This Week on Nothing Left

Michael Lumish


This week Michael Burd and Alan Freedman report back on the event held for PM Netanyahu in Sydney last week and play a vox pop with some celebrities we encountered on the way out. We then speak with retired academic Prof Bill Rubinstein on the Trump travel ban, and continue this discussion with Israeli blogger Brian of London.

We hear from expat NZ journalist Michael Kuttner in Israel, and of course, catch up with Isi Leibler in Jerusalem, plus more.

3 min Editorial: Netanyahu event

7 min Vox pop: Edwin Black, Alex Goodman, Rowan Dean, Sandy Guttman[aka Austen Tayshus]

14 min Prof Bill Rubinstein on Trump travel ban

27 min Brian of London, [Israellycool ]  Israeli blogger

51 min Michael Kuttner, [ J- Wire] expat NZ journalist

1 hr 29 min Isi Leibler, Jerusalem, speaks about Israel media reaction to Bibi visit

The podcast can also be found on the J-Air website:

Or at our Facebook page: 

NOTHING LEFT can be heard live each Tuesday 9-11am on FM 87.8 in the Caulfield area, or via the J-Air website www.j-air.com.au

Contact us at Nothing Left:

michael@nothingleft.com.au

alan@nothingleft.com.au

Linda Sarsour, Progressive-Left Ideals, and Diaspora Jewry

Michael Lumish

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

Edward Moran - Unveiling The Statue of Liberty
Enlightening the World, 1886

Two of the most significant political questions facing the West today are those of immigration policy and identity politics.

Women's March organizer, Linda Sarsour, stands at the crux of both and has successfully put pro-Israel diaspora Jewry between the horns of a political dilemma.

Sarsour just raised considerable funds for the restoration of a recently desecrated Jewish cemetery near St. Louis, Missouri. Thus, even as she despises Israel she goes out of her way to help American Jewry.

Meanwhile, as disappointed ideologues from left and right spit an endless stream of vitriol at U.S. President Donald Trump for everything from corruption to racism, the issues of immigration and identity politics garner the most rancor.

Concerns around both are vital and divisive because they cut a sharp line down the central contradictions agitating the progressive-left and the Democratic Party.

These central contradictions are those between the foundational ideological pillars of  universal human rights and the multicultural ideal, upon which the western-left stakes its moral authority.

Progressive-Left Ideals

The foundational thinking behind the ideals of universal human rights and multiculturalism is grounded in the history of western Christianity, imperialism, slavery, and war as interpreted through the lens of Enlightenment liberalism.

Concepts around universal human rights can easily be thought to bolster progressive-left immigration policies, while the multicultural ideal drives the kind of "identity politics" associated with groups like Black Lives Matter or activists like Sarsour.

The problem, however, is that these foundational ideological pillars are logically inconsistent and mutually exclusive. A person cannot simultaneously support universal human rights and the multicultural ideal if the former must defer to the latter's disinclination to make ethical judgments between cultures.

For example, a person cannot honestly claim to stand for universal human rights if that person fears speaking out for Yazidis buried alive under Islamist imperial aggression. A person cannot favor universal human rights if he or she does not really care about the desecration of Palmyra. Nor can a person honestly care about universal human rights if they aren't the least bothered by the genocide of the Christians throughout the Middle East under the boot of Arab-Muslim religious domination.

It is precisely for this reason that someone like Sarsour cannot support feminism while also embracing Sharia under the banner of multiculturalism. They are mutually exclusive concepts. Western feminism, at its most basic, is embedded within the ideal of universal human rights. The very foundation of western feminism is universal human rights. Multiculturalism as expressed in identity politics, however, insists upon holding individuals to prejudicial standards of behavior according to skin color or gendered orientation.

In this way, identity politics repudiates Martin Luther King, Jr., without his temerity to come out and honestly say so,

And this is part of the reason why the progressive-left claim to moral exemplarism, grounded in social justice, is deeply problematic and why identity politics actually promotes racism, not its diminishment.

The left only cares about social justice and human rights according to where one's "identity group" falls on the hierarchy of victimhood. In this way "identity politics" draws young people away from notions of individual freedom and equality in favor of a cultivated group victim status in competition with other ethnic or gendered minorities, including the Jewish minority.

This "cultural Marxist" way of viewing human social interactions encourages racial hatred, street violence, a manichean, black and white, Good versus Evil manner of living politics while potentially cultivating a white nationalist backlash in response.

Furthermore, it is the left-leaning, post-structural, anti-imperialist political viewpoint which frames the Arab-Muslim war against the Jews in the Middle East as actually an unjust war waged by racist, imperialist, Zionist Jews against an innocent, indigenous people "of color" who therefore have every right to fight back by any means necessary.

Diaspora Jewry

This increasingly-pressurized political dynamic puts progressive Jews - who represent the great majority of diaspora Jewry - in difficult social and political positions because increasingly they may either be pro-Israel or "progressive" but not both.

This is nothing new. The distrust and dislike between liberal pro-Israel Jewry and progressive-left, Democratic Party, anti-Zionism has been simmering for years.

The Washington Post tells us that today:

"While conservative Republicans favored Israel by a 44-point margin in 2001, the margin is now 70 points. And while liberal Democrats favored Israel by 30 points at the turn of the century, they now favor the Palestinians by 12 points."

This is the high wire that someone like, for example, Sarah Silverman must cross in an intensely public way. Silverman does not share this problem with Bernie Sanders because Sanders is not particularly pro-Israel to begin with.

Silverman honestly is pro-Israel and, if I judge her correctly, she is someone going through the process of sorting through and rearranging her political baggage.

{Shortly after the recent election Silverman interviewed Sanders and I put together a little audio something in response.}

But she is a stand-up and an actor, not a politician, so she gets the benefit of the doubt.

