Hankus Pankus, the Jewish Question, and the American Dream

Michael L.

{Originally published at the Elder of Ziyon.}

It frankly astonishes me that at this late date the Jewish Question persists.

Of all the peoples on the planet why should Jews remain under harassment not only by a much larger hostile Arab-Muslim majority in the Middle East, but through the antipathy of our supposed western-left allies who conceive of any form of Jewish self-defense as an unconscionable act of aggression?

It is as if they honestly believe that Arabs have every right to try to kill Jews and if we dare defend ourselves we are at fault.

Israel is generally despised by the left, yet we still donate to them and advocate for their issues and in, ways great and small, lend our collective weight to progressive-left causes.  We raise money and attend the Met and make phone calls and proudly support a political movement that is unfriendly to our own people.

Who does this?

What other people on the planet support political movements that are directly and openly in opposition to their own well-being?

There is, to my mind, something deeply disturbing about the Jewish relationship to western-left politics.  We did more than anyone else, given our relative numbers, to build up ideals of western social democracy.  In the United States the Jewish people were at the very forefront of the fight for civil liberties and universal human rights from the nineteenth-century until the present.

We fought against slavery and we fought for the late nineteenth-century progressive movement which opposed political corruption and child labor and unsafe work conditions and economic injustice.  We stood with Franklin Roosevelt, not to mention Eleanor, because we believed that government had an important role in protecting the economic well-being of American citizenry.

We also assimilated and became Americans and played baseball in the streets of New York, as did my father and as did the great Hank Greenberg - otherwise known in his day as "Hammerin' Hank" or "Hankus Pankus" or "The Hebrew Hammer" -  who became a legendary first-baseman for the Detroit Tigers in the 1930s.  The guy hit 183 runs batted in (RBIs) is the 1937 season.  183.  

{For those of you who know something about baseball, 183 RBIs in a single season is nothing short of miraculous and, lo, these many decades later remains the American League record for a right-hander.}

But while Greenberg was one of the greatest baseball players of all-time, he also risked his own relatively tentative acceptance on the field through actively welcoming African-American ballplayer Jackie Robinson into professional baseball.  What Greenberg would not have known is that although he stood up for the rights of Black athletes to join the bigs in 1947, the year Robinson broke into the major league, just a few years earlier the very icon of American liberalism, FDR, was indifferent to the fate European Jewry.

Greenberg stood up for Robinson when he had the opportunity, but Roosevelt certainly did not stand up for the Jews when he had his.

Franklin Roosevelt could have saved the Jews aboard the S.S. St. Louis in 1939, but he callously refused and thus effectively sentenced them to death in Europe at the hands of the Nazis.  He could have bombed the railroad tracks leading to the extermination camps, as we all know, but likewise refused.

According to historian Jerold Auerbach:

As far back as 1920, when FDR was the Democratic party candidate for vice president, he had proposed that “the greater part of the foreign population of the City of New York” should be “distributed to different localities upstate” so as to feel pressure to “conform to the manners and customs and requirements of their new home.” As a member of the Harvard board of directors he supported a Jewish admissions quota.

In 1941 he told his Cabinet that too many Jews were federal employees in Oregon. One of his grandsons recalled that the protagonists in FDR’s jokes “were always Lower East Side Jews with heavy accents.” At a wartime White House luncheon with Prime Minister Churchill, he suggested “the best way to settle the Jewish question” was “to spread the Jews thin all over the world.”

American Jews have given our allegiance to the Democratic Party since the 1930s.  We stood up for Roosevelt because we believed in social justice and universal human rights.  We stood up for the left because as Jews we understood persecution and hoped to create a liberal political system in which all people would have a fair shot at what idealists in the United States called the American Dream.

I think that Hank Greenberg knew a thing or two about the American Dream.

The truth of the matter is that Jews were so hell-bent on living the American Dream that we practically invented the notion.  Or, to be more precise, we helped popularize it to a non-Jewish western audience (via cinema, for example) who lapped it up like cream because it reflected who they were and, hopefully, still are in some measure.

We also stood up with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the movement for Civil Rights in the 1950s and the 1960s.  We saw Jewish kids slain in the American south by white racists as they fought for social justice for black people and all non-whites in the United States.

It was Jewish kids, far beyond their numbers, who stood up in the 1960s against the war in Vietnam and for social justice at home and who sometimes went off the rails entirely in doing so.

The guy on the right is Cal Abrams.  He played for the Dodgers in Brooklyn and was the brother of Arty Abrams, one my father's closest friends in the burbs of New York when I was a young'n.  Abrams wore number 18 through most of his career because he liked the magic of the number.  Ballplayers are notoriously superstitious, so when you combine that superstitious tendency with the ancient semi-Hebraic mystical-numerological system known as gematria than you end up with Jewish ballplayers who favor the number 18, which apparently means, among other things, Chai or "life."

Cal Abrams, as far as I know, did not stand up for the Civil Rights Movement, but he did play baseball in the streets of Brooklyn before joining the fight in the Pacific during World War II.  When the Dodgers picked him up after the war a New York Post headline read, Mantle, Schmantle. We Got Abie. 

Abrams turned out to be a good ballplayer, but no Mickey Mantle.  The point is, though, that he was a regular American assimilated Jew who served his country at a moment of dire need and pursued the American dream in the most quintessential manner possible, as a professional baseball player.  They even buried him in his Dodgers uniform with the number 18.

American romanticism is part of the life-blood of American Jews and nothing means Americana like baseball.  The intimate connection between baseball and American Jewry is very well documented.  It was as a means for the children of immigrants to join the larger American project and it has been handed down ever since as a natural part of growing up.

And it was, indeed, part of the American Dream even if we did not think of it in those terms as we swung bats and chased one another around on the grassy fields of our youth.  Baseball is about assimilation and integration and joining in the joys of the culture around you.  It is about resonating, long-standing cliches concerning hot dogs, stolen bases and sunny summer afternoons.  Whatever anyone might think of such cliches they comprise a manner in which Americans tell themselves who we are.  Baseball is one of the vehicles through which Americans define themselves and through which Jewish Americans likewise do so.

American Jews, much like American Blacks as described in W.E.B. DuBois' classic, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), however, have double consciousness.  We see ourselves through the eyes of others even as we see ourselves, and those others, through our own eyes.   DuBois put it like this:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

I do not wish to overstate this idea, but it is unquestionably true that the Jewish experience in the west, like the African-American experience in the United States, means always to be regarded with a certain degree of suspicion and to, inevitably, incorporate that suspicion into our sense of ourselves.  We too often come to believe the worst that is said about us, which is why we end up with Uncle Toms like David Harris-Gershon running around the United States telling people what monsters the Jews of the Middle East are.

