Obama's Racism and Counterproductive Stupidity

Michael L.

{Also published at Jews Down Under.}

Writing in Israel Hayom, conservative thinker Elliot Abrams tells us:

"This week the State Department engaged in a remarkable assault on Israel. Both in tone and in content, it marks a new hostility and plenty of sheer ignorance.

The comment, titled "Recent Israeli Settlement Announcements," ran as follows: "We are deeply concerned by reports today that the Government of Israel has published tenders for 323 units in East Jerusalem settlements. This follows Monday's announcement of plans for 770 units in the settlement of Gilo.

"We strongly oppose settlement activity, which is corrosive to the cause of peace. These steps by Israeli authorities are the latest examples of what appears to be a steady acceleration of settlement activity that is systematically undermining the prospects for a two-state solution."

323 housing units.

I feel reasonably certain that they are building many more housing "units" than that in my neighborhood of Oakland alone.

Obama's Racism

The Obama administration is both racist and seemingly incapable of learning from past efforts.

The reason the Obama administration is racist (or anti-Semitic) is because they harrass the Jews of the Middle East for daring to build housing for themselves in the very place that Jews have resided for millennia.

Long, long, long before there was any such place as London or Paris or Washington, D.C. there was Jerusalem... and it was crawling with Jews. Why was it crawling with Jews even many centuries before the first Arab showed up to steal Jewish land?

Because Jerusalem is, indeed, the ancient capital of the Jewish people.

The Arabs do not get to come along thousands of years later, take it, claim Jerusalem as "the third holiest city in Islam" - which is nonsense, they might as well claim Walla Walla, Washington as the thirty-seventh most holy city in Islam - insist that they are the actual indigenous population, and then carry out fourteen centuries of non-stop colonial violence against the Jewish natives to the region.

Sadly, however, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party do not see it that way.

They honestly believe that any future state of "Palestine" must be Judenrein and, yet, somehow, against all common sense and basic human decency, they see themselves as anti-racists.

They aren't.

Obama Administration Inability to Learn

Well, either they are incapable of learning from past experience or they are secretly malicious toward Israel and toward the Jewish people.

Whatever it is, Jewish Israelis are not going to let these knuckleheads in the White House tell them where they may or may not be allowed to live in their own homeland.

At least the racist princes of Medieval Europe only tried to impose their wills upon where Jews may be allowed to live in Europe, itself. Obama, in his remarkable arrogance, believes that he has every right to dictate where Jews should be allowed to live in Jerusalem!

And the thing of it is, not only is it racist, but it's entirely counterproductive and has been proven so year after year.

It does not matter if the Jews withdraw from the eastern section of Jerusalem, as well as Judea and Samaria, because the Arabs are not going to cease their efforts to murder Jews. Why should they? It costs them very little in their efforts, because they outnumber us by a factor of 60 to 70 to 1, and they've been engaged in the Jew Killing Project since Muhammad got angry with us for not accepting him as a prophet.

Those stubborn Jews!

Y'know, if we would not accept Jesus as a prophet despite the fact that, one, he was Jewish and, two, he actually carried a message of peace and love, then we're certainly not going to accept someone with the character of Muhammad, who was anything but peaceful.

Muhammad was a caravan raider with a taste for exceedingly young girls and he murdered very many Jews. We're supposed to respect this? I do not think so.

The bottom line, of course, is that kicking the Jews in the head from Washington, D.C. is never going to bring peace. What could bring peace is if the White House and the EU insist that there will be no additional funding of the Palestinian Authority until they cease inciting violence against Jews and demonstrate an actual willingness to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors.

Short of that the violence against us will go on and our progressive-left anti-racist friends will tell one another how it is that we deserve whatever beating the Arabs care to dish out.

Back in the Day

Lumish on the Moral Equivalency Canard

Michael L.

This is my latest bit for the fellahs down in Australia.

It is in an MP3 format because MP3 is still pretty standard.

Nothing Left # 109

Michael L.

Michael Burd and Alan Freedman from J-AIR, Nothing Left.

3 min Editorial: Leftism and the media

10 min John-Michael Howson

35 min Ruthie Blum, journalist

56 min Martin Sherman, political

1 hr 25 min Michael Lumish, Israel Thrives blog, USA

1 hr 36 min Isi Leibler, Jerusalem

Part of what I like about these guys, aside from the fact that they give me a venue, is that they attract big names.

Anyone who knows anything about the Long War knows about Isi Leibler's and  Martin Sherman's contributions to the conversation.

Ruthie Blum writes for the Jerusalem Post and the Algemeiner and John-Michael Howson has been a part of the entertainment and commentary scene for many decades in Australia.

My brief piece is concerned with the moral equivalency canard among progressive-left Jews who, ya know... mean well.

Hillary and Uncle Bernie

Michael L.

I sometimes think of Bernie Sanders as "Uncle Bernie."

I do so because he was raised a stone's throw from my dad's house in Brooklyn, back in the day.

His accent is the accent of the adult men of my youth.

Writing in the Times of Israel, Eric Cortellessa tells us:

The DNC email scandal is multilayered. Beyond the fact that a series of exchanges raised ideas of ways to weaken Sanders’s candidacy, there is also the nature of the proposals that were discussed. DNC finance chief Brad Marshall pitched Schultz on portraying Sanders as an atheist who rejected his Judaism in states where candidates’ religiosity holds sway with voters, like in Kentucky and West Virginia.

“Does he believe in a God,” Marshall asked. “He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”

My issue here is not that the Democratic National Committee (the DNC) considered using Uncle Bernie's atheism as a political club, but that they lied to the American public, and their Democratic Party constituents, in insisting upon the neutrality of the designee process.

They weren't neutral.

I do not mind that Debbie Wasserman Schultz sides with Hillary in this presidential campaign. That is to be expected.

What I do mind, however, is that the DNC lied to all of us when they claimed neutrality in the process. There was no neutrality. The thumb was definitely on the scales for Hillary and it's going to take considerable research into DNC media statements to figure out the extent of the rigged game.