Nonetheless, Silverman represents stresses within the diaspora Jewish community between their allegiance to universal concepts of social justice and Tikkun Olam versus the well-being of the Jewish people as a distinct national group. Although diaspora Jews have shown a remarkable loyalty to social democratic ideals, the people who most strongly vouch for those ideals - i.e., the international Left and the Democratic Party - do not reciprocate the friendship as we see from the Pew Research Poll (above) published in the Washington Post from last month.

The reason for this is because western progressives increasingly see Palestinian-Arabs as innocent, indigenous "Davids" bravely facing-off against the malicious, invading Zionist "Goliath." They also - in a manner both racist and condescending - view the great Muslim people as without agency and, thus, without responsibility for the foreseeable outcome of their own behavior.

Like nineteenth-century western imperialists, progressive-left identitarians treat non-whites as small children in need of fatherly protection.

And it is for this reason that so many western liberal Jews favor either loose immigration policies or open borders. To do otherwise is conceived as a betrayal of essential Jewish values of kindness, fairness, justice, and compassion. It is also seen as a betrayal of the coastal, anti-Trump resistance which can easily cost people friendships and jobs.

In other words, unless western Jews favor the unvetted importation of millions of people from among a population that generally despises us... it makes us racist.

If we object to bringing these millions into our home countries without responsible vetting procedures - despite the fact that for thirteen hundred years we lived under Arab-Muslim imperial rule as second and third-class non-citizens - this makes us terrible people and Islamophobes. Even though much of the Arab religious leadership continues to screech for the genocide of the Jewish people to this very day, diaspora Jews are irredeemable, backwards xenophobes for merely desiring the exclusion of jihadis into our home countries.

{Why should western Jews care, after all, if their own kids get harassed by anti-Semitic anti-Zionists during their college years after forking over perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition?}

Nonetheless, I probably speak for something close to a majority of diaspora Jews when I say that we welcome immigrants from anywhere in the world into our home countries.

The only thing that we ask is that they pass through regular legal channels and not include jihadis among their number.

Given the history of the Jewish people under millennia of Christian and Muslim domination, this seems like a rather small and commonsensical request.

Hmmmm...???

Linda Sarsour is a Beautiful Person

Michael Lumish

I find Linda Sarsour fascinating.

I earnestly want her to go away, but at the same time I respect the woman's abilities.

Whatever her finest intentions she is the first progressive-left American activist to introduce Sharia to the general American public in an apple pie kind of way and at the same time she is standing up for the Jewish community in St. Louis, Missouri.

A Palestinian-American activist who has voiced support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to help repair a St. Louis-area Jewish cemetery where at least 170 gravestones were toppled over the weekend.

I am impressed by her tenacity, political timing, understanding of her audience, and the brass-balls audacity it takes to sell Sharia as a complement to western feminism, while endeavoring to court semi-Zionist American Jews.

No wonder that she comes out of Brooklyn, my old man's town.

Speaking strictly for myself, I have no reason to doubt her absolute sincerity. The reason for this is because I am well-aware of the ability of intelligent and decent people to promote the worst ideas while doing so for the very best reasons.

In her latest Facebook post we read this:



This is instructive material.

It is a good example of how Sarsour plays to the counter-cultural wing of the progressive left with an emphasis on blurry spirituality and generalized niceness... in contrast to the anarcho-syndicalist wing that we saw beating up innocent people just off Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley.

She writes:

Feeling blessed. Feeling grateful for so many people, places and things. God is truly the greatest.

Sounds like a beautiful statement to me and I would very much like for myself and for the Jewish people to be included in it.

Sadly, it is impossible to see it that way.

When she says that "God is truly the greatest" it is a less-than-clever way of slipping "Alahu Akbar" into the American vernacular.

"Alahu Akbar" means "God is Great" or "God is the Greatest" or "Our God is Better than Your God" depending upon just who you speak with.

What it means to semi-conscious non-Muslims, however, particularly those of the Jewish persuasion, is that we are going to kill you dead, you insidious children of swine and orangutans. Every murderous jihadi that has existed since Muhammad screeched those same exact words before blowing perfectly innocent people to smithereens.

If this sounds paranoid to the ears of comfortable and isolated Americans, it is because they have no recognition of 1,300 years of second and third-class non-citizenship under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperial rule.

The obvious way to approach Sarsour, however - or anyone else who hopes to introduce Islamic Supremacism into progressive-left ideology - is to simply request that they justify the contradiction.

Sarsour, as a proponent of Sharia, should explain how Islamic jurisprudence is compatible with western feminism.

She also needs to describe how Jewish self-determination and self-defense in the Jewish national homeland is somehow incompatible with the ideals of the Democratic Party.

Nonetheless, her fundraising efforts for the vandalized Jewish cemetery near St. Louis should be applauded.

I like this woman because she seems to have tenacity and conviction.

She deserves an honest shot in justifying the obvious contradictions in her political stances.

This Week on Nothing Left

Michael Lumish


This week Michael Burd and Alan Freedman are delighted to have a very special studio guest in Edwin Black who is leading a campaign to have the United Nations replaced by a new organisation called the Covenant of Democratic Nations.

We also hear from Smadar Pery, an Israeli advocate living in Berlin who has some troubling observations about Jewish life in Germany, and Isi Leibler joins us as usual from Jerusalem.


1 min            Edwin Black, on Covenant of Democratic Nations

51 min          Smadar Pery, Berlin (Part 1)

1 hr 4 min Smadar Pery, Berlin (Part 2)

1 hr 22 min Editorial: Trump / Netanyahu meeting

1 hr 27 min Isi Leibler, Jerusalem

The podcast can also be found on the J-Air website:

Or at our Facebook page: 

NOTHING LEFT can be heard live each Tuesday 9-11am on FM 87.8 in the Caulfield area, or via the J-Air website www.j-air.com.au

Contact us at Nothing Left:

michael@nothingleft.com.au

alan@nothingleft.com.au

Another Note to a Friend on Facebook

Michael Lumish

I tend to be more sympathetic to the progressive-left's economic message than their racial message, which is non-liberal, promotes race hate, victim hierarchies, violence, and national divisions.

