Listening To Saddam

Doodad

Although I knew about it I had forgotten that US forces found tons of tapes of Saddam talking to his inner circle. Now a new book has been written about it called Listening To Saddam. Alex Joffe suggests that this material is relevant to Iran. I would suggest that it goes even further than that.

Joffe reveals:

"For Saddam as for the mullahs, Israel was the "one who raped our land," the "despised entity," the entity "rejected by humanity and by the nation." Zionists, Israelis, and Jews were undifferentiated. Saddam thought the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were to be carefully studied as an invaluable historical record of the global Jewish Zionist conspiracy. He believed Israel was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Zionists were responsible for reviving Pharaonic civilization in Egypt and Phoenician civilization in Lebanon in order to "break up the fabric of Arab nations." For Saddam, anti-Semitism was not simply an expedient or cover but a central organizing principle of life and thought.....Saddam saw himself as a world historical figure, a revolutionary leader with a unique destiny—yet he was also conspiratorial, egotistical, ill-informed, fundamentally Muslim, and irretrievably anti-Semitic. In different ratios, these features also describe the Iranian leadership. Their self-concept is no less revolutionary than Saddam's, and their goals are no less grandiose: resisting America's "global arrogance," driving it from the Gulf and Middle East, restoring Iranian and Muslim honor, and creating a "world without Zionism."

Saddam, Mullahs, The Muslim Brotherhood, etc etc etc. These ideas are as common as cornflakes in the Arab/Muslim world. It is indeed, "a central organizing principle of life and thought." The thing is, it's not about to change soon. It may never change!

So spare me the nonsense about it being Israel's fault or the settlers' fault. Don't make me laugh by suggesting land for peace or Israeli concessions or any of that tired old garbage. Don't tell me it's Bibi's fault, Likud's fault when it's been going on no matter what "wing," was in power. Just stop it. We all know where the real problem lies. It preceded any Occupation so forget that little hoax too. Why continue your little meaningless leftist/Progressive charade? You want peace? Then open your eyes and start pressuring and lecturing the parties with the real problem

Brief Notes: Obama Validates Palestinian Racism Against Jews

Michael

{Cross-Posted at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers}

Why is Barack Obama validating Palestinian racism? That has to be one of the fundamental questions going forward. Every time that Barack Obama (or for that matter representatives of the EU or run-of-the-mill western “progressives”) complain about Jews building housing for themselves in what Jordan dubbed “the west bank” they are validating Palestinian racism against us.

Mahmoud Abbas claims that he cannot accept a Palestinian state in peace next to the Jewish one so long as Jews continue to build housing for themselves in Judea.

Why?

If Israel can have Christian and Muslim citizens, why cannot the Palestinian Authority accept the idea that any future state of Palestine will also have Jewish citizens? The reason, of course, is because the Palestinian Authority has no intention whatsoever in ending the Jihad against the Jews of the Middle East and they do not want a state for themselves in peace next to Israel.

If that is what the Palestinians wanted they could have had that long ago.

And that, today, is my brief note.

.

Brief Notes: Reforming the Right?

Michael

Maybe it is time for Jewish liberals to start thinking about joining the Republican Party and reforming the American right. I have been a Democrat for a couple of decades and have only recently re-registered as independent, but it is becoming more and more obvious that the grassroots of the Democratic-Left is no friend to the Jewish state and thus no friend to the Jewish people.

That being the case what I would like to see is more Jewish participation among conservatives with a mind for helping to reform the Republican Party. There is no question, as anyone even vaguely familiar with the polling knows, that Republicans and conservatives are better friends to Israel than are Democrats and Progressives.

Why should Jewish people be the only people in the country wherein we are not supposed to politically support our own well-being? Because the progressive movement has made a home of itself for anti-Semitic anti-Zionists we need to split off.

And that, today, is my brief note.

.
.
.

And a Tip 'O the Kippa to Doodad for pointing out this Palestinian bit of liberality on PA television from just last week:



Palestinian kids are "created to be fertilizer for land of Palestine, to saturate land with their blood"

Palestinian TV (Fatah) - Jan. 24, 2012:

PA TV narrator: "In the refugee camp Ein Al-Hilwe [in Lebanon], a rally was held in celebration of the [47th] anniversary [of Fatah]. A political symposium was also held on the occasion of the event":

Our children are our honor and glory,
they were created to be fertilizer for the land of Palestine,
and for our pure land to be saturated with their blood.

And, yet, the left still blames the Jews.

.

Erasing Jewish History

Karam

Dr. Issam Sissalem, Educational TV Lecturer, Senior Historian at Islamic University, Gaza:

There is nothing on this land but our history, and all the prophets are our prophets. Abraham, the father of prophets, was an Arab prophet, "a monotheist and a Muslim." [Quran] And Jacob commanded his sons: "Do not die, except as Muslims." [Quran] The Hasmoneans were [also] Arabs from Edom. As historians, we state: All the remains in this land are ours, and we do not want to hear names that the enemy uses.

One of the tactics that Israel's enemies use is to erase Jewish history and fabricate Arab-Muslim history in the land of Israel.

Above we have a well-respected Palestinian "historian" claiming that the biblical figures of Abraham and Jacob were actually Muslims, despite the fact that Islam was not invented for millennia after their deaths. This, along with claiming that Jesus was the first "Palestinian shaheed" or that the Second Temple was never located on the Temple Mount, represent prominent examples of how Palestinians fabricate a false history for themselves as they seek to erase the actual history of the Jewish people.

This is just the kind of thing, btw, that "progressive Zionists" cannot bring themselves to confront because the topic, along with so many other topics around I-P as you can see from our list on the right side of this page, is entirely taboo among them.

The erasing of Jewish history and the invention of a long "Palestinian" history is one of the tactics of delegitimization that Israel faces yet progressives, whether Zionist or otherwise, absolutely refuse to discuss this kind of thing. This is fairly understandable among progressives, in general, because progressives tend to be unfriendly toward the state of Israel, so why should they care?. As for why pro-Israel Jewish progressives would also ignore the erasing of Jewish history as part of Palestinian discourse, it is difficult to fathom their refusal to discuss it or in any way counter it.

I can only conclude that progressive discourse being what it is, Jewish liberals are afraid of being called "racist" if they faced Palestinian politics directly. If they did face Palestinian politics directly they would have to admit that the PA, as well as Palestinian culture, incites hatred toward Jews, steals Jewish history, and fabricates Palestinian history.

They would have to admit that Arab and Palestinian Koranically-based racism is the fundamental source of the conflict and that the conflict needs to be viewed within the context of 1,300 years of Jewish oppression at the hands of the Arab majority.

The problem is that on the progressive-left one cannot discuss the conflict without castigating the Israeli Jews as racists and colonialists and imperialists and racists and just really, really bad people. They can point the finger at Likud. They can point the finger at Netanyahu and Lieberman. They can defame the "settlers" in Judea as evil people, but the one thing that they cannot do is speak honestly about Arab and Palestinian tactics or responsibility for this miserable and never-ending conflict.

Thus they will never discuss "Pallywood" or the recent construction of Palestinian identity or the historical connections between the Nazis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Palestinian national movement. Thus they can never go on offense, must always play defense, and therefore can never really win the argument.

Within progressive venues the game is rigged entirely in favor of the Arabs against the Jews. In fact, even discussing the conflict as a conflict between Arabs and Jews is frowned upon because it reverses the formulation of Palestinian "David" versus Israeli "Goliath."

And that, above all, can never be tolerated.

.

In Praise of the Murderers of a Months Old Baby Girl

Karam

Relatives praise Fogel family murderer on Palestinian TV

During a program aired on Palestinian television last week, the aunt of one of the Palestinians who took part in the brutal murder of five members of the Fogel family in the West Bank last march referred to him as a "hero" and "legend."...

In response to the aunt's comments, the show's host said, "We also wish them (murderers) well."

The aunt went on to read a poem she had written in the murderers' honor, while Hakim Awad's mother sent her regards to her son and proudly mentioned that he was the perpetrator of the Itamar massacre.

Yes, how proud she must be.

And I know. I know. I know.

The problem is not with them so much as it is with me for highlighting this little bit of news. We're supposed to pretend that 5.5 million Jews are not surrounded by 300 to 400 million Arabs who do not want them there and that many of those are not more than happy to see them slaughtered.