At the end of the day, however much we may assimilate, we can only really count on ourselves.  And what that means is, yes, assimilating and being proud Americans (or Canadians or Australians), and enjoying the pastimes of our countrymen, but it also means foregoing slavish and outdated loyalties that simply no longer serve any meaningful or helpful purpose.

When Franklin Roosevelt refused to use his influence to save the Jews aboard the S.S. St. Louis he sent a very clear message to American Jewry which was simply not received, because we refused to receive it.

Likewise, when Barack Obama stood up in support of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt he made a very clear statement to the Jewish people which we have also not received, because we refuse to receive it.

The message was this:

I am not to be trusted.

It is time that we took him at his word.

All peoples, however assimilated or integrated, stand up for themselves and for their children.

When considering our political options, I say that we go forth and do likewise... even as we are enjoying a dog at the park.

With Friends Like This.

geoffff

I cross post pieces at IT that on the face of it likely look are about the parochial and marginal from the standpoint of where all the action is.  Australia is a middle ranking power that diplomatically punches above its weight but no one here kids herself that the country has much sway in the way of the world. 

I do it because it is striking how similar are the issues in our countries. I do it as a reminder that we are up against a sophisticated global movement that is pulling out all stops in this sinister campaign against Israel and the Jews. 

They mean business. Rewriting history is nothing for them. For them, that is the least that they will do. 

I do it because Australia, with Canada and the Czech Republic, may be Israel's only remaining true friends in the world and in the case of Australia at least that can now change with a change of government. 

If you follow the links you may be astonished at the energy and sheer bloody-minded determination that has been invested this year and last in the ongoing process of tearing the Australian Labor Party, despite aberrations, arguably historically the most pro-Israel party in the Western world, away from its traditional rock solid support of Israel and Zionism that extends back to the foundation of Israel and decades before.

For the benefit of US readers, you will recall Bob Carr is the creepy little man who due to the vagaries of the Australian constitutional and political systems was unelected to any public office when he was appointed the country's foreign minister in 2012 by the besieged Prime Minister in a bizarre twist to a failed attempt to stop her government from falling apart.

Don't ask. 

It is to do with the faction system of the ALP, especially the power of the faction bosses in the then ruling party in the lower house and without question the most formally factioned party in the democratic world. 

Except perhaps Israel.  

The good news is that it did not work, the Australian public did its job and last year out went the government poxy foreign minister and all. As predicted former PM Gillard, now in political retirement and on the record, immediately came to regret her appointment of the creepy little man as FM and also as predicted, the creepy little man has lived on in retirement as the Jimmy Carter of Australian politics who as we all know is the strangest and creepiest little man to have ever been POTUS. Ever.

Enough background. From this point the post is as appears in the Australian blogs.   

Happy to answer any questions in comments.

 

A Defining Moment in the History of the ALP

This is a New Year greeting from NSW Labor to the NSW Jewish community just a few weeks after NSW Labor served up a big bowl of something red and smelly to the NSW Jewish community and for that matter everyone else who might think the Middle East Jews are just as entitled as their neighbours to basic civil and human rights including in particular the right to be left in peace in their own sovereign state.

Look at this . This is Bob Carr's resolution adopted by NSW Labor condemning Israel and rewarding "Palestine" for the Hamas (and Fatah) war crime of attacking the civilian population of Israel from the shelter of the civilian population of Gaza. 

It is now official.

From the policy standpoint of NSW Labor, attacking innocent civilians with lethal force carries no particular moral opprobrium at all so long as those civilians are Jews. Or at least Israeli Jews. Please do not dismiss this as hyperbole.

This is so even if the attacks are carried out from behind women and children as calculated battle tactics to deflect or inhibit directed retaliation aimed at stopping the strikes. That the intended victims are Israeli Jewish civilians overrides everything. Terrorism on a massive scale.  Cold blooded murder. Genocidal antisemitism.  Everything. Nothing is too vicious, depraved or obscene for Carr and NSW Labor to draw in a flash an immediate moral equivalence with Israel's military response to the attacks. 

Can you think of any other circumstance where Carr and the ALP would stoop so low? 

On the other hand Israelis defending themselves against these war criminals are condemned with a resolution that quite explicitly holds them responsible for the violence that Hamas coldly launched and the casualties the terror gangs have quite deliberately caused even among their own population.  

Why does Fatah always get a free pass by the way, in the muddy airy world of Bob Carr and the other strange and unpleasant men and women of NSW Labor? Given that President Abbas' boys were right in there from the start doing their best to murder civilians with the rest of them?

Why does it take a political resolution to determine a matter of international law? Why would a party ever seek to resolve any matter of law at a political conference?  The answer I suggest is obvious. That "Israel and the settlements are in breach of international law"  has long ceased to be an issue of law, at least as the concept is understood in countries such as Australia, US or Israel. The only international law that Israel is in breach is Sharia. The rest is politics and puff.

We may be witnessing the death of international law as a concept that is worth retaining. 

Carr and NSW Labor have sold out much more than you might think when they sold out Israel and the Jews. 

We can say something for certain about international law that NSW Labor in it new role as arbiter, or at least resolver, on issues legal, could save for its next conference. Firing thousands of rockets across a border at random on a civilian population in an attempt to murder as many people as possible is a breach of international law. That's an opinion NSW Labor can have for nothing. 

On reflection NSW Labor should avoid resolving that murder is illegal at the next conference. Let alone that civilised states have a duty to stop if they can with police and soldiers if they must. NSW Labor has already shown its true colours on these matters.  

This is Bob Carr's resolution, now NSW ALP policy. NSW Labor's Rosh Hashanah message follows. It's a peach.        

       MIDDLE EAST PEACE PROCESS – Resolution adopted at NSW Annual Conference

1. Deploring the tragic conflict in Gaza, Conference supports an end to rocket attacks by Hamas and an end to Israeli incursions, which have led to the deaths of innocent civilians.

1. ALP Conference applauds the last Labor government for its commitment to a two-state solution in the Middle East and specifically:

-          voting to enhance Palestinian status in the General Assembly;

-          restating the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is occupied territory;

-          opposing Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land; and

-          joining the world community in branding settlements illegal under international law.