I think, however, that it goes off the rails when it assigns malicious intent to those who disagree.

You quote Bernie Sanders:

"Trickle down economics is a fraudulent theory designed by the rich and their think tanks in order to protect the billionaires and large corporations."

Or it is a flawed theory designed to lift all economic boats.

See, that's the difference.

You want to instigate "class war" whereas I just want to see a continued steady decrease in poverty levels.

We both agree that "trickle down" economics makes little sense. My opposition, however, is not grounded in Marxist ideology but in general common sense. Merely because a corporation receives tax breaks for the purpose of increasing profits does not mean that this will translate into the hiring of more labor.

Where Bernie and I disagree is that he seems to view trickle down as a cynical attempt by bad people to rob regular Americans on behalf of the wealthy.

Sadly, I have no such mind-reading abilities and am also perfectly aware that people can promote the worst ideas while doing so for the very best reasons.

For example, much of the progressive-left promotes the notion that white people, particularly white men, are a nefarious group in need of a good ass kicking.

This view is promoted by "identity politics" which posits a hierarchy of racial and gendered victimhood and dockets people (by skin color or gendered orientation) on that hierarchy.

In this way it recreates the very thing that MLK, Jr. warned against and does so, laughably enough, in the name of social justice and universal human rights.

Donald Trump: a Nazi Zombie or Cthulhu?

Michael Lumish

{Also published at the Elder of Ziyon.}

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche 

"In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." - H.P. Lovecraft

Welcome to the new American moment of rising white nationalism, anarchist violence in the streets, and an irate progressive-left that refuses to reconcile itself to the fact of a Donald Trump presidency.

It is not merely that the Left disagrees with Trump on policy issues, it is that they have aggregated that hatred into the core of the sun for the purpose of creating nuclear fusion.

This is a level of domestic collective political hostility that no living American has seen before and nobody knows what it will produce beyond getting an autistic white kid tortured in Chicago, among other such imbecilic acts of identity politics-based violence and cruelty.

One would have to travel back to early 1860s Savannah, Georgia to gloriously revel in this degree of rancor for the President of the United States and for people of the wrong color.

When I was a kid the Left despised Richard Nixon and when he died in 1994 Hunter S. Thompson wrote an obituary for The Atlantic that twisted the knife even in death. In "He Was a Crook," Thompson wrote:

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

But even Nixon, despite the secret bombing of Cambodia, was not as reviled as Donald J. Trump is today.

In college many of my friends did not much like Ronald Reagan, either, but we did not dress head-to-toe in black - almost like tight-fitting burkas, if you think about it - and then form ourselves into "black blocs" for the purpose of beating the holy hell out of perfectly innocent people in the streets.

And that is precisely what we saw when Milo Yiannapolous dropped by UC Berkeley on his "Dangerous Faggot Tour."

And then, of course, there was George W. Bush, the "Cowboy President" who allegedly robbed Al Gore of his rightful ascension and who followed in George Sr.'s footsteps by dragging the United States into more pointless warring in the Middle East. So we bitched and we moaned and we cried and we marched and some of us even went to Midland, Texas to say hello to Cindy Sheehan at "Camp Casey" not far from W.'s ranch.

Nazis, Klansmen, and Fascists

So, why does the disdain for Trump seem so much more angry and intense than these other examples of famous American presidential loathing? It is in part because while those who dislike Trump are loudly spreading their hatred, the rest of the country is quietly going about its daily business. Recent polling shows that something close to 50 percent of Americans actually favor the temporary ban from the countries of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya. My assumption is that, like all rational westerners, these people take the rise of political Islam seriously. Some of them follow the news of the immigration crisis in Europe. 

One would not get this sense from the overall mainstream media, nor the alternative media, because the drumbeat of fear and loathing is so relentless one would surely think that almost every ethically-decent American considers the temporary ban as on some moral par with the unjust internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II.

So, why have so many Americans gone stone-cold crazy? Why are so many otherwise normal and intelligent people bursting with horror at this particular political moment?

The reason has to do with Nazis, Klansmen, and fascists.

Homophobes, Islamophobes, and Antisemites.

Sexists, Transphobes, and all other manner of benighted Arkansas pig farmers.

That's why.

When The Enemy - as embodied by the hideous yammering visage of Donald Trump - represents the very worst that unearthly existence can manifest then there are no ethical limits on behavior in beating back the terrible cosmic menace. A righteous moral stance cannot include mere disapproval or protest, but full on resistance by any means necessary... however bloody, hypocritical, or devoid of simple human decency.

And if Democrats and progressives prefer not to get their hands dirty, that's what the Boys in Black are for. Perhaps if they curb-stomp enough Trumpeteers it will serve as notice to the rest to stay out of sight and keep their white-bread, humanist-individualist, Judeo-Christian yaps shut.

And make no mistake, Trump did not magically transform into Zombie Hitler - or the monster of your choice - through his own behavior.

He was transmogrified into Zombie Hitler by a Democratic Party leadership that had grown so confident, fat, and self-satisfied that only a spectral fascist could possibly stall their well-meaning efforts to change America into a semi-socialist enclave of sneauxflakes and drones. If the Democrats decided that they are "the good people" and the Republicans are "the bad people" then they decided that Donald Trump is Cthulhu, a multi-tentacled, insatiable, monstrosity from the Deep... or a Zombie Nazi... choose whichever you like.

And this is why the self-righteous Idiots in Black took to the streets of UC Berkeley to beat the holy hell out of Trump supporters at the Milo event.

What else can you do to a supporter of fascism other than kick its head in an anti-free-speech riot in the place most famous as home of the Free Speech Movement?


Race, Gender, Class
In the years between the end of the Vietnam War and the present, the progressive-left (or what political youtube icon Dave Rubin refers to as the "regressive-left") took the best ideas that American politics has to offer and turned them into mierda.

