Eyeing Temple Mount Terrorists

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at Jews Down Under and The Jewish Press.}

This should prove interesting.

As I write, The Algemeiner is reporting that Israel and Jordan will cooperate in the installation of video surveillance cameras on the Temple Mount, perhaps within days.  The Palestinian-Arabs do not like it because they know such footage will show the world who the aggressors are on the Mount.  On the other hand, the videos, which apparently will be live-streamed to the web, will also be used as a tool to maintain the racist status quo.

If you are a Jew or a Christian or a non-Muslim of any sort, you are denied the right to pray at the site by the Jordanian Waqf... whatever that is, exactly.  At Judaism's holiest site, within the ancient Jewish capital of Jerusalem, within the Jewish State of Israel, only Muslims are allowed to pray.  The policy could hardly be more at odds with western liberal values and, yet, all the western governments support it.

Here, for example, is a recent video of a Danish Christian pro-Israel woman getting kicked off of the Temple Mount only because they have her on film from a previous visit singing.  I am rather surprised that they did not drag her away as a terrorist.  Instead, the Waqf police told her that she had no right to sing in the mosque.  She said that she was not in the Al-Aqsa mosque, but outside.  He told her that the entire Temple Mount is a Muslim mosque.

And now the Arabs are even trying to claim possession of the Western Wall.

So, just who exactly is trying to alter the status quo on the Temple Mount?



This new policy, however, of streaming live action footage from the Mount to the internet is, in my view, an absolutely terrific idea.  Let Arab-Muslim "worshipers" on the Mount - with their holy rocks and holy pipe bombs - aggressively intimidate non-Muslims by screaming at them, Alahu Akbar!!, and physically trying to drive them away, while the cameras roll 24/7.

It was not all that long ago that US Congressman Dennis Ross met the crazed Women in Black who have recently been banned from the site... or so I sincerely hope:



People should be greeted in a spirit of education, graciousness, welcoming, and spirituality.

Instead they get spit upon.  I have been to scores of historical sites throughout the United States and I was always treated with the utmost graciousness.  It took me to visit home territory to be treated like an outsider.

The Temple Mount is one of the most historically significant sites in the world and, yet, within the State of Israel non-Muslim visitors are treated like garbage when they visit.

With luck, however, the video live-streaming will have a moderating effect on Arab behavior and perhaps they will feel a little less free to demonstrate their violently racist hatred toward others on the holiest site to the Jewish people.  It must be emphasized, by the way, that the Temple Mount is emphatically not the third holiest anything to anyone.  That is a lie that has be drummed up since the rise of Zionism at the end of the nineteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth.

Although Jerusalem has had on-again, off-again significance in Islam, it was always dependent on the political moment.  Prior to the rise of Zionism the Temple Mount was essentially a ruin.  Some Jews would pray there, but the site was ignored by the Muslims because it had held no political value for centuries until the major aliyahs began.  It was only when the Jews started to come home in significant numbers that suddenly the Muslims re-discovered their third holiest site.

In any case, according to the Jerusalem Post:

PA officials have over the past few days dismissed the idea, arguing that Israel would use the cameras to arrest Palestinians “under the pretext of incitement.”

PA Foreign Minister Riad Malki said earlier this week that the Israeli-Jordanian agreement to install the cameras, which was reached under the auspices of US Secretary of State John Kerry, was a “trap.”

A pretext and a trap, eh?

The implication is that incitement to genocide against Jews is merely a pretext for locking up Arabs.  This can only mean that there is nothing morally wrong, not to mention illegal, about spreading such incitement.  As for the cunning trap, my recommendation to Muslims who go upon the Mount is to play nice with others and then you will not have to fall into this insidious "trap."

Adnan Abu Odeh, a high-level Jordanian politician said, "The cameras will document anyone who caries out an assault or Jews who want to pray there.”

Fascinating.

The obvious implication is that there is a moral equivalency between a thug endeavoring to assault an innocent person... and Jews praying.  The ethical blindness and hypocrisy of those like John Kerry, Barack Obama, Ban Ki-moon, and all those European leaders for whom this stance seems fair, is profound.

"Stabbing Intifada" Takes American Peace Activist

Michael L.

Ian Deitch, writing in the Times of Israel tells us:

An American educator who marched for civil rights in the 1960s and advocated coexistence between Muslims and Jews when he moved to Israel died Tuesday after succumbing to wounds sustained in a Palestinian attack on a bus in Jerusalem two weeks ago...

[Richard] Lakin was originally from Newton, Massachusetts, and a longtime principal in Glastonbury, Connecticut. His Facebook page displayed an image of Israeli and Arab kids hugging under the word “coexist.”

Micah Avni said his father was a beloved educator and author of a book on teaching. He was an elementary school principal in the US and taught English in mixed classes of Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem after moving to Israel in 1984.

In the 1960s, Lakin was active in the civil rights movement in the US, marching with Martin Luther King and bringing students from Boston to the South for sit-ins, Avni said.

Rest in peace.

Aleha ha-shalom.

"Occupation": The gift that keeps on giving

Michael L.

Editor's note.  Every once in awhile I come across a random comment by someone I do not know, but that I feel compelled to share.  Under an article in PJ Media by Ben Weingarten entitled, Israel, the Media’s Hard Bigotry of ‘High’ Expectations and the Obama Intifada - Hat Tip to Kate - we find this comment by B. Meislin:

The "occupation" is the key here. The claim of "occupation" is the strategy. The need for "occupation" is the tactic.

It's working magnificently.

No, the occupation must not be relinquished until the State of Israel is either erased or tottering on the brink.

It must be exploited to the hilt and never given up until it has served its purpose.

It is the reason why the Palestinians are believed---by all the beautiful people (and some less beautiful)---to be justified in doing and saying whatever they want. In killing and slaughtering, in lying and threatening, in rewriting history.

In denying Jews and Israelis any and all rights.

It is the Palestinians' ace in the hole. It is their "Get out of jail free" card. It is the gift that keeps on giving.

It is the reason why the Palestinians are defended to the hilt. It is the reason why Israel is widely considered the new Nazi Germany....

...by all the beautiful people (and some less beautiful)....

The "occupation" is the reason why anyone and everyone who hates the State of Israel and threatens it with destruction is not only given a pass but widely supported.

Alas, all those poor, miserable, occupied, oppressed Palestinians; "oppressed" only because they have thus far failed to destroy the State of Israel.

Thus far, at least.

But they are determined. They will not stop. They will insist on "suffering" because their "suffering" works wonders.

If they kill Israelis, they win (pass the sweets). If they are killed, they win as well.

Meanwhile, Israel is under greater and greater pressure; greater and greater delegitimization; greater and greater villification; greater and greater hatred.

No, the Palestinians will never give up this precious, priceless commodity.

They would be incredibly stupid to do so. And they are anything but stupid.

And yet, and yet, people---smart people, brilliant people, caring people, sensitive people, sophisticated people, professors, diplomats, world leaders, religious clergy---expect that the Palestinians will give up their ace in the hole.

All these people---among them, alas, Jews and Israelis---expect, hope,dream, that the Palestinians will give up this incredibly effective, all purpose tool, this blessed crowbar with which they plan to upend the entire Zionist Entity.

No matter how long it takes. They are in it for the duration.

Sorry, no dice. The "occupation" is extraordinarily useful. It is sacrosanct.

It is why all offers for deals were rejected.

It is the reason why all future offers for deals will be rejected.

It is the reason why the Palestinians can make maximalist demands and then say "no, sorry" when such demands are not met.

So no, there can be no "deal".

Because the "occupation" is the method---the strategy and the tactic---with which to erase the Jewish State; and it must be continued until the goal is reached.

Unless Israel agrees to commit suicide first.

(Which the enlightened nations---and citizens---of the world are all urging Israel to do...though it is a bit curious, even ironic, that such nations seem, currently, to be in the throes of embracing their own suicide....)

