 bail pending an appeal to
Canada's Supreme Court. On August 27, 1992, the Supreme Court of Canada
struck down as unconstitutional the law banning the spread of false news.
In February 2001, after being denied Canadian citizenship, Zundel left
Canada for the United States. He currently resides in Tennessee.

In August 1996, the Canadian Human Rights Commission opened yet
another chapter in Zundel's saga with the law. At issue was an Internet
site that bore Zundel's name -- the so-called "Zundelsite" -- which, since
mid-1995, had served as an electronic library of Holocaust-denial texts
and which incited hatred against Jews. The Canadian Human Rights Tribune
ordered that the site be shut down, but because it was operating from a
computer server inside the United States, the Canadian order was not
enforceable. At the trial, evidence was presented that Zundel and his wife
personally control this web site.

On February 5, 2003, officials from the U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service arrested Ernst Zundel at his home in Pigeon Forge,
Tennessee, for alleged immigration violations. He was deported to Canada
and has been in jail ever since. Mr. Zundel is confined to a Toronto
detention centre because the government is holding him on a national
security certificate -- the controversial and Draconian procedure usually
reserved for terrorist suspects.

The "Zunderlist" continues to operate as the main vehicle for
spreading Zundel's nazi doctrines, at http://www.zundelsite.org. Zundel's
wife also continues to send her daily "Z-Grams," which are less devoted to
Holocaust denial and more to fulminations against "Jewish power,"
anti-Semitic and anti-Israel conspiracy theories, and attacks on the U.S.
government and the War on Terror.

There is one other interesting fact you should know about the
Zundelsite. It carries at least two articles published by Neve Gordon,
the leftist extremist lecturer in political science at Ben Gurion
University, best known for his pronouncements that Israel is a fascist,
terrorist, apartheid state! One of these Zundelsite pieces is Gordon's
article praising Norman Finkelstein:
(http://www.zundelsite.org/english/zgrams/zg2000/zg0010/001027.html ), who
himself is almost universally seen as a neonazi, Holocaust Denier, fraud
and anti-Semite. The book by Finkelstein in this article was compared by
the NY Times to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Note how Gordon
compares Finkelstein here ethically to the Prophets of the Bible (last
sentences). The other Zundelsite publication of a Gordon article is at
(http://www.zundelsite.org/english/zgrams/zg2002/2002-November/000106.html
).

Gordon's articles have been published and cited with favor in many
other anti-Semitic and anti-Israel printed and web sites and magazines,
ranging from al-Ahram, to Radio Islam web site, to David Irving's web
site, and Gordon is a regular columnist for "Counterpunch" an extremist
and anti-Israel web magazine (it has published articles favoring Israel's
liquidation and termination), and is owned and edited by Alexander
Cockburn, who has been very widely denounced (including by the liberal New
Republic magazine) as an open anti-Semite.

The publication of Gordon's articles on Zundelsite also comes against
the background of growing criticism of the activities of far-leftist
extremists at Israeli universities and especially at his own university,
Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheba. Israel's Minister of Education
recently announced she was boycotting Ben Gurion University because of the
political activities there of a radical sociologist faculty member, who
published articles declaring that Israel was practicing genocide against
Palestinians. The press in Israel claims there is growing anger against
Ben Gurion University among Jews around the world and that some have
announced they are withholding financial support for the university as
long as the faculty extremists operate under university auspices.
Israel's recently-released nuclear spy and traitor, Mordecai Vanunu, had
begun his activities while a member of a communist student cell at Ben
Gurion University.

The same Neve Gordon whose articles are published by Zundelsite and
Counterpunch has also filed a malicious SLAPP suit against me, already
being widely compared to the libel suit filed by David Irving against
Deborah Lipstadt
(http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11497 ), because
I criticized his political opinions and his public political activities
(such as his joining the "human shields" who illegally entered Ramallah to
interfere with the Israeli army's siege against Arafat's offices, while
Arafat was hiding the murderers of an Israeli cabinet minister in those
same offices), and especially because I criticized his praising Norman
Finkelstein in the article discussed above. SLAPP stands for Strategic
Lawsuit against Public Participation, and a SLAPP suit is a harassment
suit designed to suppress free speech of one's critics. There are severe
penalties against those who file them frivolously in many parts of the
United States.

Free speech in Israel is indeed under attack. By the extremist Left.

