Israel Thrives

The Erosion of the Antisemitic Taboo-Updated

2012-01-27T13:17:00.000-08:00

Doodad

Those of us who have been paying attention know that there have been a lot of comments from well known people on the left who should know better, which are close to or downright antisemitic. Worse, no one in the mainstream media is calling anyone on these remarks. Lee Smith asks:

"Why is it that no one bats an eyelash when a former United States national security adviser says, “The Israelis have lot of influence with Congress, and in some cases they are able to buy influence”........Why didn’t his Salon interviewer call him out on it? Why hasn’t anyone else? Where are the American elites—the intellectuals, writers, policymakers, and political activists—when it comes to vigilance against anti-Semitism?"

Smith goes on to list some of the things being said and who is saying them. I suggest you read the whole informative article. He really hits the nail when he says:

"The root of this problem is not a twentysomething blogger writing something stupid on the Internet. Rather, it is that anti-Semitic rhetoric and logic are being protected and justified by those who are supposed to be gatekeepers. These people, often in the service of their larger political aims, are willing to apologize for or ignore what is obviously Jew-baiting and Jew-hatred."

"In service of their larger political aims," for sure but what will they do when they allow that genie all the way out of the bottle? It will be almost impossible to put it back in. I suspect many on the left don't want it put back in given its power in the blame Israel game. The cowardly gatekeepers? Your guess is as good as mine.

UPDATE

Joel B Pollak cites Lee's article and another:

“Israel Firster” has a nasty anti-Semitic pedigree, one that many Jews will intuitively understand without knowing its specific history. It turns out white supremacist Willis Carto was reportedly the first to use it, and David Duke popularized it through his propaganda network. And yet [Media Matters' M.J.] Rosenberg and others actually claim they’re using it to stimulate “debate,” rather than effectively mirroring the tactics of some of the people they criticize…The attempt to kosherize “Israel Firster” is an ugly rationalization."

Spencer Ackerman opines:"Some on the left have recently taken to using the term "Israel Firster" and similar rhetoric to suggest that some conservative American Jewish reporters, pundits, and policymakers are more concerned with the interests of the Jewish state than those of the United States. Last week, for example, Salon's Glenn Greenwald asked Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg about any loyalty oaths to Israel Goldberg took when he served in the IDF during the early 1990s. (On Tuesday, writer Max Blumenthal used a gross phrase to describe Goldberg: "former Israeli prison guard.") The obvious implication is that Goldberg's true loyalty is to Israel, not the United States. For months, M.J. Rosenberg of Media Matters, the progressive media watchdog group, has been throwing around the term "Israel Firster" to describe conservatives he disagrees with. One recent Tweet singled out my friend Eli Lake, a reporter for Newsweek: "Lake supports #Israel line 100% of the time, always Israel first over U.S." That's quite mild compared to some of the others."

Goldberg reveals an email he recieved after the prison guard comment:

"You can tried to hide your past but it's not working. We all know now that you worked in a concentration camp for Palestinians."

What a sad state of affairs.

For Old Friends and Old Days:

2012-01-26T22:52:00.001-08:00

Karam

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The Fresno Zionist Has a Clear View

2012-01-26T13:12:00.000-08:00

Karam

"Israel will attack Iran"

by FresnoZionist:

In today’s New York Times is a long article by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman entitled “Will Israel Attack Iran?” It is the best-informed article I’ve read on this subject yet. It is also rational and fair — there are no villains other than the Iranian regime. It is a must-read.

Bergman has interviewed Ehud Barak and several former Mossad heads. He includes a fascinating account of the various covert actions undertaken by the Mossad and perhaps other agencies like the CIA, to delay the Iranian weapons program.

There are voices in Israel that say that an attack on Iran would be ineffective or the Iranian reaction so damaging as to make even an effective attack a Pyrrhic victory at best. But the position of Defense Minister Barak and PM Netanyahu seems to be that a nuclear Iran is inconsistent with the continued existence of the state. They believe that there are only a few months in which to stop it, before the program has advanced to the point that an Israeli military intervention will be impossible.

They would like to see Iran stopped peacefully, perhaps a result of economic pressure. The next best option would be an American military operation. But the point of no return is farther off for the US than for Israel, due to its greater firepower and, to be honest, a lesser degree of concern. Iran is expected to hide what it is doing, to pretend to negotiate seriously, to put all the pieces of the puzzle in place except for the final assembly of a weapon. But at some point, Israel’s red line will be reached. If the US has not acted by then, Israel will be forced do so. Bergman expects that point to be reached sometime this year, before US elections.

All this makes sense to me. It is almost impossible to believe that the US will launch an attack on Iran in the next few months. I can’t see any advantage for the administration, which would be accused of pulling a “wag the dog” maneuver. The resulting oil shock, as well as possible retaliation against American troops in the region, or even terrorism against the US, would be blamed on Obama at the worst possible time.

But this makes an Israeli strike almost a certainty.

Israel’s intention seems to be to inform Washington at the last possible moment, in order to show respect for its most important ally, but not give it enough time to stop it. The US, on the other hand, will try to find out when Israel is preparing to strike. Both President Obama and Israeli officials have pointed to the high level of military cooperation between Israel and the US as a sign of a coincidence of objectives between the countries. But there may be other reasons it is advantageous for the US to be in close contact with the Israeli military. Some analysts have suggested that a joint military exercise planned for April was canceled due to Israeli reluctance to have 9,000 US personnel in the country at this time.

There is no question that the Obama Administration would like any action to be delayed until after the election. The issue is how far the US will go to prevent an Israeli attack before then. Opinions range from “not past diplomatic pressure” to “we will shoot at Israeli planes.”

I’m going to go with the first option. While I think the administration would rather avoid the political risks of doing the job itself, the goals of the US and its very influential conservative Sunni Arab allies would best be served by keeping Iran from going nuclear. It would be convenient for the administration to have Iran defanged, while Israel can be blamed for any unpleasant side effects.

Israel will probably find itself fighting Hizballah and Hamas, either preemptively or after they are unleashed by Iran in retaliation. There may even be attacks from other Palestinian elements who take advantage of the situation. At this point, we can assume that the US, UN, Europe, Russia, etc. will ratchet up the pressure on Israel in the name of ‘peace’, but actually to prevent any real change in the status quo. I hope Israel will be able to resist this pressure and finally crush the terrorist militias.

So there it is. I don’t blame my Israeli friends and relations who look ahead with trepidation toward what may become Israel’s most damaging war. In fact I understand those who say that there is no future in fighting one war after another, ad infinitum. I understand that a lasting peace would be far better than winning a series of wars, with their unavoidable human and material cost.

Of course I also understand that there is only one way to get this lasting peace, and that is by defeating the enemy soundly enough and often enough that they will understand that peace is to their advantage as well.

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Occupy Aipac Morons

2012-01-25T17:26:00.000-08:00

Doodad

Had to happen sooner or later, didn't it? You just know that after all the antisemitic stuff coming out of the Occupy This and That movement that Aipac would be a target and with that would come the antisemitic tropes and lies.

" Right now AIPAC is trying to drag us into a disastrous conflict with Iran, just as they had pushed for the Iraq war."

Organized by CodePink and a bunch of the other usual suspects, this hateorama promises to be just another antisemitic outpouring from the left who now seems to believe that the "1%," can be just whoever they hate.

The Occupy movement received little if any criticism from most progressives so far. I wonder how they will react to this antisemitic hatefest?

Obama Administration Attacks Israel at the UN

2012-01-25T10:27:00.000-08:00

{A Tip 'O the Kippa to Doodad.}

Karam

WASHINGTON – The US, Britain and Germany leveled harsh criticism at Israel's settlement construction policy on Tuesday.

During a Security Council session, US Ambassador Susan Rice urged Israel to halt all settlement construction in the West Bank and work to quell settler violence against Palestinians. She also expressed concern over the humanitarian situation in Gaza...

British Ambassador to the UN Mark Grant accused Israel of employing violence in the territories and called on the Jewish state to halt all settlement construction, including in east Jerusalem.

Germany's UN ambassador, Peter Wittig, said Israel was attempting to detach east Jerusalem from the West Bank, a move he claimed would make the establishment of a Palestinian state impossible.

All this racist yammering about Jews building housing for themselves in Jewish neighborhoods of Judea is a disgrace. This is Obama's doing. By harping on where Jews may, or may not, be allowed to live on that land Obama has poisoned the well entirely. No other US president has undermined the potential for a negotiated conclusion of hostilities by imposing "total settlement freeze" as a precondition for negotiations. That is pure Obama.

But just because Jews are living on historically Jewish land in what Jordan dubbed "the West Bank" it doesn't mean that Palestinian dictator Mahmoud Abbas cannot sit down with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and draw a line on a map. Thankfully the Israelis, themselves, do not seem to be suffering from the kind of racist delusions that are motivating the diplomatic corps in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain, as validated by the American president.

In his response to the criticism, Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor told the Security Council, "The primary obstacle to peace is not settlements. The primary obstacle to peace is the so-called 'claim (right) of return.' Let me repeat that: the major hurdle to peace is the Palestinian’s insistence on the so-called 'claim of return.'"

"You will never hear Palestinian leaders say 'two states for two peoples'. If you ever hear them say 'two states for two peoples', please phone my office immediately. Call me 'collect' in the event of such an unprecedented occurrence," he said.

"You won’t hear them say 'two states for two peoples' because today the Palestinian leadership is calling for an independent Palestinian state, but insists that its people return to the Jewish state. This would mean the destruction of Israel.

It is, in my opinion, long past time for Israel to stop dragging its feet and declare its final eastern borders and remove the IDF behind those borders. Furthermore, the Palestinians have forfeited any claims on Jerusalem by refusing to accept a state for themselves in peace next to Israel. That being the case, Israel should make it clear to the world that the Jews will not accept the division of our ancient capital city.

Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish state.

If the Palestinians cannot bring themselves to accept a Jewish country on the land where Jews come from then they can have lovely Ramallah as their capital.

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Do Not Speak Of It In Public.

2012-01-24T08:35:00.000-08:00

Karam

Barry Rubin writes:

Do not speak of it in public. Do not expect any Israeli official to admit it. But Israel is facing an issue unlike anything it has had to deal with during the past 50 years: It cannot depend on the United States.

The reason that Israel cannot depend on the United States is the very same reason that Jews, as a group, cannot depend on the western progressive-left. It is because the progressive movement, as well as the Obama administration, either buries its head in the sand in regards genocidal Muslim anti-Semitism or actively helps the Jihad, as we saw with the flotilla nonsense.

The difficulty with Obama is that his entire strategy in the Middle East is contrary to Israeli interests, except for putting some sanction’ pressure on Iran regarding its nuclear weapons’ program. The greatest threat to Israel today is the rise of radical Islamist regimes. Here is how Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh puts it:

"The Palestinian cause is winning. With the Muslim Brotherhood part of the government [in Egypt], they [the Egyptians] will not besiege Gaza. They will not arrest Palestinians. They will not give cover to Israel to launch a war....Israel is disturbed by this. It knows the strategic environment is changing. Iran is an enemy. Relations are deteriorating with Turkey. With Egypt, they are really cold. Israel is in a security situation they have never been in before."

But neither the progressive movement, nor the Obama administration, view the rise of radical Islam as a problem. Sure, Islamists want to murder the Jews, but just why should Barack Obama or the progressive movement care about that? The fact of the matter is that they do not care in the least, which is why it doesn't bother them that the Muslim Brotherhood has taken over Egypt and radical Islam is spreading throughout the region. In fact, under the Obama administration it is verboten to even name the problem which, of course, means that you cannot really discuss it and thus even begin to solve it.

Here is where the problem with the United States comes in. Obama does not really view this trend as a threat. He spent the first half of his term engaging with Iran and its ally Syria. Obama and his administration regards the Islamists as people who are either already moderate or are likely to become so by governing.

Since neither progressives, nor the president of the United States, have any intention of honestly facing the rise of the Jihad they simply redefine it as "moderate" and then go about either helping it or ignoring it.

To put it bluntly, the U.S. government does not even recognize the existence of the number-one threat to Israel.

And to make matters worse, the government that Obama looks to for advice, guidance, and interpretation of the region is not Israel but the Islamist regime in Turkey. That government’s sharp turn to a highly emotional anti-Israel policy has not cost it anything at all in terms of its relations with the White House, something that would have been unthinkable under any previous president.

This is because the Obama White House is simply no friend to the Jewish state and therefore cannot be considered a friend to the Jewish people. Obama has yet to visit Israel as president and even told a collected group of American Jewish leaders that they needed to talk to their friends in Israel and encourage them to explore their souls to see if they truly desire peace. Can you imagine? Barack Obama tells the world that Jewish people are not self-reflective enough and that's why there is no peace? What a horrendous and insulting thing for anyone to say, yet Barack Obama's dwindling number of Jewish supporters seem like they will forgive him anything.

Well, you know how love is.