1. NSW Labor recognises a Middle East peace will only be won with the establishment of a Palestinian state.

1. The state of Palestine should be based on 1967 borders with agreed land swaps and with security guarantees for itself and Israel.

1. NSW Labor welcomes the decision of the Palestinian Authority to commit to a demilitarised Palestine with the presence of international peacekeepers, including US forces.

1. If, however, there is no progress to a two state solution, and Israel continues to build and expand settlements, a future Labor Government will consult like-minded nations towards recognition of the Palestinian state.

It is impressive that NSW Labor achieved a world scoop on the PA committing to a demilitarised Palestine with international peacekeepers. Or at least it would be if it wasn't the mother of all crocks.  That's NSW Labor for you. I doubt if they even care that this is a lie.

But I digress. Back to NSW Labor and Rosh Hashanah.



This is from Michael Easson, one of Israel's few remaining friends in NSW Labor,  from Australia Israel Labor Dialogue. 

I was a regular at Annual Conference for my first 21 years of membership. Not so in the last 20. I was surprised at how few foreign policy resolutions were sent in by party units for consideration by the 2014 Conference. There was nothing about Syria’s devastating civil war, nor the brutal conquests by the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – including the massacre of religious opponents, persecution of the historic, remnant Christian communities, and the introduction of sharia law including the mandatory circumcision of girls by excision of the clitoris. Nor anything about conflicts and outrages against human rights in Nigeria, Ukraine, North Korea, Eritrea, Sudan and a host of trouble spots. No doubt this is partly a reflection of the long term decline of the vibrancy of ALP branches, a theme this Newsletter has commendably addressed over many years.

At this year’s Conference, there was just one resolution on ANZUS, several on Julian Assange, and 33 on Israeli settlements and Palestine.

and this

There is obviously going to be a campaign led by Carr into the National Conference. As he stated to Arab Friends of Labor at the Sunday fringe event – “next step, Federal Conference”.

There's a blow by blow description of what went on at the NSW Labor Conference on Israel (you would think they had nothing better) at that link.

An article by Michael Easson in the Spectator provides some history to this parting of the ways.  

Labor must not turn its back on Israel

The ALP has a long history of support for Israel. As it should.

7 CommentsMichael Easson 16 August 2014

Like many supporters of Israel across the Australian community, I am stunned by the erosion of sympathy and advocacy within the Labor Party in defence of the only democratic nation in the Middle East.

Shrugging one’s shoulders and writing off Labor as a lost cause would be a mistake for three reasons. First, there are plenty of advocates of Israel within the ALP, probably a majority of the Right outside NSW. Second, notwithstanding recent setbacks such as the loosely worded Bob Carr motion carried at July’s NSW Conference, social democrats still have more in common with Israel than against. Third, giving up the ghost with one side of politics is to make support for Israel, or the Palestinians, partisan causes – a dangerous position in the longer term.

What is needed is re-engagement with emerging, future generations of Labor. New strategies are also required to restore balance to the debate.

As a student in 1977, I joined Labor Friends of Israel, an organisation formed by Carr with plenty of backing across the centre and right of NSW Labor. It was morally right then and now to resist thinly disguised anti-Semitism from the far-Left on campuses and elsewhere.

There was then a lot of deep attachment from many NSW Labor figures like Lionel Bowen (1922-2012), Deputy Prime Minister under Hawke and Joe Riordan (1930-2012), anti-communist union leader, MP for Phillip and briefly a Whitlam Minister. Riordan admired the Leon Uris book Trinity as one of the best accounts of the Irish experience. He also loved Uris’s Exodus which told the story of Zionist immigration to existing Jewish communities in Palestine by refugees and others from around the world. Riordan believed the Jewish struggle for statehood was akin to Irish battles for independence.

The support for Israel from Australian Workers’ Union leader, President of the NSW ALP from 1960-1970, Charlie Oliver (1901-1990) was so ardent that his Will stipulated that the President of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies read the Old Testament at his funeral – which ALP member Leslie Caplan duly did. In this era, Bob Hawke’s passionate defence of Israel against the truly mad Labor official Bill Hartley (1930-2006) and others in the Victorian ALP inspired generations of Labor moderates. In NSW, Jewish Labor luminaries like Premier Wran’s Ministers Syd Einfeld (1909-1995) and potential successor as Premier Paul Landa (1941-1984) enjoyed wide respect.

continues here

Almost exactly ten years ago, former ALP minister Barry Cohen wrote a watershed article on what he called the Anti-Semitic Labor Party.


His party.

Carr says it is Israel that has changed but Carr knows that is a lie. Every single concession made or offered in an attempt to forge a peace deal has come from Israel. Carr knows that the Arabs can have another Arab Muslim state if they want it and they can call it what they like. They can do with what they want. This is old and settled ground and for NSW Labor to hold out that it is Israel that is an obstacle to a "state of Palestine" is nothing but a convenient and cowardly lie.

It is not Israel that has changed since Carr helped form Labor Friends of Israel in the sixties or seventies. That is Carr lying at his worst. Since then Israel has made three formal and detailed peace proposals all of which met any remotely legitimate demand or grievance. They were all viciously and violently rejected.

Of course.

 It is the demographics of western Sydney, and in particular in a swag of Labor held federal and state seats, that have changed.

It really is as simple as that. It really is that cynical and cowardly. Abandoning or attacking Israel is the course of least resistance in a world where political Islam is rampant and Jew hatred is core to the ideology. We have seen all of this before.

There is absolutely nothing new about Bob Carr and NSW Labor. 

You have to respect Michael Easson for what he does and indeed for his expert knowledge but the truth is that despite him  NSW Labor gave up on Israel and the Jews the moment there was some pain in it. 

Federal Labor is on the precipice.  Carr abandoned Israel the moment he was able and regards this as a career highlight. He instinctively and viscerally blamed Israel for flaming the 9/11 attacks. He is determined to have his way (if you have any doubt how obsessed he is with Israel and Jews you should read his published diary) and he has the tide of his party with him. 

This is the kind of friends they are. It is good that we found out in time. 

Sorry John Robertson MP and NSW Labor. Coming from you, all this talk about a society where all are valued and free from hate speech and racism, about strong beliefs in peace and freedom, rings about as true as tinnitus. 

You abandoned all that when you abandoned the only state in the Middle East that prizes those concepts. And for that reason you have to agree with the rabid left, and now it seems NSW Labor, that indeed the matter of Israel, "Palestine" and the eternal racist war on the Middle East Jews is a threshold entry level issue for all.

How bloody disgusting. So be it. 

