Gag Order Lifted on Hamas Kidnappings

Michael L.

Writing in the Times of Israel, Avi Lewish, Judah Ari Gross, and Raphael Ahren tell us:

Avraham Mengistu, 28, of Ashkelon

Two Israeli men are being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza, including one who was captured in the Strip in September after he sneaked over the border fence for unknown reasons, it was cleared for publication Thursday.

The man who has been in Gaza since September was named as Avraham Mengistu, 28, of Ashkelon. The gag order on his case was lifted Thursday morning following a lawsuit from Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth. The name of the second man, a Bedouin who also apparently crossed the border of his own volition, was not released.

It should be noted that Hamas claims to have released Mengistu who they say made his way into the Sinai.  Furthermore, we do not even have the name of the young kidnapped Bedouin, although the Times of Israel reports that he is from the town of Hura.

Nonetheless:

Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin said Israel was certain both men were in Gaza. “We have no doubt that they’re in Gaza. They have not gone anywhere elese,” Rivlin said Thursday morning, adding that Israel was seeking assistance for their speedy return as an act of “basic humanity.”

Whether or not these two individuals are still alive and within Hamas custody there are two things to note.  The first is that Israel will be blamed for not saving Mengistu because he is a black man.  The second is that this is already re-opening the Gilad Shalit debate.

Alleged Israeli Racism

This despite the fact that Israel is the only country on the planet that has moved large numbers of African people into the country not for reasons of exploitation, but for the purpose of welcoming them into the Israeli community.  Ethiopian Jewish integration into Israeli civil society has not been a smooth matter, but this hardly surprising.  The very sight of a McDonald's in Tel Aviv would have been disorienting to a people who in the flash of a moment went from a highly traditional, poor rural culture to one of the most vibrant and culturally dynamic cities in the world.

In fact, if you read the comments beneath the Times of Israel article linked to above you will already see one small example:

Marco Manila

if he was an ashkenazi they will rescue him , but this guy is negro  

The truth, of course, is that Israel is the least "racist" country in the entire Middle East and one of the most diverse and inclusive countries on the entire planet.  Jews cannot live as Jews in Saudi Arabia.  We may not purchase land, as a matter of law, in Jordan.  Yet on college campuses throughout the United States students are encouraged by hostile anti-Zionist professors, like Rabab Abdulhadi at San Francisco State University, to think of the lone, sole Jewish state as a racist monstrosity.

The Shalit Debate 

When Gilad Shalit was finally released from his Hamas dungeon - looking gaunt and pale and like nothing so much as an Auschwitz survivor - Jewish Israelis were ecstatic.  From what I am told, virtually the entire country came together as one in celebration of Gilad's freedom and in welcoming him back home.

That welcoming, however, came at a ridiculous cost.  In order to secure Shalit's freedom Hamas demanded the release of 1,027 "Palestinian security prisoners" as David Horovitz calls them over at the Times of Israel.

Horovitz, the editor-in-chief of that newspaper, has an article entitled, Israel cannot countenance another Shalit deal.  He writes:

It should have been clear at the time, and it is undoubtedly clearer now, that the Shalit deal was a mistake. For all the profound empathy with the captured soldier and his family — for all that every other Israeli family saw him as their potential son, their potential kidnap victim, on whose behalf they would shout from every rooftop to demand that any price be paid for his release — the cost was unconscionable. In the starkest terms, the brutal, grisly fact is that many more Israelis have died and will die because of the price that Israel so humanely paid to ensure that Gilad Shalit came home.

I felt bad for Gilad Shalit when he was sitting in whatever Hamas hell-hole that they kept him in in Gaza, but to be at the center of a national debate in which people argue about whether or not your release was worth it to the country must be excruciating in its own special way.

Ultimately however - and with all apologies to Gilad and his family - Horovitz is right.

In the United States, as up until recently a lifelong Democrat, I opposed the death penalty.  However, Israel is in an entirely different situation and it simply cannot continue with this merry-go-round of terrorist capture-and-release.  Israel needs capital punishment for murder and life imprisonment, with no possibility for release, for attempted murder.  {That, by the way, should include throwing rocks at moving vehicles which has, in fact, resulted in the death of any number of people over the years.}

Instead of releasing terrorists from Israeli prisons because Hamas managed to snatch a couple of Israelis, why not make Hamas pay in an exceedingly painful way for the kidnapping, itself?