If I say that, tho, it makes me a "racist" so it's better to pretend that it's Netanyahu's fault or Lieberman's fault or because Ariel Sharon was mean or because there are Jews who live where Barack Obama does not want them to.


.

King Without a Crown

Karam

.

Turkey may provide Hamas with $300 million in annual aid

DOODAD

"Turkey may provide Hamas with $300 million in annual aid, Turkish sources report. The aid would take place of Iranian funding, which has been significantly reduced. Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh reportedly received assurances to this effect during his recent visit to Turkey."

That's right President Obama. Hug that genocidal terrorist supporting buddy of yours.

.

We Have Right on Our Side

Karam

{Cross-Posted at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers}

One of the things that needs to be understood among pro-Israel advocates is that we do, in fact, have right on our side. I am not convinced that everyone in the pro-Israel community really believes that. As someone who spent years battling it out in the ditches of the progressive I-P blogosphere in places like Daily Kos, I can unequivocally tell you that many Jewish friends of Israel still believe that large parts of the "Palestinian narrative" are true.

They believe that Israel is holding the Palestinians under an unjust Occupation (they always capitalize the "O" as if it is the mother of all occupations, the uber-occupation, if you will) that must end and that it is Israel's responsibility to end it. This is the fundamental crux of the disagreement between "progressive" pro-Israel Jews and the rest of us.

As someone who watches the I-P debate (and the I-P Jewish debate) in a close daily manner, it is clear to me that the Obama administration has great potential for dividing the Jewish community. Because Barack Obama is bleeding support within the Jewish electorate this will, naturally, set Jewish people arguing among ourselves. {Shocking. I know.} Alan Dershowitz has consistently argued that we must do what we can to maintain bipartisan support for Israel within the general American electorate and I agree entirely.

The question is, though, how do we do that when we have a Democratic administration that validates a genocidal, fascist organization like the Muslim Brotherhood? Furthermore, how do we maintain political solidarity among Jews when the Jewish left tends to believe that the onus is on Israel to accept what it has always accepted, two states for two peoples, and therefore foreign pressure must be leveled onto the Jewish state, rather than on those who truly represent an obstacle to the two-state solution, the Palestinian leadership in both Fatah and Hamas?

The problem with the Jewish left is not only that they tend to forever focus their energies against Jewish conservatives, but that they perpetually ignore the millions upon millions of people around Israel that wants to see it destroyed. This is not hyperbole, but quite literally the case. The Muslim and Arab world is absolutely rife with genocidal anti-Semitism and, with the encouragement of the Obama administration, Radical Islam is coming into power, via the so-called "Arab Spring," in country after country in the Middle East. If the progressive movement doesn't have the stomach to face this, and if progressive Jews likewise have their heads in the sand, how can there possibly be any political solidarity among Jews, left, right, and center, who care about the state of Israel?

This is a good question, it seems to me.

The answer is in promoting the understanding of two major points. The first point that we need to agree upon, if we can, is that Radical Islam is a genuine and widespread political movement that seeks not only the resurrection of the Caliphate, but the genocide of the Jews. And, two, that Arab opposition to the presence of a Jewish state on that tiny bit of land is immoral on its face given the thirteen hundred years of Jewish oppression (dhimmitude) by the Arab majority. What they call the "Occupation" is nothing more than Jewish self-defense in the face of perpetual Arab hostility.

It seems to me that if we can really agree on these two points then we can reconcile the differences among Jewish people throughout the political landscape and thereby present a united front.

The key is recognizing that we have right on our side, which we most assuredly do, and that the Radical Jihad is not some fantasy of George W. Bush's fevered imagination.

.

The Erosion of the Antisemitic Taboo-Updated

Doodad

Those of us who have been paying attention know that there have been a lot of comments from well known people on the left who should know better, which are close to or downright antisemitic. Worse, no one in the mainstream media is calling anyone on these remarks. Lee Smith asks:

"Why is it that no one bats an eyelash when a former United States national security adviser says, “The Israelis have  lot of influence with Congress, and in some cases they are able to buy influence”........Why didn’t his Salon interviewer call him out on it? Why hasn’t anyone else? Where are the American elites—the intellectuals, writers, policymakers, and political activists—when it comes to vigilance against anti-Semitism?"

Smith goes on to list some of the things being said and who is saying them. I suggest you read the whole informative article. He really hits the nail when he says:

"The root of this problem is not a twentysomething blogger writing something stupid on the Internet. Rather, it is that anti-Semitic rhetoric and logic are being protected and justified by those who are supposed to be gatekeepers. These people, often in the service of their larger political aims, are willing to apologize for or ignore what is obviously Jew-baiting and Jew-hatred."

"In service of their larger political aims," for sure but what will they do when they allow that genie all the way out of the bottle? It will be almost impossible to put it back in. I suspect many on the left don't want it put back in given its power in the blame Israel game. The cowardly gatekeepers? Your guess is as good as mine.

UPDATE

Joel B Pollak cites Lee's article and another:

“Israel Firster” has a nasty anti-Semitic pedigree, one that many Jews will intuitively understand without knowing its specific history. It turns out white supremacist Willis Carto was reportedly the first to use it, and David Duke popularized it through his propaganda network. And yet [Media Matters' M.J.] Rosenberg and others actually claim they’re using it to stimulate “debate,” rather than effectively mirroring the tactics of some of the people they criticize…The attempt to kosherize “Israel Firster” is an ugly rationalization."


Spencer Ackerman opines: "Some on the left have recently taken to using the term "Israel Firster" and similar rhetoric to suggest that some conservative American Jewish reporters, pundits, and policymakers are more concerned with the interests of the Jewish state than those of the United States. Last week, for example, Salon's Glenn Greenwald asked Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg about any loyalty oaths to Israel Goldberg took when he served in the IDF during the early 1990s. (On Tuesday, writer Max Blumenthal used a gross phrase to describe Goldberg: "former Israeli prison guard.") The obvious implication is that Goldberg's true loyalty is to Israel, not the United States. For months, M.J. Rosenberg of Media Matters, the progressive media watchdog group, has been throwing around the term "Israel Firster" to describe conservatives he disagrees with. One recent Tweet singled out my friend Eli Lake, a reporter for Newsweek: "Lake supports #Israel line 100% of the time, always Israel first over U.S." That's quite mild compared to some of the others."

Goldberg reveals an email he recieved after the prison guard comment:

"You can tried to hide your past but it's not working. We all know now that you worked in a concentration camp for Palestinians." 

What a sad state of affairs.

For Old Friends and Old Days:

Karam



.

The Fresno Zionist Has a Clear View

Karam

"Israel will attack Iran"

by FresnoZionist:

In today’s New York Times is a long article by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman entitled “Will Israel Attack Iran?” It is the best-informed article I’ve read on this subject yet. It is also rational and fair — there are no villains other than the Iranian regime. It is a must-read.

Bergman has interviewed Ehud Barak and several former Mossad heads. He includes a fascinating account of the various covert actions undertaken by the Mossad and perhaps other agencies like the CIA, to delay the Iranian weapons program.

There are voices in Israel that say that an attack on Iran would be ineffective or the Iranian reaction so damaging as to make even an effective attack a Pyrrhic victory at best. But the position of Defense Minister Barak and PM Netanyahu seems to be that a nuclear Iran is inconsistent with the continued existence of the state. They believe that there are only a few months in which to stop it, before the program has advanced to the point that an Israeli military intervention will be impossible.

They would like to see Iran stopped peacefully, perhaps a result of economic pressure. The next best option would be an American military operation. But the point of no return is farther off for the US than for Israel, due to its greater firepower and, to be honest, a lesser degree of concern. Iran is expected to hide what it is doing, to pretend to negotiate seriously, to put all the pieces of the puzzle in place except for the final assembly of a weapon. But at some point, Israel’s red line will be reached. If the US has not acted by then, Israel will be forced do so. Bergman expects that point to be reached sometime this year, before US elections.

All this makes sense to me. It is almost impossible to believe that the US will launch an attack on Iran in the next few months. I can’t see any advantage for the administration, which would be accused of pulling a “wag the dog” maneuver. The resulting oil shock, as well as possible retaliation against American troops in the region, or even terrorism against the US, would be blamed on Obama at the worst possible time.

But this makes an Israeli strike almost a certainty.