But a rigged game it was for the obvious reason that we were lied to and the DNC was not neutral, but put their weight behind Hillary.

According to campaign officials, (Wasserman Shultz) will still keep her leadership role at the convention and deliver her scheduled address. For the rest of the election, she will continue to assist the presumptive Democratic nominee, along with other down-ballot races throughout the country. Longtime Democratic strategist Donna Brazile will take the helm as interim chair.

Donna Brazile, huh? Gee, that name sounds a tad familiar.

It is unclear, though, just how damaging these email revelations are going to be for the Clinton campaign and these rumors of Russian intervention as the source of the leak are exceedingly unusual.

My suspicion is that they will roll out Wasserman Schultz in the convention only if the powers-that-be determine that this story is a non-story and that they will not make any such determination.

Wasserman Schultz will likely play a significant behind-the-scenes role in Hillary's campaign, but she will continue to draw fire from her Republican rivals.

This issue is not likely to seriously hobble the Clinton campaign, but it certainly does not help arriving directly at the beginning of the Democratic Party convention.

We shall see.

Nuance

Michael L.

I have recently been criticized in a private email by a pro-Israel / pro-Jewish advocate - who I respect - for lacking nuance in my criticisms of the Long Arab War against the Jews of the Middle East.

This gentleman is a writer who has published a book on pro-Israel advocacy, but I honestly have no idea what he is talking about.

I guess that I do not value nuance over simple truths.

Here is a simple truth:

The Jews of the Middle East lived as second and third-class non-citizens under Arab and Muslim imperial rule from the seventh-century CE until the demise of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.

Now, this is not a very nuanced view, but it has the virtue of historical accuracy and I tend to think that matters.

2 + 2 = 4 is not particularly nuanced, either, but it does not make it less true.

Here is another simple and entirely unuanced truth:

The Jews of the Middle East have been under constant attack by the great Arab and Muslim majority in the region for fourteen hundred years for irrational racist and religious reasons.

That is, the source of the conflict is millenia old Arab and Muslim racist hatred toward Jews.

It is nothing else.

Europeans tend to think that the Jews of Israel are terrible people in need of sanctions for their alleged mistreatment of the indigenous, innocent, conquerors of Jewish land.

This is very odd considering the ongoing malice and rape and murder of European Christians on their own land by the emigre Arabs and Muslims that they invited into their countries for humanitarian reasons.

That is also a truth lacking in nuance.

Here is another entirely unuanced truth:

The Arabs have turned down every single offer of yet another Arab state in the Middle East since the League of Nations' Peel Commission of 1937.

There is not much nuance in the word "no."

After the war of 1967 there was not a whole lot of nuance to the statement of the Arab heads of state in Khartoum, Sudan, that there would be no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations with Israel.

The famous 3 Nos.

It does not get much less nuanced than that.

Diaspora Jews who care about the well-being of the Jewish people - particularly the Jews in the Middle East who are under constant attack by their hostile Arab neighbors - need to recognize that, as Ted Belman says, there is no diplomatic solution precisely for the reason that the Arabs do not want two states for two peoples.

What they want are the Jews dead or gone.

And that is not very nuanced, either.

People say that the conflict is complex.

It isn't.

It is grounded entirely in religious and ethnic hatred on the part of the Arabs and Muslims toward the Jews for centuries.

The fact of the matter is that Arabs in the Middle East teach their children that Jews are the issue of orangutans and swine.

And there is nothing the least bit nuanced about that either.

The Parameters of the Discussion

Michael L.

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

Most westerners - left, right, and center - think of the never-ending conflict between Israel and the "Palestinians" as one between a country with one of the most prestigious and effective armed forces in the world versus a small and hapless, but plucky, indigenous population.

What we need to do is change the parameters of the discussion.

So long as people put the discussion within the context of a large military power versus a small indigenous population, we can never possibly win the argument. So long as the Arabs within the Land of Israel are seen as "Davids" with slingshots and the Jews of the Middle East are perceived as a "Goliath" then western sympathies will always go to feisty little David.

Thankfully, unlike the Palestinian Narrative of Perpetual Victim-hood, we actually have history and demographic reality on our side in terms of the discussion from an ethical standpoint.

History: the Jew as Dhimmi

The first thing that pro-Israel / pro-Jewish advocates need to do is put the conflict within historical context. An old pro-Israel acquaintance of mine used to say "history did not begin in 1967." 

That is, in order to understand the Long Arab War Against the Jews, we need to place it within the long history of Jewish people living under Arab and Muslim imperial rule from the seventh-century until the demise of the Ottoman Empire with the conclusion of World War I.

From the time of Muhammad, until Islam ran head-first into modernity and the twentieth-century, the Jews of the Middle East were second and third-class non-citizens under the boot of Arab and Muslim imperial rule. However bad African-Americans had it in the United States under the vile rules of Jim Crow, it was never worse than Jewish people had it as dhimmis and what we call "dhimmitude" lasted one heck of a lot longer.

As dhimmis in Arab and Muslim lands, Jews (and Christians) could ride donkeys but horses were forbidden.

As dhimmis in Arab and Muslim lands, Jews (and Christians) were forbidden from building housing for themselves taller than Muslim housing.

As dhimmis in Arab and Muslim lands, Jews (and Christians) had no rights of self-defense.

As dhimmis in Arab and Muslim lands, Jews (and Christians) had no recourse to courts of law.

As dhimmis in Arab and Muslim lands, Jews (and Christians) had to pay protection money to keep their families safe from violence.

And this is one of my favorites, in certain times and places under Arab-Muslim imperial rule Jews were not even allowed to go outside during rainstorms lest their Jewish filth run into the street and infect their pure Muslim neighbors.

