And Now For Some Good News

Doodad

 Not really a surprise; Americans don't really care for terrorists.

The Children's Intifada

Michael L.

The Children's Intifada.

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When western university students and faculty call for support for the current pogrom against the Jews, the Children's Intifada, this is what they are advocating.

Say "hello" to contemporary Palestinian-Arab culture as designed by Yassir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.

They are sending their own children off to die in an effort to kill Jews and the allegedly "liberal" West could hardly care less.

Pushing the Jews out of Europe

Michael L.

{Also published at the Elder of Ziyon, Jews Down Under and Vocal Europe.}

In a January 18 piece for the Guardian entitled EU adopts resolution criticising Israeli settlement activity by Peter Beaumont in Jerusalem and Jennifer Rankin in Brussels, we read:

The European Union has unanimously adopted a tough resolution criticising Israeli settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian territories, despite fierce efforts by Israel to persuade some EU members to block it. 

The resolution was agreed by the EU foreign affairs council on Monday after Greece, one of five countries Israel had hoped would block acceptance of the resolution, backed down following a weekend of wrangling and pressure from Palestinian officials and other European diplomats.

Europe seems intent upon making itself more and more irrelevant to the Jewish State of Israel, as well as to the Jewish people as a whole. The EU's open-door policy for Arab-Muslim migrants in the millions is contributing to the evacuation of many Jews throughout Britain and the continent. The reason for this is because of the amazingly high level of violently-inclined Arab-Muslim anti-Semitism as expressed in the streets of Malmö or Paris or any number of European cities today.

The problem is not that Europe is importing perhaps millions of Middle Easterners and North Africans onto the continent, but that huge percentages of these folk happen to despise the Jewish people and tend to have no desire to integrate into liberal European society. They also tend to have an outright hatred for Gay people and a belief in the inferiority, and servitude, of women. We all know this, of course, but few decision-makers in Europe honestly seem to care or find it in their political best interests to publicly acknowledge this cultural reality.

What makes it so much worse, of course, is the inclination among those European decision-makers to isolate and reprimand the Jewish state as a kind-of unique evil. Of all the countries in the world, it is little democratic Israel that gets singled out by the EU and various European governments for sanction and continual reprimand because Jews actually dare to live in Judea and Samaria, the land that Jewish people come from.

The resolution emphasised that EU agreements with Israel applied only to the State of Israel within the pre-1967 border, adding that the “EU must unequivocally and explicitly indicate their inapplicability to the territories occupied by Israel in 1967. This does not constitute a boycott of Israel, which the EU strongly opposes”.

This is a lie, of course.

Not only does the EU not strongly oppose the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction the State of Israel (BDS) it absolutely encourages that political movement via efforts such as this one. What the EU is telling the world - much to the happiness of Islamists everywhere - is that Jewish people have no right to purchase housing on historically Jewish land..

There is an irony in the fact that while western Europe has flung open its doors for Arabs to come and live wherever they want, the western European elite wrinkle their noses at the whif of Jews building housing for themselves on the land that Jewish people have lived upon for something close to four-thousand years.

There is also considerable irony in the fact that while the EU opposes Jews who build housing for themselves and their children beyond the so-called "green line" within Israel it actively supports construction for Palestinian-Arabs within "area C" which is supposed to be fully controlled by Israel according to the Oslo Accords.

Furthermore, by sanctioning the Jews of Judea and Samaria - which Jordan dubbed "West Bank" for the purpose of erasing Jewish history and thereby undermining Jewish claims to their own homeland - the EU encourages violence toward European Jewry by those very same immigrants who often tend to despise Jews for religious reasons to begin with.

When the EU adopts resolutions such as the one above it sends a very clear message not only to the great Arab-Muslim majority in the Middle East, but to the Arab-Muslim minority in Europe, that it is open-season on Jews.

Hinting that further measures may be in the pipeline, it continued: “The EU will continue to closely monitor developments on the ground and their broader implications and will consider further action in order to protect the viability of the two-state solution, which is constantly eroded by new facts on the ground.”

The two-state solution is dead for the very simple reason that the Arab powers, including the Palestinian Authority, never wanted it to begin with. The tendency among Europeans to blame the Jews for Arab behavior is a measure of European dislike of Jews, in general.

It certainly has nothing to do with Israeli-Jewish intransigence on the question of a 23rd Arab state because the Jewish people have acknowledged their readiness to give away their heartland for peace since the Peel Commission of 1937. The reason that there is no peace between the Arab majority and the Jewish minority in that part of the world, despite the fact that Israel treats its Arab citizenry far better than does the rest of the Arab-Muslim societies, is because of Koranic forbiddance.

Yet Europe smacks around its Jews, so can you blame Jewish people for wanting to leave Europe?

Were I a European Jew I would be pondering every possibility for relocation to Israel, North America, or Australia.

April 12, 1961 - Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin

The SFSU Afro Floor

Michael L.

I have been heavily critical of San Francisco State University ever since it dedicated a mural to that old anti-Semitic anti-Zionist, Edward Said.

I noticed a story recently from the school newspaper entitled, BSU Brings Afro Floor to SF State, by Nashanta Williams:

SFSU Mural at Malcolm X Plaza

SF State’s housing will welcome a new community-themed floor after a successful bout of lobbying and protests by the Black Student Union. The “Afro Floor” will be available to students interested in living in themed housing on campus and will house cultural artwork and resources for the students.

The situation arose after a list of demands were sent to Dr. Luoluo Hong, the vice president of enrollment management, and Mary Ann Begley, the interim dean of students, after the BSU protested and took over a “pouring rights” rally last year. The protest was successful in stopping SF State’s University Corporation from signing a pouring rights deal and opened the door for conversations about the needs of black students on campus.

“We met with them in January, about a couple of our demands: some of them were retention of black students, a multicultural center and the afro floor, and they told us that the afro floor was something that can and will be done,” said BSU President Ismail Muhammad.

This story, of course, is a departure from our regular focus on the ongoing Arab war against the Jews in the Middle East and Europe. However, it seems to fit-in nicely with the recent academic concerns over "microaggressions" and the need for "safe spaces" where young impressionable minds will not be troubled.

If you read deeper into the article it says that people of the non-African-American persuasions will be allowed to live in the dorm, Ward Hall, but it is unclear whether or not they would be allowed to live on the Afro Floor, itself.

I called around the university and got no real response to the question until dean of students, Mary Ann Begley, was kind enough to promptly reply to an email.

I wrote her this:

Dear Ms. Begley,

I am a SFSU alumnus and I came across a Feb 10, 2016, story at the Golden Gate Express entitled, BSU Brings Afro Floor to SF State.

The article states that anyone may live in the dorm despite ethnicity, but may anyone, despite ethnicity, live on the floor?

I will look forward to your timely response and you have my sincerest appreciation.

Michael Lumish

In response Ms. Begley writes:

Hi Michael.  Thanks for reaching out with your inquiry.  It’s always good to hear from an alumnus!  :)

Your assumption is correct.  All students regardless of identity/protected status, including but not limited to ethnicity, are able and encouraged to live within any of our theme communities; this would include the Afro theme community that is currently being developed.

I hope that answers your question in full.  Feel free to write me back if you have other questions.

Although I have no idea what assumption that she is referring to, because I made none, it seems as if what the dean is saying is that students of any ethnicity would be allowed to live on the Afro Floor, which is precisely as it should be.

I do wonder, though, how this will play itself out in actuality.