No, the Palestinians will never be held accountable as long as "Palestine" is "occupied."

They will be able to kill with abandon; they will be able to lie with abandon; they will be able to threaten with abandon

And all this with the blessings of the world community.

While Israel, its leaders, its supporters and its citizens will be vilified and reviled for not being able to make peace; for not having the courage to make peace; for not having the foresight to make peace; for not having the desire to make peace...

...with those who have every intention of destroying her.

Second Interview with Michael Burd of "Nothing Left"

Michael L.

I spoke with Michael Burd and his partner, Alan Freedman, of Nothing Left, a few weeks ago and they aired my segment today and it can be found at the 42 minute mark.

On this episode they spoke with Isi Liebler of the Jerusalem Post, Jonathan Tobin of Commentary, Israeli journalist and Holocaust survivor, Walter Bingham, filmmaker, Maxwell Federman who has shot Working Together, a film that is essentially about Arab-Jewish economic cooperation within Israel, and myself.

The basis of our conversation was the transformation of Europe due to the immigrant crisis flowing out of the Middle East.

Check it out.

The error in raising the Mufti's role in the Holocaust

Sar Shalom

Many have set the record straight regarding Benjamin Netanyahu's statement about the Mufti's role in the Holocaust in Europe. However, even with Netanyahu's clarification, there is still a problem with his statement. No, I am not saying that there is anything inaccurate or even problematic about calling attention to the Mufti's contribution to making the Final Solution happen in Europe. Rather, the problem is that the Mufti presents an opportunity to highlight Mizrahi Jewish history, and Arab oppression of Mizrahi Jewry. Focusing on the Mufti's crimes against European Jewry forfeits this opportunity, giving the canard that the Jews are a European people more opportunity to live.

As an alternative, Netanyahu could have said that while Hitler was working to annihilate the Jews of Europe, the Mufti was scheming to annihilate the Jews of the Middle East. During the summer of 1941, we got a preview of what the Mufti would have done in the Middle East if he had gained control there the way Hitler had control over Germany. After having fled Mandatory Palestine, the Mufti found his way to Iraq where he led an Arab nationalist coup. Between the time that that coup was suppressed and the British reestablished control in Iraq, followers of the Mufti perpetrated a two day Farhud against the Jews of Baghdad, the vast majority of whom were hardly Zionist beforehand, slaughtering hundreds before the British reestablished order. The only reason the Mufti did not kill more Mizrahi Jews was because blocked from gaining the capacity to do so. Having failed to annihilate the Jews of the Middle East, he turned his attention to Europe where he pushed Hitler to remove his hesitation from annihilating the Jews of Europe.

Throwing stones at Jews everywhere

Michael L.

Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Michelle Malka Grossman tells us:

 A billboard in Detroit that reads "America First Not Israel" is causing controversy and some are accusing its message of being anti-Semitic.

The large sign, placed on 8 Mile Road in Detroit, says that it was "Paid for by Deir Yassin Remembered," a New-York-based organization that has been posting similar signs throughout the country. Although the metro-Detroit area has one of the largest Arab populations outside the Middle East, as well as a sizable Jewish community, the sign was placed in a part of the city that is neither predominantly Jewish nor Muslim.

In an interview with Detroit's WXYZ Fox News affiliate, the Anti-Defamation League's Heidi Budaj said that the ad and its choice of location is trying to "drive a wedge between the American people and the state of Israel."

This is one of the manners within which full-grown anti-Jewish Arabs, if not anti-Jewish racists, in general, throw stones at Jews.

Their nephews in Israel use actual stones against Jewish children or families in automobiles.  In Europe they tend to be a tad more discreet.  Instead of actually stoning Jews in public, which is a thousands-year-old Arab tradition in the Middle East, they simply employ regular street violence and the occasional murder or the popular torture-murder combo.

In the United States, the international Arab-Muslim political movement against the Jewish people is only now beginning to gain some traction and form some definable shape.

Most native-born American Muslims are not as keen on Jew-Hatred as their counterparts in Europe or the Middle East, simply due to the fact that the US is among the least racist countries on the planet.  However, as the percentage of Middle Eastern-born American Muslims increases, whatever amicability there may be between American Muslims and American Jews will deteriorate.

I am not generally a huge fan of predicting the future, but if the past is any indication - and I believe that it is - then as Arab-Muslim population levels grow in both Europe and the United States we will see increasing violence and increasing rhetoric of hatred toward the Jewish people, as well as the slow, long deterioration of both the rights of women and Gay people.

Jewish history tells us that the kind of thing that we are now seeing out of Detroit will soften up the people for the prospect of future violence.  Whatever its intention, that is its effect.  It serves the same function as did the old blood-libel within Medieval Europe.  First they convince one another how rotten the "other" is and once people are properly convinced of this, then they are free to commit violence.

The billboard in Detroit was put neither in a neighborhood with a significant Jewish population, nor within a Muslim neighborhood.  They specifically chose a white neighborhood because that is their target audience.

They are endeavoring to create hatred toward Jews in the United States as part of an ongoing Arab-Muslim international campaign of defamation toward the Jewish people as part of the larger, ongoing operation against Jewish autonomy and self-defense in Israel.

What is that billboard intended to accomplish other than to encourage hatred toward the Jewish people?  What is that billboard intended to accomplish other than to encourage the notion that American Jews - just like German Jews in the 1930s - are a disloyal bunch who will stab you in the back the very first opportunity that we get?

This is how adults throw stones at Jews.

Netanyahu and the Nazi Mufti (Updated)

Michael L.

Update:  I am told by reasonable sources that the original image accompanying this piece was not actually of Palestinian-Arabs.  It seems that I very well have made a mistake.  Until I can verify one way or the other it is better to err on the side of caution and simply remove the image.

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

I feel reasonably certain that there is not a single individual on the planet today under more intense political pressure than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

If the guy blinks in the rain he gets smacked around from people throughout the world for not doing it correctly.  I have never seen such persistent malice directed toward a western-style political figure.  I am not even sure that Richard Nixon received this kind of unending abuse... even at the hands of Hunter S. Thompson.  And, the thing of it is, what terrible crimes can you really lay at the guy's feet?

The man started no wars.  Even last summer's strangely named Operation Protective Edge was a response to thousands of rocket attacks into southern Israel that went on for years without international complaint.  His older brother, Yoni, was the lead in the elite Israeli army commando unit Sayeret Matkal that stormed Entebbi, Uganda, saving all those kidnapped people, and the only Israeli to have died in that operation.  This makes Benjamin Netanyahu the younger brother not only of an Israeli national hero, but of a Jewish national hero, as well.

Now there is hysteria because he had the audacity to suggest that it was the Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem that convinced Hitler to slaughter the Jews.

The fact of the matter is that the Mufti was all in favor of slaughtering the Jews in the Middle East to the very last man, woman, and child, unless they were willing to submit to Muslim rule, perhaps even then.

University of Maryland historian, Jeffrey Herf, has some words:

In his now famous comments at the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on October 20th, Netanyahu claimed that Haj Amin al-Husseini convinced Hitler to change his anti-Jewish policy from one of expulsion to one of extermination. 

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time [of the meeting between the mufti and the Nazi leader]. He wanted to expel the Jews,” Netanyahu said. “And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to mandatory Palestine],’” continued the prime minister. “‘So what should I do with them?’ He [Hitler] asked,” according to Netanyahu. “He [Husseini] said, ‘Burn them.’” 

In the Knesset in 2012, the Prime Minister asserted that Husseini “was one of the leading architects of the Final Solution,” and that “he, more than anybody else, convinced [Hitler] to execute the Final Solution, and not let the Jews leave [Europe]. Because, God forbid, they would come here. Rather that they would be annihilated, burned, there.”

Jeffrey Herf is an important historian of Nazi Germany and he denies that the Mufti convinced Hitler to exterminate the Jews rather than deport them.