The point, however, is that just as we would never discuss African-American history without reference to both Jim Crow and slavery, so we must not discuss the Long Arab War against the Jews without reference to thirteen-centuries of Arab and Muslim oppression against all non-Muslims in the Middle East, including Christians and Jews.

This is not merely a political tactic. It is a matter of framing the conversation within something that resembles an historical context. The historical context is vital because without it the conflict is incomprehensible outside of the prominent western notion of mindless Jewish malice toward Arabs, presumably as unjust payback for the Shoah.

Demographic Reality: the Scope of the Conflict

Westerners think that this is a fight between big, strong, mean Israel against the innocent, thumb-sucking "indigenous Palestinians" over land.

It isn't.

What the struggle actually is is an ongoing attempt by the Arab peoples to force Jews back into dhimmitude out of a Koranic religious imperative. 

This is a struggle not between Jews and "Palestinians" but between Jews and Arabs because of Arab-Muslim religious reasons. It is due to al-Sharia. If Israel were a 23rd Arab-Muslim country it would, indeed, be hailed the world over as a "light unto the nations."

The reason that the Arab peoples generally despise Israel has nothing to do with Jewish treatment of Arabs and Muslims within Israel. Arabs and Muslims within Israel are treated better than are Arabs and Muslims throughout the entire Middle East. The reason that Arabs and Muslims despise Israel is not due to Israeli behavior. They hate Israel because it is Jewish, a nation of infidels, who dare to hold land that was once part of the Umma.

And not just any infidels, but the very worst of the infidels, we children of orangutans and swine.

But the fact of the matter is that there are somewhere around 300 to 400 million Arabs within the Middle East. They outnumber the Jews by a factor of 60 to 70 to 1 and, for the most part, want those Jews either dead or gone.

This is not a war between a Jewish Goliath and a Palestinian David, as left-wing anti-Semitic anti-Zionists would have you believe.

This is a war against the Jews of the Middle East by the much larger and highly aggressive Arab and Muslim population in that part of the world. As far as Hamas and Hezbollah are concerned this is explicitly an Arab war of Jewish extermination.

But the demographics in the region are not with the Jews, not by a long-shot.

The Jews of the Middle East have been forced to create Fortress Israel, because the Arabs would not have it any other way. It is easy for the Arabs. Given the fact that they so outnumber the Jews it only takes a small percentage of their resources to put terrible pressure on the small Jewish population in the Middle East so that those Jews are forced to militarize.

And, needless to say, the local Arabs, the Palestinian-Arabs, are nothing but cannon fodder as far as their brothers and sisters throughout the rest of the region are concerned.

The Jews of Israel want peace more than anyone, because they are under constant threat and harassment in every single venue imaginable, from international sports to academia to the UN, the EU, and a continuing wave of little Arab kids with hand-axes.

Those of us who wish to stand up for the Jews of the Middle East, the Jews of Israel, need to frame the conversation in a manner that comports with history and the actual demographics of the fight.

We need to place our end of the conversation within an expanded context that includes centuries of Jewish history under Arab and Muslim imperial rule and that appreciates the actual geographic scope of the war against the Jews in the Middle East.

"Occupy" is an Unusual Word

Michael L.

It is not a very nice word, either.

In terms of the never-ending Arab and Muslim violence against the Jews of the Middle East the word "occupy" has ominous connotations.

It implies the brutal military occupation of those heinous Jews upon another people's land.

The word "occupy" also, of course, has benign connotations when used in other contexts. For example, no one would have any problem, - other than Jihadis - with the fact that I am occupying my chair in my office.

The truth, however, is that Israel occupies Israel like France occupies France or the Czech Republic occupies the Czech Republic. There is nothing remotely illegal or illegitimate, to use Obama's term, about Jews living and building in the land Jewish people have lived in for over 3,500 years.

The Land of Israel is where Jews come from and to argue otherwise is to suggest that the Jews are, or should be, a forever wandering people.

The very word "Israel" means, along with the Jewish State, the Jewish people. Israel is the Jewish nation. So to argue that Israel is illegally occupying Israel is to argue that the Jews should have no home. And Israel includes that part of Israel that the Jordanians dubbed "West Bank" in order to rob the Jewish people of our posterity within our own homeland.

This is to say that the foundation of the conflict is an irrational and Koranically-based hatred toward the Jewish people, without whom Islam would never have emerged to begin with. Without Israel, which is to say without the Jewish people, there never would have been a Koran or the emergence of imperial Islam.

Muslims who care about Islam owe everything to the Jewish people because were it not for the Jewish people Islam could never have developed.

Understand, of course, that I take no particular pride in the Jewish roots of the Islamic faith, but it is historically undeniable. Islam, as George W. Bush famously misstated, is not a "religion of peace." On the contrary, Islam is a religion of war and submission that divides the world into Dar al-Islam, the Home of Islam, and Dar al-Harb, which is the Realm of War or House of the Heathens.

Christianity, despite the historical behavior of Christians, actually is a religion of peace because its founding figure, Jesus the Jew, was a philosopher of peace.

Judaism is a religion of law, which is to say, a religion of justice.

There are mystical and spiritual aspects to the faith, such as QBL (Qabalah) or Tikkun Olam, a notion which derives from the former and that means to "repair the world," but at its core Judaism is grounded in Torah, just as Islam is grounded in al-Sharia.

The difference is that the Torah does not require its imposition on other people while al-Sharia insists upon its imposition upon all non-Muslims.

And that is the very definition of Jihad.

Nothing Left # 108

Michael L.

Here is this week's episode of NOTHING LEFT (19 Jul 2016)

2 min Editorial: on yet another Islamist terror attack

8 min Henry Greener, The Shtick

27 min Yarden Frankl (Honest Reporting)

48 min Mike Lumish, Israel Thrives blog, USA

55 min Brian of London, blogger, IsraellyCool

1 hr 32 min Isi Leibler, Jerusalem

My piece discusses the tendency of left-leaning pro-Israel advocates to constantly play defense with their aggressive anti-Zionist interlocutors.