Questions of racial, gendered, and economic-class injustices go directly to the heart of the western political experience. From a liberal humanist perspective there is nothing more important than treating human beings as individuals with rights rather than as some annoying or frightening member of an othered group to be treated like dirt.

The fundamental purpose of movements for ethnic and gendered freedom was to relieve all of us of the burden of never-ending bigoted and unjust animosities. In Martin Luther King's iconic "I Have a Dream" speech, that was the dream.

But no sooner had this dream approached reality than the Left turned it into a weapon and betrayed its core values in doing so.

And this is where Hillary Clinton, her "basket of deplorables," and some ridiculous grinning green frog named Pepe, comes into the story.

During the campaign, and much to Bernie Sanders' ongoing annoyance, the drums of race and gender beat considerably harder and louder than those of economic class. Activists in the Democratic Party and the progressive-left who wanted to challenge the allegedly brutal, racist, white, patriarchal, imperialist, rape-culture of America were torn between Hillary's neo-liberalism and Sanders' anti-capitalism.

So, when Hillary, who we all knew was going to get the nomination despite Sanders' admirable challenge, decided to smack Trump around with Breitbart and white nationalism she unleashed The Fear into the American population on a national scale. The next thing that we knew Facebook and Twitter and God-Knows-What-All overflowed with rumors of gun-toting, Republican-voting, Nazi-sympathizing, angry, white guys prowling the streets of America as swastikas popped up all over the media like psilocybin mushrooms after a good rain.

The fact that there are no actual Nazis, Klansmen or fascists within the ranks of American power was not about to stop a good case of mass hysteria, however, so Team Hillary dug up Richard Spencer, tied Spencer to Breitbart, and threw both into the face of Donald Trump.

And they did so even as Milo darted between American university campuses humiliating idiots and referring to Trump as "Daddy." It is thus not difficult to see just why they would despise the guy and thereby smear him as a Nazi.

The truth, however, is that this sort of manichean, black-and-white, Good versus Evil, partisan politics is ripping this country to pieces. It's harming families and friendships.

Of course, if it makes people happy, they should continue spitting the hate.

I may find it interesting in a perverse and twisted kind of way, but it's certainly not doing the country any good.

Here is a question. When we talk about political ideology, just what are we talking about? Are we talking about political theoretical models, constructed by individuals engaged in ideas which we consciously modify over time and use as a tool to help us better understand what is happening around us? Or is it more like a set of political predispositions inherited from family and friends and teachers (and the media) that serves as an unconscious ideological filter turning intellectually passive individuals into ideological Pez dispensers? Or, perhaps, some of both?

Oh, and by the way, I bet that there is no way in hell that any of you guys will recognize the ballplayer above. I would be absolutely flabbergasted if proven wrong.

On correcting the present, but not the past

Sar Shalom

Via Elder of Ziyon links list, I came across a post by Hunter Stuart, a journalist who held all the standard left-wing positions about Israel, and then came to realize the error of his understanding as the result of spending a year and a half in Israel. However, while his experience living in Israel taught him that his perceptions about the present were at odds with the reality, it did not confront him with how his perceptions of the past have elements that are similarly at odds with reality.

I know a lot of Jewish-Israelis who are willing to share the land with Muslim Palestinians, but for some reason finding a Palestinian who feels the same way was near impossible. Countless Palestinians told me they didn’t have a problem with Jewish people, only with Zionists. They seemed to forget that Jews have been living in Israel for thousands of years, along with Muslims, Christians, Druse, atheists, agnostics and others, more often than not, in harmony. Instead, the vast majority believe that Jews only arrived in Israel in the 20th century and, therefore, don’t belong here.
Of course, I don’t blame Palestinians for wanting autonomy or for wanting to return to their ancestral homes. It’s a completely natural desire; I know I would feel the same way if something similar happened to my own family. But as long as Western powers and NGOs and progressive people in the US and Europe fail to condemn Palestinian attacks against Israel, the deeper the conflict will grow and the more blood will be shed on both sides.

As followers of Israel Thrives would know, the best statement that could be made to support the notion that "more often than not, [the Jews and Muslims lived] in harmony" is that the Muslims only rarely massacred the Jews and others living under their jurisdiction. Other than that, the social order was one in which Islam was the master faith and any infidel who would not want to face repercussions had to be obeisant to that reality. Any peace that existed during that time was the result of non-Muslims recognizing their place in society and thus not provoking their Muslim masters.

There is nothing wrong in sympathizing with the Palestinians' desire for autonomy. However, Stuart goes beyond that in stating that he doesn't blame the Palestinians "for wanting to return to their ancestral homes," implying that their "ancestral homes" are in the southwestern Levant. The question to pose regarding that claim is what percentage of Arabs living in Mandatory Palestine in the 1920s were born there and of those what percentage were born to parents who were born in what became Mandatory Palestine? Whatever amount of time one deems sufficient to make the Levant one's ancestral home, to claim that just one generation more than since the start of the British Mandate is sufficient just cannot be supported. Moreover, unlike the case of the Jews, the Arabs who did not live in the southwest Levant maintained no connection to the Levant. Thus the contest is not between indigenous residents and immigrants, but between immigrants who had no prior connection (the Arabs) and immigrants returning to their spiritual home (the Jews).

One could ask why this matters. After all, he supports Israel's claims today, what's the big deal if he has mistaken views about the past? However, this ignores Orwell's lesson that "he who controls the past controls the future." As Stuart further wrote:

I’m back in the US now, living on the north side of Chicago in a liberal enclave where most people ‒ including Jews ‒ tend to support the Palestinians’ bid for statehood, which is gaining steam every year in international forums such as the UN.