That is why Israel, as well as the Middle East generally, is going to be an important issue in this year’s presidential election. To preserve relations with the United States, Israeli leaders will neither do nor say anything about that contest. Yet nothing could be more obvious than that Obama’s reelection would be extremely damaging for Israel’ security.

Indeed. If Obama is reelected there will be nothing whatsoever to hold his worst inclinations in check.

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The Evolution of the Oldest Hatred

2012-01-23T16:36:00.000-08:00

Karam

Editor's Note - Some time ago the FresnoZionist agreed to allow me to publish his work here so long as I credited him and linked back to his fine blog. I very much like this most recent piece and was actually at the anti-war rally, in Civic Center, San Francisco, where the photo above was taken a few years ago.

At the time I still considered myself a Lib Dem.

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Somebody asked me to expand on the remark I made Friday, when I said,

Today the impulse to hate — at least as it affects the more sophisticated Americans and Europeans — is directed at the concrete national expression of the Jewish people, the state of Israel, rather than at ‘the Jews’ … Irrational, obsessive hate is irrational, obsessive hate. Only the object is different. And the bloody results can be the same.

People that hate Israel every bit as viciously as the Nazis hated Jews are at pains to distinguish their hatred from antisemitism, because although anti-Zionism is acceptable, antisemitism is not.

Today, there is an absolute taboo in educated Western society against racist or ‘prejudiced’ speech. Even some words (or ones that sound like them) are absolutely forbidden. Do you recall this incident?

On January 15, 1999, David Howard, a white aide to Anthony A. Williams, the black mayor of Washington, D.C., used “niggardly” in reference to a budget. This apparently upset one of his black colleagues (identified by Howard as Marshall Brown), who interpreted it as a racial slur and lodged a complaint. As a result, on January 25 Howard tendered his resignation, and Williams accepted it [he was later offered another position] … Howard felt that he had learned from the situation. “I used to think it would be great if we could all be colorblind. That’s naïve, especially for a white person, because a white person can’t afford to be colorblind. They don’t have to think about race every day. An African American does.” — Wikipedia

The Wikipedia article lists several similar incidents. Of course the word ‘niggardly’ has nothing to do with the famous ‘n-word’, in etymology or meaning – it comes from A Swedish dialect word that means ‘stingy’ or ‘miserly’. I mention this to illustrate how incredibly touchy we can be about this kind of taboo.

How did we get here? In America, the fact of slavery followed by institutionalized racism and the struggle to end it was especially traumatic, in different ways, for both whites and African-Americans. Similarly, the Holocaust created a sensitivity to antisemitism in Europe and America. Explicit Jew-hatred is almost never expressed by the educated classes in the US and Europe (although it is quite common in the Muslim world — a recent poll shows that only 2% of Egyptians have a favorable opinion of Jews).

It is almost unthinkable that a university teacher today would delver a lecture accusing international Jewry of conspiring to take over the world, or saying that Jews have inordinate control over the US government. On the other hand, the equally false propositions that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian Arabs (despite the fact that their number has grown steadily since Israel was established), and that US policy is warped by a powerful ‘Israel lobby’ are heard in classrooms every day.

Especially in left-wing circles, where political correctness is carefully enforced and nobody would dream of accusing Jews of putting Christian blood in their matzot, it is considered perfectly legitimate to accuse Israel of deliberately shooting Palestinian children, or of killing Arabs to steal their organs, on the strength of unsubstantiated statements made by Israel’s enemies — including those who themselves regularly practice murderous terrorism! But that doesn’t matter, because actual evidence is not required when the hatred is irrational.

We find irrational, obsessive and extreme hatred of the Jewish state everywhere on the Left, particularly among Jews. One example is here.

My thesis is that extreme Israel-hatred in this context is simply an evolved form of antisemitism. Let me explain.

Antisemitism is a meme.

A meme is “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.”A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures. — Wikipedia

While it’s possible to take analogies too far, the biological metaphor seems spot-on in this case. Like a living species, traditional antisemitism developed throughout European cultures (and spread to others) until 1945, because the environment was favorable to it. In fact, one can see the Holocaust as the logical result of this development, the final flowering of it.

But like biological population explosions in which a species’ excessive expansion can change its environment in ways that make it less hospitable to the organism, the horrors of WWII changed the cultural environment in which the antisemitism meme lives. At least among educated Westerners, a resistance to traditional Jew-hatred developed, and the meme was inhibited from reproducing there.

There were other reasons. I mentioned the trauma of white racism in America. An analogy was drawn between racism and antisemitism. A great amount of energy was directed towards extirpating all kinds of prejudice in our society. Political correctness developed, which helped suppress racism and antisemitism, but also has had other non-benign effects.

Unfortunately, like living creatures, memes have the ability to mutate and mutations that improve their ability to reproduce in a particular cultural environment will be strengthened by natural selection. So rather than dying out, the meme evolved. Jew-hatred became Israel-hatred. Instead of being directed at a group of people because of who or what they are, it was directed at the state that they created for themselves. The taboos against racism and prejudice were circumvented, because the meme could be presented as political opposition to a country rather than hate for a people.

Little else changed. The fundamental irrationality of traditional antisemitism, by which Jewish crimes and the evidence for them could simply be made up, remained. The ability of the antisemite to believe anything negative about the Jew no matter how outlandish, remained. The application of antisemitism to every area of human interaction — literature, music, sports, professions, etc., remained (consider academic boycotts, for example). The extreme vitriol that characterizes it, remained. And it appears that the ultimate goal — the destruction of the hated object — remains.

One way to see the connection between the Oldest Hatred and today’s attacks on Israel’s legitimacy is to note that what is being denied by Israel-haters today is that the Jewish people are a people, and they have a right of self-determination.

Keep this in mind the next time — and I’m sure there will be a next time, probably in the next few months — that there are massive anti-Israel demonstrations against the state of the Jewish people having the chutzpah to defend itself. Not much is new under the sun.

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The "Humanitarian Racism" of the Progressive-Left

2012-01-23T09:50:00.000-08:00

Karam

Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, has published an article on Y-Net entitled "Beware the humanitarian racist."

Gerstenfeld's thesis is one that we've spilled considerable pixels about in these parts. The fundamental idea is that "humanitarian racism," i.e., progressive-left racism, is of a different type than classical racism, which Gerstenfeld labels "ugly" racism. The ugly racist is the kind of mid-twentieth century racist who would have, for example, opposed the repeal of Jim Crow laws in the American south. The "humanitarian racist," however, operates differently. Like the "ugly racist" the "humanitarian racist" thinks that people of color are inferior to white people, but assigns responsibility for that inferiority to the behavior of white people, themselves.

Gerstenfeld writes:

The humanitarian racist’s conclusion differs, however, from that of the ugly racist. He or she considers that as the non-white or weak cannot be held responsible for their acts, one should look away as often as possible even if they commit major crimes. Ugly racists fortunately can no longer get articles published in mainstream media, but humanitarian racists unfortunately are welcomed by them.

The reason that progressives either perpetually ignore, or make excuses for, the genocidal anti-Semitism that gushes daily from the Islamic world is because the progressive movement is the most racist political movement in the west today. Progressive-left racism, or "humanitarian racism," is far more virulent on the left than is ugly racism on the right. Progressives like to think of themselves as morally superior to their right-wing contemporaries, but the truth of the matter is that the progressive movement is far more racist than is the conservative movement, but it is racism of a type that is considered acceptable within what we used to call "polite society."

When it comes to the world's lone Jewish state, Gerstenfeld writes:

Exposing humanitarian racists is neglected in the battle against the de-legitimization of Israel, although crucial. The success of the Palestinian narrative and its many lies in the Western world is, to a large extent, due to its continuous promotion by humanitarian racists. They present the Palestinians as victims only, referring as little as possible to the major crimes they perpetrate or support. In this way, the humanitarian racists have become supporters or allies of Palestinian terrorists, murder and genocide-promoters.

The reason that the "Palestinian narrative" is so pervasive on the left is because the left is absolutely crawling with "humanitarian racists." These people mean well, but they honestly believe that the Muslim world, 1.5 billion people, is so inferior to white people and so helpless in the face of white aggression that they can never be held responsible for even the most heinous crimes, such as strapping a suicide belt onto a youngster and sending him off to murder.

If a Palestinian cleric quotes the famous hadith about the necessity of Muslims killing Jews hiding behind trees, this is because "white people," in the form of the Israeli government, are oppressing the innocent "indigenous population" who must be supported even when they teach their children to hate and to kill.

The humanitarian racist worldview embodies many other distortions. If Arabs, for instance, cannot be held responsible for their criminal acts, others must be. The humanitarian racist thus has to look for scapegoats. That is why Israel is sometimes accused of the crimes the Palestinians committed.

The worst humanitarian racists on the progressive-left are undoubtedly the kind of anti-Semitic anti-Zionists that one finds crawling around places like Daily Kos. They think of themselves as morally superior to others and so superior to people of color, particularly Muslim and Arab people of color, that they hold them to no standards of human decency whatsoever.

Because the conservative right holds so closely to ideals of personal responsibility they avoided falling into this racist trap. The progressive-left, however, has embraced humanitarian racism to such an extent that it has become a defining feature of their worldview and politics.

There is a certain delicious irony, though, in the fact that the "anti-racist" left is considerably more racist than almost anyone else... even as they fling around unsubstantiated charges of racism in all directions like self-righteous confetti.

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The Hadith Made Me Do It.

2012-01-22T16:23:00.000-08:00

Doodad

"Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu Sunday called on Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein to open an investigation into Jerusalem Mufti Sheikh Muhammad Hussein for incitement after he was recorded quoting a passage by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Hadith that calls for the killing of Jews."These are grave words that the world needs to condemn," Netanyahu said...."

The Mufti's reply? He was just quoting the Islamic text.

"I can't change the Hadith,"

When will the world learn that this is what it is all about? They can't change the Hadiths; they can't change the Koran. But if you notice it and talk about it, even if they admit it, you are a racist. To Hell with that.

The Progressive-Left Betrayal of the Jewish People

2012-01-22T11:05:00.000-08:00

Karam

There are certain political realities that are so large that they fade into the background like wallpaper. One of the more obvious recent political realities that is doing so is the progressive-left betrayal of the Jewish people. The main argument, here, is that the progressive-left, as a movement, has betrayed its Jewish constituency through the acceptance of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism as part of that broader movement.

Since the more recent convulsions and rioting and revolution in the Arab world, foolishly labeled the "Arab Spring," progressives have gone on to justify the rise of political Islam (or the Radical Jihad) as democracy in action and therefore something that the west should welcome. The main beneficiary of this shake-up has been the Muslim Brotherhood which is now in the process of taking power in much of the region, particularly in Egypt.

Many on the progressive-left welcome the Muslim Brotherhood because, like Hamas (not to mention the Nazis), they gained power through democratic means. This, however, does not prevent the Brotherhood from being a virulently anti-Semitic and genocidal organization.

As Robert S. Wistrich (Professor of Modern History and Director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) writes:

In a sermon during Israel’s Cast Lead Operation in Gaza (9 January 2009), broadcast to millions on ‘al-Jazeera’ TV, he (Muslim Brotherhood leader, Yusuf al-Qaradawi) referred to the Jews as “treacherous aggressors,” a “profligate, cunning, arrogant band of people.” He fervently prayed to Allah to annihilate these oppressive, Jewish Zionist criminals. Not a single Jew, he declared, should be spared by the Almighty. “O Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.”13 A few weeks later, in a statement on ‘al-Jazeera’ TV (28 January 2009), the leading Sunni Muslim cleric in the world added the following gloss on Hitler and the Holocaust:

Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the Jews people who would punish them for their corruption... The last punishment was carried out by [Adolf] Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them—even though they exaggerated this issue—he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them... Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers.

That's the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, yet western progressives do not seem to mind the coming into power of his organization or political movement. Since Barack Obama has come into office political Islam went from being a heinously genocidal movement that controlled Iran, Lebanon, the Gaza strip and the Sudan to one that now controls, or is gaining control of, Iran, Lebanon, the Gaza strip, the Sudan, and Tunisia, Libya, Turkey, and Egypt, among other countries.

What we are currently witnessing is the most significant geo-political development since the fall of the Soviet Union and progressives are ignoring it entirely, despite the genocidally anti-Semitic nature of this movement. Calling this development the "Arab Spring" is something akin to calling the rise of Nazi Germany the "German Spring," about as cruel a misnomer as one can imagine.

As Wistrich notes:

If this is not genocidal anti-Semitic incitement, then the term has little meaning. The current supreme leader of the Brotherhood, Mohamed Budi, undoubtedly shares such views on Israel, Zionism, and the Jews. His advice in 2010 to the Mujahideen in Gaza to continue to “raise the banner of jihad against the Jews, [our] first and foremost enemies” was essentially echoing an undeviating gospel of hatred.

Yet we are to welcome this development in the name of the "blessings of liberty."

