Brief Notes: The Eternal Refugee

Mike L.

In a recent comment Dan Bielak quoted a piece from 1968 by Eric Hoffer, author of, among other works, The True Believer, entitled "Israel’s Peculiar Position."

Hoffer wrote:

The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchman. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab

The Palestinians are the Eternal Refugees.

They are the only people on the entire planet to remain refugees since World War II. This, of course, is the fault of Arab countries surrounding the Jewish state. Israel integrated between 600 and 700 thousand Jewish refugees into itself following the '48 war, but the Palestinians were held in camps by their own.

One of the things that progressive-left haters of Israel refuse to acknowledge is that it is the Arab states that are holding the Palestinians in refugee camps. Even the Palestinian Authority has claimed that Palestinian refugees will remain refugees in any future state of Palestine.

And yet progressive-left anti-Zionists and Israel Haters tell us that it is the Jews of Israel who are guilty for the plight of Palestinian Arab refugees.

It is a lie and it is a lie that is promoted, wittingly or not, by Jewish progressives who hold conservative Jews guilty for the ongoing conflict, who spread hatred toward Jews who do not believe as they do, who sometimes declare a moral equivalency between Likud and Hamas, and who justify malice toward Jews who choose to live in Judea.

It's a disgrace.

Jihadis Kill Christians in Egypt and Nigeria

Mike L.

According to the Coptic Solidarity website:

Christians in Egypt and Nigeria continue to suffer at the hands of Islamists. In Egypt, Muslim mobs are rampaging through Coptic villages, while, in Nigeria, the radical Islamist terror group, Boko Haram, continues to blow up churches and slaughter Christians in their homes.

While the looting, bombing, burning, and killing continues to terrify millions of Christians in Egypt and Nigeria, the bloodshed has attracted little attention around the world. In Washington, D.C., both the Obama Administration and the State Department continue to blame the violence on poverty and social inequality rather than condemn Islamic supremacy for persecuting Christian minorities...

While 75 million Christians are being terrorized in Nigeria, Egypt’s 10 million Coptic Christians are not faring any better. Recent reports indicate that over 100,000 Copts have already fled the country since the election of Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohammad Morsi, as President of Egypt. It is sad day day for the nation when a noble peopl, with a history in Egypt that began hundreds of years before the existence of Islam are forced to flee their homeland in fear for their lives.

Meanwhile Raymond Ibrahim writes:

According to today's issue of El Fegr, "Elements of terrorist, jihadi organizations distributed leaflets today inciting for the killing of Copts in Suez, Ismailia, and Upper Egypt, promising them [Copts] a tragic end if they do not return to the truth."

An image of a copy of the letter appears on El Fegr's website. Titled "An Urgent and Important Notice," it begins by calling on "all brothers and sisters" to "kill or physically attack the enemies of the religion of Allah—the Christians in all of Egypt's provinces, the slaves of the Cross, Allah's curse upon them…" It proceeds to promise a monetary reward for whoever helps "achieve Allah's rights against his enemies."

Very few people seem to care about the persecution and murder of non-Muslims in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim worlds. If some Jewish teenagers beat up a Palestinian kid in Jerusalem it makes headlines the world over, but if the Copts are routinely brutalized and murdered in Egypt all it elicits is a yawn.

Thanks to Randall Kohn

And a Tip 'O the Kippa to Andy Lewis of ProSemiteUndercover.

Now that video is the kind of thing that we need plenty more of, for sure.

Added to the blogroll, by the way. I should have done that a long time ago, actually.

Egyptian Editor Charged with Insulting President

Mike L.

Prosecution says chief editor of privately-owned el-Dustour daily 'spreading rumors that could disturb public safety; human rights group 'shocked

A Cairo court on Thursday ordered the chief editor of an Egyptian newspaper detained pending trial on charges of insulting the country's president and potentially harming the public interest.

The case against Islam Afifi of the privately-owned el-Dustour daily is one of several lawsuits brought mainly by Egypt's Islamists against journalists, accusing them of inflammatory coverage and inciting the public against the Muslim Brotherhood, the country's largest political group.

Excuse me, but I have a question.

Am I to understand that so-called "progressives" continue, even at this late date, to believe that the "Arab Spring" was about democracy and not the rise of radical Jihad?

Do I understand that correctly?

Leading pro-democracy advocate Mohamed ElBaradei condemned the imprisonment of the editor and the issuance of the fatwas, saying such developments betrayed the values of last year's revolt against Egypt's longtime strongman, former President Hosni Mubarak.

Gee, what a shock.

Whoever could have seen this coming?

"Instigating to kill in the name of religion, and accusing revolutionaries of betrayal are not crimes, but insulting the president in the press leads to imprisonment," he said. "It's as if no revolution has taken place."

As if no revolution has taken place?

Of course a revolution has taken place. Egypt has gone from a military dictatorship interested in stability and, at least, non-hostile relations with the United States and Israel to a theocratic dictatorship that is entirely hostile to Jews, as Jews, and to the west, in general.

Thank you, Barack Obama.

Barack Obama is the best president ever and the best friend that the Jewish people ever had.

I am soooo happy that I voted for this guy.

I very much hope that he enjoys his tea and cookies with newly elected Egyptian Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi.

I wonder if Obama will allow him to come in through the front door?

Israel Thrives in Political Diversity

Mike L.

In a recent comment JayinPhiladelphia noted the following:

And as for diversity, you've nailed it 'school. We have not only an Obama voter on the front page, but also an international roster here.

We very much encourage diversity of opinion on Israel Thrives. We also want diversity of subject matter within the obvious limits of Jewish concerns and we want opinions from people in other parts of the world. While I find myself in opposition to the Obama administration, I certainly do not expect everyone who participates here to agree with me and, in fact, would consider this experiment a terrible failure if group-think prevailed.

One of the things that I am beginning to find more and more compelling, after reading our friends from Britain and Australia, in these recent months, is how much our concerns align and, yet, are distinct. I find that Geoffff and Shirl and Daphne are focused on some things while me and School and Doodad are focused on others. This, of course, is as it should be. We're all tending our home fires while keeping an eye on our mutual horizon. This has also made me very aware of how much responsibility American Jews have for criticizing the Obama administration. Those guys cannot do it as effectively as we can for the obvious reason that he's our guy, not theirs.

Those of us who regularly participate here, however, understand that our disagreements are not meant to be blood-sports in which we seek to ruin the reputations of those who may disagree on this issue or that. We welcome diversity of opinion so long as that diversity is expressed in a generally collegial manner.

As someone whose politics has evolved beyond political parties I find it liberating to be able to consider left, right, and center without the typical animus or pathos that defines partisanship. It is one of the great things about being free of political partisanship that we can look at the views of political heretics with an open mind. For example, is Pamela Geller someone to be entirely dismissed or should she be fairly considered? Should Daniel Pipes be fairly considered or are we under some partisan obligation to spit poison and hatred toward political opponents?

As someone who comes out of the progressive-left it took an awful lot of soul-searching before I could begin to consider widely alternative points of view. The training in partisan hatred (which is a pretty good definition of the role of places like Daily Kos) was strong in me. I had an automatic, knee-jerk dislike and disinterest in the views of people defamed by the left. It is the constant drawing of these lines concerning who is "in" and who is "out" that came to fascinate me, even as I rejected the premises behind those assumptions.

What are the boundaries of acceptable hatred within whatever political movement that you may think of yourself as belonging to? Are Evangelical Christians, for example, really so evil that they must be spat upon and demeaned and dismissed? I do not think so.

The conclusion that I have drawn is that one political perspective that is entirely unwelcome on Israel Thrives is anti-Zionism. There are plenty of venues on the progressive-left wherein anti-Semitic anti-Zionism is perfectly acceptable. One of the questions that this blog asks, to the discomfort of some, is just why it is that we find the rise of western anti-Semitic anti-Zionism to be primarily on the progressive-left?

I have been demonized and demeaned for asking that question persistently and in public. And, I am sorry, but asking that question does not automatically docket someone onto the political right. On the contrary. Liberalism is a political tradition that goes to John Locke and the Enlightenment and that is concerned with the rights of man, but it is also an orientation in how we relate to others. Liberalism is theory, but it is also personal practice. The authoritarian tendency is not liberal from either perspective.

An interesting question came up the other day when I claimed that defining someone else's political identity for them against their will is distinctly illiberal because it is, in fact, authoritarian. It was pointed out to me by several individuals that if this is so how could I call another person a "racist"? Wouldn't doing so be equally illiberal?

I think that is a terrific question and one that we might give some thought to, but it's precisely because I am a liberal that I can say that I do not have a pat answer to that good question. I am open-minded to the consideration of it. And it is precisely open-mindedness that is the hallmark of liberalism as we understand it as a personal orientation in the world.

There is theory and there is practice. There is the shifting historical political tradition of liberalism and then there are people who engage the world in a liberal manner. And while no one is perfect, it is unclear to me how one can revere the former while acting upon others, against their well-being, in a way entirely contradictory to the latter.

For example, not to put too fine a point on it, but accusing another person of threatening oneself and one's children in an effort to ruin that person's reputation for political reasons is simply not liberal.

It is vile, in fact.

And it is not welcome here, nor quickly forgotten.

Shock Horror Picture From Apartheid Israel

geoffff

A scene from a Tel Aviv beach yesterday, from Israeli blogger Aussie Dave

This would never be allowed in the Tweed and Byron Shires* (Elections imminent --- Pro-BDS Green Party candidates standing.)

From Ha'aretz

Israel and the PA share an interest in preserving the unprecedented level of security that continues today on the West Bank, and this interest is presumably the cause of such close cooperation between the second-rank Israeli and PA officials. This story of cooperation between Israeli and PA figures is well captured by end-of-Ramadan images in Tel Aviv: yesterday, thousands of Palestinians from all parts of the West Bank, from Jenin in the north to Hebron and Bethlehem in the south, enjoyed the final hours of Id al-Fitr on the Tel Aviv beaches. Just a few years ago such an image would have seemed unimaginable in view of continuing strife in the West Bank and violent tensions between Palestinians and Israelis.

However, the quiet that has since taken hold, reinforced by close cooperation between officials from the two sides, allowed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians this month to make their first visit to Israel in years. PA figures indicate that during the Ramadan month, some 300,000 Palestinians entered Israel in coordinated visits. Israeli officials cite a lower yet nonetheless staggering figure of 200,000. Ironically, this trend caused significant economic damage to Palestinian vendors who lost untold customers – local Palestinians who took their business to Israel.

That's what Palestinian people think of BDS.

* Dogs are banned from all but a few designated unpatrolled  beaches where tourists do not bathe. There's a $1500 fine.

Hat tip Isreallycool

cross posted Geoffff's Joint