Herf is one of the prominent scholars, along with Matthias Küntzel and Paul Berman, among a few others, that is analyzing the connection between Nazi ideology and the rise of Islamic Jihadism in the twentieth-century via organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and their little off-spring such as Hamas and the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL).  What he suggests is that Netanyahu overreached in an effort to "push back against efforts to diminish Husseini’s role as a collaborator and ideological soulmate with Nazi Germany."

As far as I am concerned, good for Netanyahu.  It was the Mufti who screamed for Jewish blood in the 1920s for "defiling" al-Aqsa, just as the filthy-footed dictator Abbas does today.

Herf assures us that "while (the Mufti) agreed with Hitler about fundamental ideological issues, he was in no position to have a major influence on decision-making about German policy toward the Jews in Europe."

Nonetheless, Mohammed Effendi Amin al-Husseini, the Nazi Mufti, was important to Hitler's plans in carrying out the Final Solution in the Land of Israel and throughout the Middle East.  Hitler's intention was to hand the baton over to Husseini once the Axis powers defeated the Allies in the Middle East.

In his self-defense Netanyahu said this:

My intention was not to absolve Hitler of his responsibility, but rather to show that the forefathers of the Palestinian nation, without a country and without the so-called ‘occupation’, without land and without settlements, even then aspired to systematic incitement to exterminate the Jews.

Netanyahu is correct.

This is not a war over land rights.  This is not even a war wherein both sides desire to fight one another.  The Jews do not want this fight and are willing to share the tiny Jewish homeland.  The Jews in Israel are far more interested in creating computer software, medical technology, good food, unnecessary litigation, and Natalie Portmans, than they are in trying to stave off violently-crazed, Koranically-obsessed Arabs.

Herf notes:

The lies that Mahmoud Abbas and others have told in recent weeks about Israel’s supposed desire to somehow infringe on the rights of Muslims to pray at the Al Aksa Mosque have their origins in lies that are now at least 75 years old. 

It goes on and on and on and on.

Mahmoud Abbas tells Israeli-Arabs - as Arafat did before him and as the Mufti did before him -  that Jews want to conquer Al-Aqsa... which is, frankly, looking more and more like a perfectly dandy idea, if you ask me.  In the 1920s, as they have done every decade, they draw the knives against old Jewish women and 13 year old Jewish boys on bicycles.  One of the Mufti's major contributions toward the persecution and murder of the Jews during the Holocaust, aside from encouraging the British exclusion of Jews from "Palestine" with the White Paper of 1939, was his war time radio broadcasts in Arabic throughout the Middle East, calling on his fellow Arabs to launch themselves upon head-chopping sprees against their Jewish neighbors.

As Caroline Glick notes in an article for the Jerusalem Post entitled, Crazy like a fox:

Husseini used his position as well to scuttle British attempts to trade German prisoners of war for Jews. In one such documented episode, in 1943 Husseini appealed to SS commander Heinrich Himmler to cancel a deal to exchange 4,500 Jewish children and 500 Jewish adults from Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria to cancel the deal and send the Jews to Auschwitz.

Himmler bowed to his appeal. The Jews were sent to the gas chambers.

Glick also speculates that Netanyahu's gaffe may have been anything but:

Due to his “gaffe,” every Western media outlet reported on Husseini’s actions. Some even mentioned that in his PhD dissertation, current Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said the Holocaust was both a myth and a joint Zionist-Nazi project. For most Westerners, this is the first they’ve heard of the fact that the Palestinian’s George Washington was a Nazi war criminal.

Like I said, crazy as a fox.

Whatever Netanyahu's intentions, people must be made to understand that the roots of the Palestinian National Movement are fascistic, violently anti-Semitic, and deeply influenced not only by Koranically-based hatred toward Jews, but also by forms of early-mid twentieth-century anti-Jewish racism of the type that the Nazis excelled at and spread into the Arab world.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Arafat's uncle and the father of Palestinian-Arab nationalism, may not have convinced Hitler to undertake the Holocaust in Europe, but he was an enthusiastic supporter of the project and hoped to import not Jews, but the Holocaust, itself, into the Middle East.

If the Palestinian-Arabs had gotten their way during World War II there would be very few Jews left in this world.  There are, in fact, very few Jews left in the world as it is, mainly due to Muslim and European racist efforts to trim Jewish numbers over the course of many centuries.

There are somewhere around thirteen to fourteen million Jewish souls worldwide, today.  If the Mufti had his way there would be none of us left and this is the "George Washington", as Glick puts it, of the Palestinian National Movement.

The man was a racist and a murderer and his followers were Nazis.

Whatever Netanyahu may have gotten wrong, he certainly has that right.

The Financial Counterproductivity of the Arab Jew-Killing Policy

Michael L.

Tova Dvorin of Israel National News writes:

"60% of Israelis have stopped buying from Arab-owned businesses in light of the terror wave; avoidance higher in Jerusalem, Sharon areas."

Well, you know how racist those Jews are.  What would you expect?   Merely because perfectly innocent native, indigenous, peace-loving Palestinians seek to kill Jews, those very same Jews economically persecute those very people.

It is entirely unjust, but perfectly in keeping with the nature of the racist Jewish state.

"Surprisingly, caution regarding Arab businesses is only second-highest in Jerusalem; 70% of Jerusalem residents polled have stopped business transactions with Arabs over the past month - a close second to the Sharon area, where 72% of residents have boycotted Arab businesses."

Oh, well, the Sharon area.

The bottom line is that that the Jews of Israel have had enough.

The Jews are not violent people.  We are not a persecuting kind of people.  The fact of the matter is that Arabs are treated better in Israel than they are anyplace else throughout the Arab-Muslim Middle East.  They have greater educational and economic opportunities than in any Muslim city from Istanbul to Cairo.

Yet they still scream for blood.

And they go after our children with knives.

Are Palestinians Nazis?

Doodad

 Is rain wet?

The real threat facing Islam

Sar Shalom

The current spate of stabbings in Israel is driven by what Abbas claims is a threat to Islam's holy sites in Israel. Of course we know that Abbas and the PA are peddling lies, but that does not mean that Islam is not facing any threat at all. To understand the actual threat Islam faces, it would help to consider the statues of "Ecclesia and Synagoga" that were placed across Christian Europe during the Middle Ages. The humiliation shown in the statue "Synagoga" was meant to show medieval viewers how objectively mentally ill the Jews were in rejecting the truth of Christianity. Since the last century, most of Christendom has rejected the supercessionist theology underlying "Ecclesia and Synagoga."

However, as Elder pointed out in March, much of Islam today has not abandoned its supercessionist theology. While the manifestation of serpercessionism is different in Islam from how it was in Medieval Christianity, one feature of Islamic supercessionist theology is that Jews have to demonstrate their subservience to Islam. The existence of the State of Israel is the most blatant rebellion against that demonstration of subservience. However, positing that Israel exists, there remain ways for Islam to demonstrate its dominion over Judaism. One of them is in denying Jews access to their holy spaces. That is what is threatened by Jews visiting the Temple Mount. There is nothing more than that that is threatened even if the Temple itself were to be rebuilt if its location were at El Kas, in between Al Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock.

However, Abbas cannot stand at the dais in Turtle Bay and declare, "Islam is the master faith. Jews ignore this at their peril. Muslims will take keen offense if they lose dominion over sites they have controlled for centuries." Therefore, he has to describe the threat as though a "legitimate" interest is threatened, hence the claim that Al Aqsa itself is under threat.

What we have to do is stop playing defense and describe what is really motivating those who are "protecting" Al Aqsa. Further, we have to let those westerners who respond to Abbas and the PA's insinuations about threats to Al Aqsa with "coddle, coddle, coddle; Israel must respect Islamic holy sites; coddle, coddle, coddle," that they are enabling those who seek to lord Islam's dominion over Judaism through control of Judaism's holy sites.

Dear Arabs

Vic Rosenthal

{Vic, of Abu Yehuda fame, was kind enough to allow me to reprint this piece.  I think that it is a necessary read. - Michael L.}

Dear Arabs,

The truth is we aren’t writing this for you, because you probably aren’t listening. But these things need to be said.