Israel’s intention seems to be to inform Washington at the last possible moment, in order to show respect for its most important ally, but not give it enough time to stop it. The US, on the other hand, will try to find out when Israel is preparing to strike. Both President Obama and Israeli officials have pointed to the high level of military cooperation between Israel and the US as a sign of a coincidence of objectives between the countries. But there may be other reasons it is advantageous for the US to be in close contact with the Israeli military. Some analysts have suggested that a joint military exercise planned for April was canceled due to Israeli reluctance to have 9,000 US personnel in the country at this time.

There is no question that the Obama Administration would like any action to be delayed until after the election. The issue is how far the US will go to prevent an Israeli attack before then. Opinions range from “not past diplomatic pressure” to “we will shoot at Israeli planes.”

I’m going to go with the first option. While I think the administration would rather avoid the political risks of doing the job itself, the goals of the US and its very influential conservative Sunni Arab allies would best be served by keeping Iran from going nuclear. It would be convenient for the administration to have Iran defanged, while Israel can be blamed for any unpleasant side effects.

Israel will probably find itself fighting Hizballah and Hamas, either preemptively or after they are unleashed by Iran in retaliation. There may even be attacks from other Palestinian elements who take advantage of the situation. At this point, we can assume that the US, UN, Europe, Russia, etc. will ratchet up the pressure on Israel in the name of ‘peace’, but actually to prevent any real change in the status quo. I hope Israel will be able to resist this pressure and finally crush the terrorist militias.

So there it is. I don’t blame my Israeli friends and relations who look ahead with trepidation toward what may become Israel’s most damaging war. In fact I understand those who say that there is no future in fighting one war after another, ad infinitum. I understand that a lasting peace would be far better than winning a series of wars, with their unavoidable human and material cost.

Of course I also understand that there is only one way to get this lasting peace, and that is by defeating the enemy soundly enough and often enough that they will understand that peace is to their advantage as well.

.

Occupy Aipac Morons

Doodad

Had to happen sooner or later, didn't it? You just know that after all the antisemitic stuff coming out of the Occupy This and That movement that Aipac would be a target and with that would come the antisemitic tropes and lies.

" Right now AIPAC is trying to drag us into a disastrous conflict with Iran, just as they had pushed for the Iraq war."

Organized by CodePink and a bunch of the other usual suspects, this hateorama promises to be just another antisemitic outpouring from the left who now seems to believe that the "1%," can be just whoever they hate.

The Occupy movement received little if any criticism from most progressives so far. I wonder how they will react to this antisemitic hatefest?

Obama Administration Attacks Israel at the UN

{A Tip 'O the Kippa to Doodad.}

Karam

WASHINGTON – The US, Britain and Germany leveled harsh criticism at Israel's settlement construction policy on Tuesday.

During a Security Council session, US Ambassador Susan Rice urged Israel to halt all settlement construction in the West Bank and work to quell settler violence against Palestinians. She also expressed concern over the humanitarian situation in Gaza...

British Ambassador to the UN Mark Grant accused Israel of employing violence in the territories and called on the Jewish state to halt all settlement construction, including in east Jerusalem.

Germany's UN ambassador, Peter Wittig, said Israel was attempting to detach east Jerusalem from the West Bank, a move he claimed would make the establishment of a Palestinian state impossible.

All this racist yammering about Jews building housing for themselves in Jewish neighborhoods of Judea is a disgrace. This is Obama's doing. By harping on where Jews may, or may not, be allowed to live on that land Obama has poisoned the well entirely.  No other US president has undermined the potential for a negotiated conclusion of hostilities by imposing "total settlement freeze" as a precondition for negotiations.  That is pure Obama.

But just because Jews are living on historically Jewish land in what Jordan dubbed "the West Bank" it doesn't mean that Palestinian dictator Mahmoud Abbas cannot sit down with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and draw a line on a map. Thankfully the Israelis, themselves, do not seem to be suffering from the kind of racist delusions that are motivating the diplomatic corps in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain, as validated by the American president.

In his response to the criticism, Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor told the Security Council, "The primary obstacle to peace is not settlements. The primary obstacle to peace is the so-called 'claim (right) of return.' Let me repeat that: the major hurdle to peace is the Palestinian’s insistence on the so-called 'claim of return.'"

"You will never hear Palestinian leaders say 'two states for two peoples'. If you ever hear them say 'two states for two peoples', please phone my office immediately. Call me 'collect' in the event of such an unprecedented occurrence," he said.

"You won’t hear them say 'two states for two peoples' because today the Palestinian leadership is calling for an independent Palestinian state, but insists that its people return to the Jewish state. This would mean the destruction of Israel.

It is, in my opinion, long past time for Israel to stop dragging its feet and declare its final eastern borders and remove the IDF behind those borders. Furthermore, the Palestinians have forfeited any claims on Jerusalem by refusing to accept a state for themselves in peace next to Israel. That being the case, Israel should make it clear to the world that the Jews will not accept the division of our ancient capital city.

Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish state.

If the Palestinians cannot bring themselves to accept a Jewish country on the land where Jews come from then they can have lovely Ramallah as their capital.

.

Do Not Speak Of It In Public.

Karam

Barry Rubin writes:

Do not speak of it in public. Do not expect any Israeli official to admit it. But Israel is facing an issue unlike anything it has had to deal with during the past 50 years: It cannot depend on the United States.

The reason that Israel cannot depend on the United States is the very same reason that Jews, as a group, cannot depend on the western progressive-left. It is because the progressive movement, as well as the Obama administration, either buries its head in the sand in regards genocidal Muslim anti-Semitism or actively helps the Jihad, as we saw with the flotilla nonsense.

The difficulty with Obama is that his entire strategy in the Middle East is contrary to Israeli interests, except for putting some sanction’ pressure on Iran regarding its nuclear weapons’ program. The greatest threat to Israel today is the rise of radical Islamist regimes. Here is how Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh puts it:

"The Palestinian cause is winning. With the Muslim Brotherhood part of the government [in Egypt], they [the Egyptians] will not besiege Gaza. They will not arrest Palestinians. They will not give cover to Israel to launch a war....Israel is disturbed by this. It knows the strategic environment is changing. Iran is an enemy. Relations are deteriorating with Turkey. With Egypt, they are really cold. Israel is in a security situation they have never been in before."

But neither the progressive movement, nor the Obama administration, view the rise of radical Islam as a problem. Sure, Islamists want to murder the Jews, but just why should Barack Obama or the progressive movement care about that? The fact of the matter is that they do not care in the least, which is why it doesn't bother them that the Muslim Brotherhood has taken over Egypt and radical Islam is spreading throughout the region.  In fact, under the Obama administration it is verboten to even name the problem which, of course, means that you cannot really discuss it and thus even begin to solve it.

Here is where the problem with the United States comes in. Obama does not really view this trend as a threat. He spent the first half of his term engaging with Iran and its ally Syria. Obama and his administration regards the Islamists as people who are either already moderate or are likely to become so by governing.

Since neither progressives, nor the president of the United States, have any intention of honestly facing the rise of the Jihad they simply redefine it as "moderate" and then go about either helping it or ignoring it.

To put it bluntly, the U.S. government does not even recognize the existence of the number-one threat to Israel.

And to make matters worse, the government that Obama looks to for advice, guidance, and interpretation of the region is not Israel but the Islamist regime in Turkey. That government’s sharp turn to a highly emotional anti-Israel policy has not cost it anything at all in terms of its relations with the White House, something that would have been unthinkable under any previous president.

This is because the Obama White House is simply no friend to the Jewish state and therefore cannot be considered a friend to the Jewish people. Obama has yet to visit Israel as president and even told a collected group of American Jewish leaders that they needed to talk to their friends in Israel and encourage them to explore their souls to see if they truly desire peace. Can you imagine? Barack Obama tells the world that Jewish people are not self-reflective enough and that's why there is no peace? What a horrendous and insulting thing for anyone to say, yet Barack Obama's dwindling number of Jewish supporters seem like they will forgive him anything.

Well, you know how love is.

That is why Israel, as well as the Middle East generally, is going to be an important issue in this year’s presidential election. To preserve relations with the United States, Israeli leaders will neither do nor say anything about that contest. Yet nothing could be more obvious than that Obama’s reelection would be extremely damaging for Israel’ security.

Indeed. If Obama is reelected there will be nothing whatsoever to hold his worst inclinations in check.

.

The Evolution of the Oldest Hatred

Karam

Editor's Note - Some time ago the FresnoZionist agreed to allow me to publish his work here so long as I credited him and linked back to his fine blog. I very much like this most recent piece and was actually at the anti-war rally, in Civic Center, San Francisco, where the photo above was taken a few years ago.

At the time I still considered myself a Lib Dem.

.
.
.

Somebody asked me to expand on the remark I made Friday, when I said,

Today the impulse to hate — at least as it affects the more sophisticated Americans and Europeans — is directed at the concrete national expression of the Jewish people, the state of Israel, rather than at ‘the Jews’ … Irrational, obsessive hate is irrational, obsessive hate. Only the object is different. And the bloody results can be the same.

People that hate Israel every bit as viciously as the Nazis hated Jews are at pains to distinguish their hatred from antisemitism, because although anti-Zionism is acceptable, antisemitism is not.

Today, there is an absolute taboo in educated Western society against racist or ‘prejudiced’ speech. Even some words (or ones that sound like them) are absolutely forbidden. Do you recall this incident?

On January 15, 1999, David Howard, a white aide to Anthony A. Williams, the black mayor of Washington, D.C., used “niggardly” in reference to a budget. This apparently upset one of his black colleagues (identified by Howard as Marshall Brown), who interpreted it as a racial slur and lodged a complaint. As a result, on January 25 Howard tendered his resignation, and Williams accepted it [he was later offered another position] … Howard felt that he had learned from the situation. “I used to think it would be great if we could all be colorblind. That’s naïve, especially for a white person, because a white person can’t afford to be colorblind. They don’t have to think about race every day. An African American does.” — Wikipedia

The Wikipedia article lists several similar incidents. Of course the word ‘niggardly’ has nothing to do with the famous ‘n-word’, in etymology or meaning – it comes from A Swedish dialect word that means ‘stingy’ or ‘miserly’. I mention this to illustrate how incredibly touchy we can be about this kind of taboo.

How did we get here? In America, the fact of slavery followed by institutionalized racism and the struggle to end it was especially traumatic, in different ways, for both whites and African-Americans. Similarly, the Holocaust created a sensitivity to antisemitism in Europe and America. Explicit Jew-hatred is almost never expressed by the educated classes in the US and Europe (although it is quite common in the Muslim world — a recent poll shows that only 2% of Egyptians have a favorable opinion of Jews).

It is almost unthinkable that a university teacher today would delver a lecture accusing international Jewry of conspiring to take over the world, or saying that Jews have inordinate control over the US government. On the other hand, the equally false propositions that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian Arabs (despite the fact that their number has grown steadily since Israel was established), and that US policy is warped by a powerful ‘Israel lobby’ are heard in classrooms every day.

Especially in left-wing circles, where political correctness is carefully enforced and nobody would dream of accusing Jews of putting Christian blood in their matzot, it is considered perfectly legitimate to accuse Israel of deliberately shooting Palestinian children, or of killing Arabs to steal their organs, on the strength of unsubstantiated statements made by Israel’s enemies — including those who themselves regularly practice murderous terrorism! But that doesn’t matter, because actual evidence is not required when the hatred is irrational.

We find irrational, obsessive and extreme hatred of the Jewish state everywhere on the Left, particularly among Jews. One example is here.

My thesis is that extreme Israel-hatred in this context is simply an evolved form of antisemitism. Let me explain.

Antisemitism is a meme.

A meme is “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.”A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures. — Wikipedia

While it’s possible to take analogies too far, the biological metaphor seems spot-on in this case. Like a living species, traditional antisemitism developed throughout European cultures (and spread to others) until 1945, because the environment was favorable to it. In fact, one can see the Holocaust as the logical result of this development, the final flowering of it.

But like biological population explosions in which a species’ excessive expansion can change its environment in ways that make it less hospitable to the organism, the horrors of WWII changed the cultural environment in which the antisemitism meme lives. At least among educated Westerners, a resistance to traditional Jew-hatred developed, and the meme was inhibited from reproducing there.

There were other reasons. I mentioned the trauma of white racism in America. An analogy was drawn between racism and antisemitism. A great amount of energy was directed towards extirpating all kinds of prejudice in our society. Political correctness developed, which helped suppress racism and antisemitism, but also has had other non-benign effects.

Unfortunately, like living creatures, memes have the ability to mutate and mutations that improve their ability to reproduce in a particular cultural environment will be strengthened by natural selection. So rather than dying out, the meme evolved. Jew-hatred became Israel-hatred. Instead of being directed at a group of people because of who or what they are, it was directed at the state that they created for themselves. The taboos against racism and prejudice were circumvented, because the meme could be presented as political opposition to a country rather than hate for a people.

Little else changed. The fundamental irrationality of traditional antisemitism, by which Jewish crimes and the evidence for them could simply be made up, remained. The ability of the antisemite to believe anything negative about the Jew no matter how outlandish, remained. The application of antisemitism to every area of human interaction — literature, music, sports, professions, etc., remained (consider academic boycotts, for example). The extreme vitriol that characterizes it, remained. And it appears that the ultimate goal — the destruction of the hated object — remains.

One way to see the connection between the Oldest Hatred and today’s attacks on Israel’s legitimacy is to note that what is being denied by Israel-haters today is that the Jewish people are a people, and they have a right of self-determination.

Keep this in mind the next time — and I’m sure there will be a next time, probably in the next few months — that there are massive anti-Israel demonstrations against the state of the Jewish people having the chutzpah to defend itself. Not much is new under the sun.

.

The "Humanitarian Racism" of the Progressive-Left

Karam

Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, has published an article on Y-Net entitled "Beware the humanitarian racist."

Gerstenfeld's thesis is one that we've spilled considerable pixels about in these parts. The fundamental idea is that "humanitarian racism," i.e., progressive-left racism, is of a different type than classical racism, which Gerstenfeld labels "ugly" racism. The ugly racist is the kind of mid-twentieth century racist who would have, for example, opposed the repeal of Jim Crow laws in the American south. The "humanitarian racist," however, operates differently. Like the "ugly racist" the "humanitarian racist" thinks that people of color are inferior to white people, but assigns responsibility for that inferiority to the behavior of white people, themselves.

Gerstenfeld writes:

The humanitarian racist’s conclusion differs, however, from that of the ugly racist. He or she considers that as the non-white or weak cannot be held responsible for their acts, one should look away as often as possible even if they commit major crimes. Ugly racists fortunately can no longer get articles published in mainstream media, but humanitarian racists unfortunately are welcomed by them.

The reason that progressives either perpetually ignore, or make excuses for, the genocidal anti-Semitism that gushes daily from the Islamic world is because the progressive movement is the most racist political movement in the west today. Progressive-left racism, or "humanitarian racism," is far more virulent on the left than is ugly racism on the right. Progressives like to think of themselves as morally superior to their right-wing contemporaries, but the truth of the matter is that the progressive movement is far more racist than is the conservative movement, but it is racism of a type that is considered acceptable within what we used to call "polite society."

When it comes to the world's lone Jewish state, Gerstenfeld writes:

Exposing humanitarian racists is neglected in the battle against the de-legitimization of Israel, although crucial. The success of the Palestinian narrative and its many lies in the Western world is, to a large extent, due to its continuous promotion by humanitarian racists. They present the Palestinians as victims only, referring as little as possible to the major crimes they perpetrate or support. In this way, the humanitarian racists have become supporters or allies of Palestinian terrorists, murder and genocide-promoters.

The reason that the "Palestinian narrative" is so pervasive on the left is because the left is absolutely crawling with "humanitarian racists." These people mean well, but they honestly believe that the Muslim world, 1.5 billion people, is so inferior to white people and so helpless in the face of white aggression that they can never be held responsible for even the most heinous crimes, such as strapping a suicide belt onto a youngster and sending him off to murder.

If a Palestinian cleric quotes the famous hadith about the necessity of Muslims killing Jews hiding behind trees, this is because "white people," in the form of the Israeli government, are oppressing the innocent "indigenous population" who must be supported even when they teach their children to hate and to kill.

The humanitarian racist worldview embodies many other distortions. If Arabs, for instance, cannot be held responsible for their criminal acts, others must be. The humanitarian racist thus has to look for scapegoats. That is why Israel is sometimes accused of the crimes the Palestinians committed.

The worst humanitarian racists on the progressive-left are undoubtedly the kind of anti-Semitic anti-Zionists that one finds crawling around places like Daily Kos. They think of themselves as morally superior to others and so superior to people of color, particularly Muslim and Arab people of color, that they hold them to no standards of human decency whatsoever.

Because the conservative right holds so closely to ideals of personal responsibility they avoided falling into this racist trap. The progressive-left, however, has embraced humanitarian racism to such an extent that it has become a defining feature of their worldview and politics.

There is a certain delicious irony, though, in the fact that the "anti-racist" left is considerably more racist than almost anyone else... even as they fling around unsubstantiated charges of racism in all directions like self-righteous confetti.

.

The Hadith Made Me Do It.

 Doodad

"Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu Sunday called on Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein to open an investigation into Jerusalem Mufti Sheikh Muhammad Hussein for incitement after he was recorded quoting a passage by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Hadith that calls for the killing of Jews. "These are grave words that the world needs to condemn," Netanyahu said...."

The Mufti's reply? He was  just quoting the Islamic text.

"I can't change the Hadith,"

When will the world learn that this is what it is all about? They can't change the Hadiths; they can't change the Koran. But if you notice it and talk about it, even if they admit it, you are a racist. To Hell with that.

The Progressive-Left Betrayal of the Jewish People

Karam

There are certain political realities that are so large that they fade into the background like wallpaper. One of the more obvious recent political realities that is doing so is the progressive-left betrayal of the Jewish people. The main argument, here, is that the progressive-left, as a movement, has betrayed its Jewish constituency through the acceptance of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism as part of that broader movement.

Since the more recent convulsions and rioting and revolution in the Arab world, foolishly labeled the "Arab Spring," progressives have gone on to justify the rise of political Islam (or the Radical Jihad) as democracy in action and therefore something that the west should welcome. The main beneficiary of this shake-up has been the Muslim Brotherhood which is now in the process of taking power in much of the region, particularly in Egypt.

Many on the progressive-left welcome the Muslim Brotherhood because, like Hamas (not to mention the Nazis), they gained power through democratic means. This, however, does not prevent the Brotherhood from being a virulently anti-Semitic and genocidal organization.

As Robert S. Wistrich (Professor of Modern History and Director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) writes:

In a sermon during Israel’s Cast Lead Operation in Gaza (9 January 2009), broadcast to millions on ‘al-Jazeera’ TV, he (Muslim Brotherhood leader, Yusuf al-Qaradawi) referred to the Jews as “treacherous aggressors,” a “profligate, cunning, arrogant band of people.” He fervently prayed to Allah to annihilate these oppressive, Jewish Zionist criminals. Not a single Jew, he declared, should be spared by the Almighty. “O Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.”13 A few weeks later, in a statement on ‘al-Jazeera’ TV (28 January 2009), the leading Sunni Muslim cleric in the world added the following gloss on Hitler and the Holocaust:

Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the Jews people who would punish them for their corruption... The last punishment was carried out by [Adolf] Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them—even though they exaggerated this issue—he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them... Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers.

That's the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, yet western progressives do not seem to mind the coming into power of his organization or political movement. Since Barack Obama has come into office political Islam went from being a heinously genocidal movement that controlled Iran, Lebanon, the Gaza strip and the Sudan to one that now controls, or is gaining control of, Iran, Lebanon, the Gaza strip, the Sudan, and Tunisia, Libya, Turkey, and Egypt, among other countries.

What we are currently witnessing is the most significant geo-political development since the fall of the Soviet Union and progressives are ignoring it entirely, despite the genocidally anti-Semitic nature of this movement. Calling this development the "Arab Spring" is something akin to calling the rise of Nazi Germany the "German Spring," about as cruel a misnomer as one can imagine.

As Wistrich notes:

If this is not genocidal anti-Semitic incitement, then the term has little meaning. The current supreme leader of the Brotherhood, Mohamed Budi, undoubtedly shares such views on Israel, Zionism, and the Jews. His advice in 2010 to the Mujahideen in Gaza to continue to “raise the banner of jihad against the Jews, [our] first and foremost enemies” was essentially echoing an undeviating gospel of hatred.

Yet we are to welcome this development in the name of the "blessings of liberty."

I say this is betrayal. It is a betrayal of the Jewish people by the progressive-left because the progressive movement is welcoming of these genocidal fascists.

Like Sheikh Qaradawi, the current leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood clearly believe that loathing of Jews and the destruction of Israel is mandated by God himself. Every Jew in the world is thereby designated an enemy within this ideology. Nor is it an accident that Qaradawi, like other Egyptian clerics, should quote an anti-Jewish saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad in a notorious hadith on the preconditions for the Day of Judgment. In his commentary, Qaradawi emphasized that the coming apocalyptic battle will not be “between Arabs and Zionists, or between Jews and Palestinians, or between Jews or anybody else.” His conclusion could not be more explicit. “ This battle will occur between the collective body of Muslims and the collective body of Jews, that is all Muslims and all Jews.”

This is what progressives are welcoming in the name of "democracy." It is this that president Obama welcomes when he calls the riots and revolutions something akin to the Revolution of '76 or the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s.

Since 1928, when Sheikh Hasan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brothers in Ismailiyah, the notion that Jews are by nature evil and can never peacefully co-exist with others has been axiomatic for the fundamentalist organization. An equally self-evident corollary is the denial of any possibility of Jewish self-rule (let alone a Jewish state) or even of civic equality with Muslims.

So, why in this world should Jewish people continue to support a political movement, the progressive movement, when it is so accepting of these fascists in the Middle East? Why are so many Jewish liberals so afraid to stand up for themselves?

With regard to Israel and the Jews, the fundamentalist attitude has never deviated during the past few decades, closely linked as it is to a truly paranoid fear of “Judaization”—often a synonym for secularism, westernization, liberal modernity, or “globalization.” Paradoxically, Brotherhood ideologues, despite their rabid anti-Westernism, have no problem in drawing liberally on non-Muslim sources for their radical anti-Semitism—whether it be the Russian Tsarist Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery, Henry Ford’s The International Jew, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, European antisemitic propaganda about Judeo-Masonic conspiracies, Christian anti-Talmudism, blood-libel slanders, or Western Holocaust denial.

The Muslim Brotherhood owes an ideological and historical debt to Nazi Germany, yet good, well-meaning, western liberals are welcoming the organization with open arms.

How this can be characterized as anything other than betrayal is beyond me.

Today's progressives are stretching the palm of friendship to the current iteration of Nazi ideology in the Arab world and, yet, they still expect our support? Ridiculous. It is long past time for Jews to drop this movement and see it for what it is. While claiming to stand for anti-racism and universal human rights, the progressive movement has thrown both those concepts into the garbage entirely.

The progressive-left stands for nothing and has sold the Jews down the river. The first thing to do now is simply acknowledge that fact.

You are betrayed.

.

Islamists Secure Top Spot in Egypt Elections

Karam

Muslim Brotherhood wins 38% share of seats in Egypt's first freely-elected parliament in decades. Hardline Islamist Al-Nour Party comes in second with 29% of seats...

Muslim Brotherhood's leader, Mohammed Badia, said on Friday that his party would honor the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, as long as the Jewish State does the same.

And, of course, as we learn in the comments, it's Israel's fault that Egypt is going fascist.

6. #2 The Question You Should Be Asking Is

How many people voted for the Muslim Brotherhood because of what Israel did to the people of Gaza during Operation Cast Lead while Mr. Mubarek stood idly by? or How many people voted for the Muslim Brotherhood because Mr. Mubarek was a sock puppet for the United States government, and by proxy, the wishes of the zionist Israeli government? or How many people voted for the Muslim Brotherhood because Mr. Murbarek was siphoning off million of dollars in US aid money for his own personal gain while millions of his people went to bed hungry at night?

World Citizen, the world (01.21.12)

.

Acknowledging a Mistake

Karma

I recently stated that Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, referred to the Muslim Brotherhood as a "moderate" organization, but was told by one reader (Kane in Arizona) that he could not find any evidence to verify this claim.

Upon looking into it, myself, I cannot either. Apparently, I made a mistake and am willing to own up to it. In truth, I was probably thinking of Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, who foolishly said that the Muslim Brotherhood was "secular."

The context of the discussion was whether or not the Obama administration is validating and bolstering that organization and the political movement of which it is the foremost expression, i.e., Radical Islam.

The fact of the matter, as anyone who is paying attention knows, the Obama administration is validating and bolstering the Muslim Brotherhood, both directly and through validating political Islam, more generally, as the outcome of Arab democracy and, thus, intrinsically worthy of support... which, of course, it is no such thing.

Nonetheless, Mr. Holder apparently never said what I thought that he had.

.

Death threats prompt Rushdie to cancel India visit

Doodad

"Authorities warn author of 'Satanic Verses' that he is potential target of underworld assassins following threats of protests from Muslim groups.

JAIPUR - Salman Rushdie will not attend a literature festival in India after authorities warned the controversial author he was a potential target of assassins at the event, following threats of protests from Muslim groups at his planned appearance."

That stuff like this still goes on in 2012 speaks for itself.

.

Israel Not An Ally?

 Doodad

Israel Matzav posts an interview with Obama wherein Israel seems not be rise to ally status. WTF?

"Our alliances with NATO, Japan, South Korea, our close military cooperation with countries like Israel have never been stronger. Our participation in multilateral organizations has been extremely effective. In the United Nations, not only do we have a voice, but we have been able to shape an agenda. And in the fastest-growing regions of the world in emerging markets in the Asia Pacific region, just to take one prominent example, countries are once again looking to the United States for leadership."

Developing an Argument

Karam

This little blog is, rightfully, a modest blog.

What we are doing here, from my perspective, is simply developing an argument over time. No single entry, or "diary," is meant to be taken as definitive. They are all small bricks which, over time, are building the structure of an argument. The conclusion of this argument is that the progressive-left, as a movement, has betrayed its Jewish constituency and that the Obama administration ruined any possibility of a near-term conclusion of hostilities between the Arabs and the Jews in the Middle East, while validating Arab anti-Jewish racism.

That's the focus.

If I were to lay out what Doodad, Oldschool26, and myself have been discussing over the preceding months in the form of an outline, say for a book, it might look something like this:


Part One, The Progressive Movement:


Chapter 1: Anti-Semitic anti-Zionism


Misdiagnosing the Source of the Problem

Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Spreading of Anti-Semitism in the Arab World

The New Historians and Edward Said

Betrayal: The Mavi Marmara and the Red-Green Alliance


Chapter 2: The Denial of History and Ideological Silencing (Or, What You Can't Discuss):


Language and Propaganda

"Jesus Was the First Palestinian Shaheed"

Pallywood

Newt and the Social Construction of Palestinian National Identity


Chapter 3: The Palestinian Colonization of the Progressive Mind


Post-Modernity and Neo-Colonial Theory

The Oslo Syndrome

Friends as Enemies, Enemies as Friends

The Palestinian Narrative


Chapter 4: Embracing the Multicultural Ideal and the Betrayal of Universal Human Rights


The Betrayal of Universal Human Rights

The Betrayal of the Women of the Middle East

The Betrayal of the Gays of the Middle East

The Betrayal of the Jews of the Middle East


Part Two, Obama's Failures:


Chapter 5: Killing Oslo and Validating Arab anti-Jewish Racism


"Total Settlement Freeze"

Biden's Outrage and Hillary's Tongue-lashing

A Judenrein Palestinian State


Chapter 6: Encouraging the Jihad and Playing Ostrich


If Bush Says that it is Raining...


Chapter 7: Capitulating to Iranian Nukes


Conclusion: Moving On


Anthony Wiener and NY-09

Who Let the Jews Out? (Who? Who?)



In any case, we press ahead.

.

Muslim Brotherhood Site Rife with Anti-Semitism

Karam

The Arabic website of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is rife with anti- Semitic and anti-Israel content, according to a recent report by a USbased media monitoring group. (Jerusalem Post)

Yes, I could not be more shocked.

The report found that the Islamist group’s website, Ikhwanonline.com, regularly features articles denying the Holocaust and warning Muslims against the covetous and exploitative nature of the “Jewish character.” Other articles extol jihad and martyrdom, condemn Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and denounce negotiations as means for regaining lands lost by Islam.

Is it wrong of me to remind readers that this is the very movement, the Islamist Spring, that Barack Obama has extolled?

I know that some will argue that Obama did not mean to support genocidal Islamism, but that he has we have in his own words. Upon the fall of Tunisia to political Islam, Obama said:

There are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat. So it was in Tunisia...

The reason that I continue to bang this drum is because I see no acknowledgement within Barack Obama's own political movement, the progressive-left, that he recognizes this mistake, a mistake that could easily lead to the slaughter of Jewish people.

Early this month Dr. Rashad Bayoumi, (The Muslim Brotherhood's) deputy leader, told Arabic media the group would never recognize the Jewish state.

“This is not an option, whatever the circumstances, we do not recognize Israel at all. It’s an occupying criminal enemy.”

An occupying criminal enemy.

As political Islam works its way throughout the Middle East, and as progressives, including Barack Obama, tell us what a wonderful development this is, the Islamists themselves tell us that they want Jewish blood. And still our "friends" in the progressive movement cheer them on.

How stupid is this, really?

One common motif on the Brotherhood’s site is “Jewish character” and its supposed history of sowing evil in the world.

In May 2010, following Israel’s Gaza flotilla raid, a writer named Mahmoud Abd Al-Rahman wrote on the website, “For ages, human society has faced the problem of the Zionist Jewish character. All nations and cultures are in agreement over the nature of the disease intrinsic in the Zionist character... namely sanctification of money, sex, robbery, interest and treachery.”

And, yet, this will not be discussed on progressive or Democratic blogs or websites or magazines.

Why is that, I must wonder?

The progressive movement has betrayed its Jewish constituency.

I do not see how this is any longer deniable.

.

Frames

{Cross-Posted at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers}

Karam

I have been criticized for my alternative framing of the Israel-Palestine conflict or, as I like to call it, the Long Arab War against the Jews. The truth of the matter is that framing is very much at the heart of what I am trying to do here.

Framing is important and what is most important is recognizing the framing of one's own political movement so that we can change that framing when necessary. It should be obvious by this point that progressive-left framing on I-P favors Arabs at the expense of Jews, despite the fact that we represent a tiny population in comparison to either Arabs or Muslims, who tend to be far more hostile to us than we are to them.

{The progressive tendency toward moral equivalency also needs analysis, but that is a discussion for another day.}

Given the uncertain status of Jews in the world, we win or lose this fight before it is even begun via framing. The well-being of the Jewish people, and the survival of the Jewish state, is very much dependent upon how our concerns get framed in venues throughout the world. The reason for this is because we are so small. 13 to 14 million Jews. That's it. We represent a tiny percentage of the world population, so what the world thinks of us makes a very big difference on the question of Jewish survival. This should be obvious. At the same time, a non-stop anti-Jewish / anti-Israel propaganda machine has been operating out of the Arab and Muslim worlds for decades and it has poisoned Jewish-Israeli relations with the progressive-left in Europe and the United States. This is because the inclination among progressives is to feel Palestinian pain due to Palestinian and Arab framing of the entire issue.

Let's take a couple of framing questions and hold them up to scrutiny. Let's take the "West Bank" versus "Judea and Samaria" and let's take the very notion that the conflict is one between Israelis and Palestinians.

The fact of the matter is that for thousands of years Judea and Samaria were called Judea and Samaria. It was only when Jordan occupied that land when we suddenly started hearing about a geographical location known as the "West Bank." Jordan called Judea part of the "West Bank" because it did not want to acknowledge the Jewish nature of that small part of the world. From 1967 until the present, despite the failure of Oslo, progressive-left Jews have also used the term "West Bank" because doing so encourages the possibility of giving that land away in a two-state solution deal. For quite some time now it has mainly been conservative Jews, the Likud, who frames the area as Judea and Samaria, their traditional names. Just as progressives want to give away that land in a two-state end of hostilities, so Likudniks, traditionally, believed that holding that land is a requirement for security.

The times have changed but, unfortunately, our framing has not changed with it. Since the Palestinians have shown the world in no uncertain terms that they have no intention of allowing the Jews of the Middle East to live in peace, state or no state, the old Oslo-based framing is now entirely counterproductive toward Jewish well-being. Calling Judea and Samaria the "West Bank" does little more at this point than validate the Palestinian narrative. The reason that Jews are almost always on the rhetorical defensive when it comes to discussing the Arab war against us is because we have a tendency to be so open-minded that our brains have fallen from our skulls and are now rolling around on the floor like marbles.

We cannot win a fight if we perpetually have that fight on our enemy's turf. That is, we cannot win the I-P argument if we insist upon adopting Palestinian framing. Calling Judea and Samaria the "West Bank" is Arab framing. Every time we use that framing we've already lost the discussion because embedded in the idea of "West Bank" is the notion that it does not belong to the Jews, but it's impossible to get people to believe that Judea is not Jewish so they don't call it by its proper, long-standing name. The reason to call Judea by its proper name is not because we necessarily wish to keep the area, but because it is, in truth, traditional Jewish land and if Israel wishes to be so gracious as to gift that land to their neighbors, so be it. In the mean time, Palestinian propagandists scream from the hillsides that the "West Bank" was stolen from them by those conniving Jews. I say that we force them to make the argument that the Jews stole Judea from its rightful owners, a brand-spanking new type of Arab that the world calls "Palestinians."

Another very big part of the framing issue has to do with underdogs and overcats. Between 1948 and 1967, the non-Arab, non-Muslim world was mainly in sympathy with the Jews of the Middle East who they viewed as a scrappy underdog surrounded by enemies 100 times their number. This is still the case. Israel remains under siege and its towns continue to get rocketed by Arab forces, but the world no longer sees scrappy little Israel as an underdog. Progressives like underdogs much more than they like facts. If even the most heinous and guilty individual can get progressives to view him as the underdog they will take his side.

After 1967, the Arabs changed the framing from that of a conflict between the vast Arab nation versus the small, harrassed Jews to a conflict between the great Israeli war machine versus the innocent, indigenous Palestinians and this is the framing that progressives use to this day. This is why "progressive Zionists" constantly get kicked around on places like Daily Kos. It's because other well-meaning progressives no longer see Jewish people as worthy of sympathy because the framing makes of us a colonial, imperalistic, racist people oppressing the other. This framing is entirely false, but so long as it operates in the background as a given among those having the conversation then the Jews can never win the argument. So long as "progressive" Jews continue to employ Palestinian-Arab framing of the issue they will continue to be kicked around in left-wing political venues and on the university campuses.

I say that we create new framing that stays true to history, that stays true to current events, but that frames the argument in such a way that the Jews of the Middle East are not maligned before the conversation even begins. Progressives, following the lead of Arab propogandists since 1967, have framed the I-P conflict in a way that maligns Jews and "Progressive Zionists" catapult that anti-Jewish framing, whether they realize it or not.

I have suggested that it is imperative that we must free ourselves from the Palestinian colonization of the Jewish mind, but we can only do that if we rid ourselves of Palestinian framing.

Times are changing and it is long past time that we change with it.

Adapt or die.

.

This is What They Teach Children

Karam

Through the worship [of Allah], we shall gain victory over our enemies, strengthen our religion, and defeat the Jews. The Messenger of Allah said: "Judgment Day will not come before the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Muslims will kill the Jews, and the Jews will hide behind the trees and the stones, and then the trees and the stones will say: Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the gharqad tree will not speak because it is one of the trees of the Jews."

This has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with embedding anti-Semitism directly into the core of the religion of Islam. Furthermore, of course, this is nothing new, but represents the kinds of things that Muslims have often told one another since the time of the prophet.

Only in the minds of progressives, however, does pointing out Muslim anti-Semitism become "Islamophobia." It's as if, as far as progressives are concerned, it's OK to spit Islamist anti-Semitic hatred at Jews, but if the Jews complain about it that makes us "racist."

How's that for a world turned inside out and upside down?

How's that for a sick game, really?

.

A Response to Kane

Karam

Who writes:

The Egyptian people have validated the Muslim Brotherhood, not Obama or the US administration...

Kane is wrong.

The Obama administration has not only sabotaged the peace process, but it has validated the Muslim Brotherhood, an anti-Semitic, genocidal organization that has an historical provenance that goes to Nazi Germany.

Say "hello" to Sayyid Qutb.



The mustache was considered snazzy in Cairo at the time.  Sayyid was a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and the author of a small essay called "Our Struggle with the Jews" wherein he writes:

The Jews also conspired against Islam by inciting its enemies against it throughout the world...This has brought the Jews of the latest era to being the chiefs of the struggle with Islam, on every foot of the face of the earth...The Jews are (also) the ones who utilize Christianity and idolatry in this comprehensive war ...... And they attack every foundation of this religion (Islam), in a Crusader-Zionist war!! How right was Allah, the most Mighty, in saying: "You will surely find the worst enemies of the Muslims to be the Jews and the polytheists."

At the center of Brotherhood ideology is the Jew as cosmic enemy, yet Kane writes:

It does appear that they will have significant influence in the new Egyptian government. Opening lines of communication with them is a recognition of political realities. They are, just as Hamas is.

This might be true if the administration was merely opening lines of communication, as if we need to talk with fascists, but it goes much farther than that. The administration validates an anti-Semitic genocidal movement when, as Barack Obama said, it compares the rise of the Jihad throughout the Middle East to some ridiculous combination of the Revolution of '76 and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s.

This is what Barack Obama said directly after the fall of Tunisia:

There are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat. So it was in Tunisia...

This does not demonstrate a sober understanding of the nature of this movement, but is an endorsement of it.

Barack Obama endorses the rise of the Jihad and progressives tell us that it is mere pragmatism on the part of the administration. I think it is the inappropriately blasé response to the rise of the Jihad, on the part of Obama's apologists, that is perhaps most disconcerting. Since Obama has come to office, political Islam has taken over country after country in the Middle East, yet his supporters merely shrug their shoulders.

This blasé attitude is reflected in Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta's attitude.

I understand the view that this is not the time to pursue peace, and that the Arab awakening further imperils the dream of a safe and secure, Jewish and democratic Israel. But I disagree with that view... The problem right now is we can’t get them to the damn table, to at least sit down and begin to discuss their differences.

The "Arab awakening"? It is obvious that officer after officer in the Obama administration considers the rise of political Islam as something positive and something to be encouraged. But to continue to talk as if the Arab uprisings represent "democracy" as we understand it in the West is to ignore the Islamist nature of this movement.

And that is just unconscionable, irresponsible, and, in truth, none too bright. Whether coming from the administration, or from well-meaning "progressives," pretending that the rise of political Islam is a good thing is highly delusional and quite dangerous.

It is long past time that we pulled our heads from the sand.

I am again reminded of how progressives told us that the Jihadis aboard the Mavi Marmara were "peace activists." Knife and pipe-wielding "peace activists."

All of this taken together, by the way, represents just why the progressive-left, as a movement, is dangerous to Jewish people the world over. They honestly believe that the rise of political Islam throughout the Middle East is a good thing despite its anti-Semitic and genocidal nature.

Is it therefore any wonder that the Democratic Party is bleeding Jewish support?

.

Second Itamar Murderer Sentenced to 5 Life Terms

Karam

Samaria Military Court sentences Amjad Awad to five life sentences and seven years for killing five Fogel family members.

You guys remember the Fogels, right?

That was the family of "settlers" who dared to live where neither Barack Obama, nor Mahmoud Abbas, wanted them to live, in a town called Itamar in the northern part of the "West Bank." Two Palestinian youths crawled into their allegedly illegal home and slaughtered almost the entire family, including a months old baby girl whose head they took.

The reason that family was slaughtered, and the reason that baby girl got her head chopped off, was not because they were bad people, but because the Palestinian Authority, backed by the president of the United States, kept telling its people that they were, in fact, bad. Genocidal anti-Semitism is rife in the Arab world and is affirmed every time the president of the United States complains that Jews should not live, and thus build housing for themselves, where Arabs do not want them to.

“I don’t regret what I did, and would do it again,” Amjad Awad told reporters in May. “I’m proud of what I did and I’ll accept any punishment I get, even death, because I did it all for Palestine,” he added.

Why would Amjad Awad regret anything when he believes that killing Jews is righteous in the eyes of Allah and represents doing something sweet for "Palestine"? The Palestinian Authority tells its people that the Jews are evil and G-d only knows how many regular Palestinians tell themselves the exact same thing. At the same time we have millions of westerners, such as Barack Obama, who tell the world that the Palestinians are essentially right to not want those Jews in their midst.

And in this way even the most violent and rabid Arab anti-Semitism is affirmed by western progressives, including the president of the United States.

This is not hyperbole. Hyperbole has to do with exaggeration in order to score rhetorical points, but nothing that I have said above is rhetorical. It is quite literally the case that the president of the United States tells the Jews of the Middle East where they should not be allowed to live. Every generation, apparently, there are non-Jewish leaders who think that, for our own good of course, we should be allowed to live here, but not there.

I have no doubt that Barack Obama has perfectly fine intentions.

I also have no doubt that every time that he, or one of his people, complains to the press about where Jews are building housing for themselves, they confirm the kind of violent Arab anti-Semitism that inclined those brutal little bastards to crawl into that home and take a knife to the throat of that baby girl.

Shortly thereafter, in the spring of last year, I signed a condolence letter to Tamar Fogel, the surviving teenage daughter, written by Professor Denis MacEoin.  He wrote:

The most important for you is to be sure that the only guilty parties were the terrorists who carried out the slaughter. And I need not tell you that these were not the first Palestinian terrorists to take out their hate, their resentment, and their jealousy on helpless Jews living on Jewish land.

Helpless Jews living on Jewish land.

Well, I do not know how helpless those Jews are, but I know that progressives object to the notion of "Jewish land" in Judea. I know that a small number of Jews (about 5.5 million and nearly half our total) are surrounded by 300 million Arabs and 1.5 billion Muslims who, for the most part, object to Jewish sovereignty on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean out of religious conviction. Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism is embedded in the Koran itself. I also know that there are any number of western progressives, such as British PM David Cameron who agree with those Arab and Muslim anti-Semites that Jews who live in Judea are like some terrible cancer that must be surgically removed.

That's why the brutal little monster could kill a baby with a clean conscience.

And that's why we should be exceedingly circumspect when discussing the evil, bloodthirsty "settlers" who rip up Sacred Palestinian Olive Groves with their bare fangs.

You want hyperbole?

That last line is hyperbolic... the rest, not so much.

.

So? What Would YOU do?

Karam

I hope that Volleyboy1 will forgive me for front paging some of his comments. The reason that I tend to front page VB is because he represents a particular trend in the American Jewish dialogue around I-P and I think that it is important to highlight that trend so that we can discuss it.

As the FresnoZionist just put it:

Non-Muslims in the West are beginning to be divided into two groups: those who believe that it is possible and necessary to talk about political Islam, and those who see that discussion as religious prejudice, and therefore taboo.

The present American administration falls into the latter group. While it is committed to fighting against those who are waging war — jihad — against us, it has abstracted the violence from its religious/ideological context, and has done its best to forbid our government and law enforcement agencies from mentioning the context.

The progressive movement, in Europe and the United States, has emerged as a sort-of shrill hall monitor of allowable political discourse and thereby makes any discussion of political Islam impossible, lest one be maligned as a "racist." This makes discussing the rise of the Jihad throughout the Middle East, which is the foremost international geo-political development since the fall of the Soviet Union, entirely unspeakable within progressive-left circles.

In response to my previous post, Muslim Brotherhood Hails Ties With US, Volleyboy1 writes:

Ok... So, who would you suggest we support? No more complaining, just solutions. We know they are bad guys, so what in reality do you suggest we do?

What would you do if you were POTUS? Given the finish of the Islamists in Egypt (they won roughly 70% of the popular vote and the liberals completely dropped out) who or what solution do you support or propose?

You are very critical of the President here - what would you do differently?

I find it interesting that VB claims that I am being "very critical" of Obama in that piece. If you give it the quick once over, you realize that it offers no criticism whatsoever. All I say in the entire piece beyond "And so there you have it" is "This is who the Obama administration is supporting."

The former comment is irrelevant to the discussion and the latter is an assertion of fact, not a criticism. In fairness to Volley, however, it is true that I am very critical of president Obama because, although I voted for him, I have concluded that he has done a poor job as president and thus does not deserve our support going forward.

Directly after the Tunisian uprising, when Obama should have had the common sense to wait and watch, he said:

There are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat. So it was in Tunisia..

Fine sounding words. Completely delusional, true, but they sound nice.

In response to Volley's question, however, what I would do were I president of the United States is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the Obama administration is supporting genocidal Islamists.

That's the question that counts. Whether Lumish would do this, that, or the other thing, is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not Obama supports the Radical Jihad or Political Islam, or whatever terminology one might want to use. As we can see from a straightforward assessment of the evidence, he and his administration do, in fact, support the Brotherhood and the Brotherhood is an organization with an historical provenance that goes to Nazi Germany.

This is what is important and part of the reason that this is important is because progressives refuse to acknowledge the obvious on this matter. By failing to acknowledge the obvious, or through obfuscating that which is clear, progressives hobble our efforts as citizens to apprehend the truth of the Obama administration's foreign policy.

Once we get to the point where obvious truths cannot be spoken because they are politically inconvenient to the president of the United States or his political party or his political movement, then we cannot even begin to deal with the difficult realities that we face as a country.

So, what would I do differently?

One thing that I would have done differently is not tell the American people that the Islamist Spring was some combination of the American Revolution and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s. That's the first thing that I would have done very differently.

The second thing that I might have done differently is help to educate the American public on the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, as School eluded, so that they might better understand just whom we are dealing with... "bad guys" as Volley admits.

Another thing that I would likely have done is cut US financial support to a fascist government. This does not strike me as the least little bit controversial. The Brotherhood is fascist and the US is now underwriting financial support to the theocratic fascist government in Egypt.

I would oppose this.

So, those are 3 things that I would do differently but, again, what I would do is entirely irrelevant to the questions being raised by this blog. The first question is whether or not the progressive movement has betrayed its Jewish constituency through making a home of itself for anti-Semitic anti-Zionists? Some of us say yes and some of us say no.

But, that's the first question.

The second question is whether or not the Obama administration deserves support when it has thrown the peace process into the garbage and now encourages the rise of Radical Islam throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds?

My answer to this question, obviously, is "no." American Jews, and friends of the Jewish state, should reject Barack Obama because he is proving himself not only hostile to our interests, but hostile to the general well-being of the United States. Make no mistake, any American president that would snuggy up with the Jihad is acting in a manner hostile to the well-being of the American citizenry, whatever his or her intention.

The road is so paved, VB.

But as the FresnoZionist concludes:

If we want to survive as a culture, we cannot continue to ignore reality, to live in a world undergoing a titanic struggle while pretending that the struggle does not exist.

Whether or not the struggle is "titanic" it still needs to be discussed.

And if in certain venues the discussion is discouraged out of politically correct cowardice and group-think?... well?... We'll simply have the conversation on more friendly and more bold terrain.

.

Muslim Brotherhood Hails Ties With US

Karam

And so there you have it:

CAIRO: The head of the political arm of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood on Wednesday hailed US-Egyptian ties during talks with the US State Department's number two, but also said they must be "balanced."

The meeting with Deputy Secretary of State William Burns at the Cairo headquarters of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) came at the end of marathon elections that propelled Islamist parties to centre stage.

Washington has reached out to the Brotherhood in a nod to the country's new political reality, with Islamists poised to dominate the first parliament since a popular uprising ousted veteran president Hosni Mubarak in February.

Sheikh Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi (January 30, 2009):

Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place.

This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.

This is who the Obama administration is supporting.

.

Tel Aviv Named Best Gay City

Karam

Editor's Note: This is a guest post from, Makabit, one of our friends over at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers. Israel is among the most Gay friendly countries on the entire planet... if not the most Gay friendly country. We need to honor this and we need to remind our progressive friends that Gay people in the Muslim and Arab worlds also deserve something resembling equal rights.

.
.
.

Israel's malicious campaign of pinkwashing--giving LGBT Israelis full civil rights, recognition of foreign marriages, health care for domestic partners, and all that other dreadful imperialist stuff they do...has paid off.

Tel Aviv has been named Best Gay City for 2011:

JERUSALEM (JTA) -- Tel Aviv has been named the best gay city for 2011 in a poll sponsored by American Airlines and Gaycities.com.

The city was selected as the "Best City of 2011" in the "Best of Gay Cities 2011" poll. Tel Aviv garnered 43 percent of the votes, followed by New York City with 14 percent and Toronto with 7 percent.

"Winning this competition constitutes an additional strengthening of the fact that Tel Aviv-Jaffa is a city that respects all people and allows everyone to live according to his/her own principles," Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai said. "Ours is a city in which everyone can be proud of who they are."

New York won in the Best Night Life category, San Francisco took the Best Pride city category, and Buffalo, N.Y., was the Most Up-and-Coming city.

More than 5,000 gay tourists visited Tel Aviv in June for its annual pride parade, according to the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality.

If you go to Gaycities.com, and look at their map of great gay cities, you're going to notice something, and that's that Tel Aviv stands alone in the Middle East. I mean, entirely alone. That little pin in the map marks the lone gay party town of the region.

Kol ha-kavod, Tel Aviv!

.