My suspicion is that - influenced by the alleged need for "safe spaces" - this will become a self-segregated floor within a university dormatory. The implication from Begley's email is that the Afro Floor is just one among other planned "theme communities."

I have no burning desire to give SFSU a hard time about this particular initiative, but it does leave me wondering about the social benefits. What would the university say if the SFSU Young Americans for Freedom wanted to create an Anglo Floor wherein the contributions to world society by white people would be taught and celebrated?

Somehow I do not think that it would go over so well.

{In truth, I am frankly astonished that SFSU even has a YAF chapter. I wonder if it is still in actual operation?}

And how would the SFSU community respond to a Jew Floor?

That would be a key test and I would encourage Hillel SFSU to look into the possibility.

Obama's Potential Third Term Undermining of Israel

Michael L.

In an article for Israel National News by Elad Benari, we read:

Speaking Sunday to CNN, Clinton vowed to support Israel but also said she would insist on the “two-state solution”, that is the formation of a Palestinian state, in order to bring an end to the conflict.

I believe that we have seen this movie before and it does not end well.

In fact, I am pretty sure that we have seen it over and over and over again since Yitzak Rabin stood on the White House lawn shaking the hand of our friend Yassir Arafat as President of the United States, Bill Clinton, smiled aglow nearby.

Hillary Clinton will likely continue the counter-productive anti-Jewish / anti-Israel Oslo-policies of Barack Obama and who, as Obama's Secretary of State, threatened and browbeat the Jews of Israel on behalf of their Palestinian-Arab enemies. They did so, and do so, while claiming to be "friends" of the Jewish people and the Jewish State of Israel.

This, unfortunately, is false.

Those of us who care about the well-being of Israel, and the well-being of the Jewish people, understand that Barack Obama has been the least friendly president of the United States toward Israel, even surpassing the record of Jimmy Carter, both presidential and post-presidential.

Carter welcomed the ayatollahs to prominence and, to this day, likes to visit his friends in Hamas. Obama simply moved the United States aside, thereby enabling a muscular Iran, with a recent influx of 100 billion dollars, to develop its nuclear program undisturbed as it expands its presence throughout the Middle East and continues its violent operations against Jews and proxi-war against Sunni Arabs in that part of the world.

This has, not surprisingly, fomented a growing strategic relationship - if not alliance - between Israel and some of the Sunni Arab states, such as Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, in opposition to both a nuclear Iran and a US-EU-Iranian strategic and economic partnership.

It should also be remembered that it was Hillary Clinton who flew to Cairo to ensure a smooth transition into power of the Muslim Brotherhood, even as that organization - the parent of both Hamas and Qaeda - called for the conquest of Jerusalem. It was also Hillary Clinton, at the behest of the Obama administration, that flew to Jerusalem at the start of the Operation Protective Edge to protect Palestinian-Arabs from the foreseeable consequences of their attempts to kill Jews, via rocket-fire, from the Gaza Strip.

I also believe the Palestinians deserve to have a state of their own. That's why I support a two-state solution.

This is a strange argument and one that we have heard many times before.

The genocidal anti-Semitic Palestinian-Arabs deserve a state, while the peaceful and civilized Tibetan-Buddhists apparently do not. The Kurds are fighters and an oppressed minority throughout that part of the world, but apparently they do not deserve a state, either. Only the Pal-Arabs deserve a state, although one is left to wonder just what their contribution to humanity has been that they "deserve" to control a Judenrein Arab state among the 22 other largely Jew-free and hostile Arab states in the Middle East?

The "Palestinians" did not even have a self-conscious national identity until shortly before the Beatles broke up.

I happen to think that moving toward a two-state solution, trying to provide more support for the aspirations of the Palestinian people is in the long-term best interests of Israel, as well as the region, and, of course, the people themselves.

Should it not be painfully obvious by now that the aspirations of the Palestinian-Arabs is not for two states living side-by-side in peace next to one another? They have refused every single offer since the Peel Commission of 1937, they name sports stadiums and boulevards after the murderers of innocent Jews, and they have trained a whole generation of their children to believe that chopping off the heads of Jewish toddlers, or stabbing old men in the streets with scissors, is beloved in the sight of Allah.

Hillary is either deluded or simply does not care... in much the same way that Obama is deluded or simply does not care.

The only question that I have, in the fairly likely event of a Hillary presidency, is will she be more, or less, hostile toward Israel than Barack Obama? I do not know the answer to that question, but given her advisers I would I would not put much faith in a Hillary presidency.

She is a creature of Oslo.

She is riding a dead horse, and it will be the Israelis - both Jewish and Arab, between the River and the Sea - that will pay the price.

Noor al Haqiqa (Updated)

Michael L.

{Also published at the Elder of Ziyon and Jews Down Under.}

Every once in awhile an honest anti-Semite drops by to say hello at Israel Thrives. The image to your left is the avatar of one Noor al Haqiqa.

Somehow or other Noor came across a piece that I wrote a little over two years ago entitled, Ryan Bellerose and the Indigenous Question and, lo, these 25 months later she decides to respond in the comments.

Normally it is not a great idea to "punch down" as news media people say, but in this case I feel compelled.

Our friend writes:

Everyone is all worried about this yidiot's this and that and no one speaks of the total idiocy of the concept that the Jews are comparable to Native Americans.

Wanna buy into the victim myth much? This kid bought that cruddy line hook, line and sinker. He has been talmudicized, poor boy.

Anyone who knows the true story of the creation of Israel and the reason for its existence, recognizes a flaw in the fact that this discussion is even taking place.

It is a diversion from the truth of the matter. The Jews of Israel and their supporters around the world are committing genocide and being allowed to get away with it. THAT is the crux of the matter, not some silly young deluded athlete of limited education and abilities who thinks he "understands" .... someone twanged his "fellow victim" sensibilities and set him loose... meanwhile he should learn REAL history, not what he might have been told in school. 

Noor runs a peculiar little radically racist blog called Snippets And Snappits, which is a very cute name for a place wherein she encourages violence against Jews as a matter of "social justice."

Noor, very clearly, is a hard-line, anti-Jewish racist.

For example, this is an image found on the front page of her blog:

I absolutely love out-and-out racists like Noor because they are honest and, therefore, much easier to deal with than the insidious progressive-left variety who pretend to be anti-racist.

And then there is this:



So, Noor would have the world believe that the Jews, via the State of Israel, are controlling the US government. This is classic stuff, the kind of thing that the Nazis believed.

It is the sprinkling of anti-Semitic magical-fairy-confetti that genocidal dreams are conjured from.

Just as the Nazis, in their malevolent hallucinations, believed that the tiny percentage of Jews in Germany (a grand total of 1 percent of the total population) were behind the scenes, nefariously pulling the strings so that Germany lost World War I - the Stab in the Back theory - so Noor seems to believe that the Jewish State of Israel is behind the scenes, nefariously pulling the strings of Washington, D.C. to the detriment of everyone but those subhuman Jews.

In any case, let's go through Noor's comment above bit-by-bit and see what we can see.

The comment is divided into four unlovely little paragraphs.

In the first she refers to Ryan Bellerose as a "yidiot." I have honestly never come across that usage before. It obviously implies "Jewish idiot." The general nastiness of anti-Semitic anti-Zionists is often hard to fathom. In this case, of course, Bellerose is neither Jewish nor an idiot, but "yidiot" is cute. It conveys racial hatred in a snippity-snappity kind of way.