You can define a person morally and politically, and make an assessment of their character, by where they stand on this issue. That is worth thirty-three resolutions for a start.   

You can thank Bob Carr more than most for that. 

cross posted Jews Down Under

Geoffff's Joint

Piece # 25 for the Elder

Michael L.

I want to thank the Elder of Ziyon for publishing my most recent Sunday piece entitled, Hankus Pankus, the Jewish Question, and the American Dream.

Here is an excerpt:

But while Greenberg was one of the greatest baseball players of all-time, he also risked his own relatively tentative acceptance on the field through actively welcoming African-American ballplayer Jackie Robinson into professional baseball.  What Greenberg would not have known is that although he stood up for the rights of Black athletes to join the bigs in 1947, the year Robinson broke into the major league, just a few years earlier the very icon of American liberalism, FDR, was indifferent to the fate European Jewry. 

Greenberg stood up for Robinson when he had the opportunity, but Roosevelt certainly did not stand up for the Jews when he had his.

Franklin Roosevelt could have saved the Jews aboard the S.S. St. Louis in 1939, but he callously refused and thus effectively sentenced them to death in Europe at the hands of the Nazis.  He could have bombed the railroad tracks leading to the extermination camps, as we all know, but likewise refused.

By the way, there is an absolutely terrific article just published at the Gatestone Institute by Guy Millière called Radical Islam, Israel and Agitprop that is probably the best overall assessment of the history and current state of the never-ending Arab-Israel war that I have read in a single article.

You guys should check it out, but here is an excerpt from that piece:

In every Western country, even in the United States, almost nobody sees that the raw invention of the "Palestinian people" transformed millions of Arabs into a genocidal weapon to be used against Israelis and even, in Europe this year, the Jews. Almost nobody sees that transforming people into a genocidal weapon is essentially a barbaric act.

Terror attacks have not stopped and will not stop so long as Arab nationalism and radical Islam exist. Israel will continue to exist at the price of eternal and strict vigilance.

Diplomatic attacks have not stopped and will not stop so long as Western countries do not break with the Arab vision of the Middle East and the "Palestinian" vision of Israel.

Disinformation attacks also have not stopped and will almost certainly increase. They could stop if, and only if, Western media admitted they had lied or been lied to -- not a high probability.

An Endless Political Möbius Loop

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at Jews Down Under.}

This strikes me as a rather eerie moment in the seemingly endless Arab-Israel war.

We just recently came out of Operation Protective Edge and things are pretty much where I expected them to be.  Hamas shoots rockets for years into southern Israel making life there something close to unbearable as Israeli children are practically born with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Israel thus kills a bunch of Gazans in securing the military objectives of degrading Hamas's rocket capability and destroying those terror tunnels which were to be used to kidnap and kill innocent Jewish Israeli civilians.

Much of the west, naturally, ran with the Hamas playbook in the sense that they did their bit for the organization by screaming to the rooftops that Israelis are fascist, racist, apartheid, murderers... and, of course, they insist upon this because they ever so deeply care abut the well-being of the Jews under siege in the Middle East.

Hamas, meanwhile, was quite literally willing to lose a few thousand of its own people in order to give Israel an international public relations black eye and it was the western left that delivered that black eye, via the press, in fulfillment of what Dershowitz calls Hamas's "Dead Baby Strategy."

But now as Obama starts bombing the Islamic State in Iraq the level of howling against the Jews in Israel has abated for the moment and I feel like we're just bobbing in the political waves.  Obama just stood up before the United Nations and made some marshmallowy feel-good sounds that will amount to little or nothing.

Concerning that speech, Ben Shapiro said this:

Speaking at the United Nations on Wednesday, President Obama performed the signal feat of cramming his head so far up his own ass that his head actually emerged from his mouth again, thereby creating the first human Escher loop.

I have to say, I do not know about Obama, but that is a very apt description of the Arab-Israel conflict.  It is an Escher Loop.  It is a Mobius Strip that just goes round and round and round.  And we're just the little ants scurrying along a hopeless and endless and consistent path to nowhere.

That, I suppose, is one way of looking at it in my darker moments.

I see no upside, though.  Do you?

Is anyone seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, because I am not.

The best that we can hope for in the long run, probably, is maintenance of the conflict.  The Arab governments have no intention whatsoever of ending the aggression and why should they when it will primarily be their cousins next door to Israel that will pay the price?  The vast majority of ideologues who hate on Jews throughout that part of the world will suffer no consequences for promoting violence and spreading malice for political reasons, so why should they stop?

Furthermore, since much of the west is more and more agreeing with them that Jews should only be allowed to live in certain restricted areas in the Middle East it often puts us in an exceedingly difficult position via our political alliances.

I have to say, though, I've seen this movie before and I very much hope that I do not have to watch it again... and again and again.

No matter how many times that I see it, it just never ends well.

Hat Tip to Soeren Kern at the Gatestone Institute.

Arab Racism and Insipid Western Apologies

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at the Elder of Ziyon and Jews Down Under.}


I have had it.

There comes a point where the level of disgust reaches such a crescendo that it makes me want to rip my left arm directly out of the socket so as to beat myself senseless with it.

{Now there is an image for you to carry through your day!}

Look, I have a question.  How is it that western-left venues always harp on alleged Jewish atrocities in the Middle East, such as the latest wholly justified Gaza incursion, while almost entirely ignoring the much more significant and perverse Muslim-on-Muslim, Sunni versus Shia violence throughout that part of the world featuring beheadings, no less?

It is profoundly unjust, which is part of the reason that Matti Friedman's work for Tablet magazine uncovering institutionalized anti-Israel / anti-Jewish media bias in "Operation Protective Edge" resonates so well.

A few years ago I wrote a brief piece entitled, Israel 1242 - Tibet 18 which garnered some attention and in which I noticed the following:

A basic tag search of the Daily Kos blog reveals that between Feb 21, 2009 and today there were a grand total of 18 essays on the topic of Tibet. That is a total of 18 essays over the period of about 13 months on a left political blog with over 200,000 registered users. During that exact same period of time, however, there were 1242 diaries on the subject of Israel...

In truth, these people do not really care about human rights at all for if they did they would care about the human rights of people who do not happen to live in Ramallah or Gaza City. If they honestly cared about human rights they would care about the Tibetans. They would care about Darfur. They would care about Congo and Chechnya.

They don't.

1242 to 18.

The blatant hypocrisy is astounding.