Audio Test # 2

OK, this time we're trying an MP4 file.

Anyone on a Mac, please let me know if this works on your system.

A Terror Attack Confirmed

Michael L.

In a recent piece entitled, "Nice Terrorism?" I found it interesting that in Nice we immediately jumped to the conclusion of terrorism yet in Fort Hood and Orlando we did not. 

I wrote:

In virtually every terrorist attack that we have in the United States, or the West, more generally, there has been a great reluctance to use the term "terrorism" much less "radical Islamic terrorism."

Fort Hood, an obvious terror attack, was dubbed "work place violence" by Ostrich-in-Chief, Barack Obama. ...

And, yet, in the hours directly after the horrific Nice attack, yesterday, everybody was using the term "terrorism" to describe this attack. The great irony is that this may be the one that actually is NOT a terror attack.

It might very well be, but we do not know that yet.

Well, now we know.

Just as Orlando was a Jihadi attack, so was Nice.

The Times of Israel, via Agence France Presse, tells us:

Nice, France — The truck driver who killed 85 people in the French city of Nice showed a “clear, recent interest” in radical Islam, the Paris prosecutor said Monday, confirming the attack was “premeditated.”

The investigation showed Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had trawled the internet for information on a terror attack in the US city of Orlando and on the killing of a police couple in a Paris suburb last month, Francois Molins said.

A search of his computer also found violent images “linked to radical Islam,” he told a press conference in Paris.

Except for the most ideologically blinkered, this should resolve the question of whether or not this was a Jihadi attack.

It was.

There was, however, very little evidence up until this moment that Bouhlel was religious or political, but, as it happens, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls was apparently correct when he said that Bouhlel was only recently radicalized.

One question that we are all asking ourselves, naturally, is where all this chaos and nonsense throughout the West is leading us?

Jews, Cops, and Black Lives Matter

Michael L.

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

Writing in the Algemeiner, Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) president Morton Klein tells us:

#BlackLivesMatter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, and over 1,000 black “social justice” activists, including other leading #BlackLivesMatter activists and allies, signed a vicious antisemitic, anti-Israel manifesto called the “2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine,” falsely accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” “brutality,” “massacres,” “apartheid,” “theft,” and “one-sided slaughter.” The “Black Solidarity with Palestine statement” also “wholeheartedly endorsed” BDS. The statement also touted international trips by “representatives of Black Lives Matter, Ferguson and other racial justice groups to Palestine” to strengthen their “joint struggle.”

JEWS 

It is clear that the Black Lives Matter movement, whatever else it may be, is definitely no friend to the Jewish State of Israel and, therefore, no friend to the Jewish people, in general.

No other ethnic group in the United States, outside of black people, themselves, supported the Civil Rights Movement more than Jewish people.

Yet the Black Lives Matter movement supports BDS which means seeking to undermine Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people. What this means, of course, is subjecting the tiny Jewish minority in the Middle East to the tender mercies of their not-so welcoming neighbors who just happen to outnumber them in that part of the world by a factor of 60 or 70 to 1.

The bottom line, however, is that any group that supports BDS - or defames Israel by flinging around hate-filled propaganda like it is confetti - should not get the support of any self-respecting Jew.

"Ethnic Cleansing"!

“Brutality”!

“Massacres”!

“Apartheid”! 

“Theft”!

“One-sided slaughter."!

There is something absolutely Medieval about all this.

This constant harping on the alleged misdeeds of the Jews has a very long and ignoble lineage. They might as well accuse us of killing Jesus or rolling non-Jewish babies around in barrels filled with spikes for the purpose of gathering the delicious goyisha blood to be employed in the ancient art of matzoh-making.

Every generation they tell one another just why it is that the Jews deserve a good beating. I mean, what kind of human beings would support one-sided slaughter? What does it say about the Jews of Israel that they practice land theft and apartheid? What does it say about them that they seemingly delight in the massacre of innocent children?

And what does it say about diaspora Jewry that they support such evil crimes against the innocent indigenous population?

Thus, what BlackLivesMatter is screeching to the world is that the very people who stood with African-Americans in solidarity, as they were breaking the shackles of Jim Crow. are, if not as oppressive as Nazis, at least as oppressive as Afrikaners during the period of South African apartheid.

{Thanks, guys. Much appreciated.}

Another question to ask, obviously, is where does all this leave American Jewish liberals?

BlackLivesMatter has the support of the president of the United States and, therefore, pretty much by definition, has the support of the Democratic Party.

This means that American Jews have the choice of either supporting a domestic political party that provides venues and financial assistance to anti-Semitic anti-Zionists or not supporting a domestic political party that provides venues and financial assistance to anti-Semitic anti-Zionists.

I, you will be shocked to learn, am going with the latter.

COPS

Morton Klein writes:

The #BlackLivesMatter movement’s incitement of anti-police violence helped create the environment that led to the Dallas massacre of police officers, according to experts including former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir; US CENTCOM official Colonel Derek Harvey, and National Association of Police Organizations Executive Director William Johnson. Johnson stated:

“It’s a war on cops. . . . I think their [the Obama administration’s] continued appeasement at the federal level with the Department of Justice, their appeasement of violent criminals, their refusal to condemn movements like Black Lives Matter actively calling for the death of police officers, that type of thing, all the while blaming police for the problems of this country has directly led to the climate that has made Dallas possible.”

I agree.

In just the same way that unjust anti-Semitic anti-Zionist rhetoric tends to result in the murder of Jews, so anti-cop rhetoric from Left organizations like BlackLivesMatter tends to result in dead cops.

This notion that white officers are running around the streets of America shooting up young black guys strictly for the hell of it is pernicious, wrong, entirely unjust, and results in violence against those who risk their necks on a daily basis to protect the American citizenry... including black people.

Black Lives Matter

According to a recent study by The National Bureau of Economic Research in a piece entitled, "An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force", by Roland G. Fryer, Jr, the assumptions of BlackLivesMatter and their progressive-left allies are false.

The study did show some differentiation on how police around the country tended to deal with black people versus how they dealt with white people. So, for example, black people were 16 percent more likely to be placed in hand-cuffs upon arrest and 18 percent more likely to be pushed into a wall in the event of resistance.

However we also read this in the New York Times piece examining the story:

But when it comes to the most lethal form of force — police shootings — the study finds no racial bias. (My emphasis.)

“It is the most surprising result of my career,” said Roland G. Fryer Jr., the author of the study and a professor of economics at Harvard. The study examined more than 1,000 shootings in 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California.

All this national chaos and mayhem and marching and rioting and, now, in Dallas, the murder of five innocent cops and for what?

What we are seeing in terms of this vile anti-Semitic anti-Cop movement is not grounded in anything that resembles reality.

What it really is is a chimera; it is the last gasp of 60s radicalism seeking to remain relevant... and innocent people, like those officers in Dallas, will die to feed this hungry ghost from the past.

NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Sends First In-orbit View of Jupiter

Nice Terrorism?

Michael L.

The mainstream media and the politicians never cease to amaze me.

In virtually every terrorist attack that we have in the United States, or the West, more generally, there has been a great reluctance to use the term "terrorism" much less "radical Islamic terrorism."

Fort Hood, an obvious terror attack, was dubbed "work place violence" by Ostrich-in-Chief, Barack Obama.

When Omar Mateen shot up the Gay nightclub in Orlando he admitted to a 911 officer over the phone that he was a follower of ISIS big shot, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, which means, pretty much by definition, that Orlando was a Jihadi attack. Nonetheless, people blamed a sort-of generalized American homophobic bigotry or some nefarious "gun culture" promoted by the NRA or, you know... Republicans.

And, yet, in the hours directly after the horrific Nice attack, yesterday, everybody was using the term "terrorism" to describe this attack. The great irony is that this may be the one that actually is NOT a terror attack.

It might very well be, but we do not know that yet.

For Nice to be considered terrorism there must be an ideological basis, religious or otherwise, for Mohamed Lagouaiej Bouhlel's aggression. It is not enough that 84 people were needless run down by this crazed maniac behind the wheel of a big white truck. For this to be considered terrorism it must be shown that Bouhlel did it for ideological and/or religious and/or political reasons and, so far, we do not have that information.

It may be forthcoming as I write, but all we know at this point is that the killer was French-Tunisian with a criminal record. He was very likely of Muslim descent, but that does not meet the standard for determining terrorism.

It might also be that he was simply stone cold crazy and this might have nothing whatsoever to do with the Jihad... but I still would not bet on it.

Below is a brief audio file of me discussing the horror above.

A Significant Point of Difference between the Elder of Ziyon and Abu Yehuda

Michael L.

There is a distinct point of disagreement between the Elder of Ziyon and Vic Rosenthal of Abu Yehuda that seems worthy of discussion.

I follow both of these writers for the obvious reason that both write for the EoZ, as do I.

Rosenthal has a piece from Monday, July 4, entitled, "How to talk to Jews about Israel."

In reference to the overall pro-Israel discussion, Rosenthal writes:

Quite a few years ago, I went to a meeting in San Francisco about Israel advocacy, sponsored by the ADL (when the ADL was still interested in Israel advocacy). One of the speakers suggested a form of triage: there are those that are strongly against us, those that are strongly with us and those that haven’t decided. Talk to the ones that are undecided, he said. {My emphases - ML.}

Four points.

There are:

1) Those that are strongly against us.

2) Those that are strongly with us.

3) Those who haven't decided.

Conclusion:

4) Talk to the ones who haven't decided.

This is precisely what the Elder and Michael Burd of J-AIR's Nothing Left radio broadcast concluded if you click through onto about the 22 minute mark.

However, in his recent piece Rosenthal believes that he was mistaken to try to convince the "undecideds."

He writes:

My personal approaches were, if anything, more frustrating. People were polite, but noncommittal. As time went on, I realized that they weren’t uninterested; rather, they sensed that my position wasn’t shared by many Democratic politicians, NPR and the New York Times. They suspected that I was influenced by Republican ideas or even becoming a Republican myself. I realized, in 1960s slang, that they were shining me on. 

Anything I said was tainted and could be ignored.

"Shining me on"?

That's a phrase that was not used when I was coming up, but the point is well-taken.

Rosenthal directly contradicts the Elder and Michael Burd because believes that few such creatures known as the "undecided" exist via the conflict.

It soon became clear that there weren’t very many ‘undecideds’. There were those that were pro-Israel, those that were against us, and those that would not listen because being pro-Israel was out of their political comfort zone.

Therefore, Rosenthal concludes that pro-Israel / pro-Jewish advocates should de-emphasize - at least somewhat - the Jewish tendency to reason with unreasonable people.

He writes:

The best thing that pro-Israel American Jews can do is to exemplify Jewish pride, self-respect and self-reliance (like the Jewish state itself). Trying to be ‘Americans of the Mosaic persuasion’ is not a good strategy, as Jewish students are discovering. They should act like Jews, representatives of the people whose roots are in ancient Judea.

So, the question is, do we as pro-Israel / pro-Jewish advocates seek to convince the "undecideds" or do we stiffen our spines and exemplify Jewish pride?

Or is that a false dichotomy?

Thesis > Anti-Thesis > Synthesis.

I say we do both.

Nothing Left # 107 (Updated to include audio and transcript)

Michael L.

Michael Burd and Alan Freedman have these exceedingly interesting individuals up for conversation today.

Jeremy Jones (AIJAC), Uri Silberman, Annika Hernroth-Rothstein, Gary Mallin, Mike Lumish, and Isi Leibler.

You should definitely give it a listen.

The guys have been generous enough to give me five minutes per week to have my say in the world and we'll see what we want to do with it.

This week, as part of my series concerning the failures of progressive-left Zionism, I focus on the tendency among hard-left Jewish Zionists, like those of the J-Street variety, to blame Jews who building housing for themselves and their children beyond the "green line" for Arab-Muslim refusal to make peace.

I think that we need more in the way of Jewish community radio, which is precisely what these guys are up to in Melbourne.

Update:

Here is my bit with the raw, unedited transcript below:



Heya guys, this is Michael Lumish of Israel Thrives, that Israel dash thrives dot blogspot dot com as well as Shirlee Finn's place over at Jews Down Under and a regular contributor to the Elder of Ziyon blog.

And you spoke with the Elder just last week and I was very interested to listen in on that conversation. The Elder definitely has his pulse on the cutting edge of Jewish political concerns and concerns around the security of the State of Israel.

I don't know exactly from where the Elder does his work, but I am speaking with you from Oakland California and I want to thank you guys for the opportunity to continue this series and want to discuss some fundamental criticisms that I have with the western Jewish left.

Last week I spoke about my first criticism of the western Jewish left, and really the western-left more generally, and that is an ideological inability to acknowledge the rise of the Jihad as a political movement not only throughout the Middle East, but throughout the world.

Orlando was a Jihadi attack and anyone who imagines otherwise is burying his or her head directly in the sand... like an Ostrich.

If Donald Trump manages to wander into the White House it will, at least in part, be because he is willing to acknowledge the enemy and SEEMS willing, at least, to take the fight to the bastards.

However, my second criticism of the Jewish Left, and the one that I want to focus upon today, is in the Jewish Left tendency to whip up hatred toward other Jews.

This is precisely what the comfy-cozy Jewish progressive-Left does in places like San Francisco or the Upper West Side of Manhattan or ensconced within any number of universities throughout Europe and the United States when they bitch and moan and whine and complain about Jews daring to live in Samaria or, excuse me, Judea?

The very land where Jewish people come from?

So I am to understand that both Mahmoud Abbas and US president Barack Obama think that it is something akin to a war crime if Jews build housing for themselves on the very land of our ancestors?

I mean, if the Jewish Left honestly believes that Israel - between the river and the sea - is conducting an Occupation - with a capital O - as if it is the Great Mother of all Other Occupations - an occupation of the peace-loving, olive-growing, indigenous Arab population then the conversation is over.

There is no conversation to be had because what much of the Jewish Left, essentially, is telling the world is that the Jews of the Middle East are a bunch of land thieves and their supporters throughout the diaspora are corrupt and heartless beneficiaries of an unjust occupation and of the persecution of the indigenous owners of quote unquote historic Palestine.

What this means, of course, is that as the diaspora Jewish left tends to hold our friends beyond the green - such as, for example, Yosef Hartuv who operates the Love of the Land blog out of Hebron - in contempt they are simultaneously providing both the Arabs and the rest of the world with a justification for Arab-Muslim bloodlust toward the Jewish people.

This is a deadly mistake.

Y'know, the Elder was in Israel last week and for all I know he is still there but he has a piece from Wed July 6 entitled The American Jewish community has already embraced BDS against "settlements"

In that article he discusses Ariel University which he describes as a beautiful campus with about 15,000 students, including many hundreds of Arab students who regularly dialogue with Jewish students through various student organizatons.

It has the only free electron laser particle accelerator in the entire Middle East.

How do you like that??

I don't know what it means, but it certainly sounds all scientific.

free electron laser particle accelerator, huh?

I had no idea that there were such things as unfree electrons.

In any case, the point of the Elder's article was to point out that pro-Israel Jewish groups from the US refuse to visit Ariel University.

Why?

Because it is beyond the green line.

Ariel University, even for AIPAC even for Birthright, represents those bad Jews over there.

J Street, which is essentially an enemy of the Jewish state, dropped in for the purpose of getting a gander at their ideological foes.

Christian groups from the US visit when they are in Israel because, unlike J Street, they actually are friends of Israel but the supposedly pro-Israel / pro-Jewish left seemingly cannot bring itself to.

If even we do not think that we have any real right to our ancestral homeland, why would anyone expect anything else from the Brits or the Democrats?

Pew Poll Results: Liberal Democrats Prefer Palestinian-Arabs to Jews

Michael L.

{Also published at Jews Down Under.}

When, exactly, did the Long Arab War Against the Jews of the Middle East begin?

From a modern historical perspective these are the phases of the Arab-Muslim aggression against the Jewish people as is clear from the secondary sources.

Phases of the Long Arab War Against the Jews in the Middle East: 

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

Some would argue that it started with Muhammad in the seventh-century around the time that the head-chopping tradition really got fashionable on the Arabian peninsula.

Others would suggest that it was a modern racist response to the Jewish people daring to return to, and build upon, Jewish land despite the fact that it had already been conquered by the invading Muslims. In this view, the 1920s, with its Arab riots and politically grounded pogroms in places like Hebron and Jerusalem, would represent an initiation point of the contemporary conflict.

The significance of non-Jews and non-Israelis to the never-ending war is obviously important. It should not be determinative; that is, what non-Jews think about Jews in the Middle East should not determine Israeli policy, but it has a significant effect and this is particularly true of the United States.

In my opinion, as an American, the US has too much influence with Israel and I am happy to see Israel - particularly during the Age of Obama - expanding its relationships across the globe from Africa to China to Latin America so that hostile American presidents, like Barack Obama, have a diminished influence on the lives of Middle Eastern Jews.

This is particularly true given the fact that the next president of the United States, like the current one, is probably going to be a liberal Democrat and recent polling shows that, for the first time, liberal Democrats prefer the Palestinian-Arab aggressors against the Jews of the Middle East.

According to a Pew Research study, published on May 4 of this year, 40 percent of liberal Democrats favor the Arabs in their war against the Jews, while only 33 percent favor the Jews.



These statistics are fairly remarkable given that for a century the Democratic Party has had no more loyal constituency than American Jewry.

Depending upon the level of American Jewish masochism and instilled self-doubt, this may begin to change. It certainly did with me. I come out of the tradition of the Democratic Party as molded by Franklin Roosevelt and bequeathed to me, and my post-Vietnam Era friends, via the New Left and the hodge-podge of its interests.

These included, of course, the anti-war movement, feminism, environmentalism, Gay rights, ethnic rights, and so forth.

When I was coming up as a kid I was a liberal Democrat and most of my friends tended to be liberal Democrats. For most of us this was probably less out of a conscious decision then merely representing the political environment that we grew up in. Most American young people, in the 1970s and 1980s from my part of the country, New York and New England, tended toward the Left.

However, I did what little I could do in recent years to warn the Democratic Party that if they continue to hate on Israel and provide venues of support for anti-Semitic anti-Zionists they would erode the support of American Jews.

It does not require genius to untangle the obvious.

Settlement Construction and the Criminalization of Jewish Life

Michael L.

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

Writing in Commentary magazine, Evelyn Gordon tells us:

On Monday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon predictably assailed Israel’s announced decision to build 800 new apartments in Ma’aleh Adumim and eastern Jerusalem. He noted that just four days earlier, the Middle East Quartet (i.e. the U.S., EU, UN and Russia) had issued a report deeming settlement construction an obstacle to peace. What Ban didn’t mention is that just a few days before that report came out, a leading Israeli leftist expert on the settlements published a comprehensive rebuttal of this claim, providing facts and figures showing that the settlements effectively aren’t growing at all.

The sheer unbridled racism and arrogance of the international Left, of the EU, the UN, and the Obama administration never ceases to amaze.

They honestly want us to believe that Jews living upon, and thus building upon, land that we come from, and that was purchased, makes us thieves.

They honestly want us to believe that the land of our ancestors actually belongs to the Arab invaders of the seventh-century CE despite the fact that Israel was the land of the Jewish people millennia before Muhammad's armies showed up with their religious-imperialist ideology of head-chopping.

The hypocrisy is profound.

The Criminalization of Jewish Existence

Ban Ki-moon wants us to think that the decision to build 800 new apartments in Ma’aleh Adumim and the eastern section of Jerusalem somehow represents an obstacle to peace? How is this possible? If an Arab builds a home in the suburbs of Paris is that a war crime? Is that an obstacle to peace?

Should that Arab not be allowed to build on land that he has purchased because it is not "Arab land"?

Anyone who ever suggested any such thing would be knocked in the head as a stone-cold racist, but not if you suggest it about a Jew living in Judea!

If a Jew building a second bathroom for his family in the eastern part of Jerusalem, or anywhere in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, is an obstacle to peace it is only because the Arabs and the EU and the UN and the Obama administration have made it an obstacle to peace. There is nothing unpeaceful about building on property that one has purchased and that is precisely what we are talking about.

They are criminalizing the mere Jewish presence on Jewish land because Jews cannot live on that land if they cannot build on that land. Does the Obama administration really want to tell the Jews of Judea that if they build an elementary school for their children that they are unethically imposing upon the rights of Arabs?

A Touch of History

The Arabs stormed out of their peninsula in the seventh-century, gobbled up the Middle East, almost took-over Europe, but were stopped at the "gates of Vienna" and thereby had to satisfy themselves merely with conquering the Iberian Peninsula.

Since that time they have conducted an ongoing genocide of both the Christians and the Jews in the Middle East and, yet, somehow, feel themselves morally aggrieved.

It is an astonishing long-term propaganda success story.

Arab-Muslim imperial aggression is historically the foremost example of imperial aggression in the world. It even, remarkably, overshadows imperial Roman expansion. Medieval Christian Europe responded to this Arab-Muslim aggression against their fellow Christians with what we call "the Crusades." In the West the Crusades are interpreted as a form of European malice that is often docketed with other atrocities, including the Holocaust.

The reason for this is because, since the Enlightenment, Europe and the West have undergone a remarkable transformation that has brought us from a primarily theological worldview to a primarily secular and scientific worldview. The secular and the scientific suggested a questioning stance toward the world. This questioning stance met with Jewish introspection and moral sensibilities to give us the West as we know it today.

{G-d help us.}

As we know, the Arab-Muslim world has not gone through such a reformation since the early days of the empire... when Islam stood atop the world. There was a time when Islamic societies led in science and discovery, but those days are long over and the reason for that is because Islam means "submission" - not "peace" as Obama would tell you - and submission by its nature must stifle free inquiry.

Ask Galileo.

Settlement Construction and the Racist Left

And this brings us back around to those uppity Jews, like my friend Yosef Hartuv of Love of the Land fame, and all the other hippie Jews like, say, Yishai Fleisher, who insist that we have every right to live in the land of our posterity. 

When racists like Barack Obama suggest that the Jewish people have no right to build on historically Jewish land they are resurrecting old, long established, medieval tropes that portray Jews as endless wanderers... as the Wandering Jew.

Somewhere in the introductory pages of A Tale of Love and Darkness Amos Oz reminds us that early twentieth-century European Jews were told, and I paraphrase, "Get out of Europe! Go back to Palestine where you belong!"

Now we are told by leftist legends like former White House correspondent Helen Thomas to "get the hell out of Palestine."

The Jewish people are a long abused minority and we represent a whopping .02 percent of the world population.

Much of the Left often suggests that world peace is dependent upon making the Jews of the Middle East leap through imaginary hoops.

But the Day of the Dhimmi is Done.

My suspicion is that a growing number of Jewish people are getting tired of being pushed against the wall - for our own alleged well-being - by false friends like Barack Obama.

The real lesson of the Holocaust is that we must stand up for ourselves.

How Beautiful is That?

This is a beautiful shot of Jupiter.

NASA's Juno spacecraft has only within this week started orbiting the great gas planet with the Big Red Eye:

After a nearly five-year journey, the unmanned, solar-powered Juno spacecraft should be going into orbit around Jupiter at around 11:15pm ET on Monday, July 4th, carrying an array of instruments that will do everything from analyzing fluctuations in Jupiter’s gravity to visualizing its magnetic field. It’ll snap some pretty pictures too, of course.

See?

NASA is not out of the game.

A big Tip 'O the Kippa to our friend Jeff.

Brief Note: Stillwell and San Francisco State

Michael L.

My neighbor across the Bay in San Francisco, and fellow San Francisco State University alumnus, Cinnamon Stillwell, has a recent piece in the Independent Journal Review entitled, "Why Is a San Francisco University Secretly Partnering with an Arab College that Promotes Jihad?"

Yes, well, I have been wondering about that myself.

This is just a brief note, although I am considering writing more on this topic for my usual Sunday contribution over at the Elder's place and elsewhere.

Stillwell notes:

SFSU signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with An-Najah University of Hebron in 2014 at the behest of Rabab Abdulhadi, director of SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED) and founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

An-Najah "University" is not exactly a friendly place for Jewish people and I wrote about this story in April of last year in a piece entitled, "San Francisco State Partners with Violently Anti-Jewish Arab University."

Given the fact that SFSU President Wong has praised the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS) as representing the finest values of the university and since those same students call for "intifada" - which is nothing less than a call for the murder of Jewish people - and recently chased the mayor of Jerusalem off of their campus, it may be time to revisit this story.

Nothing Left # 105

Michael L.

{Also published at the Elder of Ziyon.}

The show is now available and can be found here.

July 4th weekend.

We've got a bunch of people coming over today for a party and I've been wracking my brains concerning my usual Sunday EOZ piece.

I thought maybe that I would mine Israel Thrives for some older material and then acknowledged the obvious.

The Elder is featured on this Tuesday's Nothing Left radio show with Michael Burd and Alan Freedman.

I am friendly with those guys and I am a friendly with this guy and so it makes obvious sense to plug the Elder's interview.

Naturally it tends to help that I am also on the broadcast.

What I really want, however, is to talk to you guys about fairly obvious criticisms of diaspora Left Jewry.

Besides they bring in Isi Liebler on a weekly basis and one thing is certain, that guy is a tough old Jew.

Smart fellah, too, I get the sense.

In any case, my brief pieces over the coming weeks are not partisan.

It is not about Right versus Left or Republican versus Democrat.

This about what I call, on Israel Thrives, the "Failures of Progressive-Left Zionism." And you can find links to those brief pieces if you scroll-down toward the right-hand of the page.

These are:

1) Refusing to Discuss Islamist Threat

My first piece in this series, which you can hear on Tuesday, is concerned with precisely that.

The progressive-left, and the Democratic Party under Barack Obama, can barely breathe the words "Islamic terrorism." I honestly do not know if they are trying to fool us or are sincerely fooling themselves. I suspect the former, though.


2) Whipping Up Hatred Toward Other Jews

The progressive-left imagination tends to harbor "Good Jews" and "Bad Jews."

The "Good Jews" are those who tend to dislike the "Bad Jews" and the "Bad Jews" are any who live where neither Barack Obama nor his friend, Mahmoud Abbas, want them to live in Judea and Samaria. The "Bad Jews" also include people such as myself - and perhaps yourself - who insist that Jewish people have at least as much right to live anywhere within the Land of Israel as Rastafarians have to live in the Czech Republic.

Obama does not get to tell Jewish people that they may not live in Hebron or anyplace else in the land of Jewish patrimony.

So sorry.


3) Forever Playing Defense

Diaspora Jews are not a very aggressive bunch.

British Jews, in particular, like to keep their heads down and hope for the best... because, y'know, that strategy has worked out so well in the past.


4) The Moral Equivalency Canard

Everything tends to be a little-bit-of-this and a little-bit-of-that in Jewish Left thinking.

Sure, Palestinian terrorism is bad, but what about Kahane?

What about the Occupation?  (With the Big O?)

I will dig into it when I get around to recording this one.


5) Ignoring Jewish History

Would anyone ever consider discussing the circumstances of Black people in the United States without at least some reference to the history of slavery and Jim Crow?

The truth, of course, is that any discussion of the circumstances of Black people in the United States would be entirely incomprehensible without placing those circumstances within historical context.

One must at least give reference to both slavery and Jim Crow.

And, yet, somehow, thirteen long centuries of dhimmi status living under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperialism seems to count for nothing in discussions of the conflict among left-leaning diaspora Jewry.

In fact, I am not certain that even they are aware of it!


6) Frenemies

Many progressive-left Jews have the same inclination as Barack Obama.

They spit on their friends while courting their enemies.

I don't think that I have seen so much contempt for any group of people on the planet than the contempt that Jewish progressives show for Evangelical Christians. Holy Christ! You would think that those people chopped the heads off of Muslims in the streets of Wichita, Kansas, or hanged Gay people from cranes in Columbus, Ohio, in the way that the Jewish left spits contemptuously at their Evangelical neighbors.

Those people are allies and we can disagree with them in the spirit of allies.

To do otherwise is, frankly, stupid.

In any case, this is the kind of material that I will be discussing, at the discretion of Michael and Alan, for the next few weeks on Nothing Left.

And the Elder is on schedule for an interview this Tuesday.

Check it out.

Rest in Peace: Elie Wiesel (1928 - 2016)

Comet Neat

This image of comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) was taken at the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, on May 7, 2004.

The image was captured with the Mosaic I camera, which has a one-square degree field of view, or about five times the size of the Moon. Even with this large field, only the comet's coma and the inner portion of its tail are visible. A small star cluster (C0736-105, or Melotte 72) is visible in the lower right of the image, between the head of the comet and the bright red star in the lower-right corner. (Courtesy NASA, NOAO, NSF, STScI)

Sometimes The Truth Just Stares You In The Face

Doodad

 Share with a politician or brain dead leftist as required.

(borrowed from raconteur)