It makes genocidal hatred toward the Jewish people, and disparagement of our friends, fun!

As for the Jewish people being comparable to Native-Americans, it just means that both are the indigenous people in their respective parts of the world. Just as Bellerose and the Metis stand up for the rights of the indigenous in Canada, so Jewish people stand up for our own indigenous rights in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, the Land of Israel.

In the second paragraph she comforts herself with Holocaust denial through the notion of a Jewish "victim myth."

Two-thousand years of persecutions and expulsions and pogroms and dhimmi status in Arab lands and the Inquisition and the Holocaust and the constant Arab-Muslim hostility and violence and war against the Jews of the Middle East, yet to this compassionate genius it's all just a myth.

The slaughter of much of my own family by the Nazis during Operation Barbarossa in the town of Medzhybizh, western Ukraine, in the summer and fall of 1942, was apparently also a myth. As Hitler's troops were marching on the Soviet Union, the Jews of Medzhybizh were crowded into hastily fashioned ghettos, forced to road building, and then once the road building was done they were made to dig trenches, remove themselves into those trenches, and then they were shot-dead by Nazi soldiers.

Fortunately, my grandparents on my father's side had the foresight to get the hell out of there in-between the wars, but according to those like Noor al Haqiqa my family history was nothing but a myth. Jewish history, in other words, is nothing but a myth, a shadow, conjured by nefarious Jews in order to subjugate the pastoral Arabs who, we are told, want nothing more than to tend their Sacred Olive Groves in peace... even as they send their children out into the streets of Israel with their knives.

In her vague third paragraph she refers to "the true story of the creation of Israel" without giving us the slightest indication of what she means by that, although I feel reasonable certain that whatever it is, it is both false and malicious.

Finally, in her fourth and final paragraph she brings it all home by accusing the Jewish people of committing genocide.

Holocaust inversion.

According to our friend Noor, the Holocaust is a myth, but the Jews are committing an actual genocide against the perfectly innocent Arab population.

We tend to get caught up in the fights against BDS or Obama's strategically moronic empowerment of American and Jewish enemies, such as Iran, or the ongoing construction of hatred toward Jews by the Palestinian-Arab leadership, but every now and again it is not a bad idea to put a spot-light on classic anti-Jewish race hate.

It used to be that Jewish westerners primarily associated violent anti-Semitism with people who tended to have names more like Gunter.

Today anti-Semitism, in its most obvious and forthright forms, tend to come from people with names more like Noor al Haqiqa.

Update:

Over at the EOZ Bob Knot has shown that the blogger who goes under the moniker "Noor al Haqiqa" is actually a Canadian by the name of Barbara Lee.

Or, who knows?, maybe her real name is Haqiqa and she sometimes blogs under Lee.

In any case, she is apparently a Canadian retiree who is spending her "golden years" spitting hatred at Jews.

Also, as an aside, her avatar is an image of Eva Green from the 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven, directed by Ridley Scott of Alien fame.

Now I have to rent that film!

Museums and what they illustrate about those who found them

Sar Shalom

This month at Mosaic Magazine, Edward Rothstein has an insightful essay about Jewish museums and how they fall short in presenting Jewish culture. One observation I took from reading Rothstein's essay is that his observations do not apply just to Jewish museums, rather, they describe how most American Jews identify themselves as Jews in a general sense. Notably, Rothstein contrasts Jewish museums with other identity museums, which can be encapsulated in the following two paragraphs:

In the case of most minorities, to judge by the story told in identity museums, the freedom gained in the United States has been the freedom to become most like themselves. For their part, many Jewish American museums are more preoccupied with the freedom of Jews to become American than with the freedom of Jews to remain fully Jewish. In fact, there is often a suggestion that exercising the former freedom is precisely how Jewish Americans are most true to their identity. 

Thus, pride in Jewish American identity is measured in terms of how much that identity has contributed to the American scene. “However Jewish identity is defined,” we read at the Skirball, it has led to immense achievements and “its vitality is reflected in literature, film, music, drama, education, science, commerce, and technology.” Similarly, in the roster of Jewish achievements at the Philadelphia museum, in which Bob Dylan and Albert Einstein and Bella Abzug merit distinctive mention, I can’t recall any significant discussion of how Jewish identity has expressed itself in Jewish terms—in advancing Jewish scholarship, say, or in interpreting Jewish religious texts, or in formulating deeper understandings of Jewish peoplehood, or in articulating collective Jewish interests. When divisions within and among Jews are recognized, there is little doubt which parties are considered more authentic: namely, those whose ideas are most congenial to the vision of the museums’ founders. In these institutions, Judaism, including American Judaism, is transfigured into a kind of Jewish-inflected, progressive-style-Americanism.

Museums exhibits extolling a "Judaism" that resembles a "Jewish-inflected, progressive-style-Americanism," parallel the "Jewish" identities of many American Jews outside of the museums. An illustration of this phenomenon is the coopting of the Passover seder, one of the most readily identifiable rites of Jewish identity, into a ceremony to call attention to all of the oppressed peoples of today, with particular emphasis on the Palestinians. This practice takes what started as a rite to develop particularist identity around the redemption of Jewish peoplehood in ancient Egypt and turns it into declaration of progressive-style-internationalist with perhaps a bit of Jewish inflection.

It is this form of Judaism as ethnic inflection of progressive-style-internationalism that constitutes the animating ideology of groups like JStreet and the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) in the United States and Yachad in Britain. Following the pattern Rothstein noticed regarding other identity museums, are there any organizations of African-Americans dedicated to undercutting the interests of the African-American community, Central American Latinos dedicated to undermining the interest of Central American Latinos, or, particularly, Arabs dedicated to undermining the communal interests of the Arabs? Individuals can be found, but there are few if any organizations and none as prominent as JStreet.

This difference in the nature of identity between Jews and other groups has consequences. While the Frontline episode "Netanyahu at War" framed and presented plenty of material to which supporters of Israel would object, one valid observation is that Barack Obama's worldview was formed through interactions with Chicago's Jewish community, especially the attorneys Newt Minow and Abner Mikva. Obama went further and told one of his aides that this tutelage makes him the closest thing to a Jew to occupy the White House. However, the Jewishness that shaped Obama's worldview was one like that of the museums that Rothstein decries, that is a community that stood with the African-American community in the 1960's and values tikkun olam, but standing for the interests of Jews does not register.

In conclusion, Jewish identity for many Jews is fundamentally different than ethnic identity is for members of virtually every other ethnic group. One manifestation of this difference in the nature of ethnic identity is in the difference between Jewish museums and other identity museums. However, other manifestations of this difference have greater consequences for the larger Jewish community, particularly when the universalist aspect of that identity leads Jews to have sympathies for others that trump any evidence that the object of their sympathies will exploit any leeway to cause us harm. This hyperuniversalistic vision of Jewishness leads people to say based on one side's narrative, "As a Jew, I must condemn Israel's ...."

Counteracting this phenomenon will require developing a healthy mix of particularist identity along with the universalist identity. This does not mean the need to develop a sense of chauvanism, but it does mean developing a sense that one can look out for the interests of the Jewish people without running afoul of being good international citizens. Having said that Jewish museums emphasizing universalism and burying particularism and sparsity of museums doing otherwise is merely a symptom of the strain of identity in the broader Jewish community that leads to Jews advocating the case of our enemies, such museums might help legitimate the notion that such is an authentic vision of Jewish identity. Therefore, creating museums promoting a vision in which Jewry does not need approval of others to be praiseworthy, could contribute to such a change in the concept of Jewish identity, but the task should be evaluated in terms of how it contributes to the larger goal.