I say this is betrayal. It is a betrayal of the Jewish people by the progressive-left because the progressive movement is welcoming of these genocidal fascists.

Like Sheikh Qaradawi, the current leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood clearly believe that loathing of Jews and the destruction of Israel is mandated by God himself. Every Jew in the world is thereby designated an enemy within this ideology. Nor is it an accident that Qaradawi, like other Egyptian clerics, should quote an anti-Jewish saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad in a notorious hadith on the preconditions for the Day of Judgment. In his commentary, Qaradawi emphasized that the coming apocalyptic battle will not be “between Arabs and Zionists, or between Jews and Palestinians, or between Jews or anybody else.” His conclusion could not be more explicit. “ This battle will occur between the collective body of Muslims and the collective body of Jews, that is all Muslims and all Jews.”

This is what progressives are welcoming in the name of "democracy." It is this that president Obama welcomes when he calls the riots and revolutions something akin to the Revolution of '76 or the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s.

Since 1928, when Sheikh Hasan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brothers in Ismailiyah, the notion that Jews are by nature evil and can never peacefully co-exist with others has been axiomatic for the fundamentalist organization. An equally self-evident corollary is the denial of any possibility of Jewish self-rule (let alone a Jewish state) or even of civic equality with Muslims.

So, why in this world should Jewish people continue to support a political movement, the progressive movement, when it is so accepting of these fascists in the Middle East? Why are so many Jewish liberals so afraid to stand up for themselves?

With regard to Israel and the Jews, the fundamentalist attitude has never deviated during the past few decades, closely linked as it is to a truly paranoid fear of “Judaization”—often a synonym for secularism, westernization, liberal modernity, or “globalization.” Paradoxically, Brotherhood ideologues, despite their rabid anti-Westernism, have no problem in drawing liberally on non-Muslim sources for their radical anti-Semitism—whether it be the Russian Tsarist Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery, Henry Ford’s The International Jew, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, European antisemitic propaganda about Judeo-Masonic conspiracies, Christian anti-Talmudism, blood-libel slanders, or Western Holocaust denial.

The Muslim Brotherhood owes an ideological and historical debt to Nazi Germany, yet good, well-meaning, western liberals are welcoming the organization with open arms.

How this can be characterized as anything other than betrayal is beyond me.

Today's progressives are stretching the palm of friendship to the current iteration of Nazi ideology in the Arab world and, yet, they still expect our support? Ridiculous. It is long past time for Jews to drop this movement and see it for what it is. While claiming to stand for anti-racism and universal human rights, the progressive movement has thrown both those concepts into the garbage entirely.

The progressive-left stands for nothing and has sold the Jews down the river. The first thing to do now is simply acknowledge that fact.

You are betrayed.

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Islamists Secure Top Spot in Egypt Elections

2012-01-21T11:38:00.000-08:00

Karam

Muslim Brotherhood wins 38% share of seats in Egypt's first freely-elected parliament in decades. Hardline Islamist Al-Nour Party comes in second with 29% of seats...

Muslim Brotherhood's leader, Mohammed Badia, said on Friday that his party would honor the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, as long as the Jewish State does the same.

And, of course, as we learn in the comments, it's Israel's fault that Egypt is going fascist.

6. #2 The Question You Should Be Asking Is

How many people voted for the Muslim Brotherhood because of what Israel did to the people of Gaza during Operation Cast Lead while Mr. Mubarek stood idly by? or How many people voted for the Muslim Brotherhood because Mr. Mubarek was a sock puppet for the United States government, and by proxy, the wishes of the zionist Israeli government? or How many people voted for the Muslim Brotherhood because Mr. Murbarek was siphoning off million of dollars in US aid money for his own personal gain while millions of his people went to bed hungry at night?

World Citizen, the world (01.21.12)

Acknowledging a Mistake

2012-01-20T12:28:00.000-08:00

Karma

I recently stated that Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, referred to the Muslim Brotherhood as a "moderate" organization, but was told by one reader (Kane in Arizona) that he could not find any evidence to verify this claim.

Upon looking into it, myself, I cannot either. Apparently, I made a mistake and am willing to own up to it. In truth, I was probably thinking of Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, who foolishly said that the Muslim Brotherhood was "secular."

The context of the discussion was whether or not the Obama administration is validating and bolstering that organization and the political movement of which it is the foremost expression, i.e., Radical Islam.

The fact of the matter, as anyone who is paying attention knows, the Obama administration is validating and bolstering the Muslim Brotherhood, both directly and through validating political Islam, more generally, as the outcome of Arab democracy and, thus, intrinsically worthy of support... which, of course, it is no such thing.

Nonetheless, Mr. Holder apparently never said what I thought that he had.

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Death threats prompt Rushdie to cancel India visit

2012-01-20T11:25:00.000-08:00

Doodad

"Authorities warn author of 'Satanic Verses' that he is potential target of underworld assassins following threats of protests from Muslim groups.

JAIPUR - Salman Rushdie will not attend a literature festival in India after authorities warned the controversial author he was a potential target of assassins at the event, following threats of protests from Muslim groups at his planned appearance."

That stuff like this still goes on in 2012 speaks for itself.

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Israel Not An Ally?

2012-01-20T06:10:00.000-08:00

Doodad

Israel Matzav posts an interview with Obama wherein Israel seems not be rise to ally status. WTF?

"Our alliances with NATO, Japan, South Korea, our close military cooperation with countries like Israel have never been stronger. Our participation in multilateral organizations has been extremely effective. In the United Nations, not only do we have a voice, but we have been able to shape an agenda. And in the fastest-growing regions of the world in emerging markets in the Asia Pacific region, just to take one prominent example, countries are once again looking to the United States for leadership."

Developing an Argument

2012-01-19T10:37:00.000-08:00

Karam

This little blog is, rightfully, a modest blog.

What we are doing here, from my perspective, is simply developing an argument over time. No single entry, or "diary," is meant to be taken as definitive. They are all small bricks which, over time, are building the structure of an argument. The conclusion of this argument is that the progressive-left, as a movement, has betrayed its Jewish constituency and that the Obama administration ruined any possibility of a near-term conclusion of hostilities between the Arabs and the Jews in the Middle East, while validating Arab anti-Jewish racism.

That's the focus.

If I were to lay out what Doodad, Oldschool26, and myself have been discussing over the preceding months in the form of an outline, say for a book, it might look something like this:

Part One, The Progressive Movement:

Chapter 1: Anti-Semitic anti-Zionism

Misdiagnosing the Source of the Problem

Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Spreading of Anti-Semitism in the Arab World

The New Historians and Edward Said

Betrayal: The Mavi Marmara and the Red-Green Alliance

Chapter 2: The Denial of History and Ideological Silencing (Or, What You Can't Discuss):

Language and Propaganda

"Jesus Was the First Palestinian Shaheed"

Pallywood

Newt and the Social Construction of Palestinian National Identity

Chapter 3: The Palestinian Colonization of the Progressive Mind

Post-Modernity and Neo-Colonial Theory

The Oslo Syndrome

Friends as Enemies, Enemies as Friends

The Palestinian Narrative

Chapter 4: Embracing the Multicultural Ideal and the Betrayal of Universal Human Rights

The Betrayal of Universal Human Rights

The Betrayal of the Women of the Middle East

The Betrayal of the Gays of the Middle East

The Betrayal of the Jews of the Middle East

Part Two, Obama's Failures:

Chapter 5: Killing Oslo and Validating Arab anti-Jewish Racism

"Total Settlement Freeze"

Biden's Outrage and Hillary's Tongue-lashing

A Judenrein Palestinian State

Chapter 6: Encouraging the Jihad and Playing Ostrich

If Bush Says that it is Raining...

Chapter 7: Capitulating to Iranian Nukes

Conclusion: Moving On

Anthony Wiener and NY-09

Who Let the Jews Out? (Who? Who?)

In any case, we press ahead.

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Muslim Brotherhood Site Rife with Anti-Semitism

2012-01-18T21:13:00.000-08:00

Karam

The Arabic website of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is rife with anti- Semitic and anti-Israel content, according to a recent report by a USbased media monitoring group. (Jerusalem Post)

Yes, I could not be more shocked.

The report found that the Islamist group’s website, Ikhwanonline.com, regularly features articles denying the Holocaust and warning Muslims against the covetous and exploitative nature of the “Jewish character.” Other articles extol jihad and martyrdom, condemn Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and denounce negotiations as means for regaining lands lost by Islam.

Is it wrong of me to remind readers that this is the very movement, the Islamist Spring, that Barack Obama has extolled?

I know that some will argue that Obama did not mean to support genocidal Islamism, but that he has we have in his own words. Upon the fall of Tunisia to political Islam, Obama said:

There are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat. So it was in Tunisia...

The reason that I continue to bang this drum is because I see no acknowledgement within Barack Obama's own political movement, the progressive-left, that he recognizes this mistake, a mistake that could easily lead to the slaughter of Jewish people.

Early this month Dr. Rashad Bayoumi, (The Muslim Brotherhood's) deputy leader, told Arabic media the group would never recognize the Jewish state.

“This is not an option, whatever the circumstances, we do not recognize Israel at all. It’s an occupying criminal enemy.”

An occupying criminal enemy.

As political Islam works its way throughout the Middle East, and as progressives, including Barack Obama, tell us what a wonderful development this is, the Islamists themselves tell us that they want Jewish blood. And still our "friends" in the progressive movement cheer them on.

How stupid is this, really?

One common motif on the Brotherhood’s site is “Jewish character” and its supposed history of sowing evil in the world.

In May 2010, following Israel’s Gaza flotilla raid, a writer named Mahmoud Abd Al-Rahman wrote on the website, “For ages, human society has faced the problem of the Zionist Jewish character. All nations and cultures are in agreement over the nature of the disease intrinsic in the Zionist character... namely sanctification of money, sex, robbery, interest and treachery.”

And, yet, this will not be discussed on progressive or Democratic blogs or websites or magazines.

Why is that, I must wonder?

The progressive movement has betrayed its Jewish constituency.

I do not see how this is any longer deniable.

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Frames

2012-01-18T08:56:00.000-08:00

{Cross-Posted at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers}

Karam

I have been criticized for my alternative framing of the Israel-Palestine conflict or, as I like to call it, the Long Arab War against the Jews. The truth of the matter is that framing is very much at the heart of what I am trying to do here.

Framing is important and what is most important is recognizing the framing of one's own political movement so that we can change that framing when necessary. It should be obvious by this point that progressive-left framing on I-P favors Arabs at the expense of Jews, despite the fact that we represent a tiny population in comparison to either Arabs or Muslims, who tend to be far more hostile to us than we are to them.

{The progressive tendency toward moral equivalency also needs analysis, but that is a discussion for another day.}

Given the uncertain status of Jews in the world, we win or lose this fight before it is even begun via framing. The well-being of the Jewish people, and the survival of the Jewish state, is very much dependent upon how our concerns get framed in venues throughout the world. The reason for this is because we are so small. 13 to 14 million Jews. That's it. We represent a tiny percentage of the world population, so what the world thinks of us makes a very big difference on the question of Jewish survival. This should be obvious. At the same time, a non-stop anti-Jewish / anti-Israel propaganda machine has been operating out of the Arab and Muslim worlds for decades and it has poisoned Jewish-Israeli relations with the progressive-left in Europe and the United States. This is because the inclination among progressives is to feel Palestinian pain due to Palestinian and Arab framing of the entire issue.

Let's take a couple of framing questions and hold them up to scrutiny. Let's take the "West Bank" versus "Judea and Samaria" and let's take the very notion that the conflict is one between Israelis and Palestinians.

The fact of the matter is that for thousands of years Judea and Samaria were called Judea and Samaria. It was only when Jordan occupied that land when we suddenly started hearing about a geographical location known as the "West Bank." Jordan called Judea part of the "West Bank" because it did not want to acknowledge the Jewish nature of that small part of the world. From 1967 until the present, despite the failure of Oslo, progressive-left Jews have also used the term "West Bank" because doing so encourages the possibility of giving that land away in a two-state solution deal. For quite some time now it has mainly been conservative Jews, the Likud, who frames the area as Judea and Samaria, their traditional names. Just as progressives want to give away that land in a two-state end of hostilities, so Likudniks, traditionally, believed that holding that land is a requirement for security.

The times have changed but, unfortunately, our framing has not changed with it. Since the Palestinians have shown the world in no uncertain terms that they have no intention of allowing the Jews of the Middle East to live in peace, state or no state, the old Oslo-based framing is now entirely counterproductive toward Jewish well-being. Calling Judea and Samaria the "West Bank" does little more at this point than validate the Palestinian narrative. The reason that Jews are almost always on the rhetorical defensive when it comes to discussing the Arab war against us is because we have a tendency to be so open-minded that our brains have fallen from our skulls and are now rolling around on the floor like marbles.