Now how many of Stuart's new neighbors in Chicago believe that "Jew and Arabs lived in peace and harmony, as equals, in the state of Palestine, until white, European, religiously driven Jews were given a country because of the Holocaust, and committed genocide against the indigenous Arabs, while colonising the land using American and British weapons?" Is siding with the Palestinians an unreasonable conclusion from such a premise? While speaking accurately about the pre-Zionism condition of the Jews of the Levant and how many of the Palestinians have bona fide ancestral connections to the land will not necessarily induce his neighbors to abandon their factually erroneous view, accepting the false facts will definitely not challenge those views and thus leave in place the narrative that standing with the Palestinians is like standing with the Civil Rights movement that ended Jim Crow rather than standing with the Klan that opposed Reconstruction and ushered in Jim Crow.

This Week on Nothing Left

Michael Lumish


This week Michael Burd and Alan Freedman are delighted to have a very special studio guest in Edwin Black who is leading a campaign to have the United Nations replaced by a new organisation called the Covenant of Democratic Nations. (We would also like to acknowledge the Zionist Federation of Australia for making his available to Nothing Left.)

We also hear from Smadar Pery, an Israeli advocate living in Berlin who has some troubling observations about Jewish life in Germany, and Isi Leibler joins us as usual from Jerusalem.


1 min         Edwin Black, on Covenant of Democratic Nations

51 min         Smadar Pery, Berlin (Part 1)

1 hr 4 min Smadar Pery, Berlin (Part 2)

1 hr 22 min Editorial: Trump / Netanyahu meeting

1 hr 27 min Isi Leibler, Jerusalem

The podcast can also be found on the J-Air website:

Or at our Facebook page: 

NOTHING LEFT can be heard live each Tuesday 9-11am on FM 87.8 in the Caulfield area, or via the J-Air website www.j-air.com.au

Contact us at Nothing Left:

michael@nothingleft.com.au

alan@nothingleft.com.au

The Day of the Dhimmi is Done

Michael Lumish

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

IDF Soldier

There are two points concerning Jews and Israel that I very much want to get across to the politically-inclined.

The first is that the day of the dhimmi is done.

No longer will we allow ourselves to be pushed around as pawns in someone else's political game. Nor will we allow non-Jews, like Barack Obama, to tell us where we may, or may not, be allowed to live within our own ancestral homeland.

The second is that the Oslo process is dead.

It is a corpse. It is a dead albatross around the Jewish neck that is very much in need of removal and burial. I am half a world away and I can still smell the stench.

As a diaspora Jew, I am exceedingly reluctant to tell Israel what to do, but that does not always stop me.

In that spirit, Israel should declare its final borders and remove the IDF to behind those borders. But it should be up to the Israelis to decide what those borders will be because after 2,000 years of European abuse - consecutive with 1,300 years of Arab-Muslim enforced dhimmi status in the Middle East - the Jews have, by any ethical standard, earned the right of self-determination on the land that our people come from.

Anything less is an insult to social justice, universal human rights, and basic concepts of Enlightenment liberalism. It is also a direct kick in the head to the Jewish people and we do not need to put up with it.

Furthermore, and more importantly, it is only the Jews of the Middle East who give a rip about the wellbeing of their children, such as the brave young woman pictured above.

Thus I consider the recent "outpost law" or "regulation bill" a hopeful sign.

As blogger Ruth Lieberman put it:

Yesterday the Israeli Knesset passed the ‘Regulations Bill’ into law. To simplify, this law creates a legal framework for dealing with homes that were built over decades. It provides 125% compensation to absentee owners whose non-residential land was accidentally built on. 

The thing about this law that makes it controversial is that is contested by those who would rather hand over these lands to some independent Arab rule — perhaps the Palestinian Authority but their sincerity has come into question — in a diplomatic solution. But that’s politics, and it has no place in a legal discussion.

Everything, as always, is volatile in that neck of the universe. The Palestinian-Arabs are screaming from the hillsides about dire consequences if Trump moves the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and I am not the least bit confident that he will keep that campaign promise.

And, of course, the major European players are less than happy about the new law.

Raphael Ahren, writing in the Times of Israel, tells us:

Germany on Wednesday harshly criticized Israel for passing the Regulation Law earlier this week, saying the new legislation undermines trust in Israel’s willingness to reach a negotiated peace agreement with the Palestinians.

“The confidence we had in the Israeli government’s commitment to the two-state solution has been profoundly shaken,” a spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry in Berlin said in a statement.

In a related article by the Times of Israel we learn that the French are making similar grunting noises:

The French ambassador to Israel on Wednesday said a new law legalizing West Bank outposts built on private Palestinian land damaged Israel’s credibility in the eyes of the international community.

Israel has come under harsh censure since lawmakers passed the Regulation Law Monday, with the UN saying it crossed a “thick red line,” and other members of the international community warning the measure would make peace efforts more difficult.

“This is troubling for the international community, who is wondering if she should trust Israel when Israel says it’s ready to discuss with its neighbor, the Palestinians, to reach an agreement on the two-state solution,” ambassador Hélène Le Gal told Army Radio in an English-language interview.

This, my friends, is a sucker's game and you're the suckers. As we say in poker, if you look around the table and you're not sure who the fish is, it is you.

"Oslo" is a way for European governments to twist Jewish arms behind Jewish backs in order to maintain what I call the Non-Peace Process, which, as of the Obama administration, looked something like this:

1) The US and the EU demand negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

2) The parties agree to talk and then the PA, the US, and the EU demand various concessions from Israel for the great privilege of sitting down with the PA's foremost undertaker.

3) Israel fails to meet all the concessions, thus causing the PA to flee negotiations, which they never had any intention of concluding to begin with.

4)  The PA and the EU and the Obama administration place the blame for failure at Jewish feet.

5)  The EU and various European countries announce additional sanctions, thereby essentially joining the anti-Semitic anti-Zionist BDS brigade.

6)  Jihadis seek to murder Jews.

It should be obvious by now that the Palestinian-Arabs have no intention whatsoever in accepting a state for themselves in peace next to Israel. They have turned down every single offer since the Peel Commission of 1937.