Pluto is no longer considered a regular planet by most of the scientific and astronomical community. It is now considered a Trans-Neptunian "dwarf planet."

I kid you not.

What most people do not realize, and what I did not know until fairly recently, is that just as Saturn has its rings, and just as there is an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, so the Solar System, itself, is belted by a far larger ring system, the "remnants from the Solar System's formation," comprised primarily of methane, ammonia, and water.

They call this enormous ring of space matter the Kuiper Belt and Pluto is considered the largest object within the ring, itself.

Who knew?

Using Your Children as Weapons of War (Or, Stabbing for Kids!)

Michael L.

Perhaps the most vile tactic that the Palestinian-Arabs use against their Jewish enemies in the Land of Israel is the usage of their own children as weapons of war.

In a piece by Judah Ari Gross and Itamar Sharon for the Times of Israel, we read:

One Israeli man was killed, and a second man was seriously wounded, in a suspected terror stabbing north of Jerusalem Thursday afternoon...

The two Palestinian stabbers were shot by an armed civilian, police said. The two, reported to be in serious condition, were also taken to hospitals in Jerusalem for treatment. They were 14-year-old boys from Beitunia near Ramallah, reports said.

In this most recent pogrom against the Jews of Israel - this Stabbing / Car Ramming Intifada - the Palestinian-Arab enemies of the Jewish people are using their own children as the weapon of choice. Most of the assailants in this current wave of irrational violence by Arabs against random Jews in the streets of Israel are hate-filled teenagers.

What we are seeing, of course, is the result of decades of Palestinian-Arab incitement toward Jews and the inculcation of Jew Hatred into the hearts of their children within their own culture. What it has nothing whatsoever to do with is Jewish ill-treatment toward Arabs living within Jewish land.

One need merely take a glance at the Arab-Muslim Middle East to immediately understand that Arabs in Israel have it better on every level than do the great majority of Arabs throughout the Arab world. Arabs who live in Israel, including Judea and Samaria, are more well-educated, enjoy longer lives, and have much greater personal freedom and economic opportunity than do Arabs anywhere else throughout the region.

Thus, the cause of the conflict is not Jewish imposed deprivation upon the Arab population, but persistent, Koranically-based, irrational Arab-Muslim race-hatred toward their much demographically smaller Jewish neighbors.

The cause of the never-ending conflict has virtually nothing to do with the behavior of the millennia-long persecuted Jewish minority and everything to do with deep-seated theocratically-based race-hatred toward the Jewish people on the part of their former Arab conquerors.

This hatred toward the Jewish people by the Arabs of the Middle East is so culturally and psychologically entrenched that they are even willing to sacrifice their own children upon the altar of anti-Semitism.

Golda Meir was right.



She said:

We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.

Indeed.

Running with Scissors

Michael L.

In a piece for the Jerusalem Post by Noam Amir and Maariv Hashavua, we read:

The head of Israel's military said on Wednesday that he is opposed to lax rules of engagement that allow security forces to kill Palestinian assailants immediately following a terrorist attack.

IDF chief of staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot met a group of soon-to-be conscripts at a high school in Bat Yam on Wednesday.

When asked by a student about the proper response to attacks similar to those seen during the past few months, the army chief replied: “The IDF doesn’t need to get swept up in clichéd statements like ‘Kill or be killed’ or ‘Whoever comes at you with scissors needs to be killed’.”

“The tools that are at the soldiers’ disposal are sufficient,” the chief of staff said.

In recent months, over 30 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians who have committed car-rammings, stabbings, and shootings in what is being called “the lone-wolf intifada” or “the knives intifada.”

Apparently two female Arab teenagers were shot-up by the IDF when they sought to murder a 70-year-old Arab man who they undoubtedly mistook for a Jew.  They were attempting to stab him in the head with scissors when the IDF killed one of the assailants and put the other into the hospital in critical condition.

I do not know that it is for me to argue with the IDF chief of staff, but I have zero problem with a shoot-to-kill policy on any terrorists.  Obviously if a 7 year old comes at a soldier with a pair of scissors shooting to kill is probably not necessary, but when a pair of teenage girls start stabbing an old man in the head for no other reason than that they believe he is a Jew, a shoot-to-kill policy makes perfect sense.

I would even go so far to say that not only is a shoot-to-kill policy against terrorists entirely appropriate, I would even suggest that Israel deport their immediate family after whatever necessary due-process. A make-nice approach, after all, is not going to work against murderous anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist zombies trained from childhood by their culture and their families toward genocidal hatred for the Jewish people.

I am tempted to say that responsibility for the the shooting of every Arab kid wielding a knife or a pair of scissors or a pipe bomb should be laid at the feet of Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, but the truth of the matter is that these hate-filled young murderers are the product of Palestinian-Arab society and culture, not just their hideous political leadership.

If Palestinian-Arab parents love their children and would prefer to not see them "martyred" in the cause of the Arab Jew Killing Policy perhaps they would do better to teach their children that genocidal hatred is not a nice thing.

From the comments:

Brad009

Court Martial him ASAP!! Even better, stab him in the back with a pair of scissors!! What a dumbkofpt!!

I don't think that I would go quite that far.

jst166 

What stupidity by Eisenkot.  This will lead to Jewish deaths.  Terrorists should be shot to death immediately. 

It's a brutal truth, but truth it is, nonetheless.

Michael_Davison

I disagree with Gen. Eisenkopf. The shoot-to-kill protocol has been in effect since I was a raw recruit in 1970. As long as the subject doesn't overtly drop their weapon and surrender, they remain a clear and present threat, to be neutralized as quickly as possible.

Anything else is unnecessarily endangering the lives of our soldiers, police and security personnel.

And there you have it.

One of the important things to consider, however, is that we must not allow those who look upon Israel with contempt to paint those of us who believe in Jewish self-defense as warmongers or fascists.

It is only the Jewish people - and sometimes the American cop - who are held to a standard that suggests that self-defense is the equivalent of aggression.

It isn't.

How the Jews are Winning the Long Arab War

Michael L.

{Also published at the Elder of Ziyon and Jews Down Under.}

Jewish woman throwing a grenade
in the Israeli War of Independence

The long Arab-Muslim war against the Jewish people goes on and on... but the Jews are winning.

We need to acknowledge that the conflict is an ongoing expression of Arab-Muslim religious hatred toward Jews as manifested since the time of Muhammad and embedded within the Koran and the Hadiths. Further, it is promoted and prolonged by western-progressive hostility toward Israel, and thus toward Jews, more generally, veiled within profoundly hypocritical notions of social justice and universal human rights.

Some will speak of a semi-historical / semi-mythological Islamic "Golden Age" wherein ascending Islam led the world in science and was amicable toward non-Muslims, including the Jewish minority.

This is false.

Islam, historically, has most often not been friendly toward non-Muslims and their scientific contributions, aside from the advancement of Algebra, have been negligible for many centuries.

The truth is that long before the rise of the Western Enlightenment - long before Galileo pointed his little refracting telescope at Venus and proved the heliocentric view of the solar system - the Islamic world was a civilizational leader.

It conquered vast territories from Christians and Jews and others throughout the Middle East, suppressed those around them, and made a few scientific advances during a period of human stupidity, backwardness, and blindness.