Sitting upon my little perch in the Oakland hills, I am in no position to make specific recommendations about just what kind of punishment Hamas should receive when they harm Israeli citizens, but I have no doubt that the IDF is just chock-full of creative people who would have all sorts of interesting ideas on the matter.

Say "Good-Bye" to the Democrats

Michael L.

Can one be considered supportive of the Jewish people if one is hostile to the Jewish state?

I certainly would not think so, but I would bet that more and more Democrats think that way.

Writing in the Times of Israel, David Horovitz tells us:

Three quarters of highly educated, high income, publicly active US Democrats — the so-called “opinion elites” — believe Israel has too much influence on US foreign policy, almost half of them consider Israel to be a racist country, and fewer than half of them believe that Israel wants peace with its neighbors. These are among the findings of a new survey carried out by US political consultant Frank Luntz.

Detailing the survey results to The Times of Israel on Sunday, Luntz called the findings “a disaster” for Israel. He summed them up by saying that the Democratic opinion elites are converting to the Palestinians, and “Israel can no longer claim to have the bipartisan support of America.”

Israel is the only country on the entire planet that cannot coax the United States into recognizing its capital, yet somehow Israel is said to have too much influence on US foreign policy.

I have been arguing for years that the Progressive-Left and the Democratic Party have betrayed their Jewish constituency through accepting the BDS movement as part of the larger coalition.  It would be something akin to telling black people that if they wish to remain Democrats than they will just simply have to get used to the fact that the Ku Klux Klan has a seat at the Democratic Party table.

The movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel has nothing to do with peace.  BDS has nothing to do with social justice or universal human rights and everything to do with the Palestinian-Arab determination to weaken, undermine, and eventually eliminate Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people.

76% of Democrats think that Israel (i.e., the Jews of Israel) have too much influence on American foreign policy.  76%!

47% of Democrats - almost half! - think that Israel is a racist country, whereas only about 13% of Republicans think so.

88% of Republicans understand that Israel wants to live in peace, but only 48% of Democrats understand this.

This polling data was put together by Republican pollster Frank Luntz who I remember very clearly as a regular FOX News guy during the Bush II years.  This will incline some people to dismiss the numbers, but they are certainly consistent with my own experience as an activist and writer.

Unlike Luntz, however, I do not think that these findings represent a "disaster."

The Democratic Party has enjoyed the blind loyalty of American Jews for far too long.

If American Jews want bi-partisan support for Israel then we need to do a better job supporting both political parties.  The Republicans support Israel and the Jews despite the fact that most American Jews detest the Republican Party.  But Jews are funny that way.  For example, we have no better friends on the planet then Evangelical Christians, yet we tend to despise Evangelicals.

It makes me wonder if diaspora Jews, as a whole, do not suffer from some form of collective Stockholm Syndrome?  We donate time and money and blood and sweat to those who do little more than perpetually kick us in the head, while those who actually do support us, we disdain.

There is something fundamentally wrong with this.  We should not be like Barack Obama.  That is, we should support our friends and oppose our enemies.  This is what I like to think of as a little something called "normal."  Others might term it "common sense," but whatever you call it, it is in short supply among diaspora Jews.

There are those who claim that Evangelical support for Israel is only out of some malicious post-Apocalyptic End-of-Days scenario in which Jesus will return and show Adolph Hitler and the Catholic Church - to paraphrase Pat Condell - just how Jews should really be dealt with.  I think that the people who believe this of Evangelicals are fundamentally bigots.  They are assigning evil, essentially, to millions of their fellow Americans for no other reason then that they disagree with their political views.

It may very well be that for some Evangelicals support for Israel is, indeed, out of some hysterical theocratic nightmare drama, but for many, many others it is because the Bible is their book along with the New Testament.  The place names of towns throughout the United States are directly out of the Hebrew Bible.  Their entire way of being - for better or for worse - is heavily derived, ultimately, from Jewish theological traditions.

And then, of course, there is Genesis 12:3 which, in the King James Bible, reads as follows:

And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

For millions upon millions of devout American Christians, this is why they support Israel.

They recognize and honor the fact that their own spiritual-religious heritage points to the Holy Land, the Land of the Jews.

If the Democrats wish to turn their backs on the Jews for moral reasons, no less, then let them do so.