We are not going to lecture you about how the Jewish people are the original inhabitants of the land and you are newcomers, colonialists even. All that is true, but we don’t want to argue theoretically. We want to talk tachlis (you’ve been here long enough to know what that means).

You have been sold a false bill of goods by your leaders, who have grown fat over the years by maintaining the fiction that you are going to throw us out of the Land of Israel. They’ve been handsomely paid by anti-Zionists everywhere, from Hitler to the KGB to the Saudis to the Iranian regime to George Soros to the EU to Barack Obama.

You are not going to throw us out.

First of all, there are more of us. There is an absolute majority of Jews living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, even if we use your inflated population figures and even if we count Gaza. We are not the French colonists in Algeria or the Crusaders. Our birthrate is high and increasing, and yours is decreasing. Jews are moving here from the rest of the world, and Arabs are leaving.

Second, there is no place for us to go. The roughly 50% of our population that is descended from Jewish refugees from Arab countries are not going back to Syria, Iraq, Egypt, etc. (so much, by the way, for calling us ‘European colonialists’). Ethiopian Jews can’t go back to Ethiopia. And nobody else is going anywhere.

Third, we have a deep religious connection to the land. Our bible is a story about the relationship between God, the Jewish people, and the Land of Israel. The har habayit is the location of our holy temples, and our patriarchs are buried here (even if you set fire to their tombs). Don’t tell me about Mohammed’s horse.

Fourth (and this is important, pay attention), if you try to hurt us, you are going to die. This isn’t the way we want to be, but this is what necessity demands. This is what we have finally learned from our history.

Think for yourselves for once. Don’t listen to Mahmoud Abbas, Ismail Haniyeh or Raed Saleh. Especially don’t trust the Jewish traitors like those who write in Ha’aretz or who are on the payroll of Soros, Obama or the EU. They care even less for Arabs than your billionaire leaders do.

Before you take a knife or an ax and go out to kill a Jew, think about this: you will die and it won’t bring your objective even a little bit closer.

We don’t want to kill you, expel you, or humiliate you. We would be happy to live peacefully as neighbors. But we are prepared to fight for our land.

This is the state of the Jewish people in its historic homeland and Jerusalem is its capital. We insist on maintaining our sovereignty here. If you can’t deal with this, move. Go to Jordan (the original ‘Palestinian’ state), to Europe, South America, Australia, the United States. But we are not going anywhere.

Sincerely,
The Jewish people in the Land of Israel

Having to Choose: A Nation’s Agonizing Immigration Duty

Dr. Peggy Sands Orchowski

{This is an exclusive guest post and I find it interesting and controversial. - Michael L.}

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that no nation can sustain open borders. Even the wealthiest most popular “nations of immigrants” like the U.S. cannot possibly accept everyone who wants to immigrate here or even qualifies to do so. Nations have the core right and duty to choose who can immigrate: come in, stay, work and become a citizen. They do it through immigration laws established by democratic representative government and that are to be enforced. Saying that, immigration decisions certainly are one of the most difficult any nation state must make.

Think of the U.S. and other highly desired immigrant host countries as a popular public college. Millions of people qualify for entry but college administrators get to and must choose who is accepted for admission. They are making life changing decisions for the applicants, and often agonizing ones for the colleges trying to be fair and diverse. As a result, responding to changing conditions, college admission requirements usually change over time, as do immigration laws. But the admission policies in place at any one time have to be upheld and enforced (allowing for some flexibility in special cases) or there is chaos.

Our 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act is 50 years old this year. It is the most liberal immigration law in the world, the legacy of Ted Kennedy and the last major Great Society bill to be passed by the “fabulous 89th Congress”.  It truly changed the diversity of America. But it did not allow open borders. Instead it imposed a complicated 7% formula. Still today, immigrants from any nationality can apply for a green card. But no nationality will get more than 7 percent of all the permanent immigration visas granted in one year (currently about 1.2 million annually). Surplus applicants from that nation are placed on a waiting list. Every nationality is to be treated equally with no discrimination against and no preferences for (a political exception was made for Cubans in 1966).

The INA also changed another traditional admission priority for immigrants. Instead of basing admission on the individual migrant’s ability to work as had been the case since earliest days of the nation (remember, handicapped and ill migrants were turned away at Ellis Island no matter now close a family member they were), the INA gave a priority for green cards to extended family members. “Family unification” not “work ableness” is still the top qualification for a green card today.

Significantly, the Congressional jurisdiction for immigration also changed from the Labor Committee to the Judiciary committee. Immigration suddenly took on the tenor of social justice and even a sacred civil right -- which it isn't of course. Now millions of people feel qualified to immigrate to the United States. Millions apply. The U.S. simply can’t take them all.

The agonizing universal truth about immigration is that immigrants get to apply but the nation state gets to decide based on national immigration laws. Those laws have two roles: to bring in the fresh new eager labor and energy of new immigrants that most every nation now wants to add to their growth and prosperity; and to protect the integrity, national identity and labor standards of the host country’s citizenry.

That difficult choice becomes a most terrible dilemma when facing millions of desperate migrants at the borders with their families.  Humanitarian and ethnic supporters demand their right to immigrate. But even a collective of small well off nation states like the EU can’t provide enough housing, services and jobs for them all. They can’t expect that hundreds of thousands of migrants from a vastly different culture will integrate within a reasonable time into their national cultures -- ones based especially on freedom for women. Who among them should be chosen? What happens to the vast majority who aren’t?

Obviously massive permanent immigration is not a solution. It is unreasonable to expect nation states to do it and unfair to call them “anti-mmigrant” when they won’t. Another process other than massive immigration will have to be negotiated to help citizens of failing states find refuge, peace and prosperity.

{Peggy Sands Orchowski  Ph.D. has covered immigration reform on Capitol Hill for the last 10 years and is the author of the new book, The Law That Changed The Face of America: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. For more information, please visit, www.porchowski.com}

Democratize the Temple Mount

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at the Elder of Ziyon, The Jewish Press, and Jews Down Under.}

It is unacceptable that Israel maintains prejudicial policies toward Jews at the holiest site to the Jewish people.

Benjamin Netanyahu keeps assuring Barack Obama, and the American Department of State, that Israel intends to maintain the status quo at the Temple Mount.

EOZ columnist, Vic Rosenthal, proprietor of Abu Yehuda, has a few thoughts on the matter.

But the bottom line is that the status quo in Israel toward Jews, and all non-Muslims, in the Old City, on the Temple Mount, is entirely prejudicial.  I am not a particularly religious person, but I am offended at the idea that only Muslims are allowed to pray on the holiest place to the Jewish people.

Israeli policy on this question is unethical and unjust toward Jewish people, toward all non-Muslims, and it must change.

It is, in fact, a policy grounded in al-Sharia because Moshe Dayan, who obviously should have known better, made a very big mistake.  But now this mistake needs to be corrected.

Understand this:

At one time all the religions in the Middle East were political in the sense that they were total social systems.  

Throughout the great majority of human history there was no distinction between the dictates of the faith and any aspect of the life of the individual.  The same, of course, was true for Judaism and Christianity until the European Enlightenment of the 17th century.  Thankfully, both religions embraced the Separation of Church and State.

Islam has yet do so and, in fact, is moving in the opposite direction.  European Muslims - with their screeching and their stomping and their violence and their religiously grounded hatred - do not seem all that different from their Jew-Hating Middle Eastern counterparts.

So as the world burns, my natural question is, "what should Israel do?"

If you look at the scope of Israeli history the general tendency has been to defer to the West.