Islam, however, seems to have nowhere to go but down and one major reason for this is the ongoing and violent hatred toward the Jewish minority and all other infidels or apostates or "wrong" kinds of Muslims. Islam, after all, beats on nobody so much as it beats on its own.

What I would argue is that if Islam, in general, and the Islamic states, in particular, would stop harping on the fact that the Jewish people have independence on the small historic Jewish homeland, perhaps Middle Eastern Arabs could begin the process of moving into the modern world. They could - in my fondest imagination - give up old hatreds in favor of cultivating interest in the sciences and arts, building businesses and advancing local economies, bolstering the well-being of the world rather than seeking to tear it down through the Jihad.

{That would be nice.}

But the fact of the matter is that the Jews have basically won the Long Arab War.

The Long Arab War Against the Jews in the Middle East has taken the following phases in its contemporary iteration.

The Phases of the Long Arab War:

Phase 1, 1920 - 1947: Riots and Massacres 

Phase 2, November 1947 - April 1948: The Civil War in Palestine 

Phase 3, 1948 - 1973: Conventional Warfare 

Phase 4, 1964 - Present: The Terror War 

Phase 5, 1975 - Present: The Delegitimization Effort

Given the fact that the Jews in that part of the world represent a tiny minority and their Arab-Muslim enemies represent a far larger majority - and given the fact that the EU, the UN, and the United States, under the Obama administration, is hostile to that small minority - it is not difficult to come to the conclusion that the Jewish people are losing the Long War.

The fact of the matter, however, is that the Jews have survived all their historical enemies and the Arab-Muslim world, while a far larger demographic in the Middle East, is a mess. The Muslims of the Middle East suppressed and abused the Jewish minority there, not to mention the beleaguered Christians, from the time of Muhammad until the fall of the Ottoman Empire early in the twentieth-century following World War I. They conquered the Jews and they conquered the entirety of eastern Christendom and now honestly believe that such imperial conquests give them moral rights to the land that they plundered and continue to occupy and harass indigenous populations throughout the area.

However, from that moment until this the indigenous Jews have consolidated their position economically, scientifically, diplomatically, and militarily. Furthermore, they did so while under constant violent pressure from their inhospitable neighbors and while enduring the snide contempt of the European states who generally side with the Arabs against the Jews.

This is a remarkable accomplishment and it should be celebrated.

As has often been remarked, if you were to go back in time and tell a Jew in 1916 that by 2016 a reconstituted Israel would be among the most powerful nations on the planet he would certainly have thought you bonkers.

This is, of course, not to suggest that the long war is over because the Jews have defeated our enemies. We have not, and we will not any time soon, for the simple reason that our numbers are far too few and our enemies are far too many.

Nonetheless, when looking at contemporary Arab-Muslim hostility toward the Jewish people we need to teach them that they are beat.

The sooner that they realize this the better for everyone.

On Jew-washing

Sar Shalom

Last month, Andrew Pessin made an invaluable demonstration of how Jews endorsing some position does not remove that position's anti-semitism. I would like to add to the discussion about Jew-washing by drawing an analogy to general racism. Consider the case of voter-ID laws which several red states have passed. These laws disproportionately affect African-Americans who are more likely to lack the identification required under those laws. There are those who suggest that the laws are intentionally discriminatory because against African-Americans in order to suppress the vote of those who tend to vote against the laws' sponsors. If Clarence Thomas were to endorse those laws, would anyone, particularly amongst those claiming that Jewish support for BDS proves that BDS is not anti-semitic, claim that that shows that voter-ID laws are not racist?

UPDATE: I initially forgot to conclude the analogy I was developing, here is the conclusion. Just as conservative African-American endorsement of voter-ID laws, such as from Clarence Thomas, would not change those laws from being discriminatory to non-discriminatory, so too does Jewish support for BDS have no effect on its being anti-semitic.

"Palestinian" and "Jew" in Google Images

Michael L.

I cannot help but notice this.

If you go to Google Images, at least on my system, and type-in "Palestinian" this is the kind of thing that you get:



Or this:












However, if you go to Google Images and type-in "Jew" this is the kind of thing that you get:



Or this:



Check it out for yourself.

Just go to Google Images and type-in "Palestinian", check the results and then type-in "Jew" and see what comes up.

There is something very sick going on here my friends and it is embedded, yet again, in both western and Arab-Muslim cultures.

Western Islamophobia: Who Are We Kidding?

The Canary

{Editor's note: please welcome The Canary to Israel Thrives.  This guy definitely has something to say. - ML}

There is so much talk these days about Islamophobia and anti-Muslim discrimination, yet worldwide statistics demonstrate convincingly that, despite all the atrocities committed by Muslim extremists, anti-Semitism is actually growing much faster than anti-Muslim fervor, especially in Europe.

This is a rather fascinating observation, considering that Jews in Europe never threatened the lives of others, never proselytized their religion and never wanted to change their host countries’ governances. Radical Islam openly threatens innocent lives on a daily basis and openly proclaims its goal of upending Western society and democratic government structures in favor of Islamic Sharia law. This is no longer only a desire of radical Islam; the Muslim Brotherhood, considered by much of the European Union and the Obama administration to represent moderate Islam, is openly committed to governance under Sharia.

Threats no longer come from just the radical sectors of Muslim countries. The same ideology expressed by longtime radicals is now expressed by recently-radicalized Muslims living in Western societies, where they (or their parents) had settled to supposedly improve their lives over what they had left behind. Now, they paradoxically attempt to convert their host nations to the same 16th century-style governance that they (or their parents) fled before receiving sanctuary in the West.

Yet despite increasing fear of radical Islam, statistics in European countries and the U.S. persistently record significantly more anti-Semitic than Islamophobic hate crimes. The reasons are unclear but, at least in Europe, growing Muslim populations, characterized by overt societal anti-Semitism, are widely suspected as a principal cause of this.

Dictionaries define the term “anti-Semitism” as discrimination, prejudice or hostility toward Jews for no other reason but their Jewish heritage. Islamophobia is similarly described as discrimination, prejudice and hostility being unjustly directed at Muslims.

Superficially, these definitions are almost identical. Closer examinations of their meanings, however, reveals very obvious differences: While anti-Semitism is directed at a peaceful religion and a well-integrated ethnic minority, to many that are full participants in their local societies, Islamophobia represents a different phenomena, and is a far more urgent concern.

First of all, it is didactically misleading since phobias are irrational, psycho-socially abnormal behavior patterns, and concerns about radical Islam are neither irrational nor psychologically abnormal behavior. The term, therefore, is factually incorrect because, in contrast to Judaism and all other major world religions, Islam is not only a religion but also a political movement with its own distinct anti-democratic political ideology.

If one were to discriminate or express prejudice and hostility toward Muslims because of their religion, such activity would be labeled as anti-Semitism. To publically express opposition to the political ideology of Islam, which is anti-democratic and contradictory to constitutions of practically all Western democracies, cannot, however, be labeled as discriminatory, prejudicial or hostile to a religion. The protection of a democratic constitution against undemocratic dictatorial forces is, indeed, the sworn duty of every citizen in Western democracies.

Nobody would be considered a religious bigot just because he opposes Communism, Fascism or other dictatorial ideological movements. Yet, criticism of Islamic political ideology immediately conjures the b-word, and raises the specter of Islamophobia. If the Muslim Brotherhood (widely present in most U.S. mosques, and representing most of the organized Muslim political power structure in the U.S.) were to restrict itself only to representation of Islam as a religion, it would be viewed as are representatives of any other major religion. But by actively propagating the introduction of Sharia in their many mosques, the Brotherhood becomes a political organization whose goals are incompatible with the U.S. constitution.