There comes a point, therefore, where we must accept that "no means no."

But look what they could have had if they had simply accepted Jewish sovereignty on a miniscule, hatchet-shaped bit of land in north-west Israel eighty years ago.

Merely by saying "yes" the Arabs could have had not only all of "Transjordan" - which, in itself, represented almost three-quarters of the British Mandate of Palestine - but all the rest of Israel, as well, with the tiny exception of that completely indefensible strip of land bordering the Mediterranean.

Even Jerusalem - which the Arabs only care about out of some petty theological need to keep Jews from sovereignty on the central site of our historical heritage - would have been under the control of non-Jews.

Muhammad, it needs to be remembered, never stepped foot in that city.

Furthermore, the Oslo "peace process" had nothing to do with peace. It was merely a way for the Arabs and the European Union and the Obama administration to justify violence against the Jews of the Middle East because they do not honestly approve of the fact of Israel to begin with. If the Palestinians wanted a state for themselves in peace next to Israel they could have had one many times over, but that is not what they want.

What they want is Israel dead and everyone knows it.

Yet, decade upon decade the tiny Jewish minority in the Middle East make concessions for peace while many within the vast Arab population openly screech for Jewish blood. The West then uses that screeching as a justification for what they believe to be "understandable" violence by local Arabs against regular Jewish Israelis, if not Jews the world over.

For thirteen-hundred years the Jews lived as dhimmis. That is, they lived as second and third-class non-citizens under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperial rule.

Now, with an Israel Hater out of the White House and with Trump, whatever he is, in the White House, it is the time for Israel and for the Jewish people to stand up and declare that the days of desperate Jewish solicitude are over. The enemies of the Jewish people will accuse Israel - and, by extension, world Jewry - of gross immorality in its treatment of the Palestinian-Arabs. And we must not hesitate to hit them back with the truth of their racist hypocrisy every single time.

Israel Haters do not care about social justice or human rights. Is that not obvious? If they did they might look up for a moment at a world roiling with the most horrendous human rights violations all around them. The rest of the Middle East makes Israel look like a human rights Shangri-la.

And, speaking as an American, please keep in mind that jihadi and progressive-left hatred toward the Jews of the Middle East is not limited to the Jews of the Middle East. As Tammi Benjamin of the Amcha Initiative can well attest, our young people are being harassed, sometimes violently, not just on European soil... where it is now commonplace... but on American university campuses, as well. And they do so, in ironic cringe-worthiness, under the banners of social justice and universal human rights.

From the comments:

Mac Abee

Yes, German scum hate Israel don't they. A strong Jewish nation is hard to "F" with.

Like · Reply · 54 mins

Well, that's a tad strong, but I definitely think that "Mac Abee" gets his point across. Don't you?

Eyal Even

Israel is more disappointed you made a law referring to the Western Wall being occupied? That's more shameful.

Like · Reply · 4 · 2 hrs 

It is more shameful. Far more shameful. "Eyal Even" is referring to UNSC 2334, which seeks to drive a wedge between the Jewish people and our ancestral homeland. The United Nations has, in fact, decided that not only is Hebron (the home of Abraham and the Tomb of the Patriarchs) "Palestinian" land, but even the Western Wall is now assigned by the United Nations to the greater Arab nation as "occupied Palestinian territory."

The Obama administration not only allowed this vote to pass without a veto, but actually encouraged its passage behind the scenes as a parting "drop dead" to its American Jewish constituency.

J Leland Kupferberg

Israel should communicate its "German policy" to the Germans as follows:

"What the Jews do with their Land is none of your business. Germany is the last country in the world that needs to instruct the Jewish State as to what is in its best interests. Our best interests are served when Germany's leaders shut up and leave the Jews alone. Mind your own business."

Like · Reply · 3 · 6 hrs

Indeed.

Given the fact that it has elected to commit national suicide, I almost feel bad for Germany... but then that feeling goes away.

A Quick Note to a Facebook Friend:

Michael Lumish

Here is the thing from my perspective.

Because the Left has thrown so much continual hatred toward Trump from before he became the Republican nominee - up to and including charges of enjoying "golden showers" in swanky Russian hotel rooms - it has become almost impossible to separate a chronic hatred for the guy from genuine and fair criticisms.

The opponents of Trump are doing their cause a disservice by encouraging this degree of hatred.

By this point, anyone who is not already persuaded to despise the man will increasingly tune-out the white noise of ideological malice.

This Week on Nothing Left

Michael Lumish

Michael Burd and Alan Freedman have an interesting line-up this week, including our friend Sheri Oz, on the Nothing Left radio show.

Sheri lives in the beautiful city of Haifa, is making a name for herself as a pro-Israel political blogger, and writes regularly at Jews Down Under.

You guys should give this a listen when you get the chance.

3 min    Editorial: back for 2017

11 min    Senator Malcolm Roberts

26 min    Danny Lamm, president Zionist Federation of Australia

51 min     Sheri Oz, writer/blogger in Israel

1 hr 12 min  Julie Nathan, ECAJ report on antisemitism in Australia

1 hr 30 min  Isi Leibler, Jerusalem

Ban On Zionist Teabags

Doodad

 

Taking a cue from Donald Trump, Lebanon has moved to secure its homeland from an invasion of refugee Israeli teabags.

No teabag for you: a supermarket in the Lebanese city of Sidon was discovered to have been selling a box of Lipton tea with the price written in shekels, instead of the local pound; several consumers were outraged; Economy Ministry sends inspectors to track down additional 'Zionist' tea bags....An attempt to figure out how the item arrived on a Lebanese shelf in the first place found that it was originally shipped from Egypt, and that the price in shekels was intended for the Arab Israeli market. The site called on "department stores in Sidon and the area to beware of products of this kind, so as not to become the victims of the mafias of the enemy's normalization." The site also called on Lebanese security and law forces to find out how such products manage to enter Lebanon.