It was primarily due to the western governments that the United Nations acknowledged the existence of Israel to begin with.  Sometimes people will say that the UN created Israel, in order to imply the illegitimacy of the Jewish State.  This is false.  Israel was created via the blood and sweat and deaths of many thousands of Jewish people - Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Sephardim - who built the necessary infrastructure for the emergence of the state.  All the United Nations did was take a vote.  It was the Jewish people in the Land of Israel at the end of the 19th century and through the 20th century who did the work and who drained the swamps and who built the roads and who created the schools and developed the political leadership, that made it so that the UN almost had to recognize it.

But the UN did not do the work, nor did they die in the fields.  That was Jews.  You know who else it was, of course?  It was also untold numbers of Arabs who migrated into Israel because of increasing economic possibilities.  Israel is the Jewish State, but Arabs helped build it for simple, human, economic reasons.  They may have thought of the Jews as the children of swine and orangutans, but they still needed employment for the purpose of feeding their children.  Their Koranically-based anti-Jewish racism did not override their basic social need to provide for their families.

This has changed.

The Narrative and the Temple Mount

Due to the Muslim Brotherhood, Yassir Arafat and his heinous side-kick, Mahmoud Abbas - and all their little off-spring like the PLO and Fatah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad - they have succeeded in raising an entire generation of Israeli Arabs who believe that they have a religious-political-moral imperative to stab Jewish people in the neck or run us down with their vehicles.  They have been fed on the Narrative of Pure Palestinian Victimhood and thus honestly believe that they every right to take any Jewish life as a matter of social justice.

If we object we are spit upon by ideological morons, mainly in the western-left, who call us racist.

What Israel needs to do is take charge of the situation.  If the Israelis back down it will give the Arabs good reason to advance.  By handing the Temple Mount over to the Jordanian waqf it gave the Arab world reason to claim it as their own.

As we know, Arab-Muslims do not so much venerate Al-Aqsa as a place of religious contemplation, but as a violent political site in their never-ending hostility toward the Jewish minority in that part of the world.

The very last thing that is needed is maintenance of the status quo.

As Rosenthal writes:

I’ve been thinking about status quos (stati quo?) lately.

There’s the one on the Temple Mount, the absurd one that says that Jews may visit but may not pray. Lately Muslims have been trying to prevent Jews from visiting altogether. When you consider that this is and always has been the holiest site in Judaism, that Muslim colonialists built a triumphal shrine atop the ruins of the Jewish Temple – which those Muslims now say wasn’t really there anyway – the absurdity is even more manifest.

It is one thing for Arabs to discriminate against Jews, that is to be expected. It is another thing entirely for the Jewish State of Israel to discriminate against Jews.

That is simply unacceptable.

Say Hello to "Israel Time"

Michael L.

I have to say, I am not really much of a Facebook kind of guy.

In fact, Facebook scares me. I think of it as something akin to the Borg. Or, heck, maybe in the future the Borg will actually emerge out of Facebook!

Who the hell knows?

Nonetheless, there is what seems to be a young Israeli and / or Jewish woman who has launched a Facebook page entitled Israel Time.

Despite my ongoing wariness of Facebook, I am, nonetheless a creature of social media.

Thus, I introduce you folks to these folks.

The pro-Israel community is small, but we are connected.

Some may wish that we were less connected than we are... but nonetheless.

In any case, say hello to Israel Conseil, the proprietor of Israel Time.

I intend to drop in, although I think that her sensibilities are more cultural than mine, while mine tend to be more political.  I don't know, but I think that it is important for the pro-Israel community to be familiar with one another.

I suspect that she is an Israeli, while I, of course, am a diaspora Jew in the States.

A more modest suggestion for the Temple Mount

Sar Shalom

The situation on the Temple Mount, under which Jews and only Jews are restricted from prayer, has led many to call upon the government of Israel to simply declare a change of policy. Such a prescription ignores the diplomatic reality of today. I do not advocate throwing up our hands and saying that we can't do anything until that diplomatic reality somehow magically changes. However, taking action to change the situation on the Temple Mount must be preceded by action aimed at changing the diplomatic reality.

With changing diplomatic reality in mind as the ultimate goal, I'd like to suggest a start of having Yehuda Glick address the House or Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The intermediate goal would be to start a conversation that would go viral outside of Israel-advocacy circles that rejects the Arab narrative of the Land of Israel. Such a discussion would accept that the Muslims have a right to the footprints of and access-ways to the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosques, but such rights should not include restrictions of activity elsewhere on the Mount that respect the sanctity of the location. Glick testifying before Congress won't directly start such a conversation, but the coverage of such testimony might. If not, we could also seek out another spark for a conversation about how rights on the Mount should be delineated.

On "Jewish values"

Sar Shalom

Barack Obama's typical response to those who complain that he favors the Palestinians too much is that in actuality he does support Israel, but that that support is rooted in Israel's "Jewish values." When Israel strays from these "Jewish values," Obama sees it as his place to prod Israel to come closer to those values that make Israel worthy of support.

It may be tempting to dismiss Obama's protests as camouflage for his ulterior intent to reimpose the Pact of Umar on Middle Eastern Jewry. However, I do not think any such approach could be intellectually defended [Update:] has any reasonable chance of convincing anyone who does not already believe so. A better approach would be to ask what exactly does Obama mean by "Jewish values?" One possible suggestion I would offer for Obama's concept of "Jewish values" comes from a fictional account by Victor Hugo:

All at once, in this whitish band, two figures made their appearance. One was in front, the other some distance in the rear.

"There come two creatures," muttered Gavroche.

The first form seemed to be some elderly bourgeois, who was bent and thoughtful, dressed more than plainly, and who was walking slowly because of his age, and strolling about in the open evening air.

The second was straight, firm, slender. It regulated its pace by that of the first; but in the voluntary slowness of its gait, suppleness and agility were discernible. This figure had also something fierce and disquieting about it, the whole shape was that of what was then called an elegant; the hat was of good shape, the coat black, well cut, probably of fine cloth, and well fitted in at the waist. The head was held erect with a sort of robust grace, and beneath the hat the pale profile of a young man could be made out in the dim light. The profile had a rose in its mouth. This second form was well known to Gavroche; it was Montparnasse [a street ruffian].

He could have told nothing about the other, except that he was a respectable old man.

{...}

While Gavroche was deliberating, the attack took place, abruptly and hideously. The attack of the tiger on the wild ass, the attack of the spider on the fly. Montparnasse suddenly tossed away his rose, bounded upon the old man, seized him by the collar, grasped and clung to him, and Gavroche with difficulty restrained a scream. A moment later one of these men was underneath the other, groaning, struggling, with a knee of marble upon his breast. Only, it was not just what Gavroche had expected. The one who lay on the earth was Montparnasse; the one who was on top was the old man. All this took place a few paces distant from Gavroche.

The old man had received the shock, had returned it, and that in such a terrible fashion, that in a twinkling, the assailant and the assailed had exchanged roles.

[After obsering a struggle, Gavroche caught the exchange between the old man and his attacker]

He was repaid for his conscientious anxiety in the character of a spectator. He was able to catch on the wing a dialogue which borrowed from the darkness an indescribably tragic accent. The goodman questioned, Montparnasse replied.
"How old are you?"-- "Nineteen."-- "You are strong and healthy. Why do you not work?"-- "It bores me."-- "What is your trade?"-- "An idler."-- "Speak seriously. Can anything be done for you? What would you like to be?"-- "A thief."
A pause ensued. The old man seemed absorbed in profound thought. He stood motionless, and did not relax his hold on Montparnasse.

Every moment the vigorous and agile young ruffian indulged in the twitchings of a wild beast caught in a snare. He gave a jerk, tried a crook of the knee, twisted his limbs desperately, and made efforts to escape.

The old man did not appear to notice it, and held both his arms with one hand, with the sovereign indifference of absolute force.