Paradoxically, it is exactly the political ideology of Islam that explains the strong association that the political left in Western democracies has forged with Muslims over the last few decades. On first impression, such a coalition would appear unlikely since the political left has, traditionally, been secular. Yet, despite the obvious religiosity of Islam, its religiously motivated anti-democratic tendencies, its radical discrimination of women and the ideological overlaps between Islam and the third-world, anti-imperialistic socialist ideology (including anti-colonialism, anti-Judeo-Christian morality and strong, third-world, underclass affinities with people of color) have established a strong emotional as well as a political alliance between the political left and Islam.

This coalition has been developing since the mid-1960s, and came together for the first time following the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War in 1967, in which Israel annihilated the combined armies of the Muslim Arab world and conquered all of the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria. Suddenly, the prior underdog, Israel, morphed in the eyes of the political left into a White European Colonial outpost in the Muslim Middle East, obviously overlooking the fact that almost half of Israel’s Jewish population were not of European descent but actually refugees from African and Muslim countries. Picking up the argument of the Muslim world, the political left concurred that the Crusaders had returned and conquered Jerusalem again: but that this time, the Crusaders were not Christians but ‘The Jews.’

History demonstrates that anti-Semitism was religious at times over the past centuries, and at other times economic; but it always was used as a political tool of governing classes, whether during the monarchies in England, Spain or Russia; the Catholic church in her fiefdoms in Italy; rightist political parties in Fin-de-Ciecle Vienna at the end of the 19th century; Nazism in Hitler’s Germany or Communism in Russia (and later in the Soviet Bloc under Stalin and his successors).

In other words, anti-Semitism has over centuries been used as a political tool by both the political right as well as the political left. We now appear to have entered another historical period of political anti-Semitism on the political left.

It wasn’t always like that: Israel was founded on socialist principles in 1948. Her political leaders were among the founders of the Socialist International: the social-democratic leadership forum of social democratic political parties that were established after WWII. But everything changed with the 1967 war. Though widely recognized as a war of defense for Israel, the subsequent occupation of Arab lands branded the country as a neo-colonialist power in the eyes of the left. Even today, almost 50 years later, it is the only functioning democracy in the Middle East. But the majority of the Socialist International continues to view Israel with political distain. Through becoming a dominant military and economic power in the Middle East, Israel, like the U.S., is seen as a vestige of unmitigated capitalism and economic as well as military colonialism: little Satan and big Satan, as the Islamic Republic of Iran likes to call both countries.

Until the Obama administration came to power, following their Judeo-Christian believe systems, Israel and the U.S. shared most definitions of political rights and wrongs. The political left, however, believes that this view leads to neo-colonialism, and that it is reactionary in its rejection of the political relativism of the left.

This political relativism of the left allows and even encourages those considered to be suppressed by colonialism to revolt. Under the believe system of political relativism, the “oppressed” can practically do no wrong, and are even in the right when committing acts of terror, kidnappings, mass murder, abuses of civilian populations and initiating wars if it is in the name of freedom and social justice. So naturally, Hamas (an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood) and Hezbollah (a vassal of Iran) are considered moderate political organizations to the political left. It is almost surprising that the left has not embraced ISIS.

Threatened since its creation by the United Nations in 1948 with extinction, the country of Israel, despite its founder’s socialist traditions, could not afford to go along with the moral relativism of the political left, which increasingly sided with those who openly sought her destruction. The country, along with over 200 member states of the United Nations, is the only that is openly threatened with extinction by other member states (Iran and others). Yet no resolution ever condemned such threats. Indeed, over 90 percent of resolutions of condemnation in the various bodies of the United Nations are directed at Israel every year. Though it is the only parliamentary democracy in the Middle East, Israel cannot even get nominated as a member of the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission. In the meantime, human rights pariahs like Iran, Libya and Saudi Arabia are routinely elected.

So, the history of recurrent political anti-Semitism appears to repeat itself: the world needs a bogeyman, and nobody is better suited for this role than ’The Jew,’ – this time in the form of the Jewish state of Israel, which, objectively, is one of the world’s great national success stories.

Even the U.S. political system is proof of the connection between anti-Israel polemics and unadulterated anti-Semitism. One just has to listen to some of the sermons of President Obama’s longtime pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and of his ideological twin, the Nation of Islam’s Minister Louis Farrakhan. Both are well-known Afro-centric racists and anti-Semites who discovered their Jewish bogeyman!

Like many politicians of the political left in Europe before them, members of President Obama’s foreign relations team have expressed the opinion that the creation of Israel was a political mistake. This is not a new opinion in this country’s foreign policy establishment. Indeed, when President Truman ordered a United Nations vote in favor of Israel’s creation in 1948, he overruled his own Secretary of State. Such opinions voiced by the current administration, however, deserve attention, since the Obama administration’s policy toward Israel has been clearly influenced by the administration’s leftish ideology. So it should not surprise that we have witnessed a clear turn away from the traditional support of Israel, and more alignment with antagonistic policies toward Israel from the European Union.

Economic and academic boycott movements against Israel started in the UK and Scandinavian countries (mostly Norway and Sweden). They were initiated by leftish fringe groups but appropriated over time by social democratic politicians all over Europe, and became official policy of some social democratic political parties and governments led by those parties in Sweden and Norway. Boycott movement have also crossed the Atlantic and are now present on most college campuses in the U.S., once again demonstrating the common cause of the political left fringe and Muslim groups.

Outright anti-Israel stances are still rare in U.S. politics but, as noted before, the U.S.–Israel relationship has changed decisively under President Obama. Moreover, it was surprising to see how much political support Israel has lost from the left in Congress, when even prominent Jewish politicians in the Democratic Party publically supported President Obama’s Iran deal, which was considered an existential threat to Israel. It was also interesting to note that, desperate to secure votes to prevent the override of a potential Obama veto, the administration did not hesitate to subtly raise concerns about Jewish dual loyalty, an argument that has fed anti-Semitic prosecutions of Jews for centuries.

Though he describes himself as “Israel’s best friend in the White House,” he is a politician brought up on the extreme Marxist left, with a Muslim Marxist father dedicated to fighting British Colonialism (for details see The Canary’s earlier biographical series on President Obama). Obama’s psychological affinities to leftist ideologies render him sympathetic to the European Socialist view on Israel. Socialist ideology has dominated his presidency from the beginning, whether in domestic or foreign policy. In one of his first acts as President, he actually removed Winston Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office because he did not, unlike most Americans, see him as a WWII hero but as the villain of British colonialism between the two World Wars. Considering Obama’s foreign policy toward Israel, his very public support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Muslim Brotherhood offshoots in the U.S., is no wonder that President Obama’s relationship to ‘The Jews’ has been questioned. Some media outlets have publically questioned whether President Obama should be considered anti-Semitic.

Once his White House tapes became public, President Richard R. Nixon did not mince words in his conversations with Kissinger, which could be viewed as anti-Semitic. But he likely saved Israel after the surprise attack by Egyptian and Syrian armies when he expedited weapon deliveries during the Yom Kippur War. President Lyndon B. Johnson was also known to have uttered anti-Semitic remarks at times. But a few such remarks do not yet make an anti-Semite.