We cannot win a fight if we perpetually have that fight on our enemy's turf. That is, we cannot win the I-P argument if we insist upon adopting Palestinian framing. Calling Judea and Samaria the "West Bank" is Arab framing. Every time we use that framing we've already lost the discussion because embedded in the idea of "West Bank" is the notion that it does not belong to the Jews, but it's impossible to get people to believe that Judea is not Jewish so they don't call it by its proper, long-standing name. The reason to call Judea by its proper name is not because we necessarily wish to keep the area, but because it is, in truth, traditional Jewish land and if Israel wishes to be so gracious as to gift that land to their neighbors, so be it. In the mean time, Palestinian propagandists scream from the hillsides that the "West Bank" was stolen from them by those conniving Jews. I say that we force them to make the argument that the Jews stole Judea from its rightful owners, a brand-spanking new type of Arab that the world calls "Palestinians."

Another very big part of the framing issue has to do with underdogs and overcats. Between 1948 and 1967, the non-Arab, non-Muslim world was mainly in sympathy with the Jews of the Middle East who they viewed as a scrappy underdog surrounded by enemies 100 times their number. This is still the case. Israel remains under siege and its towns continue to get rocketed by Arab forces, but the world no longer sees scrappy little Israel as an underdog. Progressives like underdogs much more than they like facts. If even the most heinous and guilty individual can get progressives to view him as the underdog they will take his side.

After 1967, the Arabs changed the framing from that of a conflict between the vast Arab nation versus the small, harrassed Jews to a conflict between the great Israeli war machine versus the innocent, indigenous Palestinians and this is the framing that progressives use to this day. This is why "progressive Zionists" constantly get kicked around on places like Daily Kos. It's because other well-meaning progressives no longer see Jewish people as worthy of sympathy because the framing makes of us a colonial, imperalistic, racist people oppressing the other. This framing is entirely false, but so long as it operates in the background as a given among those having the conversation then the Jews can never win the argument. So long as "progressive" Jews continue to employ Palestinian-Arab framing of the issue they will continue to be kicked around in left-wing political venues and on the university campuses.

I say that we create new framing that stays true to history, that stays true to current events, but that frames the argument in such a way that the Jews of the Middle East are not maligned before the conversation even begins. Progressives, following the lead of Arab propogandists since 1967, have framed the I-P conflict in a way that maligns Jews and "Progressive Zionists" catapult that anti-Jewish framing, whether they realize it or not.

I have suggested that it is imperative that we must free ourselves from the Palestinian colonization of the Jewish mind, but we can only do that if we rid ourselves of Palestinian framing.

Times are changing and it is long past time that we change with it.

Adapt or die.

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This is What They Teach Children

2012-01-17T11:47:00.000-08:00

Karam

Through the worship [of Allah], we shall gain victory over our enemies, strengthen our religion, and defeat the Jews. The Messenger of Allah said: "Judgment Day will not come before the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Muslims will kill the Jews, and the Jews will hide behind the trees and the stones, and then the trees and the stones will say: Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the gharqad tree will not speak because it is one of the trees of the Jews."

This has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with embedding anti-Semitism directly into the core of the religion of Islam. Furthermore, of course, this is nothing new, but represents the kinds of things that Muslims have often told one another since the time of the prophet.

Only in the minds of progressives, however, does pointing out Muslim anti-Semitism become "Islamophobia." It's as if, as far as progressives are concerned, it's OK to spit Islamist anti-Semitic hatred at Jews, but if the Jews complain about it that makes us "racist."

How's that for a world turned inside out and upside down?

How's that for a sick game, really?

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A Response to Kane

2012-01-17T09:50:00.000-08:00

Karam

Who writes:

The Egyptian people have validated the Muslim Brotherhood, not Obama or the US administration...

Kane is wrong.

The Obama administration has not only sabotaged the peace process, but it has validated the Muslim Brotherhood, an anti-Semitic, genocidal organization that has an historical provenance that goes to Nazi Germany.

Say "hello" to Sayyid Qutb.

The mustache was considered snazzy in Cairo at the time. Sayyid was a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and the author of a small essay called "Our Struggle with the Jews" wherein he writes:

The Jews also conspired against Islam by inciting its enemies against it throughout the world...This has brought the Jews of the latest era to being the chiefs of the struggle with Islam, on every foot of the face of the earth...The Jews are (also) the ones who utilize Christianity and idolatry in this comprehensive war ...... And they attack every foundation of this religion (Islam), in a Crusader-Zionist war!! How right was Allah, the most Mighty, in saying: "You will surely find the worst enemies of the Muslims to be the Jews and the polytheists."

At the center of Brotherhood ideology is the Jew as cosmic enemy, yet Kane writes:

It does appear that they will have significant influence in the new Egyptian government. Opening lines of communication with them is a recognition of political realities. They are, just as Hamas is.

This might be true if the administration was merely opening lines of communication, as if we need to talk with fascists, but it goes much farther than that. The administration validates an anti-Semitic genocidal movement when, as Barack Obama said, it compares the rise of the Jihad throughout the Middle East to some ridiculous combination of the Revolution of '76 and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s.

This is what Barack Obama said directly after the fall of Tunisia:

There are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat. So it was in Tunisia...

This does not demonstrate a sober understanding of the nature of this movement, but is an endorsement of it.

Barack Obama endorses the rise of the Jihad and progressives tell us that it is mere pragmatism on the part of the administration. I think it is the inappropriately blasé response to the rise of the Jihad, on the part of Obama's apologists, that is perhaps most disconcerting. Since Obama has come to office, political Islam has taken over country after country in the Middle East, yet his supporters merely shrug their shoulders.

This blasé attitude is reflected in Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta's attitude.

I understand the view that this is not the time to pursue peace, and that the Arab awakening further imperils the dream of a safe and secure, Jewish and democratic Israel. But I disagree with that view... The problem right now is we can’t get them to the damn table, to at least sit down and begin to discuss their differences.

The "Arab awakening"? It is obvious that officer after officer in the Obama administration considers the rise of political Islam as something positive and something to be encouraged. But to continue to talk as if the Arab uprisings represent "democracy" as we understand it in the West is to ignore the Islamist nature of this movement.

And that is just unconscionable, irresponsible, and, in truth, none too bright. Whether coming from the administration, or from well-meaning "progressives," pretending that the rise of political Islam is a good thing is highly delusional and quite dangerous.

It is long past time that we pulled our heads from the sand.

I am again reminded of how progressives told us that the Jihadis aboard the Mavi Marmara were "peace activists." Knife and pipe-wielding "peace activists."

All of this taken together, by the way, represents just why the progressive-left, as a movement, is dangerous to Jewish people the world over. They honestly believe that the rise of political Islam throughout the Middle East is a good thing despite its anti-Semitic and genocidal nature.

Is it therefore any wonder that the Democratic Party is bleeding Jewish support?

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Second Itamar Murderer Sentenced to 5 Life Terms

2012-01-16T10:57:00.000-08:00

Karam

Samaria Military Court sentences Amjad Awad to five life sentences and seven years for killing five Fogel family members.

You guys remember the Fogels, right?

That was the family of "settlers" who dared to live where neither Barack Obama, nor Mahmoud Abbas, wanted them to live, in a town called Itamar in the northern part of the "West Bank." Two Palestinian youths crawled into their allegedly illegal home and slaughtered almost the entire family, including a months old baby girl whose head they took.

The reason that family was slaughtered, and the reason that baby girl got her head chopped off, was not because they were bad people, but because the Palestinian Authority, backed by the president of the United States, kept telling its people that they were, in fact, bad. Genocidal anti-Semitism is rife in the Arab world and is affirmed every time the president of the United States complains that Jews should not live, and thus build housing for themselves, where Arabs do not want them to.

“I don’t regret what I did, and would do it again,” Amjad Awad told reporters in May. “I’m proud of what I did and I’ll accept any punishment I get, even death, because I did it all for Palestine,” he added.

Why would Amjad Awad regret anything when he believes that killing Jews is righteous in the eyes of Allah and represents doing something sweet for "Palestine"? The Palestinian Authority tells its people that the Jews are evil and G-d only knows how many regular Palestinians tell themselves the exact same thing. At the same time we have millions of westerners, such as Barack Obama, who tell the world that the Palestinians are essentially right to not want those Jews in their midst.

And in this way even the most violent and rabid Arab anti-Semitism is affirmed by western progressives, including the president of the United States.

This is not hyperbole. Hyperbole has to do with exaggeration in order to score rhetorical points, but nothing that I have said above is rhetorical. It is quite literally the case that the president of the United States tells the Jews of the Middle East where they should not be allowed to live. Every generation, apparently, there are non-Jewish leaders who think that, for our own good of course, we should be allowed to live here, but not there.

I have no doubt that Barack Obama has perfectly fine intentions.

I also have no doubt that every time that he, or one of his people, complains to the press about where Jews are building housing for themselves, they confirm the kind of violent Arab anti-Semitism that inclined those brutal little bastards to crawl into that home and take a knife to the throat of that baby girl.

Shortly thereafter, in the spring of last year, I signed a condolence letter to Tamar Fogel, the surviving teenage daughter, written by Professor Denis MacEoin. He wrote:

The most important for you is to be sure that the only guilty parties were the terrorists who carried out the slaughter. And I need not tell you that these were not the first Palestinian terrorists to take out their hate, their resentment, and their jealousy on helpless Jews living on Jewish land.

Helpless Jews living on Jewish land.

Well, I do not know how helpless those Jews are, but I know that progressives object to the notion of "Jewish land" in Judea. I know that a small number of Jews (about 5.5 million and nearly half our total) are surrounded by 300 million Arabs and 1.5 billion Muslims who, for the most part, object to Jewish sovereignty on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean out of religious conviction. Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism is embedded in the Koran itself. I also know that there are any number of western progressives, such as British PM David Cameron who agree with those Arab and Muslim anti-Semites that Jews who live in Judea are like some terrible cancer that must be surgically removed.

That's why the brutal little monster could kill a baby with a clean conscience.

And that's why we should be exceedingly circumspect when discussing the evil, bloodthirsty "settlers" who rip up Sacred Palestinian Olive Groves with their bare fangs.

You want hyperbole?

That last line is hyperbolic... the rest, not so much.

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So? What Would YOU do?

2012-01-14T14:40:00.000-08:00

Karam

I hope that Volleyboy1 will forgive me for front paging some of his comments. The reason that I tend to front page VB is because he represents a particular trend in the American Jewish dialogue around I-P and I think that it is important to highlight that trend so that we can discuss it.

As the FresnoZionist just put it:

Non-Muslims in the West are beginning to be divided into two groups: those who believe that it is possible and necessary to talk about political Islam, and those who see that discussion as religious prejudice, and therefore taboo.

The present American administration falls into the latter group. While it is committed to fighting against those who are waging war — jihad — against us, it has abstracted the violence from its religious/ideological context, and has done its best to forbid our government and law enforcement agencies from mentioning the context.

The progressive movement, in Europe and the United States, has emerged as a sort-of shrill hall monitor of allowable political discourse and thereby makes any discussion of political Islam impossible, lest one be maligned as a "racist." This makes discussing the rise of the Jihad throughout the Middle East, which is the foremost international geo-political development since the fall of the Soviet Union, entirely unspeakable within progressive-left circles.

In response to my previous post, Muslim Brotherhood Hails Ties With US, Volleyboy1 writes:

Ok... So, who would you suggest we support? No more complaining, just solutions. We know they are bad guys, so what in reality do you suggest we do?

What would you do if you were POTUS? Given the finish of the Islamists in Egypt (they won roughly 70% of the popular vote and the liberals completely dropped out) who or what solution do you support or propose?

You are very critical of the President here - what would you do differently?

I find it interesting that VB claims that I am being "very critical" of Obama in that piece. If you give it the quick once over, you realize that it offers no criticism whatsoever. All I say in the entire piece beyond "And so there you have it" is "This is who the Obama administration is supporting."

The former comment is irrelevant to the discussion and the latter is an assertion of fact, not a criticism. In fairness to Volley, however, it is true that I am very critical of president Obama because, although I voted for him, I have concluded that he has done a poor job as president and thus does not deserve our support going forward.

Directly after the Tunisian uprising, when Obama should have had the common sense to wait and watch, he said:

There are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat. So it was in Tunisia..

Fine sounding words. Completely delusional, true, but they sound nice.

In response to Volley's question, however, what I would do were I president of the United States is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the Obama administration is supporting genocidal Islamists.

That's the question that counts. Whether Lumish would do this, that, or the other thing, is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not Obama supports the Radical Jihad or Political Islam, or whatever terminology one might want to use. As we can see from a straightforward assessment of the evidence, he and his administration do, in fact, support the Brotherhood and the Brotherhood is an organization with an historical provenance that goes to Nazi Germany.

This is what is important and part of the reason that this is important is because progressives refuse to acknowledge the obvious on this matter. By failing to acknowledge the obvious, or through obfuscating that which is clear, progressives hobble our efforts as citizens to apprehend the truth of the Obama administration's foreign policy.