The old man's revery lasted for some time, then, looking steadily at Montparnasse, he addressed to him in a gentle voice, in the midst of the darkness where they stood, a solemn harangue, of which Gavroche did not lose a single syllable:--

"My child, you are entering, through indolence, on one of the most laborious of lives. Ah! You declare yourself to be an idler! prepare to toil. ... Woe to the man who desires to be a parasite! He will become vermin! Ah! So it does not please you to work? Ah! You have but one thought, to drink well, to eat well, to sleep well. You will drink water, you will eat black bread, you will sleep on a plank with a fetter whose cold touch you will feel on your flesh all night long, riveted to your limbs. ... You desire fine black cloth, varnished shoes, to have your hair curled and sweet-smelling oils on your locks, to please low women, to be handsome. You will be shaven clean, and you will wear a red blouse [prison uniform of that day] and wooden shoes. You want rings on your fingers, you will have an iron necklet on your neck. ... Believe me, do not undertake that painful profession of an idle man. It is not comfortable to become a rascal. It is less disagreeable to be an honest man. Now go, and ponder on what I have said to you. By the way, what did you want of me? My purse? Here it is."

And the old man, releasing Montparnasse, put his purse in the latter's hand; ...

Les Misérables, Volume IV, Book IV, Chapter II

To relate this story to Israel's situation, the Palestinians are like Montparnasse with Israel as the elderly gentleman. The Palestinians are poor and see others' possessions as belonging to them, and thus try to rob Israel. Israel, being in a stronger position, suppresses the attempted robbery. But, Jewish values mandate sympathy for the downtrodden, do they not? Thus, if Israel were truly acting in accordance with "Jewish values," she would give the Palestinians what they are attempted to seize despite having them at her mercy, as the elderly gentleman did in the vignette. Could this be what Obama expects of Israel, that sympathy for the downtrodden should override all assessment of what leads to their being downtrodden?

Rafah Cleric Calls upon "Palestinians" to Stab Jews.

Michael L.



The Jews of the Middle East are people under almost constant assault by the hostile Arab majority population.

None of this is new, of course.

Arabs in that part of the world have called for the intimidation, humiliation, persecution, and murder of Jews since Muhammad started popularizing his fun-filled head-chopping policy.

Brandishing a dagger in a mosque, Muhammad Salah "Abu Rajab" said this:

Today, we realize why the [Jews] build walls. They do not do this to stop missiles, but to prevent the slitting of their throats.

My brother in the West Bank: Stab! My brother is the West Bank: Stab the myths of the Talmud in their minds! My brother in the West Bank: Stab the myths about the temple in their hearts!

Today, we have declared a curfew [in Israel]. Listen to what the Jews are saying to one another: Stay at home, or go outside to your death. They have no alternative. Oh men of the West Bank, the first phase of the operation requires stabbing in order to bring about a curfew.

You know, if the Arabs within the land of Israel honestly want war, I feel reasonably certain that Israel can give them what they want.

But, as the old cliché goes, "be careful what you wish for, you may very well get it."

A Pop Quiz

Emmet

{Editor's Note - everyone please stop talking and take your seats.  We are going to have a pop quiz in the form of a multiple choice examination that was created by Emmet.  The fundamental question is what descriptions accurately describes each of the following?

And no chewing gum in class!}


Number 1, The Iran Nuclear Deal:

a)  President Obama's antipathy to Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia propelled him to sign the deal.

b)  President Obama's antipathy to Israel propelled him to sign the deal.

c)  President Obama was very disingenuous in not calling it a treaty, (two thirds of Congress would have had to ratify it) but, an “agreement”.

d)  Anyway, the Europeans were threatening to unilaterally break the sanctions regulations.

e)  No deal would have meant war. 

Number 2, With their vote for the Iran Nuclear Deal, Congresspeople Wasserman -Schultz, Nadler, Booker, et al:

a)  Showed they are afraid of President Obama's revenge. (remember Senator Menendez)

b)  Showed their allegiance to the Democratic Party (and it's ultra liberal wing) rather than to America.

c)  Were confident that they cold still cajole the “Jewish” vote with it's contributors, to support them in future campaigns.

d) They voted their conscience. 

Number 3, anti-Semites:

a)  Ayatollah Khamenei is an anti-Semite.

b)  President Erdogan of Turkey is an anti-Semite.  

c)  Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite.

d). Hitler was an anti-Semite.  

Number 4. Jerusalem:

a)  The Temple in Jerusalem was built by King Solomon after King David proclaimed Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel.

b)  In the Koran, Sura 17, Solomon's temple is described.

c) The Turks built the Al Aksa mosque stating, it is on the spot where the temple stood, to show that Islam supercedes all religions.

d) Jerusalem should be internationalized. 

Number 5. Fences/walls:

a) Turkey built a fence on Cyprus separating the Greek and Turkish communities. This prevents the Greek Cypriots from ever recovering their property now inhabited by Turks

b)  The Spanish  have built a fence encircling their cities, Ceuta and Melilla, on the African continent surrounded by Morocco, to prevent Africans from entering Europe.

c)  The Egyptians have built a fence between the Sinai peninsula  and Gaza successfully reducing, the construction of tunnels, smuggling, terrorist infiltration, etc.

d) The wall in Israel is illegitimate.

Number 6. Gaza:

a)  Is home to terrorists.

b)  All polls show that a large majority of it's inhabitants hate Jews.

c)  Christians have been driven out. The last Christian bookstore closed two years ago.

d)  Is an open air prison administered by Israel.   

Just Another Friday Night Sermon In "Palestine"

geoffff

You really do need to see this.

It explains in about five minutes what is going down right now in Israel and the terrorocracy that is "Palestine". Or if you prefer, the "Palestinian Terrorcracies".

This is important for us, why?

We are witnessing the opening salvos of what could become known as the Jerusalem Terror Pogrom Against The World's Jews.

And anyone else who gets in the way or who are easier to get at.

This is by no means the first of these pogroms and it will not be confined to Israel or even the Middle East. But we also know this vicious blind rage and riot against innocent people will be instantly gentrified by the Western media into the "Third Intifada" or perhaps something even grander depending on how many innocent Jews are caught at a helpless moment by programmed thugs of infinite cowardice, and slashed or stoned to death.

There will be a count of how many thugs are killed in defence from them and also civilians caught up in it by accident. We know this because we have been here so many times before. The  lead will be a figure from somewhere of "Palestinians" killed and injured in the anti-Jew pogrom now being kicked off before our eyes. The figure will be in every media report, ...print, television, radio, internet. It will be on everybody's lips.

The media loves numbers especially on a day by day basis or even hour by hour.

Here's a fun fact. Every piece of information published by the media about "Palestinian" casualties and much else is sourced in Hamas and Fatah.  Even what purports to be from UN agencies such as UNWRA or "Palestinian health authorities" or NGO's or Israeli "human rights" groups.

The groups that ordered the pogrom are the source of our information about what is happening to the "Palestinians".  

Behind the pogrom? Tehran. There can be little doubt.  Hamas and the Abbas ring are willing instruments but nothing like this can be ignited without more than a nod from the clerics with the guns and the gallows in Iran. They are now more powerful than they have ever been and they and Moscow will call most of the shots across the region thanks to nearly seven years of US foreign policy.

Why the slow killer riot now?

Why not. The "Palestinians" and their sponsors and bosses know they will be rewarded for this with recognition and moral and material support and their enemies will be sanctioned, isolated and condemned for defending themselves.

Besides they hate Jews and the thought of stabbing one seems to have an almost erotic appeal in this ugly ideology. Tony Abbott may have gone but the death cult is still with us.

They have come to believe that Israel and the Jews are hated as much in the West as they are in Muslim lands. Why wouldn't they? There is always plenty of mileage in attacking Israel cruelly and without provocation. That has its cheer squads right across Europe once again and they are always celebrated from abroad for their "courageous resistance".

From there flows money.

Which is not bad for a bunch whose hallmark tactics are to hide behind women, or kids tossing rocks, or under hospitals and schools , or to strap bombs to other people or,  

I could go on.

We are harvesting the first of the fruit planted in the field cultivated so carefully from the first days of President Obama. The sort of world that is about to be his legacy and our future.

How fitting that the vision splendid dawns with a good old fashioned Jew kill pogrom that could go world wide. 

Watch this closely as it unfolds. We could be living in the fourteenth century.  



MEMRI: Rafah Cleric Brandishes Knife in Friday Sermon, Calls upon Palestinians to Stab Jews



Now? Does anyone still think this is about the "settlements" or the "occupation"? At all? Even a little bit?  One might be that gullible but you will have to accept that Israelis are not.

They know who and what they are dealing with and it has been a dangerous oversight for the rest of us to have not known. To have no idea. Even now.

This is important?

Because this thing is not confined to the Middle East. And even if it was (which is bad enough) there is little or no difference between the ideologies that the Israelis are confronting and those ruling and warring across most of the rest of the Muslim Middle East.

They hate us as much as they hate the Israelis.

Some say they hate us because of the Israelis but that is because the world is full of gut lazy bigots.  They hate the Israelis because of us and for them this is personal.

Whenever these attacks are carried out in the West they usually try to murder a few Jews if they can, but this is hard because there are so few.  In any event it is only symbolic. In the West any infidel will do.

This is a poisonous ideology that is dangerous to us all, because like all poisonous ideologies it uses hate to control and that is a literally a murderous combination. I stay out of the "is this religion?" or "is it Islam?" discussions. Not my field and not my business. That is a matter for Muslims.

Some Muslims definitely have strong views on that but ultimately for the rest of us it is irrelevant.

I know a Nazi when I see one. We should all know them and their collaborators on sight.

Nazis anywhere are a problem for all of us everywhere.

Disdain: A Response to Doodad

Michael L.

This is a small blog, but I very much appreciate the participation of my friends and few have been a more stalwart supporter than my old buddy, Doodad.

I remember Doodad from way-back-when at Daily Kos.  In fact, he was one of the first Jewish progressive-left exiles to join me in this venue.  When we started out we were practically howling into the wilderness all by ourselves.

But we persevered because the issue of how the world treats its Jewish minority matters.

It obviously matters to us and it should matter to all Jewish people, everywhere.  Frankly, I think that it should matter to everyone with a conscience or historical sensibility, but it does not.  Just as I do not spend much time fretting over the fate of our friends in the Czech Republic - and they are, in fact, among the best friends that Israel has - so I do not really expect non-Jews to fret over the fate of the Jews in the Middle East.

That seems to be our job.

But Doodad has a recent piece entitled, The Only Good Palestinian......, that I would like to discuss.

This actually started off as a comment under that piece, but I decided that maybe I have enough to say that I could front-page it on a relaxed Sunday morning.

So, here it goes.

-

Doodad, you say that you have disdain for Palestinian-Arabs, yet you extol Mohammad Zoabi who is not only a Palestinian-Arab, but one from an exceedingly prominent political family. I like Mohammad Zoabi, as well. He is a brave and highly intelligent kid and a friend to the Jewish people.

He, in fact, stuck his neck out for us and we need to appreciate that fact, as you clearly do.

Part of the problem that we have, though, is that non-Jewish westerners tend to think that people like you - or me, for that matter - are simply racists.

Because they have gobbled-up the Palestinian Narrative of Total Victimhood they naturally believe that the Jews of Israel are bullies to the "indigenous" population... as if Jews are, somehow, not indigenous to Judea.

Thus, if you have disdain for Palestinian-Arabs this simply makes you a bad person.

What they never seem to seriously take into account is that Arabs have been kicking the holy crap out of Jews in the Middle East for fourteen hundred years.  In fact, the hostile Arab-Muslim majority, which outnumbers Jews by a factor of 60 or 70 to 1, have done an excellent job of keeping our numbers small, over the centuries in that part of the world, so that we would never regain autonomy or the means of self-defense.

The real source of Arab hostility toward Jews is that they failed to keep us in submission.  The overall project of submitting the Jews failed.  Barack Obama, former president of the Harvard Law Review, never took the time to figure that out.

How many more centuries are Jews supposed to get our asses kicked before we stand up and say, "no"?

They honestly believe that the Jews are the aggressors.  Of course, Germans in the early part of the twentieth-century were absolutely convinced that the Jews - who represented 1 percent of the German population at the time - were likewise aggressors.

So, really what is going on here is that unless Jewish people throughout the world accept the idea that the hostile Arab majority in the Middle East have every right to try to kill Jews, we are "racists" who should be either ignored, disdained, or actively fought.

And yet the progressive-left still expect to get our political support, our money, and our votes.

It's astonishing, really.

Greg Brock, the Jews, and the New York Times

Michael L.

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

Throughout the twentieth-century the New York Times was never a friend or ally to the Jewish people, nor is it a friend or ally to the Jewish people today.

During World War II, the Times buried the Holocaust deep within its pages and, as far as I am concerned, it will never live down that criminal negligence, that crime against the six million dead, and neither will its owner and publisher, at the time, Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

Severin Hochberg, in a 2006 review of Laurel Leff's Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper, for the Oxford University journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, tells us:

"Leff's grim conclusion is that the mass murder of the Jews was simply not an important enough story for the New York Times. This, in turn, was partly because it was not an important enough story for the Allied governments or the Western public. Another crucial factor in the decision to minimize the plight of the Jews, according to Leff, was the personal influence of the New York Times' publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Sulzberger believed that the Jews were not a "people," much less a race, and that they should not be treated differently from anybody else, even when clearly targeted for annihilation. His obsessive need to deflect accusations that the Times was a "Jewish" newspaper influenced coverage of Jewish persecution and ultimately mass murder."  (My emphasis.)

Little seems to have changed over at the Gray Lady or "the newspaper of record."

Many of you will recall that the Times recently published a "Jew Tracker" showing which Jewish politicians did, and which did not, support Obama's Iran non-treaty that gives that government - a government that perpetually calls for the murder of Israeli-Jews and all Americans -150 billion dollars and the ability to shortly gain nuclear weaponry.

To my astonishment the conservative Washington Free Beacon, under the byline of Adam Kredo, claims to have attained emails between senior New York Times editor, Greg Brock, and a pro-Jewish reader and critic who slammed the paper for running this vile material before public pressure forced them to remove it.

{This fiasco by the Times, by the way, raises the odor of the Rototom Sunsplash festival in Spain where public pressure likewise forced the Reggae event to accept Matisyahu simply as a performer, not a Jewish performer under some enforced BDS obligation to answer for the alleged crimes of the Jewish state.}

According to the Washington Free Beacon a reader / critic of the Times wrote editor Brock the following and called the inclusion of the Jewish list "stupid":

Are you so ignorant that you don’t understand the historical significance of what you’re doing?  Are you so tone deaf? Why don’t you include addresses so that people’s homes can be attacked?...

My parents were Holocaust survivors and the first thing the Nazis wanted to know is: where are the Jews?  This merely furthers the classic anti-Semitic trope of dual loyalty.

Greg Brock fired back with:

But it would be helpful if you did your homework. You’ll find that we are in excellent journalistic company. I just wish the Times had thought of it sooner so we do not appear to be copying others.

Do you ever read the Jewish press—some of the finest journalism around, in my humble opinion.  If you search online right now, you will see that these publications have been keeping a running count of the voting position of Jewish senators and representatives for weeks. 

To which the reader / critic responded:

Do you understand that dual loyalty is a classic anti-Semitic trope?  Do you understand that the accusation that Jews are voting against their national interests and for their faith-based communal interest is a call to violence?  Somehow, the sensitivity you show to racial issues is lost when your target is Jewish.

Do you understand that you’re creating a hostile environment for Jews whether they agree with the NYTimes editorial position or not?” asked the reader, who further described the post as “stupid” and offensive. 

It is difficult to fathom the kind of outrageous stupidity that it takes to single out Jewish politicians for public derogation when no other ethnic group is treated with such malice.  It was not so long ago that the New York Times was, in fact, considered the paper of record.  When I was kid we received it in our box on a daily basis and my father would spend half of Sunday perusing the massive tome that they put out every weekend.

But those days are long dead.

The Times, it should be noted, was not the only significant publication that believed that singling out Jewish politicians for disgust was reasonable.  Joshua Keating over at Slate liked the idea, although he acknowledged the crudity of it.  He wrote:

It seems willfully obtuse to pretend that the position of the Israeli government and the views of at least a prominent faction of the American Jewish community aren’t a factor in this debate.

That does not sound entirely unreasonable, now does it?

However, I will look forward to the day when the New York Times tracks black politicians, as black people, or Latino politicians, as Latinos, or Gays as Gays, as they do Jews as Jews.

Until we begin to see that perhaps Greg Brock might consider not bickering with thoughtful readers over a prejudicial, bigoted, and yes, stupid, NYT policy.

I am hitting the poker table in SF tonight.

And I am telling you that these people are out for blood.

Joools, in particular, is looking to kick my ass.

The Only Good Palestinian......

Doodad

I won't finish that sentence the way some might expect me to given my uh, disdain, for Palestinians. That uh, disdain (wink wink nudge nudge say no more,) hasn't got any better given the latest bloody actions by some Palestinians and the support for said terrorism by a lot of Palestinians including Jerusalem shop keepers and passerby's. Let's face it; I don't like their hate and I don't like them in general just like I wouldn't like a festering boil on my tush.

But I'm not stupid. Despite my generalized uh, disdain, for Palestinians, I know they aren't all the same. And every so often one brave soul speaks up; once in a blue moon mind you, but still, here is one.

I have long resisted saying this, but the ongoing Arab violence in Jerusalem has pushed Arab idiocy beyond my capacity for tolerance. I now need to say it and to say it publicly: I am embarrassed to be an Arab. 

From the start, we have refused to accept the existence of one tiny Jewish state. We fought that state tooth and nail using all the venom and anti-Semitism that we could muster. We isolated and mistreated our own Palestinian siblings so we could use them as tools against the Jews. We have not relented. We have not shown an ounce of compassion, humanity, or even smarts. We made the destruction of the Jewish home our signature cause. We made hate our religion. When will this nonsense stop? 

Even some of us Arabs who have the privilege of also being Israeli have not learned to behave like civilized people. We dismissed, threatened, and silenced Mohammad Zoabi, one of our own, because he dared profess love for his country and revulsion towards terrorists. We have demonstrated in support, not of our own state, Israel, but in support of the terrorists who want her destroyed.

Of course that writer is not really a "Palestinian," but of Arab descent. But there have been actual Palestinians who have voiced similar things; some are even still breathing.  Hen's teeth of course and that is why this Intifada crap and constant hate and violence will never end.

The writer continues his wisdom.

Those of us who are able to accept Jews as the brothers and sisters that they are, are few and far between.  I can count on the fingers of my hands the honorable Arabs who take such a stand publicly.  The rest of us are an embarrassment, the plague of the Middle East, and a blotch on humanity....... 

Jerusalem belongs to the Jews, not only because it is rightfully theirs, but also because we don’t deserve any of it.  Those of us Arabs who live in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, would long ago have been deported if Jews behaved like us.  Yet we keep pushing and pushing, hoping to break them. 

The Jews will not break.  They will not break in Jerusalem or anywhere else because they are much better than us.  We will continue to wallow in our own victimhood complex while the Jews thrive, and this, my fellow Arabs, is all that we deserve.

 I pray he continues to draw breath.

The Jihadists and the Ethnic Cleansing of the Christians in the Middle East

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at Vocal International.}

It is astounding that as Muslims drive Christians out of the Middle East, Christians beyond the region do not seem to much care.  The rise of political Islam, since the misnamed "Arab Spring" - hereafter referred to as the Arab Nightmare - has unleashed waves of violence, chaos, and cruelty the likes of which I have not seen since coming to political awareness.  Christian churches are being destroyed in the thousands, if not tens of thousands.  Christian girls are sometimes raped and subject to forced conversion.  Christian men are forced to their knees, dozens at a time, for the purpose of filming decapitation as a recruitment tool for savages to come join the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

{Just how it is that watching videos of head-chopping could act as a positive recruitment tool for people all around the world remains an ethical mystery.}

Pope Francis was recently in the United States, but Francis, strangely enough, is not much of a friend of Middle Eastern Christianity.  Although he spoke eloquently concerning the European moral imperative to drown in immigrants, he breathed not a word concerning the heinous fate of Christians in the Muslim Middle East.

If you want to know what is going on with Middle Eastern Christians, or the Copts of Egypt, Raymond Ibrahim is the "go to" guy.  I have written about Mr. Ibrahim before:

One of the great tragedies and hypocrisies of the current moment is the Christian and western-left failure to speak out against the persecution of Christians throughout Muslim lands. Perhaps the foremost scholar addressing this horrendous violation of human rights is Raymond Ibrahim, the author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians.

In a recent piece Ibrahim outlines the Muslim persecution of Christians in July of this year alone.

Nigeria:  Dozens of Christian churches were attacked in the Muslim-majority northern regions of the nation, where Boko Haram is headquartered...

Boko Haram jihadis shot and killed 29 people in two Christian enclaves of northeast Nigeria.  Most people in Dille village ran but those who could not were gunned down and many homes were set ablaze.

Iraq:  The Islamic state blew up another Christian church under its authority, the Mother of Aid Church which had stood in central Mosul for thousands of years.  The blast also killed four children who were near the church at the time.  IS also transformed the St. Joseph Church, an ancient Chaldean church in Mosul, into a mosque.  Pictures of St. Joseph show that the dome has been painted black and the church has been stripped of all crosses and Christian symbols and images...

Egypt: Three church related attacks occurred.

Niger:  Approximately 70 Christian churches and an orphanage continue facing a lack of resources and difficult conditions in rebuilding six months after thousands of Muslims attacked and destroyed them in “revenge” for the offensive Muhammad cartoons published by the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo—a secular magazine based in France that also habitually mocks Christianity.

Sudan: Two imprisoned Presbyterian pastors are on trial and facing a possible death sentence. Rev. Yat Michael and the Rev. Peter Yen Reith of the South Sudan Presbyterian Evangelical Church are being charged with espionage and blasphemy under the Republic of Sudan’s Islamic laws.  Other church leaders say that Christians are often targeted for their faith and that the government’s accusations are pretexts: “This is not ‘something new’ for our church.  Almost all pastors have gone to jail under the government of Sudan. We have been stoned and beaten. 

And on and on and on.  And, you can be sure, the above sampling hardly scratches the surface.

Middle Eastern Christianity is among the most persecuted minority groups in the world, today.  They are being killed, forced to convert, or driven from their homes by the very people that the western-left hailed as the enlightened, democratic proponents of the "Arab Spring."

The "Arab Spring", of course, turned into an Arab Nightmare with the result that throughout the entire Middle East untold numbers of Arabs and Muslims have been slaughtered in internecine fighting between any number of various Jihadi groups, both Sunni and Shia.  And, as we learn on the morning that I write, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has destroyed the ancient Arch of Triumph in Palmrya, the classical Roman city in Syria.

But, as is rarely noted, it is the Christians in the Middle East, due to the violent and hate-filled forces unleashed by the Arab Nightmare, who are paying the biggest price.  They are certainly paying the least noted price, that much is certain.  What we are witnessing in the Middle East is nothing less than the ethnic cleansing of Christians from the region.

The irony, of course, is that even as Jihadis drive Christians out of the area, or kill them, so the formerly Christian countries of western Europe, particularly Germany and Sweden, seem eager to transform the very nature of their societies in order to accommodate millions of Muslims migrating out of the Arab Nightmare.

Or will they bring it with them?

Political sands are shifting throughout the world, as the United States recedes and as Putin's Russia comes to the fore, but the consequences of the Arab Nightmare are in no way limited to the Middle East.  They are currently most strongly felt in Munich and Stockholm and, I am sure, Brussels.