As long as I am paraphrasing, let me mangle a little Gloria Steinem:

The Jews need the Democratic Party like a fish needs a bicycle.

I, for one, believe in supporting our friends, not our enemies.  Furthermore, it is only through such support that we can ever hope to influence, and in some measure reform, conservative political elements in the United States, or the West, more generally.

I am not a Republican.  Not yet, anyway.  However, given the general disdain of the Democratic Party for the Jewish State of Israel, it takes a special type of Jew to continue to worship at that altar.

Some might even say that it is a form of idolatry.

American-Left Politically-Correct Chicken-Shit

Michael L.

There is a moral disconnect between western-left opposition to racism, since the end of World War II, and its general disdain for the lone, sole Jewish state of Israel.

For most "liberals" or "leftists" or "progressives," depending on how one defines such terms, this disconnect is veiled and, therefore, sometimes difficult to see.

One way to put a spot-light on it, however, is to note the negative attention that Israel receives from the western press versus the degree and quality of attention that it gives to countries like Syria or Iraq or Sudan or Congo or Saudi Arabia or North Korea.  The press knows very well that while about two thousand Arabs were killed by Israel in its operation against Hamas in Gaza last summer, that hundreds of thousands of Arabs have been killed, and millions displaced, in Syria within the just the last two years alone.

The number of war dead in Syria, in fact, already far outstrips - by perhaps four-fold - the entire number of dead in the Arab-Israel conflict since 1948, which amounts to about fifty thousand dead, total.  About two-thirds Arab and one-third Jewish.

The fact that the western-left, and the universities, and the UN, and the EU, and the Obama administration focus their disdain on Israel and not on, say, Syria, gives away the lie.

They say that Israel is abusing the local Arab population, yet, somehow, they do not seem to much care about abused Arabs who live anywhere else.

It tells us very clearly that this is a sucker's game and Jews are the suckers.

Israel is propped up, over and over again, to be socked in the mouth by the "human rights" community.

Yet the human rights community - those who stridently and self-righteously call for "social justice" - are blatant hypocrites who care about no such thing.  It is very sad, in fact.  I grew up believing that if an organization had the word "justice" or "peace" directly within the name of the organization that it probably stood for justice or peace.

This is not the case... if it ever was.

The fact of the matter is that if the "human rights community" honestly cared about social justice and universal human rights then it would care far more about Islamic State atrocities than the efforts of six million Jews to protect themselves in that part of the world.

That so many concerned "liberal" non-Jews excoriate Israel tells us that at the heart of western-left "liberalism" is a bigoted worm, eating away at the very soul of the movement, that intends to do Jewish people harm.

What to look for from the candidates (cont.)

Sar Shalom

In my previous post about the presidential race, I wrote about what messages the presidential candidates should promote irrespective of what policies they would implement if elected. This post will look at what we can expect in the way of policy from whoever get elected. However, looking directly at what any candidate would do if elected is unlikely to be feasible because the candidates are unlikely to say anything more than that they would support Israel and may or may not include work towards a two-state solution. This type of pledge is so banal in checking off key constituencies that it tells us nothing about what any candidate would do if elected.

Yet, even without specifying exact policies or how hard they would push for a peace process, there is something which would provide a clue to the parameters bounding their potential policy: their narrative. For instance, if a candidate's justification for Israel's existence starts at Wannsee and ends at V-E Day, that candidate's sympathy for Jewish connection to any part of Jordan's 1949-conquest would probably be different than if the justification stems from 13 centuries of the Islamic equivalent of Jim Crow. Similarly, if the plight of the Palestinians is compared to that of the Kurds today or of the Jews until 1948, it would create more justification to push for their maximalist aims than if their plight is compared to that of the Hutus in post-genocide Rwanda.

While the candidates are unlikely to address the issue in such terms on their own, they would also have less reason to evade questions about the narrative than they would questions like, "Under what circumstances would you withhold your Security Council veto in protection of Israel?" Any chance of the Jewish media prodding in that direction?

Michael Oren Names a Villain

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at the Elder of Ziyon, Jews Down Under, and the Jewish Press.}

Former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, has recently published his highly anticipated memoir, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide.

In the weeks and months leading up to the publication much chatter arose suggesting that Oren primarily blamed US President Barack Obama for the deterioration of US-Israeli relations during Obama's tenure.  Oren's recent articles in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and Foreign Policy raised very serious concerns about Obama's foreign policy competency and his friendliness toward America's foremost ally in the Middle East, the Jewish State of Israel.

Those articles raised expectations concerning the book.

Therefore, many people are asking themselves "who is the villain?"

The Primary Question

Over the years, Barack Obama has nurtured an animosity among pro-Israel / pro-Jewish people throughout the world for his support of political Islam and his apparent eagerness to welcome a nuclear-armed Iran as a strategic partner to the United States... despite the fact that Iran is a Muslim-authoritarian theocracy that likes to hang Gay people from cranes.

Many of us who follow the conflicts in the Middle East want to know why Obama supports the Muslim Brotherhood and the forthcoming Iranian bomb?

As Ambassador to the United States, Oren is used to fielding all sorts of questions concerning Israel.  One question that he found interesting, and I paraphrase, is this:

Is it easier to explain Americans to Israelis or Israel to Americans?  

He suggests that it is much harder to explain America - or, at least, the current American president - to Israelis than the other way around.

For Israelis, but also for many alert diaspora Jews, Obama's support for the Muslim Brotherhood is alarming and unfathomable given the fact that the Brotherhood is the parent organization of both Hamas and al-Qaeda and it called for the conquest of Jerusalem during Muhammad Morsi campaign rallies.

The Muslim Brotherhood is, in fact, a genocidal organization because it contemplates a second Holocaust against the Jews of the Middle East, via the conquest of Israel, and it supported Nazi Germany and the Nazi cause during, and after, World War II.

Thus, Oren writes:

"Most challenging to explain to Israelis was Obama's support for Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.  Contrary to the assurances I had received that the administration would not engage the Isamist movement, the State Department formally initiated ties with Brotherhood leaders in January 2012.  Six months ater, after the election of the movement's leaders, Mohammed Morsi, to the presidency - by just over 51 percent of th vote - those contracts became an embrace."

This is a question that concerned Jews - aside from the ideologically blinkered - have been grappling with for years.  Although Obama's supporters, and particularly his Jewish supporters, refuse to acknowledge the obvious, the fact remains that the President of the United States supports a movement - political Islam - that oppresses women, is chasing Christians out of the Middle East, despises Gay people, is destroying antiquities, and screams from the hilltops for the blood of the Jews.

The fundamental question that Oren seeks to answer is, how is this possible?

The Cairo Speech of 2009

Whether or not the Cairo speech is the most important speech in the career of Barack Obama, it is the one wherein he endeavored to "reset" the American relationship to the Islamic world... as if there is any such monolith.

Concerning the speech, Oren writes:

More passionately than ever, he described his personal connections with Muslims and his conviction that "Islam is part of America."  He reiterated his vision of a new era of understanding between the United States and Muslims based on "mutual interests and respect" and the shared American and Quranic values of "justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings."

Oren suggests that if you wish to understand Obama's foreign policy in regards the Middle East then the Cairo speech is key.  Unlike President George W. Bush, Oren claims that Obama was intent on supporting authentic, democratically-elected Muslim leadership.  Whereas Bush hoped to impose democracy, Muslim or otherwise, onto the Arab-Muslim Middle East, Obama was intent on taking what he considered a more "enlightened" and respectful approach grounded in his education at the feet of post-colonial professors such as Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi in places like Columbia University and Harvard.

The events around the Cairo speech presaged what was to come.  Over Hosni Mubarak's objections, Obama invited the Muslim Brotherhood to the speech despite the fact that the Brotherhood has generally been considered an enemy of Egyptian governments since the 1920s.  However, Mubarak represented old-school Cold War-style Arab-Nationalist dictatorships of the sort that Obama opposes in contradistinction to the new-school democratically elected "authentic" Islamists which Obama supports.

While opposing secular dictatorships is certainly within the liberal tradition, if Obama is a liberal and liberals support freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and social justice, then why does Barack Obama support the Ayatollahs and the Brotherhood?

The answer, according to Oren, is that both are seen by the president as representing authentic expressions of Muslim democracy.  Many Christian Copts may have been kept from voting at the point of a rifle by Brotherhood members and Iran's "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Khamenei, was not democratically elected and, in fact, was a product of the anti-American 1979 revolution. Nonetheless, according to Oren, Obama concluded that they represent the true democratic will of the Muslim world, along with other milder Islamists like Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

The Post-Colonialists

Obama's instincts are not his alone.

The Cairo speech is an expression of American post-colonialism as derived from an important strand of western academia typified by the late professor of literary criticism, Edward Said, and historian Rashid Khalidi, among others.  

Obama grew up in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and through the decay of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States toward the end of the twentieth-century.  He attended university at a time when veterans of both those fights held influence and tenureship throughout the Western academe and who generally looked upon American and Western influence throughout the non-western world as one of imperialism, racism, and theft of natural resources.

Oren says this:

Their ideas found fullest expression in Orientalism, a book published in 1978 by Edward Said, a Columbia literary critic and spokesman for the Palestinian cause.  Said denounced Middle East experts - the Orientalists - as "racist, imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentic," and accused them of abetting the region's conquests by the West.  Only by identifying "wholeheartedly with the Arabs" and becoming "genuinely engaged and sympathetic... to the Islamic world" could these scholars redeem themselves.  They had to shun traditional Middle Eastern professors such as Bernard Lewis and reject Israel, which Said maligned as the ultimate Orientalist project.

Thus according to Said and any number of currently working academics - including Jewish ones who claim to be pro-Israel - Israel represents a western, racist imperial intrusion onto the land of other people.

So, really, just who is the villain here?

The Villain

If anyone intends to use Oren's book to castigate or malign the Obama administration there is plenty of material here to mine.

Do not be shy.  Go right ahead.

I do not need to draw bullet points, just go into the index and choose the pet peeve of your choice.

{Mine is the apology to Erdogan which Oren actually approved of.}

An important truth of this book, however, is that while Oren is unsurprisingly kinder to Benjamin Netanyahu than he is to Barack Obama, he is also more than fair to Barack Obama.  This is not a book intended to smear anyone.  Oren is a well-respected historian and I, as someone who follows the conflict closely, found his portrayal of his central characters, including himself, to be decent.

Obama is not a villain in this treatment because the writer, in terms of Obama versus Netanyahu, is not dealing in Good Guys versus Bad Guys.  He is doing his best to be fair while, simultaneously, keeping an eye on his own political future, in the coming years, within Israel as a Knesset member with the moderate Kulanu party.

If there is a villain in Oren's story it is not Barack Obama nor, obviously, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The real villain is the news media.

Again and again throughout the book Oren castigates the news media for distorting the truth and Matti Friedman's important contribution to this subject did not go beneath notice.

Oren writes:

Israel sells.  Arabs massacring Arabs in, say, Syria is a footnote, while a Palestinian child shot by Israeli soldiers is a scoop.  The racist undertones are clear but the reality, irrefutable.  And no one understands it better than the terrorists, Hamas and Hezbollah.  If they fire at Israeli civilians, Irael will retaliate and invariably kill the Palestnian and Lebanese civilians behind whom the terrorists hide.  The pictures will be gruesome, and if insufficiently so, the terrorists will manufacture them, exhuming bodies from morgues and graveyards.  The staged images, picked up by editorless blogs proliferate on the Internet.  Many will be reproduced, uncritically, by the mainstream press.

Oren has many significant criticisms of Barack Obama and understands his flaws as a product of western post-colonial ideology which, in my view, is correct.  The problem is not that Obama has malice toward Israel, but that he honestly believes that the Arabs have been abused under Israel due to circumstances that neither could well control.  Obama is sympathetic toward the plight of the Jews in the Middle East, but he is also sympathetic toward the local Arab population who he believes have been displaced and occupied.

The End

Ultimately the book is a terrific read because, throughout, Oren is on the run and he is a man with a mission and that mission is defending and protecting the Jewish State of Israel.  His take on Barack Obama, however, is fair.  He gives Obama credit where credit is due, but he also criticizes Obama in an honest and straight-forward manner, which is why this highly sensitive administration takes such objections to the book.

The main criticism that he has of Obama is that he is an ideologically-driven president who simply does not understand the Middle East.  Obama hoped that an unclenched American hand could meet an unclenched Islamic hand.  This is an admirable goal for any president of the United States, but the only happy faces that Obama is finding in the Middle East are in the faces of the Iranian ayatollahs.

And that is not good for either Israel or the United States or Europe or the Sunni-Arab states.

No one is happy with the Iran nuke deal aside from the Iranians, Barack Obama, and some within the Democratic Party.

Oren certainly is not.