Once we get to the point where obvious truths cannot be spoken because they are politically inconvenient to the president of the United States or his political party or his political movement, then we cannot even begin to deal with the difficult realities that we face as a country.

So, what would I do differently?

One thing that I would have done differently is not tell the American people that the Islamist Spring was some combination of the American Revolution and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s. That's the first thing that I would have done very differently.

The second thing that I might have done differently is help to educate the American public on the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, as School eluded, so that they might better understand just whom we are dealing with... "bad guys" as Volley admits.

Another thing that I would likely have done is cut US financial support to a fascist government. This does not strike me as the least little bit controversial. The Brotherhood is fascist and the US is now underwriting financial support to the theocratic fascist government in Egypt.

I would oppose this.

So, those are 3 things that I would do differently but, again, what I would do is entirely irrelevant to the questions being raised by this blog. The first question is whether or not the progressive movement has betrayed its Jewish constituency through making a home of itself for anti-Semitic anti-Zionists? Some of us say yes and some of us say no.

But, that's the first question.

The second question is whether or not the Obama administration deserves support when it has thrown the peace process into the garbage and now encourages the rise of Radical Islam throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds?

My answer to this question, obviously, is "no." American Jews, and friends of the Jewish state, should reject Barack Obama because he is proving himself not only hostile to our interests, but hostile to the general well-being of the United States. Make no mistake, any American president that would snuggy up with the Jihad is acting in a manner hostile to the well-being of the American citizenry, whatever his or her intention.

The road is so paved, VB.

But as the FresnoZionist concludes:

If we want to survive as a culture, we cannot continue to ignore reality, to live in a world undergoing a titanic struggle while pretending that the struggle does not exist.

Whether or not the struggle is "titanic" it still needs to be discussed.

And if in certain venues the discussion is discouraged out of politically correct cowardice and group-think?... well?... We'll simply have the conversation on more friendly and more bold terrain.

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Muslim Brotherhood Hails Ties With US

2012-01-14T07:54:00.000-08:00

Karam

And so there you have it:

CAIRO: The head of the political arm of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood on Wednesday hailed US-Egyptian ties during talks with the US State Department's number two, but also said they must be "balanced."

The meeting with Deputy Secretary of State William Burns at the Cairo headquarters of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) came at the end of marathon elections that propelled Islamist parties to centre stage.

Washington has reached out to the Brotherhood in a nod to the country's new political reality, with Islamists poised to dominate the first parliament since a popular uprising ousted veteran president Hosni Mubarak in February.

Sheikh Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi (January 30, 2009):

Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place.

This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.

This is who the Obama administration is supporting.

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Tel Aviv Named Best Gay City

2012-01-13T17:12:00.000-08:00

Karam

Editor's Note: This is a guest post from, Makabit, one of our friends over at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers. Israel is among the most Gay friendly countries on the entire planet... if not the most Gay friendly country. We need to honor this and we need to remind our progressive friends that Gay people in the Muslim and Arab worlds also deserve something resembling equal rights.

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Israel's malicious campaign of pinkwashing--giving LGBT Israelis full civil rights, recognition of foreign marriages, health care for domestic partners, and all that other dreadful imperialist stuff they do...has paid off.

Tel Aviv has been named Best Gay City for 2011:

JERUSALEM (JTA) -- Tel Aviv has been named the best gay city for 2011 in a poll sponsored by American Airlines and Gaycities.com.

The city was selected as the "Best City of 2011" in the "Best of Gay Cities 2011" poll. Tel Aviv garnered 43 percent of the votes, followed by New York City with 14 percent and Toronto with 7 percent.

"Winning this competition constitutes an additional strengthening of the fact that Tel Aviv-Jaffa is a city that respects all people and allows everyone to live according to his/her own principles," Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai said. "Ours is a city in which everyone can be proud of who they are."

New York won in the Best Night Life category, San Francisco took the Best Pride city category, and Buffalo, N.Y., was the Most Up-and-Coming city.

More than 5,000 gay tourists visited Tel Aviv in June for its annual pride parade, according to the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality.

If you go to Gaycities.com, and look at their map of great gay cities, you're going to notice something, and that's that Tel Aviv stands alone in the Middle East. I mean, entirely alone. That little pin in the map marks the lone gay party town of the region.

Kol ha-kavod, Tel Aviv!

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Must read post at Elder of Ziyon: Netanyahu Interview

2012-01-13T11:19:00.000-08:00

By oldschooltwentysix

Here is the Elder's post concerning an interview of Benjamin Netanyahu by the Australian.

As I said in a comment:

We get lost at times in seeing the anti-Israel hysteria surrounding us, and lose sight of the support for Israel outside the chamber we occupy.

The subject matter was Iran, the Palestinians, and Israel's standing in the world.

An excerpt:

Netanyahu is actually making a profound point here. Israel is making very big gains in Asia, which an Atlantic-centric Western media and the Arab world both tend to miss. Israel is making significant progress in Asia diplomatically, economically, in all measures of trade and in military-to-military exchanges. And it's not just in Asia that Netanyahu has something positive to talk about: "The same thing is happening in Africa. I'm going there soon, but I just had visits from the leaders of Uganda, Kenya and South Sudan. They're concerned with the Islamist tide above them.

"We have excellent relations with many countries of central Europe. They're concerned with the Islamist tide to the south. Canada is like the other Australia, or Australia is like the other Canada, an extraordinary country.

"I would also mention that small, little-known country called the United States of America. The support for Israel in the US has skyrocketed. It has always been high, but it has gone up year by year."

Netanyahu cites a plethora of polls to bolster this claim, and continues: "An overwhelming swath of the American public identifies with Israel because they view it as sharing the same values and ideals as the US.

"So the description of Israel as isolated in the world is not correct."

Please read the whole thing. It left me feeling better, and I hope it will do the same for you!

(Cross-posted at oldschooltwentysix)

Obama Supports the Muslim Brotherhood

2012-01-12T22:16:00.000-08:00

Karam

I seem to be on some sort-of Barry Rubin marathon, but the guy's work resonates and he has a recent piece entitled, Such a ‘Great’ Idea It Can Now Be Proclaimed But Not Criticized: Obama Supports the Muslim Brotherhood, as Dan pointed out the other day.

I read pretty much everything that Rubin writes and I have to say that close-minded "progressives" make a great mistake when they assume they can simply dismiss his analyses because he is "right-wing"... as if that, in itself, represents cause to dismiss a significant scholar.

The fact of the matter is that Rubin is a supporter of the Labor Party, as he mentioned to me in a personal email some time back.

He writes:

Not only is the Obama administration, as I’ve written for the last year, favoring radical Islamist forces — despite the fact that these are anti-Western, pro-terrorism, building dictatorships, and openly antisemitic and anti-Christian — but now even the establishment media is admitting it.

The link goes to a New York Times article with the following headline:

Overtures to Egypt’s Islamists Reverse Longtime U.S. Policy

Now, am I to understand that "progressives," as well as the Obama administration, actually favors genocidal Muslim fascism? That's what making "overtures" to Egypt's Islamists means, after all. It means accepting contemporary Nazism as a reasonable part of the international discussion.

And so for the first time in U.S. history an American government, to the applause of the vast majority of the mass media, is backing an anti-American authoritarian movement. Here’s how the New York Times explains it:

The Obama administration has begun to reverse decades of mistrust and hostility as it seeks to forge closer ties with an organization [the Muslim Brotherhood] once viewed as irreconcilably opposed to United States interests.

For a number of years, now, I have been arguing that progressives have buried their heads in the sand when it comes to the issue of Radical Islam, but this is beginning to no longer be the case. What we are seeing, instead, is the embrace of genocidal, anti-Semitic Islamism by progressives of high rank, such as the president of the United States.

I was fairly shocked when a group of leftists, including western politicians, joined with Jihadis aboard the Mavi Marmara in order to confront the Jews on the high seas, but I certainly never expected the president of the United States to quietly endorse the Jihad, as Obama is now doing.

As Rubin writes:

of course the U.S. government must deal with Egypt’s government, but that doesn’t mean it should publicly proclaim that the Brotherhood is a nice group and give what amounts to an unconditional endorsement of it.

This is essentially giving the presidential "thumbs-up" to Arab Nazis who continue to support the slaughter of Jewish people. How ideologically blinkered must one be to support a president that bolsters a fascistic theological organization like the Muslim Brotherhood?

It's frankly amazing.

What we are now witnessing is absolutely profound in its implications, but do not look to the progressive-left for any meaningful analysis of the subject. They won't because they can't and the reason that they can't, aside from the shear inconvenience of having to explain just why they are now supporting contemporary Nazism, is because it is entirely inexcusable.

As I’ve written before, it’s possible to elect a dictatorship. The Egyptian people have a right to do so, but that doesn’t mean the West should like it.

Is that not obvious? As naive, and sometimes malicious, progressives love to remind us, the Egyptian people are engaging in democracy and therefore who are we to deny them that most fundamental right?

It's stupid, I know, because none of us are saying that the Egyptians should be denied democracy, it's just that those of us who are conscious would very much appreciate it if they did not help bring a long-standing theocratic fascist organization, with a history that goes to Nazi Germany, to power right next door to all those Jews.

Second, why should the burden of reversing “decades of mistrust and hostility” be exclusively on the United States? Doesn’t the Brotherhood, which benefits from U.S. engagement, need to do that also or even beforehand? Why is there no conditionality here, no hint that the Obama administration or New York Times understands how hostile the Brotherhood has been and continues to be? If the U.S. president won’t demand a quid pro quo (something in exchange for his concessions), who is going to look after U.S. interests?

Well, clearly, no one is going to look after U.S. interests. Certainly the president of the United States is not going to. Another question to ask is, who is going to look after Jewish interests? Not only will the president not do so, but even Jewish progressives cannot bring themselves to do so.

Third, by saying the Brotherhood was “once viewed as irreconcilably opposed to United States interests,” the author suggests this is no longer true. We know that the Obama administration thinks the Brotherhood has changed. Yet there is no evidence in terms of deeds, ideology, or statement made in Arabic that the Brotherhood has done so.

Quite the contrary. There is every reason to believe that the Brotherhood is just as blood-thirsty as it always was. It takes a certain kind of numbskull to ignore direct threats of the type that we recently heard in Tahrir Square. The crowd, supporters of the Brotherhood, were quite literally calling for the genocide of the Jews and, yet, we have the president of the United States endorsing such an organization.

In other words, Obama isn’t just observing but is affecting events. Now, note how the Obama administration avoids this issue:

“It would be `totally impractical’ not to engage the ‘Brotherhood because of U.S. security and regional interests in Europe,’ a senior administration official” said. But we are not talking about holding talks, we’re talking about becoming apologists for Islamism, a position announced and defended in a detailed explanation by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It is entirely predictable that as the revolutionary Islamists take anti-American and dictatorial stances, the Western media will underreport them and the Obama administration will ignore them, if only to defend the mistaken ideas they hold and the mistaken policy Obama has staked out.

Yup. The American media will underplay all of this, as will the American progressive-left which is showing itself to be more and more comfortable with the rise of Islamist fascism in the Middle East.

I take it as a betrayal, but I am someone who is emphatically NOT comfortable with the kind of genocidal anti-Semitic rhetoric that comes screeching out of Cairo.

My grandfather and grandmother, on my father's side, got out of Medzhibozh, Ukraine, (the founding place of the Chasids, by the way) while the getting was good, but that entire side of the family was murdered by the Nazis.

Call me a "racist," if you will, but I am opposed to those who seek the murder of Jews. I know that it's an intolerant stance... not nearly so open-minded as a good progressive should be... but I tend to be hard-hearted that way.

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"This is not the screed of an antisemite."

2012-01-12T18:51:00.000-08:00

Doodad

Just the suggestion of a Kossack and some of his fellows that the recent Iranian scientist assassination is not about delaying the inevitable but:

"It's almost as if the intention is to get the Iranians to fire a missile at an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz which would cause a wider war... The Israelis would force us into hitting the Iranians, hitting back....The idea that Bibi and his hawklings would actually be trying to egg Ahmadinejad and Company into starting what would surely be a disastrous hell of a war, spreading through assets like the Kuds forces, Hezbollah and Hamas throughout the region, sickens me."

Uh, hey guys, yeah, it IS an antisemitic screed. That's why you denied it; because you knew it was. Nice try though. Too bad not one Kossack called you morons on it.

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You Can't Say That!

2012-01-12T08:42:00.000-08:00

Karam

{Cross-Posted at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers}

I always find it interesting when I am told that something that I have said is not false, but simply offensive and therefore beyond the bounds of reasonable political discussion.

I have been told this a number of times about various things and have even created a list of That Which Cannot Be Spoken which is currently sitting just to your right on this blog.

Barry Rubin, one of my favorite analysts, just wrote this:

Someone had written an article in the left-wing British magazine New Statesman, which always bashes Israel sometimes in the nastiest terms, defending Israel’s 2008-2009 Gaza operation called “Cast Lead.” In the article, the writer had gone into great detail to set forth the facts of what happened and to rebut the wild allegations of war crimes and the many outright lies told about these events.

But here’s the relevant part for all of us: my colleague explained that there had been about 300 comments to that article, some positive and most negative. And, he recounted, not a single one of the negative responses cited a single fact. They did not say, for example: “Oh, you’ve gotten the numbers wrong,” or “Here’s a critical point you missed.”

No, the theme of every attack was that “only a fascist would say this” or “you cannot say such a thing.”

What these people were saying is that they don’t have to argue with you or pay attention to what you are saying. They can just close their eyes, put their hands over their ears, and scream: “Liar! Evil person! You have no right to disagree with us or else we will destroy you.”

You can see why this reminded me of the incident with Batatu. And George Orwell, too...

It is the lowest form of political discourse to merely label someone something negative in order to dismiss whatever point they may be endeavoring to make.

If, for example, I say that Palestinian national identity is the world's newest national identity and that most "Palestinians" did not consider themselves to be any such thing until the second half of the twentieth century, it is not sufficient to call me a "racist."

The truth doesn't care about whatever label you may assign to someone in order to dismiss them.

The truth is the truth and in this case it may be an inconvenient truth for pro-Palestinian activists who wish to see Israel dissolved as a Jewish state, but why should inconveniencing anti-Zionists bother me?

It doesn't.

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ZionTruth Has Some Words

2012-01-12T07:10:00.000-08:00

Karam

Editor's Note - Anyone who posts here knows that I often like to front page reader's comments if I think that those comments either need responding to or because I believe that they would make a terrific stand alone post.

I hope ZionTruth doesn't mind, but I very much appreciate his comment below and want to make sure that our readership gets an opportunity to look it over. - Mike L.

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Clueless? If only. Clueless can be fixed with a little knowledge. With the anti-Zionists you don't get mere ignorance, you're confronted with a total unwillingness to listen. Buttressed by utter contempt.

"For a just and viable peace that guarantees the rights of the Palestinians while taking account of the Israelis' security needs." Yes... one side has rights (dreams, lofty ideals, justice aggrieved etc.), the other, mere security needs (measures to ensure they aren't killed—why, thank you).

The past two decades, Israeli Jews have debated the outcome of 1967, including the Jewish population centers set up in the post-1967 territories, sincerely and furiously. There was even a limited readiness to broach the topic of 1948, though the prospect of having the very foundation of the Jewish state condemned has never been welcomed even by Meretz. In contrast to this, any notion that the Jews have a right to their state in Palestine, as opposed to having been done a favor in the face of the Holocaust, is derided as racism, false history, mythology or worse.

The Progressive Left has never respected the Jewish claim. Their view of Zionists is from above, and from the judgment seat. They hold that the very first batch of Jews arriving from Russia in 1882 (always Russia—a similar arrival from Yemen is never mentioned, lest it seriously dent their view of Zionism as "White European Settler-Colonialism") was the beginning of sin, the point before which everything was perfect. From such a standpoint, they view even the Binational "Solution", where the Jewish nation is to be dispossessed of its one and only nation-state, as an act of clemency, graciousness over true justice, which would be Helen Thomas's call for all Jews to be ethnically cleansed from Palestine.

The greater part of the Israeli Jewish public in the years before the Great Disillusionment (which would be August 2005—the evacuation of all the Jews in the Gaza region, followed by rocket barrages on pre-1967 Israeli Jewish towns) would have been content with an equal-claimants view of this conflict. That is, if the world had accepted comparisons to the Hutus and Tutsis, similar peoples with an equal claim to the land that had better be solved by some sort of sharing agreement. But the Progressive Left rejects forthwith any such view; its beloved comparison is of French vs. Algerians in Algeria, and we know how that ended. The greatest contempt the Progressives have is for the Zionist who believes Jews too are in Palestine by right. Such an uppity thought does not go well with the ideal of Israel and Zionism standing trial before the world.

In all my years of reading the stuff on anti-Zionist forums, Karmafish, nothing, and I mean nothing, has outraged me more than the anti-Zionists' sheer contempt they have for the idea of the Jews' connection to this land. The lighthearted ease with which they dismiss that connection as a bunch of fairy-tales and construe Zionism as a colonialist relic is something that should fill any Jew with righteous indignation. If no respect is given to us and our rights—nothing but bones of "security needs" thrown to us, and not very reliable ones either—then how do they have the gall to demand our respect toward our adversaries? It's usually better to be smart than right, but only up to a point; once the imbalance is such that you become a doormat, you're no longer smart either.

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This Is What Progressives Do Not Want You To See

2012-01-11T13:35:00.000-08:00

Karam

Friday Sermon in Al-Bireh, West Bank

Palestinian Authority TV, January 6, 2012:

Oh, servants of Allah, every evil and catastrophe on the land of Palestine - moreover, in the whole world - is caused by the Jews.

They generate civil strife with their clandestine handiwork, their despicable texts, their bitter hearts, and their abominable intentions.

Allah said: "Whenever they kindle the fire of war, Allah extinguishes it, but they strive to do mischief on the earth, Allah loves not those who do mischief."

This is the history of the Jews.

Many a covenant have they violated. Many a prophet have they slayed.

Rabbis do not stand up before Jewish congregations and say anything like this about any other people on earth, yet this kind of violently anti-Semitic incitement is rife in the Muslim world.

Moreover, if I dare to point this out, progressives will call me a racist.

How's that for chutzpah?

It is the contention of this blog that the progressive-left has betrayed the Jewish people.

When the left refuses to face the screeching hate that comes from the Arab world and insists that anyone who does so is a "racist" or a "warmonger" then you just know that they have capitulated to the Radical Jihad.

When the president of the United States compares the Islamist Winter to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s, then you know that the progressive movement is laboring under the most hobbling of delusions.

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Why Progressives are Clueless on I-P

2012-01-10T20:39:00.000-08:00

{Cross-Posted at Pro-israel Bay Bloggers}

Karam

There are reasons why the progressive-left likes to smack around the Jewish state and one of the foremost of such reasons is their near total misapprehension of the source of the conflict. Progressives tend to think that the reason for the never-ending, and increasingly annoying, I-P conflict, is that the Jews of the Middle East are mean.

In the plainest terms possible, that is it. Progressives, as a rule, think that Israel is mean. The mean Jewish Israelis are oppressing the innocent "indigenous" Palestinians and they need to stop it. This represents the essential mental process of most progressives when they bother considering the Arab war against the Jews of the Middle East. It's all about underdogs. Whoever holds underdog status is considered to be the righteous "good guy" among the vapid progressive activist types.

In the summer of 1967 the Jews of the Middle East successfully defended themselves from Arab aggression and, in doing so, acquired the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the "West Bank" from Jordan. After both those countries refused to take back that land in return for peace, as they told us with the three famous "no's" at Khartoum, the Soviets, the Arabs, and their western progressive allies have successfully turned the Jewish David into the Israeli Goliath.

Of course, they get a little cognitive help among people who are paid to encourage them to think this way. NGOs, the United Nations, and various journalists and academics who specialize in spreading hatred toward the Jewish state... and G-d only knows how many anti-Semitic anti-Zionist bloggers who do it not for pay but out shear self-serving righteous indignation combined with willful ignorance of the subject... continually paint Israel as a racist, apartheid, imperialist, colonialist, rogue state.

So what is your average American liberal to think?

Day after day after day Israel gets clobbered by people either emotionally or financially invested (oftentimes both) in doing everything that they possibly can to demean and defame that country for its alleged crimes against the Palestinians and they are almost always on the left. This is, in fact, the product of untold billions of dollars in Arab oil revenue over the recent decades as a source of funding for non-stop anti-Zionist propaganda directed at gullible, usually well-meaning, western liberals.

If this were not true, surely Israel's defamers would not be defamers, but instead would be honest critics. For if they were honest critics they might note the 1,300 years of Jewish persecution in Muslim and Arab lands that directly preceded the long Arab war against the Jews of the Middle East from the 1920s until today.

But they don't.

The only way to make the acidic progressive case against the Jewish state, and thus against the Jewish people, is to ignore centuries of Jewish history in that part of the world. Unless you ignore the long centuries of Jewish second and third class citizenship under Muslim rule, it is impossible to portray the Jews merely as the callous oppressors of the innocent Palestinian-Arabs.

In truth, you have to ignore all sorts of things to maintain the typically progressive stance that the Jews are guilty and that the Palestinians should be free to react in any violent manner possible because they are the righteous victims.

Not only do you have to ignore 13 centuries of dhimmitude to paint the Jews in roguish colors, you also have to ignore all the various times that the Palestinian-Arabs have refused to accept a state for themselves in peace next to Israel. If you admit, as the historical record shows, that the Palestinians have never accepted a peaceful resolution to the conflict despite ridiculously good offers for statehood, such as the Peel Commission proposal of 1937, then you must conclude that the reason for the ongoing problem is not the Jews, but persistent Arab intransigence to this very day.

Yet the Jewish state is the only country on the planet that suffers daily attack in the progressive press and they do so under the guise of "social justice" and "human rights." 5.5 million people are dead in the Congo over the last 15 years, but the progressive-left does not care. Tibet remains under the brutal Chinese occupation, decade after decade, but the progressive-left does not care. In Darfur Muslims slaughter black Africans and use rape as a weapon of war, resulting in the dislocation of millions of people, but the progressive-left does not care.

And I am supposed to take progressive anti-Zionist hatred toward the Jewish state as something other than anti-Jewish racism?

Oh, please.

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Ah, the Arab Spring

2012-01-09T13:55:00.000-08:00

Karam

Antisemitic Banner Raised at Egyptian Soccer Game: "One Nation for New Holocaust"

Doesn't it just bolster your faith in the pro-Arab Spring progressive-left and their Jihadi cheer-leading president?

And this is from the same soccer match:

Barack Obama and the progressive-left applaud the Islamist Spring despite the genocidal nature of the Jihad, which is integral to it.

And this is not utter foolishness, how?

{A Tip 'O the Kippa to Cif Watch.}

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Strictly for the Hell of It

2012-01-09T13:44:00.001-08:00

Karam

Aaron David Miller Tells Us Why Obama Doesn't Much Like the Jewish State

2012-01-09T08:47:00.000-08:00

{Cross-Posted at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers}

Karam

He writes:

Barack Obama has an Israel problem. Almost three years in, the US president still can’t decide whether he wants to pander to the Israeli prime minister or pressure him.

That Barack Obama has an "Israel problem" can hardly be in doubt, but it is mainly a problem of his own creation because, indeed, Obama does want to keep the pressure on Israel, but pressure to do precisely what is anyone's guess? After all, the Israelis long ago agreed to two states for two peoples while the Palestinian-Arabs have year after year, and decade after decade, absolutely refused to end their war against the Jews in the Middle East.

This, apparently, is what the Obama administration fails to understand.

Buckle your seat belts. Unless Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu find a way to cooperate on a big venture that makes both of them look good, and in a way that allows each to invest in the other, the US-Israel relationship may be in for a bumpy ride.

It is going to continue to be a bumpy ride because Barack Obama does not understand Israel, doesn't care to understand Israel, and most certainly does not understand the conflict in the Middle East. Obama, like most progressives, thinks that the Jews are mean and that if they would stop being mean then there would be peace between the vicious Israeli colonialist state and the peace loving indigenous population who want not nothing more on this earth than to tend their Sacred Palestinian Olive Groves and raise their children to be accountants and pastry chefs.

Unlike his two predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Obama isn’t in love with the idea of Israel.

I would say that this is a considerable understatement. President Obama, through his contempt for Prime Minister Netanyahu has demonstrated a distinct dislike for Israel and no amount of pandering to the American Jewish population before the coming election is going to change that. The truth of the matter is that Obama does not much like the Jewish state and I predict that if he gets reelected he will show that dislike, that contempt, in a much more open manner because he will have nothing to lose. It is then that we will really see the ways in which Obama has swallowed the fabled "Palestinian narrative" lock, stock, and barrel.

Intellectually he understands and supports the pro-Israeli trope – small democratic nation with dark past confronts huge existential threats – but it’s really a head thing.

Does he understand that, even intellectually? I tend to doubt it. From his behavior toward Israel it seems far more likely that he views Israel in much the same way that progressives in general view Israel, i.e., as a racist, imperialist, colonialist, apartheid state that needs to be pressured heavily in order to make it accept a Palestinian state in Gaza, and Judea and Samaria. Of course, just because Israel long ago agreed to such a state, and the Palestinians have never so agreed, does not faze the anti-Israel Obama one little bit.

He still seems hell-bent on pressuring Israel to accept what it already accepts and won't pressure the Palestinian-Arabs to accept what they have never accepted. Israel favors two states for two peoples and the Arabs do not, yet Obama thinks that the United States must pressure Israel. It's rather odd, actually. Or, perhaps, just simply ridiculous, but there it is.