In a local interview the teabags claimed they were just trying to find a good place to live and practice their culture without the fear of being in hot water all the time.

 

"Genghis Hitler"

Michael Lumish

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

This is the most pathological moment in US political history since 1968.

I come out of the progressive-left, but the movement lost me when I started noticing Nazi Swastikas entwined with Stars of David at anti-war rallies in San Francisco.

Once it became clear that anti-Zionists were making homes for themselves within the Obama administration, I knew that it was time for me to leave the party. Asking Jews to sit across the Democratic Party table from anti-Semitic anti-Zionists, such as Linda Sarsour, is something akin to asking black Americans to sit across the Democratic Party table in political kinship with the Klan.

It is suggesting common-cause with an anti-Zionist seeking to bring Sharia into the United States under the cover of feminism. (Of feminism, for chrissake.) This is not a criticism of Muslims as people, but it is very definitely a criticism of Sharia. Whatever else Sharia may be, it is a theological-political ideology and thus open to public scrutiny and criticism. This is particularly true when the head-chopping of non-submissive women or the throwing of Gay people off of rooftops is seen
as a moral imperative for so many within the Islamic faith.

Jewish people need to draw the line at anti-Semitic anti-Zionism of the type represented by Sarsour who once twittered that "nothing is creepier than Zionism."

In the meantime the progressive-left, the Democratic Party, and Clinton Incorporated have turned Trump into the Devil, but what they fail to understand is that their intense and overblown hatred immunizes the guy from their own criticisms.

Whenever they lambaste Trump as a "fascist," or something akin to Hitler, he garners quiet sympathy while making his accusers look malicious, ignorant, and untrustworthy in their conclusions.

The Accelerating Ideological Drumbeat

The intense hatred for Donald Trump is, in part, a result of the accelerating ideological drumbeat around issues of race, gender, and class as derived from the New Left and the Vietnam War. During the 1960s we saw the rise of Second Wave Feminism, the anti-war movement, Gay rights, environmentalism, Black Power, Brown Power and on and on. This churning political chaos blended progressive-left identity politics with socialism eventually resulting in the remarkable challenge by Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2016.

There are, quite obviously, very good historical reasons for all of this. Does anyone really need reminding of how long women in the United States were non-citizens? Or how long black people were slaves? Thus, the New Left take-over of the universities was a response to centuries of unjust marginalization and displacement of the allegedly inferior other.

The problem is not that in speaking up for women, or in opposition to war, or in favor of minority rights, that the Left had nothing to say. They clearly had plenty to say. The problem is that they refused to acknowledge their winnings on the table.

That is, the less racist and sexist the West became in recent decades the harder and faster the drumbeat of race, gender, and class became, eventually emerging, during the Obama administration, as the high-pitched shrill of identity politics that we know today.

And that really is the saddest part.

The faltering liberal West represents the most socially just and welcoming form of political organization in human history, yet it is lambasted by a significant portion of its own citizenry as among the very worst.

Instead of joining with the white American middle-class for the purpose of moving forward in relative harmony, the progressive-left demonized those people, particularly the conservatives among them, as precisely what is wrong with the West today.

One Reason Why Hillary Got Beat

In the months leading into the 2016 presidential election the tempo of progressive-left accusations of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, disaster capitalism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and generalized badness, approached a crescendo.

One of my favorite examples was when transgender Inside Edition reporter Zoey Tur (née Robert Albert Tur) threatened violence against Brietbart-associated writer and radio talk show host, Ben Shapiro, because Ben referred to her as a "Sir" during a panel discussion on Caitlyn "Bruce" Jenner.

The rather burly Ms. Tur subsequently threatened Shapiro with a "curb stomping" which anyone who has ever seen the movie History X can tell you is a rather unpleasant form of getting one's ass kicked... if not, more likely, dead. Shortly thereafter Shapiro suggested that such brutality might be considered a tad "unladylike" thereby revealing that someone obviously needs to give him a good mansplaining.

Shortly after the election, the MTV "2017 Resolutions for White Guys" video nicely summed-up the progressive-left, politically-correct, coastal zeitgeist that nudged Trump into the winner's box.



While no one ever accused the people over at MTV of being big thinkers, the truth is that during the brief historical moment between World War II and the present the West actually made tremendous gains in social justice. Yet it is precisely at this moment that the cries of racism and sexism and fascism dramatically increased in direct proportion, ironically enough, to the diminishment of racism, sexism, and fascism.

Never before was a society so free and, yet, so despised by so many for its alleged lack of freedom.

In retrospect, therefore, it is not particularly surprising that as the Clinton campaign conjured the "alt-right" as an object of hatred with which to smear Donald Trump that many less partisan Americans refused to buy into that hatred.

The more the Clintonistas pointed the trembling finger of accusation toward all those politically-incorrect heinous "deplorables" - otherwise known as their fellow Americans - the more those people either adopted that attribution as a badge of honor or dismissed the Left as a bunch of anti-white racist, anti-American hate-mongering nit-wits.

In other words, each time progressives spit the notion that Americans from places like Lexington, Kentucky or Provo, Utah or Ottumwa, Iowa were essentially a bunch of bigoted, heteronormative, neanderthal, pig farmers another Republican-operative angel received its wings.

Immunization

By turning Donald Trump into "Genghis Hitler," as my friend Trudy put it, the Left leaves no room for negotiation, discussion, or even thought. By accusing Trump of anything and everything - up to and including "golden showers" in Russian luxury hotelrooms - it immunizes the guy from genuine criticisms.

It means that people who seek some reasonable objectivity in their understanding of what is actually happening must slog through an endless miasma of bullshit to get at a kernel of truth.

And what this means is that the kind of key honest criticisms that could sway the general American citizenry back toward a left-leaning direction are lost in the political swamp, thereby freeing president Trump to do damn near anything he wants. After all, if almost everyone left-of-center is willing to string the guy up for putting his shoes on in the wrong order, why should he not just go forward and do whatever he wants, anyway?

