Obama Legitimizes Terrorism

Michael L.

The tidbit below was written by Ariel Ben Solomon and published by the Jerusalem Post:

The US and Hezbollah are in secret indirect talks managed by London dealing with the fight against Al-Qaida, regional stability and other Lebanese political issues.  

Senior British diplomatic sources, quoted in a report in Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai on Wednesday, said British diplomats are holding discussions with leaders of the Lebanese organization and transferring the information to the Americans.

The discussions “are aimed at keeping tabs on the changes in the region and the world, and prepare for the upcoming return of Iran to the international community,” according to diplomatic sources in Washington.

Because the US, unlike the UK, recognizes both the political and military wings of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization and refuses to distinguish between them, US officials cannot legally meet with any member of the party. But according to the sources, the US is willing to hear the views of the party and “warm up to a direct relationship in the future.”

Hezbollah is, of course, an Islamist organization that hopes to install al-Sharia as the basis of government.  Al-Sharia, needless to say, oppresses women, calls for the murder of gay people outright, and seeks the domination of all non-Muslims within the historic system of persecution and exploitation known as dhimmitude.  It is also a terrorist organization in that it has targeted perfectly innocent people for death based on their religion and heritage.  And let us not forget, of course, that Hezbollah was behind the 1983 bombing of United States marine baracks in Beirut that killed 241 American GIs.

And now, under Obama, the US wants to “warm up to a direct relationship in the future” with this vile organization.

This represents yet another example of the lengthening list of ways in which the Obama administration has clearly and consistently and persistently supported the rise of political Islam throughout the Middle East, if not throughout the world, more generally.

The administration's focus on al-Qaeda is a red herring.  Al-Qaeda is just one organization among others that call for the Jihad against the west, and for the genocide of the Jews, but in its ideology, if not its tactics, it shares the same goals as the Muslim Brotherhood - out of which it was born - and Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the various Salafist organizations, and, yes, Hezbollah.

One of the reasons that Obama's foreign policy in the Middle East is so counterproductive is because of the central contradiction that resides at its heart.  In one breath Obama hypocritically condemns Qaeda and in the next he bolsters all the other major organizations that support Qaeda's ultimate goal of imposing Sharia wherever possible and on violently confronting the west whenever possible.

Finally, let us not forget that it was Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, who said, "If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide."

And this is who Obama wants to warm up relations with?

I know that Obama's ostrich-like Jewish sycophants, like the vicious nitwit who ran the failed Progressive Zionist blog, will make excuses for anything that Obama says or does, but how it is that they can continue to support a president of the United States that consistently undermines their own interests, not to mention the general well-being of the Jewish people throughout the world, remains hard to grasp within any rational assessment of his behavior viz-a-viz Jews or viz-a-viz the Jewish State of Israel.  They might argue that because this is not about direct discussions with Hezbollah that it is much ado over nothing, but if the report is true it is an indication of just where this administration is headed.

The Obama administration needs to be reminded that just as one cannot support the Muslim Brotherhood and still claim to be a friend of the Jewish people, so one cannot support Hezbollah and claim to be a friend of the Jewish people.

Until such a time as Islamist organizations give up the Koranically-based Jew Hatred which resides at the heart of their religious tradition, no western politician can be supportive of them and still expect the friendship and backing of the Jewish people.

And, yet, they do and the majority of us, at least in the United States, still kiss their feet.

Attacks on Toddlers Continue

JayinPhiladelphia

Racist violence against Jews in the Jewish homeland never takes a break, not even during holidays.

Four Arab 'men' have been arrested following the stoning of a two-year old Jewish girl in Jerusalem on Thursday.

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat called on authorities to crack down on a recent wave of stone throwing attacks in the city. “It’s about time we start treating a stone as a weapon,” he told Israel’s Channel 10 TV.

I'd say it's long past time for that.  Let's hope these latest in the line of cowardly, wannabe murderers who attack babies are removed from civil society for quite a while.   Let's hope something serious is done by the authorities to put an immediate end to the everyday racist violence carried out against Jews in the Jewish homeland.

Here's to a very speedy recovery for Avigail Ben Zion, and may the Chanukah lights provide warmth and strength to her family as they now deal with this tragedy during what should be joyous times for all of us.

Of Lights and Festivals (Updated)

Michael L.



Tomorrow is going to be a very strange and wonderful day at the Lumish household.

It is Hanukkah.  It is, in the United States, the Thanksgiving holiday.  And, on top of all that joyousness, it also happens to be Laurie's 30 Something birthday!  We're having a few friends over.  We're going to light the candles and carve the turkey and give presents to my beautiful wife.

I picked up the fun tune above from a terrific piece by Shimona in the Palace entitled, Calories and Candlelight – Chanucah in Israel, over at Jews Down Under.

You guys should take a gander at this exceedingly well-written and joyous piece by Shimona.

She says:

At any rate, this remix beautifully symbolises, in a nutshell, the way Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews have come together in the modern State of Israel, to rebuild the Jewish State in our ancient homeland and that the Jewish People is One.

I am not a very religious guy, but sometimes it is nice to be reminded of the best of it.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you, Shimona.

And with many thanks to Shirl in Oz:



Update: This video is fun!



A Tip 'O the Kippa to the Elder.

Those that Scoff

by oldschooltwentysix

Here in the Progressive bastion, where many like to claim superior knowledge and education, I have often informed people that discrimination against Muslims in America is small compared to discrimination against Jews. Many simply scoff. It is a matter of ignorance, falling for hype, being duped to believe that night is day.

In truth, few of these people are actually involved. They rely on what most say inside their bubble. They only see the matter intellectually. Indifference and insularity certainly play a part. Yet one may surmise that if another minority besides a Jew claimed offense or persecution they would clamor support. The intellectual approach, and the echo that resonates among themselves, prevents them from seeing that they practice a double standard, or recognizing that it has a discriminatory effect towards the Jewish minority and one and only Jewish state. Facts, presented objectively, expose the disconnect and the discrimination that results from ignorance, under the false assumption they hold that they are only being fair.

To illustrate, according to the FBI, in 2012, rather than rampant discrimination against Muslims, Jews remain the No. 1 target of anti-religious hate crimes in America. No other group comes even close. From the FBI web site, of the 1,340 victims of an anti-religious hate crime:

• 62.4 percent were victims of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias.
• 11.6 percent were victims of an anti-Islamic bias.
• 7.5 percent were victims of a bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).
• 6.4 percent were victims of an anti-Catholic bias.
• 2.6 percent were victims of an anti-Protestant bias.
• 0.9 percent were victims of an anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias.
• 8.6 percent were victims of a bias against other religions (anti-other religion). (Based on Table 1.)

Those that scoff, and especially those that are quick to call out "Islamophobia," probably don't even know where the concept of Islamophobia was developed. An eyewitness to the creation of the word, wrote:

"This loathsome term is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics."

The strategy was to emulate homosexual activists who used the term "homophobia" to silence critics and exploit the weaknesses of the Western psyche that recoils at the notion of being labeled racist (though Islam is not a race). 

BEWARE OF THOSE THAT SCOFF, especially those that, among themselves, echo and share information that ignores facts like shown above which expose the underlying bigotry and discriminatory effect of their positions. There's a lot more they do not know. Yet we who are not indifferent or removed must bear the brunt of the ignorance.

Obama Bluffed

Michael L.