Posted 5/01/2004 09:50:00 PM

1. Some news about Israel's most anti-Israel leftist extremists:

An Israeli academic employed by the University of Haifa, Illan Pappe,
recently published a book "A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two
Peoples". The dedication at the front of the book is to
Pappe's two sons as reads follows: "Ido and Yonatan, my two lovely boys.
May they live not only in a modern Palestine, but also in a peaceful
one". I wonder how Pappe's apologists will explain the use of the term
"Palestine" instead of "Israel"? Here is an Israeli academic, employed by
an Israeli university, wishing the demise of Israel and its replacement by
Palestine. If this is not a treasonous position, I wonder what would be?
Another Israeli academic, Ran HaCohen from Tel Aviv University, writes
articles for the extremist anti-Israel Antiwar.com web site. His articles
carry a small logo depicting the map of
Israel. One can sea the areas occupied by Israel in 1967, and the area in
Southern Lebanon that was occupied by Israel, and one can see Israel
within the green line, labeled as "occupied by Israel in 1948". Here is an
Israeli academic, employed by an Israeli university, who believes that ALL
of Israel is occupied territory.
Source:
http://list.haifa.ac.il/pipermail/alef/2004-May/005010.html

2. A newcomer to the ranks of the Israeli (or ex-Israeli) Jews for the
Liquidation of Israel is one Haim Bresheeth, who
teaches "film" at the University of East London, a fourth rate college in
the UK. A PLO stooge and active in "Jews against Zionism" - (which has
Neturei Karta ties), he actually has the nerve to claim to be some sort of
"maven" regarding the Holocaust, although his main mission is to prove
that the Zionists are responsible for it
(http://www.aldeilis.net/zion/zionhol01.html ).
Here he is in his sparkling brilliance:
http://www.inminds.co.uk/jews-against-zionism.html#t3 . He is currently
writing Bash-Israel pieces for the anti-Semitic Egyptian daily Al Ahram
(take a look at
http://www.mindspring.com/~fontenelles/bresheeth/bresheeth1.htm and
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/599/op2.htm ), best known for its
promotion of "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and theories about what
Jews put in Passover matzos. Here is the opening of his recent al-Ahram
piece, distributed by the Islamic Association For Palestine, P O BOX 1163
BRIDGEVIEW, IL 60455:

Sharon's willing accomplices

By Haim Bresheeth
Al-Ahram Weekly
29 April 5 May 2004
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/688/op8.htm
Bush and Blair will share in the historic guilt Israel will bear for
the crimes of Sharon, writes Haim Bresheeth*
Like a ventriloquist dummy speaking the words of its master, we
heard the world's most powerful man reciting a script written in
Jerusalem by one responsible for bathing the Middle East in blood
for decades.
***
His web page is
http://www.uel.ac.uk/cultural-innovation/about/staff/haim-bresheeth.htm
and his personal email addres is haimb@blueyonder.co.uk

Want to write to the "Governors" of the college about him? They are
listed at http://www.uel.ac.uk/governors/membership.htm

4. Thanking Ariel Sharon: http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=3607

5. Cheers for Doug Feith:
http://nationalreview.com/gaffney/gaffney200404300909.asp

6. The Real Mideast 'Poison'
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0404/krauthammer_2004_04_30.php3
By Charles Krauthammer

7. The PC Thought Patrol:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0404/femina.html

Posted 5/01/2004 03:26:00 AM

1. Israel's Manslaughtering Court
Israelnn.com News:
More details on yesterday's massacre of the five members of the Hatuel
family are now known. These included the pregnant mother and her four
daughters.

More details on yesterday's massacre of the five members of the Hatuel
family are now known. Two terrorists from Dir el-Balah, the Arab village
closest to Kfar Darom and the Kisufim route to Gush Katif, lay in wait
around noon for Jewish cars to arrive.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Yaalon, who arrived at the scene of the
attack this morning, made it plain where he places the blame: The Supreme
Court. He said that lining the Kisufim Route are "houses that, for
security reason, we wanted to remove, and pay the occupants compensation.
But the legal system did not allow us to do this." The homes served as
camouflage for the terrorists and their actions. As of last night,
however, this is no longer true: the army did not ask anyone and destroyed
13 houses in the region, as well as three more in the Rafiach area. Four
of these were houses that the Court previously ruled could not be
destroyed, and two of them were houses that helped hide yesterday's
terrorists.


2. Jerkwater, Gaza - A Story of Gush Katif (from 1994)

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 distaer 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 mpt 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 othe 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 gatgate 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.

http://www.jewishmag.com/11mag/opinion/opinion.htm