It’s also a conflict that is vital to American interests. And those interests are being threatened by the divide between those who want a solution and are serious about moving toward one, and those who aren’t serious about finding a solution and throw out obstacles. After three years, the president has clearly placed the Israelis in the latter category and the Palestinians in the former.

Precisely. All evidence to the contrary, Obama blames the Jews of the Middle East for the ongoing conflict, despite the fact that it has been the Arabs, century upon century, that has persecuted its Jewish minority and now will not allow the Jews to live in peace and in sovereignty on Jewish land.

As for Bibi Netanyahu:

Obama doesn't like him, doesn’t trust him and views him as a con man. The Israeli prime minister has frustrated and embarrassed Obama and gotten in the way of the president’s wildly exaggerated hopes for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which he’s been pursuing with more enthusiasm than viable strategy since his inauguration.

Quite right. Obama has an irrational disdain for the Israeli leader that matches his irrational disdain for the Jewish state. Furthermore, he has been pursuing an end to the conflict with far more enthusiasm than viable strategy. In fact, he has been pursuing an end to the conflict with no strategy whatsoever beyond trying to force Israel to accept what it has already accepted and through a racist policy of seeking to prevent a Jewish presence on ancient Jewish land.

To make matters worse, when the president went after a settlements freeze, Netanyahu called his bluff and Obama backed down – a terrible humiliation.

Is Obama humiliated? I tend to doubt that. He certainly should be humiliated because the demand that Jews should be allowed to live here, but not over there, is racist to the core. Any president of the United States should be thoroughly embarrassed if he honestly thinks that he has the right to tell an entire ethnicity where we may be allowed to live. Heck, I am embarrassed for him.

In the end, the Barack-Bibi relationship is likely headed south because the trust and capacity to give each other the benefit of the doubt has long ago evaporated.

The blame for this falls squarely on the shoulders of Barack Obama who, through his ingestion of the "Palestinian narrative" at the feet of Rashid Khalidi, believes that because Israel is almost entirely at fault for the conflict, only Israel can fix the situation, which is the exact opposite of the truth. This is also why Obama is entirely incapable of fixing the problem. He doesn't understand it, so how can he possibly fix it?

Without some common enterprise to bind them together and with a great many issues to drive them apart (settlements, the peace process), relations will get worse, taking their toll on the US-Israel relationship, Israel’s security, American interests and, for certain, any remaining hope for a two-state solution.

Yup.

And look for "progressives," including "progressive Zionists," to kick around the Israeli Prime Minister because of this, rather than understand that it is the American President, himself, who has entirely screwed up the potential for a negotiated settlement.

It is Obama who has failed, but they will give Netanyahu the blame.

Watch.

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I'll See Your Hack and Raise You.

2012-01-09T08:20:00.000-08:00

Doodad

HA! Saudis and others were pretty pleased when some hacker published Israeli private information hacked from the net. Pleased indeed. But now, well, they had to know that there would be a tit for tat. Yes, some Israeli hackers have found Saudi info but instead of immediately publishing it, have morally given the original hackers a way out; stop doing what you are doing and we will not publish. Gotta love those Israelis. They also have plans to do more if needed, even if it is technically illegal. I'm sure that will loudly denigrated by the same people who found the Saudi's actions, quite alright.

Payback sucks, right?

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Obama's Failures and a Reply to Mets102

2012-01-08T20:01:00.000-08:00

Karam

In a recent post I began the process of outlining Barack Obama's failures viz-a-viz the Arab-Israel conflict.

There are at least four major failures, including:

1) The Ruination of the Peace Process.

Wherein Obama destroyed any near term potential for a negotiated agreement between Israel and the Palestinians by insisting upon "total settlement freeze."

2) The Validation of Palestinian Anti-Semitism.

Wherein Obama seems to agree with the Palestinian Authority that Jews should not be allowed to live, and therefore build housing for themselves, in what Jordan dubbed the "West Bank."

3) The Encouragement of Jihad.

Wherein Obama compared the rise of genocidal Islamism throughout the Arab world to the American Revolution and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s.

And 4) The Capitulation to Iranian Nukes.

Wherein Obama capitulates to Iranian nukes.

I did forget one, though.

5) The Insistence Upon De-Coupling our Understanding of Terrorism from the Radical Jihad.

Wherein Obama discourages his administration from acknowledging the Islamic nature of Jihadi terrorism.

In response to the first four of these concerns, Obama supporter, Mets102, wrote the following:

Are the Egyptian People not entitled to the same blessings of liberty that Israelis enjoy or that we Americans enjoy? What is wrong with our president engaging the largest political party in an emerging democracy?

It's difficult to know just how to respond to this comment.

Mets seems to believe that a single election in which the genocidal, anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood gain 41 percent of the Egyptian vote and the even more extreme Salafists gain an additional 20 percent, thus giving the entire country over to Political Islam, somehow represents the "blessings of liberty that Israelis enjoy or that we Americans enjoy."

Forgive me if I disagree with such an assessment for, at least, two reasons.

The first, of course, is that the mere fact of an election does not suggest democracy. Mets knows as well as I that the Nazis were democratically elected, as was Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood affiliate in the Gaza strip. Even dictator Abbas ran out his mandate about 3 years ago and is now a non-elected, non-democratic ruler. What I fail to understand is that, given the fact that Mets knows these things, just why he would raise this canard?

The second reason, which is more important, is that people seem to know little of the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, and must be ignoring what they currently say:

Oh Allah, take this oppressive, Jewish Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one. - Yusuf al-Qaradawi / Muslim Brotherhood.

One of the themes of this blog is that progressives are remaining willfully ignorant about Radical Islam, both its history and its current behavior, and thereby refuse to educate themselves to the Nazi roots of the Islamist trend. Or, as I like to say, progressives would not acknowledge the Jihad if they were blindfolded and on their knees in some basement in Karachi.

The Nazi roots of the Brotherhood is established historical fact that anyone should learn about before speaking on the subject.

As I have mentioned any number of times previously, there is honest academic work currently being done on this topic. The main writers that I am immediately familiar with are:

Matthias Kuntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (2007).

Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (2003) and The Flight of the Intellectuals (2010).

Edwin Black, The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust (2010).

and Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. (2009)

This is a fascinating and emerging historiography and you cannot speak about groups like the Brotherhood without having some familiarity with what the historians are saying and what they are showing us is the Nazi provenance of this movement. These are not ideologues. These are not people involved in political dirt-fights.

These are scholars.

It is time to move on from old alliances that are no longer reliable and old assumptions, such as progressive-left friendship to the Jewish people, which simply no longer hold true.

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Ron Paul, Glen Greenwald and dKos, Oh My!

2012-01-08T16:13:00.000-08:00

Doodad

Over at dKos there is some pretty hot and heavy discussion going on about Ron Paul and why not? The guy's a scumbag and the antithesis to all things progressive. What is interesting is how most Kossacks are fuming about Glen Greenwald's take on Paul. Greenwald is no Paul lover but he has defended the guy and many of his positions.

One fine Kossack hits a home run when it comes to Greenwald's cadre of followers.

"(5+ / 0-)Recommended by: BlueStateRedhead, askew, foufou, SaintC, fcvaguy
I've never seen a fever swamp of left wing anti-Semitism like I've seen in the comments threads of a Glenn Greenwald post on Israel. All sorts of accusations of "Secret control" of Washington by hidden cabals, hidden money, AIPAC puppetry, etc. Claptrap about how politicians really don't want to support Israel, but hidden "powerful forces" make them. It's 1920s Henry Ford Protocols of Zion conspiracy theories about how hidden global Jews control America for Israel. Ugly, ugly stuff. While the American liberalism has about 2% crazed bigots, compared to the American Right driven by about 60-70% crazed racism and bigotry (in my opinion), there are no false equivalencies.But we do have bigots on the left, and Greenwald's toxic spew on Israel attracts them like flies. No surprise they gravitate to the left's version of Ron Paul, just as Klan types did to Ron Paul in the 90s.

by WinSmith on Sun Jan 08, 2012 at 10:20:11 AM PST[ Parent ]"

Naturally, along comes another Kossack to defend Greenwald and offer up the "you will be called an antisemite if you merely criticize Israel, " canard. Another antisemite apologist runs the halls of dKos.

"Greenwald is rational about Isreal (2+ / 0-)which is why he is called "anti-Semitic." Anybody who criticizes Israel, or the unfair sway it has over American politics is routinely called "anti-Semitic," even if it is a Jew who is doing the criticizing.And calling someone "anti-Semitic" in this context is beneath contempt, intellectually bankrupt, and downright scummy.This sort of name calling is probably what hide ratings were invented for. I don't believe in censoring even people who comment out of their butts, but maybe somebody else won't share my liberal attitude on this.

by recontext on Sun Jan 08, 2012 at 12:19:03 PM PST[ Parent ] "

The bottom line is this. If you want to find antisemites you can go to a fascist right wing guy like Paul or a Progressive like Greenwald. Or you can go to dKos and find, not a lot, but way too many, apologists for both. The fact that almost all of the very few replies to WinSmith's expose of Greenwald's antisemitism were in defense of the swine speaks for itself.

Why the Progressive-Left is Bad for the Jewish People

2012-01-08T00:52:00.000-08:00

Karam

Elder of Ziyon and Cif Watch are discussing a story about Daylife / Reuters that, in my opinion, offers an excellent example of just why progressive-left I-P assumptions are dangerous to the Jewish people.

As the Elder writes:

First there were "settlers."

But that wasn't inciting enough.

So we then had "Jewish settlers."

But with overuse, it didn't bring in the hate that journalists wanted to bring across.

So then came "Right-wing Jewish settlers."

But even that didn't capture the seething disgust that objective journalists wanted to convey towards them.

So now we have, from Daylife/Reuters:

"Extreme right wing Jewish settlers, one of them injured from a rock hurled by pro-Palestinian activists during a weekly protest, stand in front of their house in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem December 30, 2011. Some 100 activists protested against the Jewish settlement in the predominantly Arab neighborhood and threw rocks towards a house occupied by the settlers leading them to confront the protesters, to minor clashes."

So people who live in a house in Jerusalem are "extreme right-wing Jewish settlers."

But the people who throw rocks at them, literally spilling their blood, are simply "pro-Palestinian activists."

Adam Levick over at Cif Watch is none too happy with this story, either:

So, here is yet another example of the lazy political labeling of Israelis who reside in neighborhoods of Jerusalem where Jews lived for thousands of years – except for the period from 1949 to 1967, when Jordan cleansed Jews from the “East” section of the city.

But, the reason for my emotional reaction was that, unlike the “journalist” who wrote the caption, I personally know the victim of the Palestinian attack.

His name is Yaakov...

Yaakov is not an “extremist” in any sense of the word unless, of course, you consider an extremist to be any Jew who lives in neighborhoods across the arbitrary green line.

Yaakov is an observant, learned Jew who liberally and humbly imparts his wisdom and erudition on Torah (Hebrew Bible) and Halacha (Jewish law) to his family, friends and Shabbat guests. But, Yaakov, like me, grew up in the U.S., and is also literate, witty and pithy in musing on the often farcical minutia of secular American pop culture.

Moreover, Yaakov is real, nuanced and certainly – as with everyone who inhabits this beautiful yet complicated nation – not an abstraction.

An extreme, right-wing Arab threw a rock at a man because he was a Jew – a Jew whose name is Yaakov.

This is, of course, just one small story among many others just like it in which journalists portray ordinary Jews who live in the eastern section of Jerusalem, or in the area of land that Jordan dubbed "the West Bank," in the most biased and provocative terms possible while white-washing Palestinian violence. It has become a progressive default to almost always portray Jewish people in the conflict in unflattering terms that justify violence against them.

It's a disgrace and a dangerous one, at that.

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Tunisians greet Haniyeh: "Kill the Jews!"

2012-01-06T14:09:00.000-08:00

Doodad

"From Point of No Return: Cries of 'Out with the Jews!', 'Kill the Jews!' greeted the arrival at Tunis airport of the Hamas chief in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, StandWithUS (France) reports. A few hundred people gathered on 5 January at the Tunis-Carthage airport to welcome Haniyeh. As they waited for him they sang antisemitic chants and slogans to the glory of Palestine and the liberation of Gaza. They carried Palestinian flags, the flags of the Ennahda movement, and the black flags of the Salafists. Ismail Haniyeh was arriving in Tunisia from Turkey for a two-day visit."

This is what "emerging democracy" looks like in the middle east. It will only get worse; everywhere the people of these countries have been unleashed to hate Israel. That's what democracy seems to mean to them. They are all Hamas now, to quote some crazy leftist Brits.

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Volleyboy1 Has Some Words:

2012-01-05T09:28:00.000-08:00

Karam

Obama supporter, Volleyboy1, has commented under my recent post, “Barack Obama is No Friend to the Jewish People or the Jewish State.” His argument seems to be that if the Obama Administration is encouraging the Radical Jihad then the Israeli government is seeking to communicate with the Muslim Brotherhood... as if these two things are somehow equivalent.