An important question is, will this hatred topple the guy or will it feed his strength?

Why Sam Harris Opposes the Temporary Ban

What??

Comparing Trump’s Wall to the Israel-Egypt Barrier

Jon Hayes

{Editor's note - Jon is a young writer seeking to hone his chops a bit and is a founder of USS Sports Machine. Fresh and thoughtful voices are always welcome.}

Prime Minister Netanyahu has faced severe backlash by Israeli media after tweeting out his support for President Trump's wall along the border of Mexico, citing the effectiveness of the Israel-Egypt barrier. Though it was likely improper of Netanyahu to involve himself in such a messy situation considering the relationship between Israel and Mexico, it is important here to examine the accuracy of Netanyahu's statement. Did the Israel-Egypt barrier actually stop immigrants from entering Israel through the south? And if so, would it be as effective in the U.S.?

According to the Guardian, the Israeli-Egypt barrier cut illegal immigration from 2,295 in January to just 36 in December for a decrease of 98.4%. At first glance, this gives serious weight to the conclusion that building a wall would be the right move for the United States.

However, because the geography of the two areas are so different, something that worked for Israel may not necessarily work for the U.S.. It is certainly not an apples-to-apples comparison. In fact, in an interview with The Intercept, Magal, the company which helped build the Israeli border, claimed that the level of protection Israel uses is only effective in well-populated areas. Hagai Katz, who was speaking on behalf of Magal, went on to say that "If you’re in an open spaces, which is more like a desert in a way, not a lot of vegetation, and no nearby cities, then you know putting a fence for thousands of kilometers or miles it just doesn’t make sense”. The US-Mexico border, spanning both the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts, would fall squarely into the "doesn't make sense" category.

Despite Netanyahu's tweet, walls such as the Israel-Egypt barrier don't actually stop illegal immigration themselves, a major promise that Trump has made when speaking about the wall. Instead, what they do is slow down immigrants enough for patrolling border agents to catch them. This becomes increasingly evident by examining other barriers, such as the Israeli West Bank barrier. This barrier reduced lives lost by terrorist attacks from 117 in 2004 to only 45 in 2005, for a reduction of 60%. However, as reported by Haaretz, the Shin Bet and Israeli Defense Force actually contributed this reduction to their own improvement in their joint ability to act against terrorists.

Similarly John Kelly, chief of the Department of Homeland Security said in a recent Senate testimony that "A physical barrier in and of itself will not do the job. It has to be, really, a layered defense". He further stated, “If you were to build a wall from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, you'd still have to back that wall up with patrolling by human beings, by sensors, by observation devices.”

Though it is not impossible for the U.S. to replicate Israel's success, the cost of building it and stocking it with the necessary personnel and technology will likely be much higher. And since unlike Israel, the U.S. isn't using it to stop terrorist attacks, they will need to decide if the price tag is worth it.

What??

What Trump's travel order should be compared to

Sar Shalom

One of my coworkers was once in the Air Force where he worked at a missile silo in combat targeting. For launching missiles, only officers have sufficient authorization to select a target at which to direct a missile, while for the most part only enlisted personnel have the knowledge of how to operate the systems that deliver the missiles to any specified target. Therefore, combat targeting requires pairing enlisted personnel with officers in order to have both the authorization to launch a missile to a specified target and the technical capacity to do so.

Occasionally, the Air Force would send inspectors to rate the capability of the officers to deliver missiles to their targets. Invariably, when the inspectors would come, this coworker of mine was the enlisted airman paired with the officer in order to give the officer the best chance of passing. However, one time that the inspectors came, he was paired with an officer who insisted that he knew all about what he needed to do. Since this officer insisted he knew what he was doing, my coworker simply let him go ahead, and wound up being the only officer to fail when assisted by him.

Donald Trump is essentially that officer. As I have explained before, I can respect decisions reached through a reasonable decision-making process, even ones with which I would disagree or have unease. However, as is clear in Trump's travel order, he thoroughly bypassed the inter-agency process and disregarded everyone in Congress, including those in his party, instead relying exclusively on "security specialists" like Steve Bannon to create his order. The result is an order that disrupts such threats as graduate students conducting medical research and a YU student evacuating the remaining Jews from Yemen while alienating those whose cooperation we need to actually do anything effective about the threat. It is true that there are threats in the world. However, we have procedures in this country to confront these threats and we have professionals, both uniformed and civilian, in government service who deal with assessing whether or not there is some inadequacy in those procedures and, if so, what additional procedures could be implemented that would achieve the greatest improvement in security for the least disruption in societal function.

Like the relationship between that officer to my coworker, Trump is in a position of authority over those professionals. Also like that officer, he lacks the competence to do what he claims is his objective and should rely on those who have the competence. Unfortunately for this country, unlike the officer, there is no inspector overseeing Trump with the power to impose any consequences for his disregard of the expertise of those who know about attacking this nation's challenges.

Fascistic Left Anti-Fascists Attack Half-Jewish Gay Foreigner at Berkeley

Michael Lumish

Milo - who is neither "alt-right" nor white nationalist - still has a way of upsetting young tender bomb throwers.



This is Milo's response (with a big tip 'o the kippa to oldschool):

What everyone in Hasbara should read

Sar Shalom

Today's Atlantic has an article about convincing people. The main example of the article is how liberals could convince non-liberals to support liberal policies. However, the principle would also apply to how Zionists such as ourselves could convince those who aren't committed Zionists. The essential principle is that you have to work from the "ethical code" of your audience rather than your own ethical code. Studies show that one of the main values of conservatives is group loyalty while liberal care about fairness. Yet, often conservative Jews try to convince their liberal co-religionists they are obligated to support Israel because of loyalty to the tribe. That argument is never going to work. What might work would be to reframe what it means to be fair in a way that is more favorable to Israel, thus appealing to their sense of fairness and achieving at least part of the desired result.

Was It a Muslim Ban?

Dave Rubin asks: