The Embassy Move

Michael Lumish

If Trump has any intention of actually moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem we should know in about three weeks when he arrives in Israel. Given that the 50th anniversary of the 6 Day War is fast approaching if he is going to announce the relocation he will likely do so during his upcoming visit.

It's my bet that if he does not announce then that he probably never will.

We shall see.

The Last Time Jews Faced Machine Guns

Doodad

{The article Doodad refers to is this piece from the Daily Mail. - ML}

The Holocaust? No.

The last war against genocidal Arab countries? No.

Yesterday. In England. At Parliament.

Heavily armed Metropolitan police threw Jewish activists out of an event hosted by a Labour MP at Parliament this week after they asked 'disruptive questions', MailOnline can reveal 

Mark Hendrick, MP for Preston, chaired the pro-Palestinian event which was organised by the controversial Palestine Return Centre (PRC). The group has been accused of links with Hamas, though a spokesman denied this. 

The main speaker at Tuesday's event – which was held to discuss Israeli conduct in Jerusalem – was Kamal Hawwash of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who used his speech to accuse Israel of being 'an expert at inciting hatred'. 

At a previous Labour event, he said he considered a man who knifed two Israeli men to death, and injured a woman and toddler, a 'martyr' carrying out an 'act of revenge'. If people found his actions 'unacceptable', he said, 'that's up to them'. 

The Jewish activists listened quietly to the speeches but then strongly challenged the presentations during the question-and-answer session. Mr Hendrick summoned police armed with machine guns to eject them, leaving them 'shaken and upset'.

Read more.

 Machine guns for pity's sake. Machine guns. Oh England, I weep for you.

The Remarkable Pussitued of the Jewish Left

Michael Lumish

Abbie Hoffman

I cannot even begin to tell you how disgusted I am at the cowardice and stupidity of the Jewish left.

This feeling is greatly exacerbated by the fact that I come from that very movement.

The children and grandchildren of communist and socialist Jewish Hellraisers - willing to face billy-clubs in the streets of New York throughout the first two-thirds of the twentieth-century - are absolutely terrified that patriarchal, Islamic Supremacists will call them bad names on their laptops.

It's pathetic.

And they are also terrified of - and therefore deferential toward - Black Lives Matter, which is basically the current iteration of the Panthers.

The truth is that the diaspora Jewish Left is "chickenshit"... as Obama people might put it.

From the soft luxury of the American upper-middle-class they spit contempt at Jews who are tired of kissing anti-Zionist ass.

The Jewish left is filled with privileged cowards wondering what the advance of progressive-left anti-Zionism means to their Social Network.

If you want to see a true split within the diaspora Jewish community, keep insisting that Jews bow our heads before our enemies.

Fun with antisemitic anti-Zionists

Michael Lumish

I suppose this is rather stupid, but I find "trolling" antisemitic Facebook pages to be kind-of a kick.

There is a page called "Israel is a War Criminal" that I recently became aware of and - as one would expect - they specialize in separating out Jewish people in Israel, if not pro-Israel Jews, more generally, as a unique evil.

Therefore this morning I dropped in briefly to say hello with this little message:

Good morning anti-Zionists! How are you guys today? One of the things that give me a great deal of satisfaction is the knowledge that the Jewish people, after 2,000 years of diaspora have reconstituted our ancient homeland and reclaimed Jerusalem, the ancient capital of the Jewish people. That in itself is a very beautiful thing, I can hardly even tell you. But, y’know, when the Jews who arrived in the Land of Israel from the concentration camps nobody thought that they could actually beat the combined Arab armies. But nobody quite realized that the combined Arab armies were so feminine. 

Former dhimmis, along with Jewish women and half-starved Holocaust survivors actually beat the very cream of the Arab fighting forces in 1948 to re-establish Jewish sovereignty on historically Jewish land. And then to see this small struggling country not only survive but thrive just fills my heart with joy and gladness for the redemption of the Jewish people. Now, of course, Israel is a world leader in a variety of areas including technical and medical sciences, water reclamation, agriculture, not to mention arts and letters. Some of the top universities in the world are in that country. It’s really very gratifying.

Peace to you, please, my friends.

So far responses include these:

And this:

Ade Dino Sutrisno

Life is short. But but the hellfire is for eternity. Peace be upon the prophets and their fervent followers. The killer of the prophets may enjoy this world as much as they can. Prosper and oppress as much as they want. The earth the only paradise they will ever know. For a day will come for them when they will stare in horror.

But, ya know, when I was twelve I used to turn over rocks, too.

France's Dilemma

Doodad

Do they elect a far-right, possible bigot and antisemite who will do a lot to solve the immigration/terrorist problems France is experiencing or will they elect the centrist who won't? Macron supports an open door immigration policy and has expressed confidence in France's ability to absorb more immigrants and welcomes their arrival into Europe, asserting that the influx will have a positive economic impact. His proposal to provide each young adult a "Culture Pass" of 500€ which may encourage young people to discover the culture of France and deter terrorism suggests he is somewhat of an idiot but what the heck; this is France after all and if they were that smart they wouldn't have the almost daily terrorism problems they now experience. It's so frequent, one would almost think they were occupying Palestine or something.

I suspect they will elect Macron and live with the consequences. I don't really care because I don't like Le Pen either and I have never forgot France's awful collusion during the Holocaust.

UC Berkeley Islamophobia Conference This Weekend

Michael Lumish

I will be writing on the 8th Annual UC Berkeley Islamophobia Conference coming up this weekend for Campus Watch under the auspices of Daniel Pipes' Middle East Forum.

The foremost questions that I have, vis-a-vis Islam and the West, are concerned with the compatibility of Sharia with Enlightenment liberalism.

That is, I fail to understand how a juridical-political system of patriarchal Islamic supremacism can possibly be consistent with the Constitution of the United States or fundamental notions of universal human rights as found, for example, within western feminism.

I also called the cops and the mayor's office in that town because they seem to have lost the plot.

I doubt that I will run into trouble because American Islamism is not the same as progressive-left fascism, but just look at this mess:

UCLA’s Gelvin Buries Obama’s Middle East Policy Failures

Michael Lumish

{Also published by Campus Watch , the Daily Caller, and Jews Down Under.}

"How will history judge Barack Obama in terms of his policies and actions toward the Middle East?" asked UCLA Professor of Middle Eastern History James Gelvin at UC Berkeley.

A crowd of around 100 students and faculty, some in Muslim attire, crammed into a small conference room in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies in Stephens Hall to hear Gelvin’s lecture. The venue was tight and some students squatted just outside the door near a cameraman filming the lecture for online distribution. He spoke with a map of the Middle East projected onto a wall behind him and near a series of posters reading in Arabic and English, “In Accordance with Sharia Law” and “Have a bit of commitment – Inshallah.”

Gelvin’s answer to his opening question—that Obama’s policies were in line with his predecessors’ during the Cold War—strained credulity and mirrored the Middle East studies establishment’s strategy to defend Obama’s record regardless of the chaos it sparked.

The Trump administration’s airstrikes against a Syrian military airfield following a chemical attack in the six-year civil war that has left hundreds of thousands of Syrians dead and millions displaced is only the most recent evidence of this chaos. Iran’s march toward the production of nuclear weaponry encourages a regional nuclear arms race, while the rise of ISIS and the subsequent slaughter of the Yazidis, Middle Eastern Christians, and thousands of Muslims further reveals Obama’s true legacy.

Gelvin downplayed these shortcomings and said that Obama sought a return to a non-interventionist foreign policy, which he claimed was typical of U.S. behavior in the Middle East during the Cold War.

He began by quoting an unnamed Obama critic who wrote that “the abandonment by the world’s leading power of its leadership responsibilities” led to the disaster that is the Middle East today. Gelvin attacked what he called a consensus among political analysts that Obama sidestepped vital issues, such as Syria, lacked requisite foreign policy experience, and practiced an “overabundance of caution,” thereby projecting American weakness and lack of resolve.

Calling this view false, Gelvin argued that during the Cold War America’s primary foreign policy goals in the Middle East included blocking Soviet intervention, maintaining access to fossil fuels for Western markets, promoting stable pro-Western powers (whether democratic or otherwise), and preserving the independence of the Jewish State of Israel.

The fundamental difference between Bush II and Bill Clinton, according to Gelvin, is that Clinton, as a liberal internationalist, believed the West had the right of intervention so long as it could be justified as representing the will of United Nations. Bush and the so-called “Neo-conservatives” felt less constrained—so much so, in fact, that Gelvin referred to “Neo-conservatism” as the “evil twin” of liberal internationalism, but without the constraints of international law.

Gelvin’s apologia for Obama was unconvincing. Was U.S. policy during the Cold War even remotely “non-interventionist”? Given the U.S.-backed toppling of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadeq in 1953, the Suez Crisis of 1956, the direct U.S. intervention in Lebanon in 1958 and again in 1982, and the placing of medium-range ballistic missiles in Turkey prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, among many other actions, the answer is “no.”

Moreover, it is highly questionable to term Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East “non-interventionist.”

During the falsely named “Arab Spring” in 2011, Obama either enacted or abetted the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, who was killed after U.S.-initiated regime change, and Egypt’s military dictator, Hosni Mubarak, who was removed from power and thrown into prison thanks in part to Obama’s pro-Muslim Brotherhood policies. This is hardly non-interventionist.

Moreover, Obama’s acolytes railed at Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech before Congress opposing the Iranian nuclear deal, and the Obama administration inserted itself directly into the last Israeli election with the intention of ousting Netanyahu from power.

Where Obama was “non-interventionist,” it was to uphold his deal with Iran. Thus, he ignored the pleas of Iranians in the 2009 “green revolution” for support against the regime and chose not to enforce his 2013 “red line” threat against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons.   

Whether Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East was driven by a naïve desire to retreat from traditional U.S. responsibilities around the world or by a high-minded, carefully-vetted analysis with the Cold War as a model, the Middle East is a wreck and Obama eroded the trust of U.S. partners in the region, including Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

Historians of the Middle East will wrangle over Obama’s legacy in that region for years to come and if Gelvin’s analysis is any indication, the tendency to downplay the former president’s failures will persist. As information become available and events unfold that contradict the official narrative, they may find apologetics increasingly difficult.

Focusing on the wrong things, and where attention should be turned

Sar Shalom

A common refrain from supporters of Israel is that the PA has to condemn terrorism if it wishes to be accepted as a civilized organization. However, for the PA to condemn terrorism is meaningless. What is needed is for the PA to accept a definition of terrorism that does not change depending on the identity of the perpetrator or the identity of the victim. The following characteristics define terrorism:

• physical violence
• intended to influence political events
• targeted at those with no nexus to a legitimate casus belli.

If all three conditions are met, the action is one of terrorism, and the absence of any one them means that the action is not terrorism. Both hold whether the actor is Muslim, Christian, or Jewish; or whether the recipient is Muslim, Christian, or Jewish. Rather than seeking a condemnation of terrorism, we should seek acknowledgement of such a definition of terrorism.

However, even properly addressing terrorism is of limited value. The focus on terrorism starts from the premise that no ends can justify the means of terrorism. However, if the only thing wrong is their reliance on terrorism, if the ends are fundamentally sound and the only problem is their means, then what would be wrong with promoting BDS? An would be, as Einat Wilf has said, "you can have a violent struggle for a noble cause, and you can have a non-violent struggle for a very sinister one. To establish that their ends are illegitimate, we have to insist on three points:

• The Jews are a people.
• The Jewish people are deeply connected to the Land of Israel in particular and Jerusalem in particular.
• The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery.

One could complain that centuries ago, the Arabs/Muslims acknowledged the Jews' connection but still suppressed the Jews under their heel. However, making that acknowledgement now would have a critical difference from then. Back then, they had the means to keep the Jews under their heel on their own. Today, they require the help of do-gooders in the West in order to reinstate that past. In order to gain those do-gooders' help, they need to portray the conflict as one to establish justice which requires portraying the Zionists as foreign colonialists. Acknowledging those three things means telling the West's do-gooders that justice actually means providing something for the Jews and thus they would have to give up on getting their help in expelling the Jews.

This Week on Nothing Left

Michael Lumish


This week Michael Burd and Alan Freedman speak with US commentator Jeffrey S Wiesenfeld about his fears for the future of US Jewry, and we then hear from Mustafa Akyol, a self-described moderate Muslim on the place of Islam in the modern world.

The fellahs speak with Swedish journalist/politician Nima Gholam Ali Pour on how life for Jews in Sweden is getting worse, and Isi Leibler joins them as usual from Jerusalem.



3 min Editorial: latest Palestinian advocacy

9 min Jeffrey S Wiesenfeld, on US Jewry and Israel

52 min Mustafa Akyol, Muslim US-based journalist

1: 15 Nima Gholam Ali Pour, Swedish journalist/politician

1: 32 Isi Leibler from 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 Jewish Left and the Conflict between Multiculturalism and Universal Human Rights

Michael Lumish

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

It's very sad, really.

I am watching my former political home, the American progressive-left, rip itself into ideological pieces.

In an apparent effort to reconcile the irreconcilable - i.e., the multicultural ideal (as represented by Sharia) with universal human rights (as represented by western feminism) - it is throwing Enlightenment liberalism, and with it the tradition of rational discourse, directly into the toilet.

Things have gotten so bad that in the universities the very notion of rational discourse, as we received it from Enlightenment, is increasingly viewed as a racist, sexist, heteronormative social-political construct designed to serve the white patriarchal power structure.

Here, for example, is an uncomfortable truth that illustrates the tension between multiculturalism and universal human rights within the progressive-left, but which they refuse to even discuss:

You cannot favor Sharia and be feminist both at the same time.

Sorry, Linda, but this is one of those reasons why I call my Elder of Ziyon blog "Acknowledging the Obvious."

I have no doubt that since Linda Sarsour recently sprang into the national spotlight off the political corpse of Hillary Clinton that there have been any number of people trying to square this circle. If someone can point me to a source wherein that was accomplished - where Sharia law and feminism were intellectually reconciled -  I would like to learn of it because maybe I am wrong.

What do I know? I make no claims of expertise in Sharia.

All I know with certainty is that the Jews who refused to allow themselves to be chased out of Israel by the Romans faced thirteen centuries of oppression and persecution under that juridical philosophy in the centuries between Muhammad and the Ottoman defeat in World War I.

A mere thirteen centuries.

Although the rules of "dhimmitude" varied from place to place and century to century within the Islamic world, Jews, along with other dhimmis, like Christians and Zoroastrians, could not build homes on land above those of Muslims. We could not ride horses. We could not carry weaponry and had no rights of self-defense, nor access to courts of law. While the Byzantines may have used the area around the Western Wall for a garbage heap, the Muslims simply built a mosque above what was the Hebrew Temple and declared the holiest site of the Jewish people as forever non-Jewish.

And it is not as if this is merely some abstract, irrelevant, historical detail from the past.

It is not as if I am merely holding a historical grudge.

It is ongoing.

It is at this historical moment, like every other for century upon century, that popular Islamic preachers regularly call for the murder of Jews. Yet much of the left provides them with cover by portraying the Jews in the Middle East as the oppressors of the innocent "indigenous Arab" population.

Thus, if an American Jew, such as myself, so much as suggests that keeping jihadis out of the United States is a good idea we are subject to progressive-left contempt. Who are we, after all - we grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Jewish immigrants from the Pale of Settlement - to deny succor to Arab children of war? Who are we beneficiaries of American generosity to deny that generosity to others?

These would be terrific questions were they not entirely otherwise.

Most Jews do not want to see jihadis move in next door because Sharia is a political theory that spells violent Jewish subjugation. Opposing the Jihad is no more prejudicial toward Muslims than opposing Nazism was prejudicial toward Germans. We do not have a problem with Muslim immigration into the United States. We do have a tremendous problem, however, with the importation of the Jihad into the United States as we are seeing currently in Europe.

Jihadism is a theo-political philosophy, an aspect of Islam, that calls for the spread of Sharia throughout the world. People who oppose the rise of political Islam are constantly told that all Muslims are not jihadis.

Let me assure you that we know this, already, but that is not the point.

We also know that this rhetorical tactic is a diversion. It is a method of evading the necessary national conversation around immigration policy. But, if anyone thinks that opposing the Jihad is the same as opposing Muslims, in general, then it is they who think of all Muslims as crazed head-choppers seeking the reinstitution of the Caliphate, not their political opponents.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party and the progressive-left are basically telling their Jewish constituency that if we wish to remain in good-standing we must embrace the arrival of hundreds of thousands of people from a culture that despises us and harasses our kids on university campuses throughout the West.

These are the same universities that turn a blind eye, or - as in the case of San Francisco State University - actually support and defend student groups calling for the murder of Jews. When the anti-Zionist contingent at SFSU confronted the mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, on that campus, they cried out, "Intifada! Intifada! Long live the intifada!" This is nothing less than shouting for the racist murder of the Jewish people directly into the face of a prominent Jewish leader among Jewish students and staff at an allegedly "liberal" college.

The irony is rich.

Nonetheless, SFSU president Leslie Wong believes that the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS) "is the very purpose of this great university."

The reason for all of this ideological chaos and inconsistency is because the progressive-left is increasingly anti-liberal and thus increasingly in opposition to its own professed values.

We see it at UC Berkeley when leftists beat the holy crap out of Trump supporters or pepper-spray them in the streets.

UC Berkeley (2017)

We see it when they demand ideological conformity over free speech and, thus, undermine not only the honest interrogation of ideas, but the very foundation of social justice, to begin with.

Ultimately the tension between multiculturalism and universal human rights is undermining Enlightenment liberalism. In the ongoing, but largely unspoken, tension between these twin progressive-left ideologies multiculturalism is slowly devouring universal human rights and liberalism along with it.

This decline in significance of universal human rights led, in recent decades, to the progressive-left and Democratic Party betrayal of women, Gay people, and minorities throughout the Middle East, the emergence of the new politically-correct racism at home, suppression of freedom of speech on the campuses, and the rise of left-leaning antisemitic anti-Zionism throughout the West.

The progressive-left has, in fact, betrayed us all, particularly those of us who counted on it the most.