The point, of course, is that the grassroots / netroots of the Democratic party in the United States, and the western-progressive left, as a whole, excoriates Israel far-and-away out of all proportion to Israeli-Jewish sins.  Those who read these pages know this.  The problem is getting the rest of them to understand the nature of the ongoing misinformation campaign against the Jews of the Middle East.

Let us look at one small example from Peter Beinart that the Elder quoted last Thursday, September 18.

Beinart claims:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the story of a powerful state oppressing a stateless people. But it’s also the story of rival, equally legitimate, nationalisms.

This is simply, wholly, and entirely false.

These two brief lines show us very clearly that Beinart has swallowed the so-called "Palestinian narrative" whole.  He lapped up every ounce of poison cream and believes wholeheartedly in The Great Inversion of 1967 that Joshua Muravchik recently wrote about in Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel and that the Elder recently reviewed.  Beinart's first big mistake, therefore, is buying into the nonsense that the conflict is between a powerful state and a small, helpless, largely innocent native population.

This is not only false, it is precisely the Arab propaganda line that the PLO first started hawking, upon Soviet tutelage, in the mid 1960s.  It sounds good from a semi-academic, post-colonial, Edward Saidian perspective, but it also happens to be historical hogwash.

There is no "Israeli-Palestinian conflict."  What there is is an Arab conflict with everyone else in that part of the world, including the Jews.  We must make it very clear that this is an ongoing, millenia-long aggression by the majority Arab populations against all minorities in the Middle East.  The problem arises when we allow acidic and ignorant individuals such as Beinart to decontextualize the conflict by making it seem that Jews are the aggressors when, in fact, Jews are defending themselves from an exceedingly aggressive and hostile Arab majority, as are others, such as the Copts and the Kurds.

The question of Israel is a question of the civil liberties and human rights of the Jewish people.  The Arabs hold well over ninety-nine percent of the landmass of the Middle East and control twenty-one countries.  These are Algeria, Bahrain, the Comoros Islands, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.

And, yet, Peter Beinart thinks that the Jewish people, his own people - a people held under a system of submission to a foreign power for thirteen long centuries - needs to cut itself in half to give a state to its enemies on its own minuscule bit of land.  And he thinks so despite the fact that the Arabs have always and perpetually turned down the two-state offer.  They turned it down in '37 and '47 and '67 and 2000 and 2008... and every moment and every day in between.

Furthermore, the "Palestinians" are not a stateless people quite simply because they are not a distinct and separate ethnicity.  The conquering Arabs represent something close to 400 million people throughout that part of the world and they have, over the centuries since Muhammad, claimed all of that territory for themselves while driving out and persecuting both Christians and Jews and all non-Muslims.

Finally, to call "Palestinian" nationalism equivalent to Jewish nationalism is to show a deep and profound disrespect not only for history, but for one's own people.  The Jewish people have lived on that land for something over 3,500 years.  We are, in fact, the closest thing to an indigenous people that that land has... unless there is some misplaced tribe of Jebusites wandering around somewhere who have eluded notice.

"Palestinian" nationalism, on the other hand, was born a quarter past last Tuesday and represents an entirely aggressive response to Jewish national reconstitution.  These are hardly "equivalent" nationalisms and I do not see where the Jewish people are under any obligation (moral, legal, or otherwise) to recognize a people who only recently constituted themselves as a people for the sole purpose of opposing the creation and maintenance of our small home.

In the mean time, I cannot even book a room at the Mecca Hilton.

That is quite some beautiful building, wouldn't you say?

The Elder recommended that I give it a shot and I thought, "why not?"  So I called the Hilton Corporation and, indeed, I failed in this modest endeavor.  I tried twice, in fact, and both times I ultimately found myself listening to muzak.

I also called the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles a couple of times, but they were even less helpful than the Hilton staff.

At one point one of the clerks from Hilton said, "We don't want to exclude anyone,"  yet, another, perhaps more honest clerk, told me straight-up, "Non-Muslims cannot enter the Holy City of Mecca."

Ya don't say?

And, yet, the left constantly excoriates the Jews Israel on issues of universal human rights.

It is entirely unjust.

On Narratives and Tactics

Sar Shalom

A common refrain in the pro-Israel community is that the media are biased against Israel. Coverage of the recent fighting in Gaza has been such that even Gary Rosenblatt of The (NY) Jewish Week, who previously has been a staunch defender of the media against charges of bias, felt forced to admit that there was something untoward in the media's coverage of the conflict. In addressing the media's bias, it would help to look at how the narrative frames developed that lead to today's skewed coverage in order to develop our own strategy to counteract it.

Recently, Columbia Journalism Review recarried an article about The New York Times' coverage of Israel. Early in to that article was a vignette about how narratives at the Times changed from Israel as a scrappy upstart fending off those who would exterminate her to Israel as cruel overlord:

During the winter of 1974, Seymour Topping, the assistant managing editor of The New York Times, and his wife, Audrey, visited Jordan as part of a tour of the Middle East.

On their stops in Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, Topping often had to confront criticism that the Times’ coverage was too favorable to Israel. It was a familiar enough situation for him; to be the editor of the Times in charge of international coverage meant you were a magnet for complaints. They were usually about the paper, but sometimes about US policy, which foreigners often believed was refracted through the Times’ coverage.

In Jordan, King Hussein took a different approach: He arranged for the Toppings to visit a nearby Palestinian refugee camp. The visit affected Topping markedly—he saw both the squalor of the camp and the festering hatred of Israel—and he recounted afterwards that he realized he had not understood the role of the Palestinians in the region’s future until then.

What this episode demonstrates is that King Hussein caught on to a strategy that I have seen mentioned during my days following the DLC: if you want to convince the public to support you against your opponent, tell them something that they don't know about your opponent but would not like if they did. Before the West saw how the Palestinian refugees were living, the narrative was that the victims of the worst genocide from Europe were attempting to restart their lives in the face of nihilist opposition. The new information that Jordan presented to Topping showed that instead of the opposition to Zionism being nihilistic, there was an actual victim of Israel's birth. This led to a new narrative that the victims of Europe's worst genocide sought to rebuild their lives at the expense of innocent, as most westerners came to see them, others. Unfortunately, when this new narrative began to gel, our only response has been to reiterate the facts underlying our old narrative more loudly.

In the absence of facts supporting the Palestinians' claims, the facts underlying our narrative would carry the day. However, if the Very Serious People of the world think that the facts underlying the Palestinian narrative are more significant, no amount of telling our old narrative will change their perception. This applies equally to Holocaust and Hamas' rockets. What we need to do is to tell the Very Serious People something about the Israeli-Palestinian that they don't know, but would make them not like the Palestinian national movement if they did. Since the Very Serious People's love affair with Fatah is based on the belief that Fatah is the last-best hope for peace, the facts we reveal would have to undermine that notion. Further, the Very Serious People are loathe to admit that there is no hope for peace, so undermining the notion that Fatah is the last-best hope for peace will require showing that there is an alternate partner to get to peace.

Accordingly, the next time dignitaries (political candidates, media editors) visit Israel, instead of showing them what Israelis are living through under Hamas terror, show them genuine voices for peace on the Palestinian side. The first example should be a gathering of Sheikh Jabari with what the Very Serious People call "settlers." This information would serve two purposes. It would show that if Fatah is dethroned, that hope is not lost for attaining peace. Further, it would show that the "settlers," are an excuse for Fatah to refrain from making peace rather than a real obstacle, as proved by the willingness of Palestinians like Jabari to meet with them. Preferably, the dignitaries would witness one of these meetings in Jabari's home in Hebron, but if they are unwilling to go where Israel "has no right to be," the meeting should be moved to where the dignitaries would be willing to go to witness it. This could be followed by more similarly minded Palestinians, such as the followers of Mohammed Daoudi Dajani's Wasatia movement. However, more important would be to see how the Palestinian national movement reacts to the Palestinians who genuinely seek peace as is evident in the anti-normalization crusade.

Ultimately, the goal is to supercede the current narrative the way the Arabs got the current narrative to supercede the one that existed until 1967. The new narrative should be one which acknowledges that there is Palestinian suffering, but which attributes that suffering to the national movement using the people as pawns and that the people who actually are trying to help the Palestinian people do not measure their progress by how far they roll back Jewish aspirations.

Are Jews Allowed to Even Visit Mecca?

Michael L.

I am a Jew.

Can I go to Mecca?

Let's find out.

I called the Saudi Arabian Consulates General office in Los Angeles (310-479-6000) and tried to ask them if I could come to Mecca as a Jewish tourist.

And when I say tried to ask them I mean that I am not at all certain that I was entirely successful in this minor endeavor.

The first nice lady who I spoke with recommended that I speak with the Visa Office.

That office recommended that I speak with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

I asked people for their names, but they said that they were not allowed to give out that information, and I certainly cannot blame them for that.

But, I want to see Mecca.

I do.

And I want to know more about official Muslim-Saudi restrictions on Jews in the Holy City and the country as a whole.

Is that wrong?

And am I racist for wondering how it is that a Jew cannot even visit land where Jews lived for millenia prior to the rise of Islam?

Let's find out, shall we?

.

By the way, I do not often read Maureen Dowd of the New York Times but in her article concerning Mecca in 2010 she writes this terrific line:

Couldn’t Mecca, I asked the royals, be opened to non-Muslims during the off-season? 

:O)

Actually, now that I think on it, that could easily have been a line coming from the ample mouth of the late, great Joan Rivers.

Latest Post for the Elder

Title:  Weakness, Stupidity, and Head-Chopping

Here is a tid-bit:

I may be rambling a bit - and G-d only knows that I need a stalwart editor - but this popular head chopping fad that we have been reading about is ghastly... horrific... mind-bogglingly revolting... there are no words and it leads one to wonder the extent to which this kind of thing has been going on all along....that is, if I may wonder aloud without insulting anyone's religious faith, for chrissake.

Although I do respect people's religious traditions, this particular practice, for some strange reason, crosses a line for me, particularly when it is practiced on children as we saw with the Fogel family attack.  Your mileage may vary, but I find myself in the nay-saying camp when it comes to chopping off people's heads in the name of the deity.

So, is this head-chopping thing a fad or has it been going on all along in basically the same measure?

Certainly it is recommended in the Koran.

Sura 47 reads, in part:

When you encounter the unbelievers on the battlefield, strike off their heads until you have crushed them completely...

Therefore, this head-chopping habit is embedded in Islam's holiest book and I am pretty sure that Sura 47 is not the only place.

Here is a rather academic article by Timothy Furnish of the Middle East Quarterly on the subject from 2005.

I cannot help but think that Jesus would not approve.

In any case, I certainly do not and there is but no question that Obama was wrong when he said, the other day, something to the effect that no religion calls for harming the innocent.

That is a lie.

Obama is either ignorant or lying.  My suspicion is the latter.  How is it possible that I know more about Islam than the guy who went to Islamic school as a child?

Christianity is a religion of peace and compassion in the words of the founder.

Judaism is a religion of law.  One keeps Kosher - if one does so - not because of any contemporary notions concerning health, but because it is the written law, Torah.

Islam is a religion of submission and is the only religion in the world that advocates taking a sharp blade, stabbing it into a person's neck, and sawing their head off.

Does noticing this and mentioning it aloud make me a "racist"?

Alan Dershowitz On The Dead Baby Strategy And Other Crimes Against Nature

geoffff

Some readers of geoffff's joint may know that the blog has shamelessly claimed for itself credit for coining the phrase "dead baby strategy" to describe the standing plan of the ruling Gaza authorities of the day, whoever and wherever they may be on the day and that is by no means necessarily in Gaza, to put civilians and especially children in the way of wars so as to harvest the propaganda value of the resulting lost lives for the war effort. 

Ah huh. Dead baby strategy. We had seen it before so many times it could be predicted with certainty with Operation Pillar of Cloud in November 2012 when it reached a new low of this depraved theatre of the grotesque.  Recall the Egyptian PM on a flash visit of solidarity just in time to carry for the cameras a freshly killed infant, son of a distraught BBC man no less. Turned out the child had been killed by a Hamas misfire.

Other images used have been of casualties of the Syrian conflict where there is an availability of dead kid stock several orders of magnitude over what is available in Gaza and is guaranteed to be always fresh in store.   

All you have to do is lie that the Jews did the killing and that of course is no sweat at all. Been doing that for centuries. 

 It was time it was given a name. Snuff movie is morally in the same field but doesn't quite cover it.  Death porn is closer.  

Anywhere in the world , building vast war tunnels with the blood and resources of a brutally and unlawfully ruled people and placing war facilities, including operations, war tunnel entrances and enormous munitions stocks among whatever facilities the people have been left after the plundering, would be seen as an enormous crime. To then instruct the civilian population to stay put and ignore warnings to evacuate that they know will come as the criminals have already attacked the civilian population of the hated enemy would hardly be seen as a point in mitigation anywhere.

Except in Gaza.

Over 300 kids were killed digging those tunnels. Hamas and the PA are the sources for that. Apparently the kids were prized as diggers because of their size and agility.  Likely they would have died horribly of course. 

What do you call this. A war crime? It doesn't even begin to describe it. Of course it is a war crime, not just one, but it is something else besides. Can you call it genocide not only as a policy for the Jews but also as policy for the Gazans, even when it is part of a single coherent strategy that includes rapidly expanding the population of the ruled people for the purposes that include the waging of jihad?

A policy that enslaves women, entrenches poverty, grinds out never ending grievance and that has resulted in Gaza having among the highest birth rates and population projections anywhere going all the way back to 1967 when living standards in Gaza and other places nearby dramatically began to improve in key sectors.

But I digress.

That was way before Hamas was calling the shots and the policy settings, such as they were, were flung in reverse with all seven gears grinding like a Norwegian submarine right back all the way to the seventh century. 

Not just Gaza by the way. The policy extends beyond Gaza. But how is a population explosion possibly in the same street as genocide?

Not the right word just now. But who knows what these maniacs are capable of and as the antizionist bigots in the West are fond of accusing Israel of genocide that involves the same population explosion it must be said that Hamas and its ugly sisters are guilty of a crime against their own people that is in the same dimension even now.

Not to mention the policy regarding the Jews.

Whatever else you could call this thing, you can say for sure it is uglier than a hatful of massacres and something else even uglier besides. You don't have to be a moral philosopher to note this.  

Where else in the world and in history would there be any doubt about the nature of a crime like this? There may  excellent reasons to not intervene including the most excellent reason of them all; that there is nothing that can be reasonably done. But whether it was genocide in Darfur, the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia or the crushing of the Tibetans there would be no lack of moral clarity about what we were seeing. 

Except in Gaza. 

Why is that? Isn't that being a little racist?  Because it sure looks like it to me. A kind of double racism. The racism that relieves the rulers of Arab peoples and especially "Palestinians" from all responsibility for their terrible crimes even against their own people and the racism that places the burden of responsibility for these crimes squarely onto the Jews.  

I've got to say this so please hear me through. We know it was determined Third Reich policy from the start to breed, as they saw and put it, as many Germans as possible so that they could be burned for a purpose that transcended the value of their lives.  This was a core theme of the ruling ideology.  Everyone knew this. It was taught in the schools. Beyond the individual is the state and beyond the state is the ruling ideology that must and will triumph even as the individual as an animal must die and whose duty therefore is to submit to the service of the state with his life.

In the light of events I guess one of the crimes you could accuse Hitler is the genocide of the German people. It is certainly true that Germans were his first victims and not just the Jewish Germans. 

Which brings me back to Gaza.  

As Hamas and its ugly sisters are being rewarded for their crimes and have people to burn as a result of a political culture that has a pathological attitude toward women and girls and a death cult attitude to the value of human life they will of  course keep on doing this.

But here's the thing. The rewards for Hamas are mainly in the West. They can see for themselves the strategy is working in spades and at a cost to them that is negligible. Other people's kids that have been brought into the world for this purpose as policy. 

The people of Gaza are oppressed and no one can seriously believe that there are not many among them who know what Hamas is up to and who just want a good and quiet life. But such thoughts are crimes in Gaza let alone words and how in any event supporting Hamas from the West can in any way be seen as in the best interests of the people of Gaza has to be dangerously close to racism in its own right.

Here is Alan Dershowitz nailing it at the Gatestone Institute. 

Hamas quickly produces photographs of dead babies to be shown around the world, while at the same time preventing the media from showing its rocket launchers in densely populated areas.
Unless Hamas's "dead baby strategy" is denounced and stopped -- by the international community, the media, the academy and all good people -- it will be coming soon "to a theater near you".
If Hamas's dead baby strategy works, why not repeat it every few years? And why shouldn't other terrorist groups, like ISIS and Boko Haram, adapt this strategy as Hezbollah has already done?

On June 13, 2014, the commander of the Gaza Division of the Israel Defense Forces took me into a Hamas tunnel that had recently been discovered by a Bedouin tracker who serves in the IDF. The tunnel was a concrete bunker that extended several miles from its entrance in the Gaza Strip to its exit near an Israeli kibbutz kindergarten.

The tunnel had one purpose: to allow Hamas death squads to kill and kidnap Israelis. The commander told me that Israeli intelligence had identified more than two dozen additional tunnel entrances in the Gaza Strip. They had been identified by the large amounts of earth being removed to dig them. Although Israeli intelligence knew where these entrances were, they could not order an attack from the air, because they were built into civilian structures such as mosques, schools, hospitals, and private homes. Nor could Israel identify their underground routes from Gaza into Israel, or their intended exit points in Israel. Israeli scientists and military experts had spent millions of dollars in aneffort to develop technologies that could find the underground routes and intended exits for tunnels that were as deep as a hundred feet beneath the earth, but they had not succeeded in finding a complete solution to this problem. The planned exits from these tunnels in Israel were also a Hamas secret, hidden deep in the ground and incapable of being discovered by Israel until the Hamas fighters emerged. At that point it would be too late to prevent the death squads from doing their damage.

Sure to get this 

I was taken into the tunnel and saw the technological innovations: tracks on which small trains could transport kidnapped Israelis back to Gaza; telephone and electrical lines; crevices beneath schools and other civilian targets that could hold explosives; and smaller offshoot tunnels leading from the main tube to numerous exit points from which fighters could simultaneously emerge from different places.

Continues here. A must read.

cross posted geoffff's joint

The problem with land swaps

Sar Shalom

Among the international intelligentsia, it is taken as an article of faith that the solution to what they call the Israel-Palestine conflict must be based on the "borders" that existed before the 1967 war. One problem, that this international intelligentsia recognizes, with this approach is that establishing the 1949 Armistice line as a border would make Israel's borders indefensible. Their response is to say that the border will not have to follow the armistice line exactly but could be altered by land swaps in which the Israel could gain land from the Jordanian side of the armistice line in exchange for giving Palestine an equal amount of land from the Israeli side. Right away, this approach raises practical questions such as whether any secure borders could be drawn for Israel in which Palestine has to have at least as much territory on a dunam basis as was on the Jordanian side of the armistice line prior to 1967 and the fact that Abbas holds a veto over any exchange going forward. However, these problems are beside the point from the fundamental flaw of the underlying premise of land swaps. I would call this flaw the supermarket shelf fallacy.

Suppose you walk in to a supermarket and see some produce on the shelf. To whom does that produce belong? The obvious answer is the supermarket. However, are you allowed to walk out with that produce? Of course, just so long as you pay the supermarket for that produce. Such is the status that the land swaps paradigm accords the disputed territories. That paradigm holds that because the land was under Arab jurisdiction prior to the 1967 war, it belongs to the Palestinians. It then tries to mitigate the effects of awarding "proper ownership" to the Palestinians by saying the Israel can acquire part of that land by paying the Palestinians for it.

The fundamental premise of the entire paradigm is that it considers jurisdiction prior to the 1967 war as the first and only criterion by which to determine proper ownership for today. The impetus for that position could come from the preamble to UN Security Council Resolution 242 which states, "Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war ...." However, even on that foundation, the notion that Arab jurisdiction confers rights for today falls flat because of how the disputed territories came under Arab jurisdiction. The international intelligentsia would claim that they rightfully came under Arab jurisdiction because of Partition. What this ignores is that Partition was an advisory resolution, in part due to the General Assembly only having authorization to issue recommendations, and thus could only come into force by both sides accepting it and giving it the force of bilateral treaty. Furthermore, even Partition did not give the Arabs jurisdiction over any part of Jerusalem, setting it aside for international jurisdiction. Yet, the international intelligentsia accords pre-1967 jurisdiction in Jerusalem as proof-positive for rights today. What all this shows is that jurisdiction prior to 1967 is the result of Jordan's conquest during the 1948-1949 war. Thus, decreeing that jurisdiction prior to 1967 confers automatic rights for today means picking and choosing what acquisitions of territory by war are acceptable.

None of this is meant to suggest that the Arabs living in the disputed territories should forever be subjects of a state in which they have no say in its governance. However, changing that situation does not require using the outcome from any previous war, whether in 1949 or 1967, as the basis on which to draw today's map. The principles underlying Partition were reasonable criteria by which to draw the map at that time. If I were to raise any objection, it would be that the Arab state was given exclaves in the Jewish state (Jaffa and Acre) while no exclaves in the Arab state were given to the Jewish state such as Gush Etzion. Even this could be justified because because removing the Arab population of Jaffa and Acre from the Jewish state had the effect of securing a Jewish majority for the Jewish state before the Jewish influx from the rest of the Middle East and the Arabs' abandonment and occasional expulsion from their villages in what became Israel. However, those principles applied today would produce a map that looks nothing like the Partition map. It is time to think of how the principles underlying Partition would affect the map if invoked under today's conditions.

Where is the Jewish Pro-Israel Left?

Michael L.

If the great majority of Jews are liberal-progressive and if the vast majority of progressive-left Jews believe in Israel as the national homeland for the Jewish people, just where is their media presence?

I do not see it.  Do you?

Given the fact that most Jews are progressive and given the fact that most progressive Jews are Zionists, one would think that there would be a significant media presence to support the progressive Zionist viewpoint, but there is not.

Jon Segall and fizziks had a little something going for awhile, but they're just a couple of guys with a blog, just like we are.  I find it difficult to believe that all of western liberal Zionism cannot muster enough support to even have a significant media presence or political hub of some sort.

Why is it that almost all the pro-Israel magazines, newspapers, and blogs are considered "conservative"?  Ha'aretz, of course, is not, but pretty much everything else is.  The Jerusalem Post features Martin Sherman and Caroline Glick and would definitely be considered a conservative news outlet.  The almost brand-spanking new Times of Israel is moderate, under editor David Horovitz, as is the venerable Jewish Daily Forward.

But Commentary is conservative.

Arutz Sheva is conservative.

Algemeiner is conservative.

The Jewish Press is conservative.

Israel Hayom is conservative.

And among the blogs, fuggedabout it.  The pro-Israel / pro-Jewish blogs are considered conservative almost entirely across the board.  Israel Thrives is non-partisan and we welcome voices from across the political spectrum with the obvious exception of anti-Semitic anti-Zionists.

However, the Elder of Ziyon is moderate-conservative.

Jews Down Under is moderate-conservative.

CiF Watch is moderate-conservative.

The Gatestone Institute is moderate-conservative.

David Shapiro's Truth Revolt is conservative.

Gates of Vienna is conservative.

Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs is conservative-libertarian.

Israpundit is conservative.

Geoffff's Joint is conservative.

Abu Yehuda (formerly of Fresno Zionist fame) is conservative.

Sultan Knish (aka the brilliant Daniel Greenfield) is conservative.

Mark Golub of Shalom TV is, I would argue, moderate, along with Jon Haber's Divestthis!.

And, at this point, I don't think that anyone quite knows, or cares, what the New Republic is about.  (Marty Peretz should never have trusted Peter Beinart with the reigns.)

There is, however, an anti-Israel Jewish left snuggied up to, or thoroughly embracing, the anti-Semitic BDS movement.  Jeremy ben Ami and J Street got comfy-cozy with BDS so that even Jon Segall felt it necessary to distance himself from the group.  There is Jewish Voice for Peace that is viciously anti-Zionist.  There is the notorious Mondoweiss that no one with a clue could possibly call either pro-Israel or pro-Jewish.  There is Adam Shapiro's International Solidarity Movement that got the ignorant, naive, and pissed-off Rachel Corrie killed.

And G-d only knows how many left-liberal anti-Israel Jewish college groups have sprung up over the last few years.

But the point is this:

Where the hell is the Jewish left-liberal pro-Israel media presence?

There is Ha'aretz and precious little else and calling Ha'retz "pro-Israel" is, in itself, a significant stretch.  And it is not as if I stand with them.  On the contrary, I have been exceedingly open with my specific criticisms of the Jewish left.  These criticisms include:

1) Refusing to Discuss Islamist Threat

2) Whipping Up Hatred Toward Other Jews

3) Forever Playing Defense

4) The Moral Equivalency Canard

5) Ignoring Jewish History

6) Disregarding Friends and Supporting Enemies.

What I fail to understand - among the very many things that I fail to understand - is how it is that if progressive-left Jews represent the majority of diaspora Jews and if the majority of diaspora Jews favor Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people, that there is virtually no liberal Jewish pro-Israel organizations in the media, either mainstream or bloggish?

Where are the liberal Jewish venues making the liberal Jewish pro-Israel argument?

I suppose that they must be out there, but as someone who keeps an ear to the ground on such things their voices are barely audible.