While nobody reported President Obama to have made an anti-Semitic remark, his intimate 20-year relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a flaming anti-Semite with violently anti-Israeli view points, suggests that future presidential historians will have to pay close attention to this question when assessing Obama’s presidency. Such a close assessments of the administration’s attitude toward Islam will not be required because no other population, African Americans included, has received as much positive attention from the Obama Administration. But who would have expected anything else from the most socialist administration in decades?

Podcast # 12 - The Temple Mount, the Default Single-State Solution, and Dr. Andrew Pessin

Michael L.

This one is also about ten minutes long and is concerned with a couple of stories from Arutz Sheva, i.e, Israel National News.

The first is entitled, Disagreements delay security camera deployment on Temple Mount

And the second is entitled, EU demands Israel stop demolishing illegal Arab settlements.

I also have a few words concerning Dr. Andrew Pessin of Connecticut College. I like Pessin, but the thing about the guy is that he is a Jewish philosopher, and what is not to like about Jewish philosophers?

Pessin got knocked around by campus crybullies for daring to call-out Hamas for the dogs that they are.

Jeez, what a pure offense to hypocritical idiots.

My Predictions Stink

Michael L.

SNL's Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton

Just in general - just in life - it is better to admit one's mistakes rather than deny them or try to cover them up.

I have recently made two mistakes, live and in public, that I need to own up to... not that anyone really cares, but what the hell?

The first is that at the beginning of this horrendous political season I predicted a Clinton / Bush fight to the death.

In my sexist imagination, I presumed that Hillary Clinton, as played by Kate McKinnon, would scratch Jeb Bush's eyes out.

I was wrong.

What I did not foresee was Jeb's actual disinterest in the job... his laziness and boredom. He seemed to wake up maybe a month ago with some tough-punching TV ads, but it is far too little and far too late.

Jeb is as uninteresting as a bucket of warm porridge sitting on the side of the road on a hot summer Sunday afternoon with nowhere to go.

Nobody cares more about the political future of Jeb Bush more than does Jeb, himself, which is apparently not very much. One of the few things that I liked about George W. is that when he finally left office he knew to shut the hell up. The problem with Jeb is that he shut the hell up before he even started running for the position.

Most Americans aren't any more interested in the name Bush than they are in the name Clinton.

But, in any case, I got that one wrong in August of last year with Michael Burd on Melbourn's J-AIR.

My second misprediction, which I expressed on a recent podcast, was that The Donald would win Iowa.

Not so much!

This is probably for the best. Whoever eventually wins the presidency, I do not want to see Trump's trembling finger above the button. I generally prefer to judge candidates on their positions, rather than on their looks or personality, but Trump is a bit scary.

I mean, once in real power, G-d only knows what the guy would do. I don't think that I want a gentleman who believes that he is above regular social standards to be among the most powerful people in the world.

Do you?

By the way, I apologize for continuing to promote this SNL skit, but it slays me.

Kate McKinnon is just brilliant as Hillary and Larry David as Uncle Bernie is spot-on.

I am telling you guys that I can easily see him sitting around my mother's dining room table eating her ruggelach and kvetching about whatever.

I don't make this stuff up... other people do.

The Unabashed Zionist

Michael L.

{Also published at the Elder of Ziyon, The Jewish Press and Jews Down Under.}

Remember Professor Andrew Pessin?

Anyone who follows the Long Arab War against the Jews of the Middle East knows about the harassment of vocal pro-Israel professors on western university campuses, including in the United States.

As I wrote in a piece last summer:

Professor Andew Pessin is a Professor of Philosophy at Connecticut College.  He studied at Yale and earned a PhD at Columbia University.  He is the author of five books, including most recently Uncommon Sense: The Strangest Ideas From The Smartest Philosophers.  He is also friendly to the Jewish State of Israel and in opposition to political Islam for reasons having to do with social justice and human rights.

Pessin, as you will recall, took a beating on his home campus for daring to disparage Hamas. Meanwhile, at San Francisco State University, professors Rabab Abdulhadi and Trevor R. Getz have partnered with what is perhaps the most racist university in the entire world, An-Najah National University, in the Palestinian Authority controlled town of Nablus. and nobody even blinks.

The ADL has this to say about An-Najah National University:

An-Najah University, in the West Bank city of Nablus, has been a flashpoint in the conflict between Israel and Palestinians since at least 1980, when violent anti-Israel protests led the Israeli military to close the school intermittently. Today the student council of An-Najah is known for its advocacy of anti-Israel violence and its recruitment of Palestinian college students into terrorist groups. The council, almost completely controlled by factions loyal to Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah, glorifies suicide bombings and propagandizes for jihad against Israel. Hamas has described An-Najah as a "greenhouse for martyrs." 

Yet San Francisco State University supported Abdulhadi, while Connecticut College turned its back on Pessin. Is this the sad condition of American campuses these days? Supporting a genocidal organization like Hamas is A-OK from a progressive-left viewpoint, but supporting the lone, sole Jewish-democratic country in the entire world is verboten and considered illiberal?

Well, I am pleased to see that Professor Pessin is well-liked by most of his students, one of whom wrote this:

actually the best professor at conn. intensely passionate about the subject matter and works exceptionally hard to make sure his wording is precise and his arguments are clear. will go out of his way to help, he read 8 drafts of one of my essays. take pessin's classes if you want to learn rigorous (real) philosophy.

Aside from garnering the support of some very well respected colleagues at nearby universities, such as Richard Landes of Boston University, and successfully high-lighting the issue of anti-Jewish support for genocidal terrorists on American college campuses, he has also started up his own venue which he calls The Unabashed Zionist.

"Because an unabashed Zionist is better than a bashed one."

I could not agree more.

In a recent piece by Noah Beck of the Algemeiner we learn:

A pro-Israel professor won’t be on campus at Connecticut College when classes start Monday, missing the second straight semester since his 2014 Facebook post criticizing Hamas led to death threats and ostracism.

Andrew Pessin “requested and received a sabbatical for the Spring semester to continue his studies in Jewish philosophy and Israel studies,” Connecticut College spokeswoman Pamela Serfes said in an email last week. “He has been and continues to be a valued member of the Connecticut College faculty.”

The vague and misleading response glosses over the intensity of the campaign against Pessin — he first took a medical leave last spring as a smear campaign against him was at full throat. The controversy exposed an administration unwilling to enforce its own honor code to protect a professor against anti-Israel activists and a student journalist responsible for covering the very controversy she had joined.

It seems to me that those of us in the pro-Jewish / pro-Israel community need to stand up for this guy... which is why I am writing this piece.

Check out The Unabashed Zionist and lend your vocal support to Professor Pessin who did nothing more than disparage Hamas, an organization in great need of disparagement from decent people everywhere.

In the Hamas Charter we read:

Within the circle of the conflict with world Zionism, the Hamas regards itself the spearhead and the avant-garde. It joins its efforts to all those who are active on the Palestinian scene, but more steps need to be taken by the Arab and Islamic peoples and Islamic associations throughout the Arab and Islamic world in order to make possible the next round with the Jews, the merchants of war.

The next round with the Jews.

This document is nothing less than a call for the genocide of the Jewish people within living memory of the Holocaust, yet Pessin gets called to the carpet for strongly disagreeing.

I have tended to be critical of San Francisco State University because it is one of the most racist universities in the entire country, but Connecticut College made an exceedingly bad decision when that administration refused to stand up for Dr. Pessin.

May he find greener pastures elsewhere.

Pluto

Enough is Enough: Hadar Cohen, Rest in Peace

Michael L.

Times of Israel Staff and Judah Ari Gross tells us:

A border Police officer succumbed to wounds suffered during a shooting and stabbing attack near Jerusalem’s Old City Wednesday, after efforts to save her life at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus failed.

The woman was identified as Hadar Cohen, 19, from Or Yehuda.

Cohen was rushed to hospital in critical condition after she was wounded in the attack shortly after 2 p.m. local time. Paramedics who treated her at the scene said she was fighting for her life.

Hospital officials said she was shot in the head. “We succeeded in stabilizing her condition for a time, but her head wound was so severe she never had a chance,” a hospital spokeswoman said.

Enough is enough, as my dear old mom used to say.

Israel needs to behave like a normal nation, a normal people, and fight back when their own children are under assault.

The basis of the conflict is nothing other than long-standing Arab-Muslim prejudice against the Jewish people. That is all that it is. The Arab people living under Jewish-Israeli rule in that small country enjoy greater civil liberties and greater opportunities for personal and financial advancement than do their own brothers and sisters throughout the rest of the Arab-Muslim Middle East.

The problem that Israeli-Arabs have living under Israeli rule is fundamentally the same problem that French and German Arabs have living under French and German rule. For reasons primarily of religion, Muslims in Europe are reluctant to assimilate and therefore sometimes create highly inhospitable neighborhoods ("No-Go Zones") for those of the ethnicity of their host countries and are managing to actually create al-Sharia courts in European cities.

Within Israel, Arab children are raised from birth to regard Jews as an Eternal Enemy that Allah enjoys the murdering of.

It is Arab-Muslim religious bigotry that is driving this conflict and until the West recognizes this fact it will go on and on and on. But, as we know, the never-ending war against the Jews in the Middle East serves the political purposes of the Arab governments. The Arab invention of a Jewish Demon serves to distract the uneducated Arab masses from their abuse by their own governments. Furthermore, the western governments have every reason to pander to Arab-Muslim anti-Jewish bigotry because there are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world compared to 13 or 14 million Jews.

Anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitic violence, as Ruth Wisse reminds us, is political.

This young woman was murdered by a Palestinian-Arab for no other reason than that she was Jewish.

When vicious western-leftists imply that Arabs have good reason for killing Jews, due to the "Occupation," what they are really saying is that Jews have no rights to live in the Jewish heartland of  our ancestry, Judea and Samaria. This is precisely what UN chief, Ban Ki-moon, suggested just the other day.

When Arabs seek to murder Jews for political reasons, it is resistance.

When Arabs seek to murder non-Jews for political reasons, it is terrorism.

The real question is what should Israel do about this third intifada?... and, make no mistake, this is very definitely a third intifada, the Stabbing Intifada... the Car Ramming Intifada.

If Israel gets tough, the EU, the UN, and the Obama administration will come down upon it like a ton of bricks.

If Israel does not get tough, then violent Palestinian-Arab racists will continue to kill their children.

What would you do?

Iowa 2016

Michael L.

The Donald 

Trump blew it... primarily because he is something of a scowling asshole.

I enjoyed his campaign for the same reason that I occasionally watched The Apprentice. I read an article a few days ago - G-d only knows from where - which compared the Trump campaign with Sanders and Rubio that I thought was very interesting. The writer suggested that Trump and Sanders had more in common than might appear on the surface.

Both are backward-looking guys.

Trump wants to return to the American "greatness" of the 1950s. He wants international American dominance and prosperity without the Jim Crow laws. He wants the America of his childhood back, without the down side, as do many millions of others.

He is not out of the running, but I think he blew his golden opportunity. Trump shot from the hip and many people applauded him for it because, even though they may have disagreed with him, they appreciated his apparent honesty and courage to call things as he sees them. The problem is that he can also be remarkably obnoxious in ways that cross the sexism and racism lines.

I agree with him that the United States government should put a near halt to immigration from the Arab-Muslim world - given their general tendency toward anti-Semitism, misogyny, and authoritarian al-Sharia, not to mention the probable infiltration of Jihadis - but he really lost me when he disparaged Fiorina's looks.

It made me want to punch him in the nose.

Cruz

It is a little hard to imagine, but Dershowitz once claimed that Ted Cruz was the most intelligent student that he ever had. Really? Even more intelligent than Barack Obama? 

That is very impressive.

I barely even heard of the guy before this election cycle and just figured him for yet another Texas redneck, more or less in the mold of George W. The truth, obviously, is that Cruz is turning out to be far more formidable than many of us assumed at the start of the race. He has a sort-of hang-dog look to him that many people from my New York and New Englandy neck-of-the-woods will generally not find appealing. 

But I am willing to give the guy a chance. I am going to oppose whoever the Democrats put up this year, even Uncle Bernie, and may just sit this one out. But I am still enough of a political junkie to want to hear what candidates, including Cruz, have to say.

The real problem, from my point of view, is the Jewish / Evangelical divide. Cruz is a Tea Party kind of a guy and although the Tea Party folk are friendly with Israel - and thereby generally friendly with the Jewish people - they are not very friendly toward Gay people and often hold retrograde viewpoints on the roles of women in the world.

Whether this view of the Tea Party is accurate, or not, it is what puts a screeching halt to American Jewish support for that political movement and, thus, for Cruz.

Besides, most Jews would rather rip their left arm from its socket and beat themselves silly with it before they would pull the lever for a Republican.

Rubio

He is such a handsome and intelligent young guy. He could almost be a Latino JFK. 

Rubio is still in the race because he exceeded expectations with 23 percent of the Republican vote.

This makes it a three-way race on the Republican end and I suspect that Rubio may be the candidate best able to knock Hillary off of her high horse.

Of all the viable candidates in the field Rubio, along with Cruz, would probably be a good friend to Israel. Nonetheless, I see the guy as primarily Vice Presidential material. I wish him well, but we shall see. New Hampshire might shake things out a little.

If he gets the nomination, however, I suspect that he will get my support.

Uncle Bernie and Hillary

Yes, I think of him as "Uncle Bernie."

What can I tell you? My father is from Brooklyn and my mother is from the Bronx. This definitely makes him Uncle Bernie.

That accent is the accent of the adults of my youth. I can easily see him - or Larry David - sitting around our dining room table, eating my mother's ruggelach, and kvetching about whatever.

Nonetheless, if Trump wants to return to 1954, Uncle Bernie wants to go back to the fun-filled days of 1968.

I have to say, part of me is proud to see a Jewish American take a shot at the Presidency. G-d knows that if by some miracle Sanders were to actually get there the anti-Semites would go entirely out of control. I mainly concern myself with progressive-left racism but under the circumstances of a Sanders presidency the right-leaning variety would definitely stand up in the United States and make themselves heard.

Who knows? Maybe we'd even see the fourth incarnation of the Klan.

My assumption from the beginning - just like all of yours - was that Hillary would be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States in 2016. In the beginning almost no one saw Uncle Bernie ride his Jewish Socialist horse into the ring. 

As of the figuring at this moment, Hillary took 49.9 percent of the Democratic vote in Iowa and Sanders took 49.6 percent. Good for Sanders. I cannot imagine that he could win the general election, but it gives me deep joy to see him annoy Hillary Clinton.

Will he take New Hampshire?

I haven't even looked at those polls, but one need not be a magician to predict that he will.