In a March, 2012 article by The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg we have this tidbit:

In the most extensive interview he has given about the looming Iran crisis, Obama told me earlier this week that both Iran and Israel should take seriously the possibility of American action against Iran's nuclear facilities. "I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don't bluff." He went on, "I also don't, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly what our intentions are. But I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say."

Well, as president of the United States, Obama clearly does bluff.  He did bluff, Iran called his bluff, and now the chips are flowing to the other side of the table.  Of course, I knew that he was bluffing as soon as he denied it.  As a long-time poker player it is obvious that when someone sitting across from you claims that they do not bluff, that they are bluffing.  No player who makes such a statement is taken seriously and whatever else Barack Obama may be, he is certainly a player.

Basically what the Iran deal comes down to is that in exchange for a great financial windfall, due to the lifting of sanctions, the Iranians get to continue enriching uranium as they come closer and closer to that much coveted nuclear arsenal.  You cannot really blame Iran.  They look to their right and what do they see?  US troops in Iraq.  They look to their left and what do that see?  An Afghanistan that until quite recently was occupied by US forces.  So naturally they want the bomb as a deterrence.  They may want it for other reasons, but there is no question that they also want it for deterrence and who can blame them?  If I were the Ayatollah Khamenei I would want nuclear weaponry, as well.

But just because Iran has very good reason for wanting a nuclear arsenal it does not mean that the United States, and the west, more generally, is obligated to allow it to happen.  Nonetheless, that is precisely what we are seeing.  The Obama administration never had any real intention of preventing a Sharia Bomb, because the Obama administration is weak.  The United States, under this administration, is in retreat throughout the world and ultimately has not the fortitude or the will to prevent Tehran from going nuclear.

Does this mean that when Iran attains its nuclear arsenal they will automatically use it against Israel and / or the west?  I sincerely doubt it.  Despite their crazed End of Days eschatological religious view, the ayatollahs are neither stupid nor entirely irrational.  They don't want to see Tehran turned into a parking lot any more than we would like to see either Washington D.C. or Jerusalem obliterated.  But that's not really the point.  An Iranian bomb will mean a power shift throughout the Middle East with Iran becoming the regional hegemon, the continued ascension of political Islam, and an arms race that will see both Egypt and Saudi Arabia scrambling to come up with nuclear weapons of their own.

Meanwhile, Iran will gain the power to harass Israel to its Turkish Delight and Israel's ability to respond will be severely curtailed under an Iranian nuclear umbrella.

At this point the only real question is not if Iran will get the bomb, but when?

And why?

Because Obama bluffed and he did it badly.

Al-Jazeera, the Devil, and Me

Michael L.

This morning I accepted an offer to appear on Al-Jazeera UK television by Julia Chapman, a producer for various news outlets including ABC and the BBC.  The show is something called, The Listening Post.

The funny thing is that I won't see it because I do not get al-Jazeera and even if I did, I certainly wouldn't watch it.  In fact, I just read recent reports that Al-Jazeera America is a huge flop and thank G-d for that.

Do not get the wrong idea, however.  It is not as if that they are yanking me into some studio.  I have simply agreed to video a one minute segment for the show in which I answer one or more of the following questions:

1. American news coverage is often accused of being biased against Iran. Did you see that in coverage of the deal that was struck over the weekend? Have you seen a shift in the way American media depicts Iran?

2. How do you feel the American media has addressed Israel's concerns about the Iran deal? Give some examples.

3. Why have Twitter and YouTube been such an important part of President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Zarif’s media strategy? How do you think this compares with how the previous president interacted with the world?

There is a part of me, I must admit, that wonders if this is not a mistake from an ethical standpoint.  Much of the western left is friendly toward al-Jazeera even as they despise FOX News with the blinding hatred of a thousand suns.  I am not a huge fan of FOX, either, but Al-Jazeera is an enemy of the Jewish State of Israel and, thus, an enemy of the Jewish people.

Nonetheless, if I can add a little balance within a hostile venue then I will go for it.

So Long and Thanks For All The Fish and Chips

Doodad

  So there is a deal with Iran. Yee-haw.  Israel is not too impressed but is fairly busy right now pulling all the knives out of its back. So who knows how this will all proceed. One thing I didn't expect to see was a WARNING from the increasingly lousy Brits. Yes, a WARNING that Israel should not do anything that would undermine the deal of the century.

Britain to Israel: Don't undermine Iran nuclear deal

UK's Hague warns Israel of acting out, says 'would discourage anybody from taking any steps to undermine agreement'. Hezbollah: 'Deal is major victory for Iran, defeat for enemies' 

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly announces Israel is not bound to nuclear deal signed between world powers and Iran in Geneva, the West now cautions Netanyahu of carrying out an operation that would challenge the deal he dubbed "a historic mistake". Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Monday that Israel should avoid taking any action that would undermine the interim nuclear agreement reached between Iran and world powers. Urging world leaders to give the interim deal a chance, Hague said it was important to try to understand those who opposed the agreement. But he urged Israel and others to confine their criticism to rhetoric.

"We would discourage anybody in the world, including Israel, from taking any steps that would undermine this agreement and we will make that very clear to all concerned," Hague told parliament. 

Hague, who gave an update on the nuclear talks in Geneva, added he had not seen any signs that any country opposed to the agreement would try to disrupt it "in any practical way", but said Britain would be "on its guard".

On its guard for Iran?  Screw Britain... but thanks for all the fish and chips.

Jews in Judaea

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at Jews Down Under.}

Jews building housing for themselves in our traditional home is considered a crime not just by the often violently racist local Arabs, but by their allies in the west.

The tidbit below was written by AFP, whatever that is, and published by Y-Net:

Israeli authorities have given the go-ahead for the construction of 829 new settler homes in the West Bank, Peace Now said on Monday.

"The construction of 829 homes has been approved by a committee of the Israeli military in charge of the West Bank," said Lior Amihai, a Peace Now activist.

"This is yet another move that threatens to derail the peace process," Amihai told AFP.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has warned that ongoing settlement building by Israel in the Palestinian territories threatens the future of Middle East peace talks, which stand at an impasse little more than three months after they began...

The latest move comes two weeks after Israel announced its largest plan for settler homes ever, saying some 20,000 would be built in the West Bank.

This is all just so predictable.

The Jewish presence in Judaea and Samaria is actually quite small, representing only a few percentage points of the overall population and, yet, western governments and the progressive-left agree with the anti-Jewish racist Arab population that even one Jew in Judaea is far too many.

What is preventing a peaceful resolution to the long Arab war against the Jews is not the fact that Jews have children, and thus build housing for themselves, but that the Arabs are viciously bigoted against the Jewish minority for religious reasons and have been since we refused to throw ourselves at the feet of Muhammad in the 7th century.

This has always been the problem and it is the reason why traditionally-raised Arab teenagers in the Middle East enjoy throwing rocks at elderly Jews and historically could do so with impunity.

To the extent that westerners honestly care about this issue - which is a doubtful premise to begin with - when they hear about Jewish "settlement" building in the "West Bank" they tend to think that Jews are encroaching on the land of the perfectly innocent, bunny-like, allegedly-indigenous population.  One thing, among many others, that they do not understand is that the Jews have built no new townships in many years.  The building that these people keep complaining about are within existing Jewish towns and villages.

The bottom-line, however, is that if the local Arabs honestly wish to gain autonomy within a state on Jewish land then they must accept the presence of Jews on that land.  If Arabs cannot accept the fact of Jews on Jewish land then they will never create the little, corrupt terrorist entity, with full membership rights in the United Nations, that they supposedly want.

In the mean time, what we need to tell non-Jewish westerners is that complaining about Jews building in Judaea is the equivalent of complaining about the French building in Toulouse or the Easter Islandish building on Easter Island.

The surest way to prevent a negotiated resolution of the conflict is to insist that Jewish land is not Jewish land and that, therefore, Jews have no right to build there, despite the fact that it represents a grand total of about .5 percent of the Middle Eastern landmass.

And yet, somehow, Israel thrives.

It is, indeed, nothing less than a miracle.

What the Hell Happened to Karma?

Michael L.

Those of you who know me know that I come out of the progressive left, and the grassroots / netroots of the Democratic Party, and that - once upon a time, under the moniker Karmafish - I was a regular at Daily Kos and Maryscott O'Connor's blog, My Left Wing.

Daily Kos begat My Left Wing and My Left Wing begat a number of derivatives, including Israel Thrives.  Daily Kos is hanging in there, but has lost the majority of its influence and has earned the wariness and disdain of most serious politicians.  My Left Wing has, essentially, died.  There is a lot of blood flowing under these bridges and a lot of hard feelings, disgust, and betrayal that involve thousands of people, ultimately.

Such is the nature of anonymous ideological infighting within political social media via the intertubes.

Blog-O-Centric rancor has a bitterness and quality all its own and it can be as real as hard-feelings in actual life for very many people.

{It's an ugly mess, actually.}

I still think, though, that a history of the left political blogs could be a very interesting work.  It could make for an enlightening book or dissertation.  It could relate the story of how new social media galvanized people around common interests in fundamentally new ways and it would (or should) start with the Howard Dean campaign for the presidency in 2004, which led to Daily Kos and all the various blogospheric spin-offs, in the years that followed.

I am certain that there is already work published around this theme and I assume that a few sociologists are on this and very much doubt that professional historians are.

I recently noticed, however, that on My Left Wing, where I have not participated in any significant way for a very long time now, one of my friendly acquaintances - and a very good and brilliant man, indeed - sought to answer the question, "What happened to Karma?"

I wrote this in response:

Hi Mad (0.00 / 0) 

this is false: 

"What has happened to Karma is that he has come to think his perspective on "the progressive left" and Israel is the only one." 

Untrue. 

What has happened to "Karma" is that he has come to recognize that the western left has accepted anti-Semitic anti-Zionism as part of its larger coalition. 

What happened to "Karma" is that he came to recognize that the Obama administration favored the rise of political Islam under the misnomer "Arab Spring." 

In this way, the grassroots / netroots of the Democratic Party has abandoned any notion of universal human rights because they cannot bring themselves to speak against the most hard-line, fascistic political movement in the world today. 

Political Islam (or "radical Islam" or "Islamism") is a violent and reactionary political movement that flings its women into potato sacks - when they are not flinging acid into the faces of young woman or shooting in the head young woman who seek an education - as western feminists call it "freedom." 

Islamists hang gay people from cranes in Iran, are chasing Christians out of the Middle East entirely, seek the second and third class citizenry of all non-Muslims, and cry out for the genocide of the Jews. 

What happened to "Karma" was his recognition that his alleged political allies honestly do not give a shit. 

Not only that, many in the western progressive-left accuse those of us who object to these fundamental transgressions on human rights as racist. 

That's what happened to "Karma." 

As far as I am concerned, the western left can go fuck itself. 

It stands for nothing and it defames those of us who dare to stand up in favor of its own alleged values.

I wish all my former political friends nothing but the very best in this world, but political sands are shifting.

No politician, or political movement, or political activist, can support the genocidal enemies of their friends and maintain those friendships for long.  When the Obama administration supported the Muslim Brotherhood, and when the grassroots turned a blind eye or cheered, I knew that it was time to go.

Sensibilities and the "Sons of Pigs and Apes"

by oldschooltwentysix

Yesterday, in a brief discussion with a friend, I mentioned a book called, "The sons of pigs and apes": Muslim antisemitism and the conspiracy of silence, by Neil Kressel, that I recently came across.

My friend is a progressive. Not like the ones to be found online. She is more accepting. And this is not to criticize her. It is more concerned with the way things are. About how Jews experience a disconnect when it comes to their status as an oppressed minority, more accurately the deprivation of that status, as hatred and threats to them grow out of all proportion.

After I mentioned the book, of which I had read a Kindle sample, she asked what is that, referring to the phrase "sons of pigs and apes." My conversational response was that it's what Muslims call Jews. This link to Palestinian Media Watch provides context. The belief is ingrained in Islam, past and present. Here is an example, among many, from last July:



Some say PMW disseminates propaganda. However, in 2007 Senator Hillary Clinton praised PMW for exposing child abuse, imposed by the Palestinian Authority, as above, through indoctrination that teaches them to hate Jews and Israel. Such demonization is prevalent in Palestinian society, and simple to discover if one looks.



Back to the story. Rather than acknowledgement of the utter indecency of calling EVERY Jew a son of a pig or ape, my good hearted friend admonished me for suggesting that ALL Muslims call Jews sons of pigs and apes. Did I not see that this is what a listener would conclude from my remark?

Only later did I realize her orientation was more concerned with protecting sensibilities of Muslims, generally, rather than the sensibilities and human rights of Jews, ALL Jews, to be free from these hateful, eliminationist threats, insults and behaviors based on the underlying belief by too many Muslims that Jews deserve to be exterminated.

The summary of Kressel's book says:

Though it is impossible to determine precisely how many of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims hold anti-Jewish beliefs, Kressel finds that much bigotry comes from the highest levels of religious and political leadership.

There are 14 million Jews on the planet. If only 5% of Muslims held these beliefs, that would be 60 million people. Is my perceived bigotry or bigotry of Jews the real problem here?

Of course, before going forward, I had to clearly concede that I did not intend to suggest that ALL Muslims hated Jews. That should have been a given in the scheme of things. But the main point was lost, that Muslims do call Jews the sons of pigs and apes. With rare exception, ONLY Muslims do this.

There is nothing bigoted about presenting this fact based truth, not to mention the virtually complete silence of the Muslim community to confront it. It is not just Muslims, however. The Kressel summary also says:

[M]any in the West refuse to recognize this issue. The growing epidemic of hate has been largely ignored, misunderstood, or downplayed, Kressel reveals, because of apathy, ignorance, confusion, bigotry, ideology, purported pragmatism, and misguided multiculturalism. Those who value human rights ignore antisemitism at their own risk, he cautions, noting that no antisemitic regime or movement has ever been otherwise reasonable or progressive. 

This is what matters, at least to me. To say that "the sons of pigs and apes" is what Muslims (and only Muslims) call Jews (which is accurate), does not imply that ALL Muslims are equally guilty. To raise the implication actually diverts from what matters, which is the express bigotry toward Jews simply for not being Muslim, and the ignorance and indifference of too many among us.

Though not the intention of my friend, the same cannot be said for others, including activists that proclaim the right to define social justice. Diversion becomes a tactic to shut down discussion. In this case it diverted from the very first question asked about the insidious phrase itself, and perhaps lost was an opportunity to become more enlightened about reality that will likely continue to be obscured so long as communication is between those that agree among themselves.

Turning Dragonese

Empress Trudy


My view of it is this. What I personally, emotionally hope for is irrelevant. This is why we in the civilized world have courts of law. This is what ayin tachat ayin really means - making the punishment exactly fit the crime and no more. This is why we don't pitch the punishment of murderers and rapists over to the families of the victims. Because vengeance is cathartic but it's not justice. So how I personally feel about it isn't entirely germane.

Now having said that, I am willing to admit, paraphrasing Churchill, that in times of dire need good men are called upon to do very dark things. Because the reality of our eternal confrontation with the Arabs is just that - dire and eternal. I will never concede even a millimeter of the benefit of the doubt that they themselves never believe exists. They are certain and I am willing to take them at their word. To believe otherwise is projecting more upon their desires and goals than even they do.

We here, generally, in the well fed west make some fundamental assumptions about the world that, while they are true, they are true here and not everywhere. And not concerning everyone.

We believe 'people' whoever they are, are nice and good and are more or less merely misunderstood or agitated by forces they don't understand. This is patronizing and infantile. This flies in the face of 5,000 years of recorded history. Individuals can be nice, mass movements are bloody awful things.

We believe in the White Man's Burden, that if the swarthies and wogs were shown what's what they'd all eventually fall over themselves to be just like us. This is patently ignorant. Not even middle class Mexico is 'just like' middle class Shangai.

We, I think if you really pried it open, are dismissive of faith to the point that we don't believe that it's a significant social force or driver for movements either for good or for violence. We here in the secular left have jettisoned most of society's connection to faith and assume everyone else has too or, if, for example the Salafists or the Ayatollahs talk about divine justification they're lying to everyone because they're nihilists who believe as little as we do. This is, on its face, a dangerous and silly thing to believe. Faith matters; what we're arguing about is the difference between fanaticism and piety and both of those things are very real.

So burdened down with all this terribly arrogant and erroneous baggage we scold and browbeat the Jews exhorting them to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Without really believing in any of it or that the threats to the Jews are real or that if they were - and here's the rub, that even if they WERE, they wouldn't matter. The Jews would happily go on being 'secular' bagel and a schmear high holy day Jews more or less - maybe with a few less civil rights but all they'd have to do is abandon their entire identity to skirt that problem. Just like the German Jews of the 1890's I suppose??

We here, even among ourselves in the Zionist camp, are constantly saying "well when the Arabs learn to stop teaching their kids to want to exterminate us it will work out." The shorter form of that is "When they change their entire society, culture and narrative there will be peace." A good working definition of what a society IS, is what it inculcates and fosters in its own children.

Well that's never going to happen. To anyone, ever. In any society in the world. No one is ever going to abandon what they hold dear for someone else's benefit. Only the lunatic anti Zionists be they Jewish or not say this. The Arabs don't. The Muslims don't. The French courts mandating women can't wear the niqab don't. The ayatollahs in Iran aren't telling the Jews to change. They're telling them to die.  No - only the Liberal left "Jews" say this and that's because there's nothing they hold dear in the first place. When you believe in nothing, losing it is part of the plan.

This is why I maintain a hard line. Not because of what I happen to hope for personally but because after 90 years, Jabotinsky is still right about it. "The Iron Wall" is still true. Not because we're evil, but because it simply is accurate and there is no reason to delude ourselves that wanting it not to be true is a sure course forward. In the Renaissance, mapmakers would fill in the areas they knew nothing about with "There Be Dragons". Who knew, maybe there were? Odds are no one was ever coming back to tell us whatever they discovered. And half of them lied about it.

Politically we're somewhere southwest of the end of the world - in a region where the Jews are told "There Be Dragons - go ahead tell us what you find and report back." If we refuse or hesitate we're called Reptiliphobes if we're eager we're called illegal occupiers of Dragistan. The Dragistanians are telling us to die or move, while our better moral angels on the left are scolding us to adopt the ways of the Sea Serpent. Meanwhile we hold out this absurd notion that as soon as the Dragons stop breathing fire and eating people, join a union, legalize gay marriage and all those other things - in short - stop being so...Dragon-y, it will be glorious.

But it's not.

Morally Equivalent Emptiness

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at Jews Down Under and The Bar and Grill.}

In the comments under a recent Times of Israel piece entitled, Netanyahu: Islamists taking us back to the ‘Dark Ages’, we read this:

 Louis Arpino · Knoxville, Tennessee

"The more isolated from the world that Israel becomes, the more hysterical Bibi becomes. Radical Judaism, with whom Bibi is politically in bed with, is no better than radical Islam. 

The both preach the same hate."

It is hard to know just what is behind this kind of stupidity.  For some people the moral equivalency canard derives from a liberal desire to be evenhanded.  For others, as I suspect with the gentleman above, it derives from a desire to kick the Jews in the teeth.

Whatever the reason for this kind of thing, however, we see it all the time and it is always wrong.

One cannot even begin to compare radical Islam with "radical Judaism."  It's a matter of having a rational sense of proportionality and of recognizing that Jews are not flinging their women into potato sacks or flinging acid into their faces for disobeying their men or shooting 12 year old girls in the head for wanting an education.

On the first matter, there are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world so that if even a relatively small portion of them, say 10 percent, favor radical Islam that is 150 million people, which represents more devotees than either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union ever dreamed of having.  Furthermore, unlike radical Islam, "radical Judaism" (whatever that is exactly) is not a prominent international political movement.  There is no Jewish equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood running around the world, supporting terrorism, and seeking to hijack entire countries.

The moral equivalency canard has a corrosive and highly toxic influence within the conversation around the long war against the Jews in the Middle East, as well as western foreign policies, more generally.  People, particularly on the left, will say things like, "Well, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."  When it comes to the Arab-Israel conflict, this is entirely false.  You cannot compare the efforts of a small, traditionally persecuted, minority to defend itself from a much larger hostile population, with the efforts of that much larger hostile population to slaughter or subdue the minority.

The problem is that this attitude is pervasive throughout the western world, including the United States.  One evening I was chatting with a friend of mine who happens to be gay and of a Christian background from Texas.  We were, not surprisingly, discussing politics.  I was making the case to him, and to the others in the room who were, to a person, on the left, that political Islam is an actual political movement that we need to take seriously.  My friend responded with words along the lines of, "Oh, yeah?  Well, what about the Evangelicals?  What about the Christian conservatives in this country?  What about those racist Tea Party people?!"

At the time I just looked at him slack-jawed.

It amazes me that so many people do not comprehend the vast moral distinction between a conservative American Christian who opposes abortion and gay marriage with a political movement that quite literally hangs gay people from cranes.  The ideological blinkertude of someone who would morally equate conservative American Christians with political Islam is just staggering in its failure of rational comprehension.

In conservative Christianity we have ministers who tell their congregations that he who blesses Israel shall be blessed and he who curses Israel shall be cursed.

In radical Islam we have imams and ayatollahs screeching to the heavens for Jewish blood.

In conservative Christianity we have mothers and fathers who do not want their children to run away to San Francisco, stick a bunch of metal in their faces and then come down with a sexually transmitted disease.

In political Islam they simply kill gay people outright.

In conservative Christianity we sometimes have men who would prefer it if their wives stayed at home with the kids.

In political Islam we have men who force their women into sack-cloth and refuse to allow them to leave the house without a male escort.

In conservative Christianity we sometimes have prominent preachers who sleep with prostitutes or who turn out, themselves, to be gay.

In political Islam we have preachers who call quite literally for genocide.

To suggest that either conservative Christianity or "radical Judaism" is in any way equivalent to what we see with political Islam is to reveal a deep and troublesome moral confusion.

Whatever its faults and flaws, conservative Christianity is a friend to the Jewish people and we should treat it as such.  In my view, we Jews have treated our conservative Christian friends like dirt.  We malign them and claim that the only reason they support Israel is out of an eschatological longing for the End of Days and the punishment of the Jews at the hand of Jesus.

This is to assign a malicious intention to people who simply do not deserve it.  Democrats and progressives encourage this hatred toward conservative Christians because they see conservative Christians as their Number One Enemy for cultural and electoral reasons.

In the mean time, blood flows from the Koran through the streets of Cairo and Damascus and Benghazi and Khartoum.

Francois Hollande in Ramallah

Michael L.

The tidbit below was written by Evelyn Gordon and published by Commentary:

For the second time in two weeks, France has proven itself the most serious foreign-policy player the West currently has. First, it thwarted an abysmal nuclear deal with Iran. Now, it’s come up with the most creative idea for advancing Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy that I’ve heard in years.

Speaking in Ramallah yesterday, French President Francois Hollande essentially told Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas the following: You think Israeli settlement construction is destroying prospects for a two-state solution, and therefore want it halted. I agree. But the Israelis think these prospects are being destroyed by your demand to relocate millions of Palestinians to Israel (aka the “right of return”). So why not trade concessions on the right of return for a settlement freeze?

The point of Gordon's article is to emphasize the fact that if they truly wanted to create an atmosphere conducive toward ending the long Arab war against the Jews of the Middle East, western leaders need to pressure not only Israel, but the Arabs, as well.  Of course, Gordon also recognizes that Hollande's initiative won't bring peace, either, because the local Arabs refuse to make any concessions, period.

Furthermore, she writes:

Abbas told Hollande he has no authority to deviate from the Arab League’s stance on the refugees, begging the obvious question of what the point of the current talks are if he has no power to actually negotiate.

Nevertheless, the French proposal at least acknowledges the obvious fact that peace requires concessions by both sides, not just one. And that is a necessary first step. For as long as the world keeps pandering to Palestinian rejectionism by not demanding any concessions, as the Obama administration has, the Palestinians will never have an incentive to make any.

This neatly suggests something that I have been trying to emphasize for a long time, now.  The reason that dictator Abbas is not free to actually negotiate is because the conflict is not between the Jews of the Middle East, as represented by the State of Israel, and some local Arab entity, but between the Jews of the Middle East and the vast Arab world that refuses to accept Jewish sovereignty within the tiny Jewish homeland.  The Jews lived as a despised, persecuted minority for thirteen hundred years under Arab imperial rule, yet the Arab governments won't even go so far as to acknowledge the history of that persecution.

Can you imagine if the United States refused to even acknowledge the history of African slavery in the Americas?  That is, essentially, what we are facing.  Of course, the reason that they can get away with that is because the west, including western Jewry, is overly squeamish about criticizing the Arab world, particularly if it concerns Islam, which this issue most obviously does.  In effect, we are erasing thirteen hundred years of Jewish history so as not to discomfort our former masters.  This is how craven western Jewish discourse is on the topic of the long war.

Nonetheless, it is a step in the right direction to see a western leader recognize that everything is not always and forever up to Israel and that sometimes, perhaps, the so-called "Palestinians" should also be pressured to make concessions if we ever possibly want to see peace between the great Arab majority in the Middle East and the tiny Jewish minority there.

The Social Construction of Hatred

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at Jews Down Under and the Times of Israel.}

The social construction of hatred toward the Jewish people by the Islamic world and the western-left should, at this point in human history, be axiomatic.

In the Arab-Muslim world they scream bloody murder on a daily basis that the Jewish minority is evil and must be destroyed.  Western "liberals" either do not care or believe that the Jews deserve whatever beating that we get for allegedly being mean to Palestinian-Arabs.  Ayatollahs and imams throughout the Middle East shake their fists in the air and tell their people that the tiny Jewish minority are vile in the sight of Allah and that it is a spiritual blessing to murder Jews.  In the mean time, western progressives tell one another that the Jews of the Middle East are racist, imperialistic, colonialist, apartheid, war-mongers and thereby justify an ancient Arab-Muslim culture of violence toward the Jewish people.

This, of course, is nothing new.  What led to the various persecutions and pogroms and expulsions of the Jewish people throughout European and Arabic history was the defamation of the Jew.  My father's side of the family was slaughtered in the town of Medzhybizh, in the western Ukraine during Operation Barbarossa in July of 1941, precisely because of the incessant defamation of Jewish people in western Europe.  They were forced into road building, along with the Christian population of the small town, to aid the Nazi advance into the Soviet Union and when the roadways were completed they were made to dig ditches just outside of town at the point of a rifle.  When the ditches were completed the estimated 3,000 Jews of Medzhybizh were lined up in those ditches and shot dead by the Einsatzgruppen, professional Jew murderers.

This is a brief video of the last old Jew of my family town.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGqn9lefLH0

Since the end of World War II the primary sources of genocidal anti-Semitism have been the Arab-Muslim world and the United Nations, within which the Arab and Muslim governments have huge influence due to the simple fact of numbers.  As anyone who follows the long Arab war against the Jews knows, the United Nations is an enemy of the Jewish people and of the Jewish State.  The United Nations has 193 member states and yet an exceedingly disproportionate number of its resolutions represent hostility toward Israel despite the fact that Israel has a far better human rights record than does any other country throughout its entire region.

In the beginning of this year the United Nations compiled a report entitled,"Children in Israeli Military Detention," which claims that, "It is understood that in no other country are children systematically tried by juvenile military courts that, by definition, fall short of providing the necessary guarantees to ensure respect for their rights."

The UN also claims that "Ill-treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized. This conclusion is based on the repeated allegations about such treatment over the past 10 years and the volume, consistency and persistence of these allegations."

These conclusions reflect another UN report from June of this year, addressed by scholar Phyllis Chesler in a Times of Israel piece entitled, UNICEF’s Blood Libel Against Israel, which suggests that Israel tortures Arab children.

Chesler writes:

UNICEF has not released a similar report which focuses on the systematic use of Palestinian children as human shields by Palestinian jihadists; on the increase in honor killings of Palestinian daughters by their Palestinian families on the West Bank and in Gaza; or on the sophisticated indoctrination of Palestinian children by Palestinian adults into becoming suicide killers.

In the more than fifty UNICEF reports on the “state of Palestine,” it blames Israel for whatever harm comes to Palestinian children. And, when UNICEF does look at the horrifying war raging in Syria, these reports do not register psychologically with a global community eager to believe that Israel is the worst country in the world.

Chesler clearly understands what most of us understand and that is the simple fact that when it comes to Israel the United Nations is simply not to be trusted.   We all know that the UN spends far more time and energy kicking the hell out of the Jewish State than it does addressing the far worse human rights violations that we see throughout Africa and the rest of Asia.  In fact, the main business of the UN seems to be ripping down the Jewish State of Israel and it does so out of Arab-Muslim Koranically-based loathing for Jews.

Thus, I do not believe for one minute that this UN report is either honest or fair.  And even if I am wrong, and that Israel is as morally heinous as the report claims, how can any fair-minded person trust such claims when the Sudan and the Congo and China and Turkey - in its occupation of Cyprus - get a free pass?

And this brings me to my central point.

Why is Michael Lerner, of Tikkun Daily, publishing Jew Haters like David Harris-Gershon?

In a recent piece for both Daily Kos and Tikkun Daily, Harris-Gershon spreads hatred toward his fellow Jews by citing the first UN report above which simply cannot be trusted.  Even if the UN report is accurate, which I highly doubt, given the fact of UN malice toward Israel why would this man cite it in a malicious manner that could very easily incite violence toward his own people?  He must know that the UN is hostile to Israel and yet he uses a UN report as a club with which to beat the Jewish people and to create hatred toward them.

And that, finally, is the point.

Harris-Gershon writes:

While this report found the IDF's practice of awaking children at night, blindfolding them and escorting them, unaccompanied, to interrogation centers most troubling, it also highlighted Israeli soldiers' practice of binding children and holding them to be of concern.

The children who were cuffed and detained on Friday were, according to an Israeli military spokesperson, suspected of preparing to alight a tire, and that the children were detained to "prevent mayhem." However, witnesses say that Israeli troops' presence at the weekly protest is what sparked clashes, and that soldiers began rounding up children after stun grenades were thrown toward them.

He draws this conclusion from a report by the Palestinian-Arab Ma'an News Agency.

It might be that this report is accurate, but I have to wonder why Harris-Gershon gives such credence to a "news agency" that is absolutely hostile toward his own people and then uses a report from that "news agency" to cite a United Nations report that spreads the blood-libel against Jews?

The bottom line is that people like Michael Lerner and David Harris-Gershon are constructing hatred toward their fellow Jews and they do so, with hideous irony, in the name of social justice and human rights.  The truth, of course, is that neither Lerner, nor Harris-Gershon, are the least bit interested in social justice.  If they were they would also be interested in social justice for the Jewish people, but instead they spread hatred toward their own.

"Jews Down Under" Nominated for a Hasby Award!

Michael L.

Each year the Elder of Ziyon hosts the Hasby Awards and this year our sister blog, News and Views From Jews Down Under, is nominated under the category Best Pro-Israel Blog.

Whether or not JDU actually wins the award, Shirlee in Oz needs to be congratulated for creating a space that has become fairly prominent within a very short period of time.  It takes considerable intelligence, creativity, networking, and just plain hard work to do what Shirlee has managed to do, so we here at Israel Thrives wish JDU nothing but the very best and I will look forward to engaging there, and publishing there, going forward.

Make sure to vote for JDU!

CAMERA Opens Jerusalem Hub

CAMERA Opens Jerusalem Hub, Expands Focus on International, Israeli Press

 Pioneer Watchdog Organization Sees Enhanced Opportunity to Promote Media Accuracy and Accountability

(JERUSALEM, ISRAEL) – CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, announced the expansion of its Israel operations with the opening of its Jerusalem office this week. The new facility will serve as the center for CAMERA’s presence in Israel and will enable increased activity in promoting accurate coverage of Israel and the Middle East in the North American, European and Israeli media.

Strategically located at a prestigious technology park which houses several major international media outlets as well as Israel’s Government Press Office, the new office is home to two CAMERA affiliates. Presspectiva (www.presspectiva.org.il), CAMERA’s popular Hebrew-language website launched in 2010, will share space with the influential CiF Watch (www.cifwatch.com), which monitors the Guardian and other British media outlets.

BBC Watch (www.bbcwatch.org), CiF Watch’s sister site, will continue to operate from its branch in northern Israel.

CAMERA, Presspectiva, CiF Watch and BBC Watch are responsible for securing countless corrections in leading  print and broadcast outlets on key subjects such as Palestinian prisoners, Israeli policies towards the Gaza Strip, United Nations resolutions, sensitive holy sites, and many others. Staff members regularly communicate with journalists and publish op-eds and letters to the editor which clarify and focus on topics frequently misrepresented by mainstream media reporting.

“In the last nine years, certain Israeli news editors have internalized an important lesson. If at one time they thought they were better off disregarding our findings, they now realize it is in their interest to respond to our calls for accountability and accuracy,” noted Tamar Sternthal, Director of the Israel office, who joined CAMERA in Boston in 1999 and subsequently opened CAMERA’s virtual office in Israel in 2004.

CAMERA and Presspectiva have submitted several complaints to the Israel Press Council, resulting in corrections made by Israeli media outlets. “All too often, misinformation appearing in the international media originated from Israeli sources, underscoring the importance of Presspectiva’s work,” said Jerusalem native Yishai Goldflam, Editor-in-Chief of Presspectiva.  

“The establishment of the Jerusalem office is the natural next step in the ongoing growth of CAMERA’s global efforts. We look forward to hosting events and conferences for both the Hebrew and English-speaking public,” stated Andrea Levin, President and Executive Director of CAMERA, from the organization’s Boston headquarters.

For more information please contact:

Tamar Sternthal (054-217-6700) / Adam Levick (054-540-6627)

tamar@presspectiva.org.il /adamlevick@cifwatch.com

Jordan Declares Jewish Prayer on Temple Mount Illegitimate and Illegal

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at News and Views From Jews Down Under and the Times of Israel.}

The tidbit below was written and published by Jerusalem Post staff.

The top Jordanian government official responsible for the custodianship of religious holy sites in Jerusalem is quoted in local press on Tuesday as saying that he is “adamantly opposed” to any Jewish worship atop the Temple Mount.

Abd Al-Nasser Nassar, who serves as Amman’s top legal adviser for Islamic and Christian property in Jerusalem, is quoted as telling the Jordanian daily al-Rad that his government rejected an Israeli request to allow for Jews to pray in a small, designated area atop the site.

The top Jordanian government official responsible for the custodianship of religious holy sites in Jerusalem...

The stupidity is so profound that it sometimes literally hurts.

I am going to have to go back into Moshe Dayan's memoirs, and scan through the primary and secondary sources, in order to understand just what the man was thinking when, after the 6 Day War, he handed the Temple Mount to Jordan.

To Jordan!

Israel begged Jordan to stay out of the war, but they didn't because the Egyptians were claiming victory even as they were getting badly beaten.  So, after Israel cleaned everybody's clock and regained control of Israel's holiest site after 2,000 years, Moshe Dayan hands it back to the Arabs?  And how is it that after the Yom Kippur War of 1973 that Israel allowed the Temple Mount to stay in Arab hands?

It is just unfathomable.  And now we have Arabs telling us that we are not allowed to pray on the holiest site within the religion of Judaism?

It's shameful, in fact.

And, in the mean time, the Waqf - whatever the hell that is, exactly - has spent the last 45 years destroying evidence of the Jewish presence on that spot in order to destroy Jewish history, itself.

From the comments:

Gila Rut Rina Wittow

Why on earth should Jordan - an Islamic country - have any say on whether or not Jews can pray on their very holiest site?! It is against both international and Israeli law to arrest or harass Jews - and other non-Muslims - simply for praying peacefully on the Temple Mount.

We are going to continue praying there anyway and more and more people are being drawn to do so. Hashem is bringing us back to our land and to our holiest place. Personally, He gave me a life-changing and utterly overwhelming experience of His infinite and loving presence and the reality that all there truly is is G-d, just below the Temple Mount nearly ten years ago, and helped me come home in many many incredible ways.

It is only right that we should be able to pray openly on the Temple Mount and be clearly informed as Jews how to prepare halachically beforehand with mikvaot provided, and where we can safely walk on the Mount being indicated by signs.

It is completely ridiculous and utterly offensive to be harassed by Israeli police and to risk arrest simply for doing what we need to do as Jews, or as other people who put G-d first in their lives, in what is after all supposedly a democracy and our very own country!

I have to say, it cannot be easy going through life with a name like Gila Rut Rina Wittow, which may partially explain why she seems even more pissed-off about this than I am.

Jim Draper

Maybe one day soon the idf will block all muslims from the jewish temple mount and Blow the Dome to smitherines.

This guy has to be an American!

Theodor Rebarber 

The inexcusable mistake is to ask permission from Jordan (or anyone else) whether Jews have the right to pray at their holiest site in their own country. If there is trouble after Israel extends freedom of religion to Jews on the Temple Mount, that will only expose the irrationality and ill will of those who oppose it. In that case, all decent people will rally to support Israel. The American government will have no choice but to support it as well.

Theodor means well, but I do not think that he has been following the conflict very closely if he thinks that for one moment that "all decent people will rally to support Israel" no matter what happens or no matter Israel does or does not do.  Not even all "decent" Jews will do so and, in fact, there will be plenty of Jewish people who will advocate for our enemies or simply sit on the sidelines.

My problem with someone like Stuart (aka, Kane in CA), for example, is that while he is a self-identified Jew, he seems to stand for nothing.  We haven't seen the guy around these parts for awhile and that is not surprising, but I still don't get what he thought that he stands for viz-a-viz the long Arab war against the Jews in the Middle East?

whitewidow

The Jews have no right to any Palestinian land.Please do not give them the right to pray on the temple mount.Jews cannot be trusted they are the killers of all the prophets.Israel is an illegal Apartheid state built on stolen property.

Ta Da!

And there you have it.

Also please note the way that, in under 45 words, whitewidow combined classic fundamental religious Islamic Jew Hatred with contemporary western-left secular Jew Hatred.

I would call it fascinating, were it not entirely nauseating.

Future Partners For Peace

geoffff

This is a tape of what and how "Palestinian" kids are taught in schools that are pretty much entirely funded by countries in the West through either the UN or by direct extortion from the terrorist and criminal gangs that rule whatever you would call what passes for a "Palestinian" polity.

It was shown by Bibi to John Kerry in a meeting a few days ago in a desperate attempt to get the blockhead to see some sense. To see what is in front of his nose. 

It's in Hebrew and that's a bonus.  It includes the cutest couple of adds that you will see anywhere even if you don't know what they are selling. 

Are there people who really seriously think that the Israelis will peacefully give into this vile and abominable thing that has been hatched on the world? Ever? Are they insane? Would you? Would any free people?

Seriously, do you think the Israelis could even be bothered listening to all the gratuitous advice from the safe and abroad? Of course not. Would you?

How do you handle these people who teach their kids this stuff? Any ideas? 

When they say that Israel is their land they honestly and passionately believe it. From their world view it is their land. That is because it was once under the Caliphate and therefore forever Muslim land under the purist title of all. That bestowed directly by God. Man made law is irrelevant. Worse than irrelevant. It is blasphemy. 

Either you accept this crazed view of the Middle East and the world in some sort of nutty delusion out of Bizzaroland or you do not. At the end of the day it all gets down to what you mean by "law" and by civilised human behaviour.  

This is about Australians. And Europeans, Americans and the rest. Its our civilisation foundations that are under attack here and they make no bones about it.     

hat tip Shirlee

cross posted Geoffff's Joint

David Swindle's Recent Response

Michael L.

I am very much enjoying this ongoing conversation with PJ Media editor, David Swindle.

The conversation, at this point, revolves around the concepts of "social justice" and "tikkun olam," the evolution of the Republican Party, and if Jews should join it, and his own personal journey as a conservative and as a person concerned about ethics, politics, and religion.

This, naturally, does not prevent David from being something of a smart-ass in the opening sentence of his last installment, which reads:

This dialogue appears to be moving in an unexpected but very welcome direction: you recognizing the errors of your positions and coming to adopt mine instead.

I laughed out loud when I read that, I have to tell you!

In any case, David is a good man who is on the Christian religious right and I think that if we do it well, and if we maintain respect for one another, this conversation has significant potential.

So, check it out. 

Brief Notes: Book Announcement

Michael L.



Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work, Faculty of Medicine at Monash University, Philip Mendes, is the author of the forthcoming book, Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance.

In the course of promoting his book professor Mendes wrote the following tidbit for abc.net:

So why does the BDS movement highlight the views of this small group of anti-Zionist Jews who are so unrepresentative of collective Jewish opinion? There are two reasons.

The first is a continuation of malevolent historical practice. There has been a long history of anti-Semitism in parts of the radical Left whereby a small number of unrepresentative token Jews are opportunistically encouraged to exploit their own religious and cultural origins in order to vilify their own people. This happened in 1929 when American Jewish Communists were obliged to defend the anti-Jewish pogroms in Palestine. It happened again in 1952/53 when Jewish Communists were rolled out to endorse Stalin's anti-Semitic Slansky show trial in Czechoslovakia, and the so-called Doctors' Plot. It has happened many times since 1967 when left-wing Jews have been pressured to publicly conform to the anti-Zionist fundamentalism of the far Left.

Radical Left groups would never employ such techniques against other historically oppressed nations. They would not publish the views of Indigenous Australians who completely oppose land rights, or demand that a feminist journal publish the views of women who totally oppose abortion. They would certainly not publicize the views of Palestinians or Arabs who support Zionism.

The western-left is bleeding Jews and this is a book that I am very much looking forward to reading.

Of course, it is not just the BDS movement that highlights anti-Zionist Jews, but more mainstream left-wing publications like Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, and the UK Guardian, not to mention Ha'aretz, who do so, as well.  This is the appeal and function of someone like David Harris-Gershon.

I honestly think that it is long past time for the Jewish people to get out of the left entirely.  I understand, of course, that this still places me in the distinct minority among Jewish public opinion, outside of Israel, yet the fact remains that Jewish support for the left is declining for the very simple reason that the left is generally non-supportive of us.  This doesn't mean that we should necessarily rush off and become Republicans, but we have to stop supporting a political movement that is increasingly hostile to the vital interests of the Jewish people.

Some will say that it is better to stay within the Democratic big tent in order to help bring about a more sympathetic culture toward the tiny, historically persecuted Jewish minority in the Middle East, and while I sincerely empathize, I just do not see it happening.

What is happening is the reverse, which is why there is a growing literature on the phenomenon.

Rest in Peace

Private Eden Atias.

Does Barack Obama Have a Learning Disability?

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at News and Views from Jews Down Under and the Times of Israel.}

The tidbit below was written by Reuters and published by Y-Net:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Wednesday his peace negotiators had resigned over the lack of progress in US-brokered statehood talks clouded by Israeli settlement building.

The development would mark a new low point for the talks with Israel that resumed in July and which officials from both sides have said have made little headway...

In a statement to Reuters TV on Wednesday, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat did not elaborate on the report of his resignation, but said the sessions with Israel were frozen.

"In reality, the negotiations stopped last week in light of the settlement announcements last week," he said.

It is hard to imagine that Obama does have a learning disability given the fact that he was the president of the Harvard Law Review - a little organization, by the way, that my eldest brother was also at one time a member of.  Furthermore, he is among the most successful politicians in the long, miserable history of politicians.  So, really, how stupid can the man possibly be?

And, yet, the Obama administration is making the same fundamental mistake today that it made directly out of the gate during his first term.  When it comes to the Arab-Israel non-peace process the very first mistake that Obama made, as I have discussed ad nauseum since 2009, is on the insistence of "total settlement freeze."

There is absolutely no reason in this world why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and miserable little dictator Mahmoud Abbas, cannot sit in a room and draw a line on a map, even if some Jews are building housing for themselves on the other side of that line.  To think otherwise is racist on its face and it is long past time that the Netanyahu government said so.

The question now becomes, has Barack Obama learned nothing from the past?  Is he capable of learning from experience and changing direction when necessary?  It certainly doesn't seem so.  Just as the demand for "total settlement freeze" wrecked the first Obama attempt at negotiations, under Secretary Hillary Clinton, so it is now wrecking his second attempt at negotiations, under Secretary John Kerry.

Kerry calls the settlements "illegitimate," but what does that mean, exactly?  Other than the fact that both Abbas and Obama want to tell Jewish people where we should be allowed to live and, thus, build housing for ourselves, it doesn't mean much.  Notice that he doesn't use the word "illegal."  There is a reason for that and the reason is that any such contention has been refuted over and over and over again.   Furthermore, any such contention would need to be grounded within UN deliberations and decisions, but the UN is notoriously corrupt and is primarily a vehicle that the Arab and Muslim governments use to lambaste Israel out of a toxic, pervasive, and fourteen hundred year old Arab-Muslim religious hatred for the Jewish people.

In this way the United Nations, which makes international law, has entirely undermined the very notion of "international law."  Since international law is determined by the UN and since the UN is under the domination of corrupt Arab and Muslim dictatorships, why should anyone take international law seriously?  It is rarely enforced and it is always politicized and, therefore, it is international law, itself, which has become entirely illegitimate.

Housing cannot be illegitimate.  Housing is either well-built upon a solid foundation or it is not.  One thing is certain, the non-peace process is most obviously not built upon a solid foundation and the reason for that is because what the Arabs want is not peace, but eventual victory over their former Jewish subjects.

From the comments:

1. Peace talks, shmeace talks  

Good riddance. Who wants to negotiate with terrorist scum anyway?  

Righteous Zionist, Israel (11.13.13)

My, my.  Somebody certainly got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.  "Terrorist scum"?  That is rather strong language in reference to Mahmoud Abbas and his team, don't you think?

No?

8. Stalled talks = Israel not handing out more free prizes  

Palestinians just got prisoners released and an extra 75 million from Kerry but that was yesterday. If they are going to talk they want more free prizes. The US, EU and Israel are dumb enough to do it.  

Sam, Canada (11.13.13)

Sam in Canada is correct.

The US, the EU, and Israel are, in fact, dumb enough to do it.  My evidence for this assertion is the simple fact that we keep seeing them do it!  Israel just forked over a bunch of murderers - including a murderer of a Holocaust survivor - who were hailed as heroes by the Palestinian Authority and the US just handed out 75 million tax-payer dollars so that Saeb Erekat could sit in a room and look at some Jews.

I wonder if he brought his knitting needles.

Israel Killed Arafat

Michael L.

Or, at least, that is what the Palestinian Authority is claiming.

Israeli-Arab journalist, Khaled Abu Toameh, writes this for the Gatestone Institute:

Palestinians renewed their allegations that Israel was responsible for the "assassination" of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. But a thorough reading of the Swiss scientists' report shows that their findings are inconclusive. Russian scientists who also examined the remains have said there was insufficient evidence to support the claim that Arafat may have died in 2004 by polonium poisoning.

Many Palestinians are saying that Israel could not have "killed" Arafat without help from the people who were very close to him. According to this theory, the same Palestinian officials who have been pointing a finger at Israel may themselves have been involved in the death of Arafat. "I am sure it is someone in his close circle, " Arafat's widow, Suha, Arafat told Reuters last week. "It must have been someone close to him."

Speaking strictly for myself, I could not be more delighted if Israel had killed Arafat.  If an Israeli underground operation is responsible for finally doing away with one of the foremost bloody Jew Haters in recorded history, I could not be happier.

One of the biggest mistakes that Israel ever made was in recognizing this murderer and his organization, the PLO, to begin with.  The Jewish people of the Middle East are under no obligation, legal or moral, to recognize and negotiate with an Arab organization that wants to see them either dead or subdued under Arab-Muslim imperial rule.

What we need always to keep in mind when we hear stories such as this is that what counts the most is the freedom and civil liberties of the Jewish people after their liberation from thirteen long centuries of Arab-Muslim dominance and persecution within the system of dhimmitude.

If the Israelis did kill Arafat, which is a distinct possibility, then he got what he so richly deserved.  It was Yassir Arafat that buried the Oslo Accords by refusing to even make a counter offer to Ehud Barak after Barak offered him the entirety of Gaza, well over ninety percent of the "West Bank," and the eastern section of Jerusalem as a capital for whatever little, corrupt terrorist entity that he would have put together in his ongoing effort to murder Jews.

If Israel did kill Arafat it is obvious why they would not admit to it, but that is rather sad.  I would much prefer - if Israel did the deed - for the government to stand up and say, "You're G-d damn right, we killed Arafat because we are not going to put up with people who are in the Jew Killing Business."

Why?

Because the Day of the Dhimmi is Done.

That's why.

Those Savage Israelis!

Michael L.

The tidbit below was written by Shachar Chai and published by Y-Net.

Israeli assistance has begun to flow into the devastated regions of the Philippines. A search and rescue force, five officers from the Medical Corps and Homefront Command as well as a representative of the Foreign Ministry, landed in Manila on Monday and flew to the disaster zone. Their mission: Evaluate the situation on the ground and determine how to best assist the search and rescue efforts with their expertise and resources.

IDF Homefront Command enlisted search and rescue reservists for the mission, but they received the call-up on short notice. The Medical Corps restocked the medical equipment and supplies expected to be sent with the delegation, as the focus of the Israeli mission will be to set up a field hospital that will treat hundreds of injured survivors who are homeless or separated from their families.

Ah, yes, those savage Israelis.

I wonder how many people Saudi Arabia has on the ground in the devastated Philippines today?

From the comments:

5. As always Israel will lend a hand to  

those who suffer these terrible disasters, and kudos to those other contries that are also quickly on the scene with aid. I do wonder if the "oil rich" countires are helping out???? My thoughts are also with the folks working in Israel from the Philippines, they must be going through a very bad time right now, especially those that may not have heard from their families. It is easy to say "be strong" but easier said than done. Prayers for the Philippines and couragous people.  

benjy (11.12.13)

I am with benjy, both the human being and the poooch.

19 Jews in Egypt

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at News and Views from Jews Down Under.}

As the Elder of Ziyon reports there are about 19 Jews left in the country of Egypt... and what they are doing there is anyone's guess.



The Jews were ethnically cleansed from the Middle East, with the obvious exception of Israel, after World War II and after Israel's War of Independence.  Between 1948 and the early 1970s almost a million Jews were driven from their homes throughout the entire region.  They were stripped of their possessions.  They were stripped of their finances.  And they were kicked out of country after country throughout the Arab-Muslim Middle East.  I am fairly astonished that they weren't killed, but then, many of them were killed.

The difference between the Jewish refugees and the Arab refugees is that the Jews were assimilated into the Israeli economy and culture.  The Arab refugees from the '48 war were in held in camps by their Arab-Muslim brothers and sisters, which is where their grandchildren remain to this day, within violently-inclined little hot-beds of hatred designed for the specific purpose of pointing that hatred at the Jewish minority in that part of the world.

What we are seeing is the Arab-Muslim manufacture of a genocidal culture and now it is the Christians who are being driven out of what was their land prior to the Muslim conquests following the rise of Islam.  The ethnic-cleansing of the Jews in that part of the world is an old story, but the final ethnic-cleansing of Christians is happening right before our eyes.

Raymond Ibrahim, an American scholar of Coptic descent, is the go-to guy.

What astonishes me the most is that western Christian liberals honestly do not seem to care.