They are not.

Volleyboy quotes Ha’aretz:

Israel's new ambassador in Cairo, Yaakov Amitai, will attempt to open communication channels with Islamic officials in Egypt, including representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and the radical Salafi movement's Al-Nour Party, according to a senior diplomatic official in Jerusalem.

He goes on to suggest that American capitulation to the Jihad is not only a Democratic Party weakness, but also a Republican Party weakness.

But while we are on "Islamists" how about our friendship with the Saudi Royal family? A friendship that blossomed under Republicans.

Volleyboy’s problem is that no one here is defending the Bush administration and just because Israel is willing to talk with Egypt, including the Brotherhood, this is not nearly the same thing as suggesting, as Barack Obama did, that the rise of the Jihad is something similar to the American Revolution or the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s.

The fact of the matter is that the Obama administration is quite literally encouraging the rise of a genocidal anti-Semitic movement and there is no possible spin that can turn that into a good thing.

Israel is a very small country, surrounded by enemies, and will talk with anyone who will talk with her. This is only natural given Israel’s position in the world, but the President of the United States is a world leader that sets world agendas. Israel has a practical need to speak with its neighbors no matter who is in charge, but Barack Obama is literally encouraging the rise of the Jihad. Whatever his intention, this is clearly the effect.

Furthermore, Volleyboy1 fails to address the two other major criticisms in my piece. He does not explain how it is that the Obama administration ruined the “peace process” by demanding “total settlement freeze,” thus forcing Mahmoud Abbas to demand nothing less as the price for negotiations.

He also fails to explain how it is that the Obama administration dares to tell Jews where they may, or may not, live on ancient Jewish land, despite the fact that such a demand justifies Arab racism toward Jews. There is no reason why the presence of Jews in what the Jordanians dubbed “the West Bank,” land that has been known for millenia as Judea and Samaria, should prevent the Palestinians from accepting a state on that land.

If Volleyboy1 wants Jewish people to continue to support this administration, as I did initially, then he will have to do considerably better then merely noticing that Israel will talk with her neighbors, whomever they may be.

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Barack Obama is No Friend to the Jewish People or the Jewish State

2012-01-03T06:35:00.000-08:00

Karam

{Cross-Posted at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers}

It cannot be emphasized enough that the Obama administration is generally hostile to Israel and, perhaps more importantly, has acted in ways that have hurt that country by eliminating any near-term possibility for a peaceful conclusion of hostilities between Israel and the Palestinian-Arabs. As virtually everyone knows by this point, Obama destroyed the potential for a negotiated end of the conflict by placing the unreasonable precondition of "total settlement freeze" on the table, thereby driving Mahmoud Abbas up his tree, where he yet lingers.

That's the first thing that must be kept in mind when considering the various ways that Obama has been bad for Israel and thus bad for the Jewish people. Obama ruined any possibility for a negotiated settlement. This cannot be emphasized enough. Obama took whatever potential there might have been in negotiations and threw them into the garbage entirely. The only question is, why? What was he thinking? Or was he thinking, at all? It's hard to know what would motivate the president of the United States to destroy the potential for peace between Israel and the Palestinian-Arabs, but that he did so is not in doubt.

For this reason, if for no other, Jewish people and friends of Israel must prevent a second, potentially disastrous, Obama presidency. If Obama is this hostile and incompetent now, when he still needs Jewish support for winning a second term, how will he behave when he has nothing to lose?

Of course, ruining the "peace process" is only one reason why Jewish people and friends of Israel should vote against Barack Obama 11 months from now. Another reason to show Obama the door is because his demands that Jews not be allowed to live, and thus build housing for themselves in Judea and Samaria, is a policy that justifies Arab racism against Jews. Mahmoud Abbas has demanded that any future state of Palestine must be Judenrein and Barack Obama apparently agrees. Why else would he insist that Jews should not be allowed to build housing for themselves on what is traditionally Jewish land?

Although it is rather difficult for me to believe that Obama is a racist, his policy on Jewish settlement building is, in fact, racist against the Jewish people. Can you imagine if any high ranking government official suggested that in the United States Italians should be allowed to live east of the Mississippi River, but not west of the river? Any such statement would be met with slack-jawed amazement, if not complete and utter outrage, yet this is essentially what Barack Obama is telling the Jews of the Middle East. They may only be allowed to live where he decides. It's difficult to imagine, but we need not imagine it because it is now part of the historical record. Obama literally thinks that he has the right to tell Jewish people where we may be allowed to live.

Also, of course, it was Barack Obama who told the world that the Radical Jihadi uprisings throughout the Middle East were something akin to the American Revolution and / or the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s, as if Martin Luther King were a genocidal Jihadi Jew Hater. In this way, Barack Obama literally supports a movement that has genocidal intention toward the Jewish people and portrays that genocidal Jew Hatred as a matter of "social justice." This is not hyperbole, but quite literally the case. As the Muslim Brotherhood and their fascist affiliates throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds rise to power, they are doing so with the blessings of the President of the United States. It's so outlandish that people have a hard time wrapping their brains around this fact. It just seems so unlikely. Why would the President of the United States support genocidal Islamist intentions toward Jews? Chances are that was not his intention, but if it was not his intention, just why did he do it?

In any case, I have gone over this ground many times in the past and will probably continue to do so in the future because, much to my astonishment, these facts are being whitewashed by Obama supporters. Those of us who care about the Jewish people, and thus the Jewish state, must do whatever we can do to remind Jewish people, and friends, just how rotten the Obama administration has been for Israel and, therefore, how rotten he has been for the Jewish people.

We need to bang this drum as often and as loudly as possible because if Obama gets a second term the potential consequences are absolutely horrendous. We will see Iran go nuclear and the Middle East ruled by the Radical Jihad.

Barack Obama may be comfortable with such an outcome, but we cannot afford to be.

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Why Support a Movement that Would See Israel Destroyed?

2012-01-01T12:11:00.000-08:00

Karam

It simply makes no sense.

Progressive-left Jews support a movement, the progressive movement, that is also home to anti-Zionists who would see Israel destroyed as a Jewish state and the Jewish people, thereby, subject to potential genocide.

Why in this world should Jewish people support a movement that, ultimately, is indifferent to the fate of the Jewish state and that supports people who actively seek to undermine its well-being and, therefore, the well-being of you and your children?

It really is as simple as that, folks.

You can support Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land or you can support the progressive-left. You cannot support both because the progressives will not allow it. The reason that they will not allow it is because they also support anti-Semitic anti-Zionism as we see on a daily basis on Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, and the UK Guardian.

Day after day after day, the Jewish state comes in for a beating from our erstwhile allies. They do not criticize. They demean, defame, and demonize and they do so within venues that we are supposed to believe represent our friends and allies.

They aren't.

Jews supported and helped build the progressive movement from the beginning, but the progressives have turned on you and that is what you, at long last, must recognize. I know that it's hard. Friendships are involved. Long-standing commitments are involved. Job security, even, is also sometimes involved. But we cannot allow ourselves to throw Israel into the toilet because we do not wish to alienate fake friends.

The bottom line is that the progressive movement has accepted anti-Zionism and, thereby, rejected us.

That's a fact.

It's a sad fact, but fact it is.

And it is long past time that we acknowledge it, deal with it, and move on.

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HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2012-01-01T10:38:00.000-08:00

DOODAD

Welcome to 2012! Let's hope it is our best year yet.Of course, some things are not likely to be better given the so called Arab Spring. Let's look at what the Islamists are saying.

"Muslim Brotherhood: Israel peace deal isn't binding Leader in Egyptian Islamist movement says it won't recognize Israel under any circumstances, and might put up peace treaty with 'Zionist entity' up to referendum; 'Israel is enemy entity,' he says....'Israel is enemy entity' He stressed that under no circumstances will the Brotherhood recognize the State of Israel. "Is rising to power conditional on recognizing Israel?" al-Bayoumi wondered. "That's out of the question, no matter what the situation is. On no condition will we recognize Israel. It is an enemy entity, an exploiting, criminal occupier." According to al-Bayoumi, no member of the Muslim Brotherhood will ever meet with Israelis...."I won't allow myself to sit down with a criminal," he said. "We won't cooperate with Israel in any situation."

No real surprise there. Some of the MB have suggested a people's referendum about the peace agreement. Doubtless, given the overwhelming people's support for the Islamists, the Egyptian public would likely vote against the peace treaty. There is just that much hate out there. I don't think it would all matter that much in the long run. From all accounts their economy is so bad that they won't be doing much except begging other nations for bailouts for a long time to come. Welcome to the long Arab Islamic Winter, Egypt.

Progressive-Left Jews and Progressive-Left Enemies of the Jewish People

2011-12-30T18:48:00.000-08:00

Karam

Progressive-left enemies of the Jewish people have thrust liberal Jews into the position in which they can choose to be progressive or they can choose to favor Israel, but they cannot choose both. The reason for this is not that supporting Israel violates progressive principles, but because the progressives, themselves, are abandoning the Jewish people in favor of their Palestinian-Arab enemies. Despite our long-standing support for the progressive movement, and our centrality in the history of that movement, the progressive-left has betrayed the Jews.

Since Israel successfully defended itself from genocidal Arab aggression in the 6 Day War, western progressives portray the Jewish state as a “colonialist, racist” villain. We see this day in and day out throughout progressive media. Anti-Semitic anti-Zionist leftists tell Jewish progressives that they are apologists for racism, colonialism, apartheid, imperialism, oppression, genocide, and outright murder.

It is true, of course, that only a small percentage of western progressives are hate-filled, acidic anti-Zionists of the type that we find on places like Daily Kos. The problem is that the rest of the progressive community has accepted anti-Semitic anti-Zionism as part of the larger coalition and are, day after day, convincing themselves that the anti-Zionists are right. It is for this reason that Jewish progressives are being slowly, but surely, demonized and pushed out of the progressive movement.

One of the mistakes that pro-Israel progressive Jews are making, therefore, is in continuing to support a political movement that doesn't care if we live or die. How can any Jewish person who cares about Israel simultaneously support a political movement which seeks to erode the legitimacy of that country or dissolve it as a Jewish state? Every time that a progressive Jew donates money to a progressive cause, or otherwise supports the progressive movement, they are supporting and bolstering people who ally themselves with those who salivate after Israel’s destruction.

This is the first horrendous Jewish liberal mistake. How ridiculous must one be to support people who have no interest whatsoever in supporting you? It is, quite simply, moronic. I wish that it were not so, but it is so and pretending otherwise only supports Israel's enemies. And this leads us to another horrendous liberal Jewish mistake. We have absolutely got to stop thinking that progressive preferences ipso facto represent the truth. It simply doesn’t work that way. A terrific recent example of this is when presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich said that the Palestinians are an “invented” people. This is, of course, true of all peoples, but the difference is that the Palestinians are, as a people, the most recent addition to the community of nations and were, therefore, “invented” only within living memory. The truth of this is not dependent upon one’s politics, but upon the facts of history. If I am wrong, then I am sure that someone can hand me a text of “The History of the Palestinian People in the 18th Century.”

No one can possibly do so because there was no “Palestinian people” in the 18th century, nor, in fact, through most of the 20th.

It is also true that the “Palestinians” were born from the greater Arab nation as a weapon against the movement for Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel. Were there no Israel, were there no Zionism, then today there would be no Palestinian people. Period. Even Rashid Khalidi acknowledges that the driving force behind Palestinian nationalism was Arab opposition to Jewish self-determination. The mistake that liberal Jews are making is in bolstering Arab claims to Jewish land by catering to this fantasy of a "Palestinian" presence in Israel since "time immemorial."

Does this mean that the Palestinians are not a people? Of course, not. What it means is that their claims on Israeli land are paper thin. Does this mean that the Palestinians should not have a state? Again, of course, not. While there are no people on the planet less deserving of a state then the genocidal Palestinians, they should get one, nonetheless, in order to eliminate their bogus claims on Israel. In the meantime, liberal Jews who care about the state of Israel do themselves no favors by pretending that "Palestinians" have a long and ancient history on Jewish land.

They don’t and anyone who says otherwise is either lying, ignorant, or malicious.

Pick two out of three.

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Bulldozing Jewish History

2011-12-29T21:44:00.000-08:00

Karam

Our friend Giulio Meotti has some words:

Threatened by Arab countries, Israeli authorities just closed the Mughabri Bridge, preventing Jews and Christians from entering Temple Mount. Historically it should be noted that only under Israeli rule was the site open for everyone, Muslims, Christians and Jews. The Waqf is now attempting to deliberately destroy all archaeological evidence of Jewish claims to this site, while using terror and intimidation to impose its exclusive claim to Temple Mount.

The Waqf has removed every sign of ancient Jewish presence at the site. At the entrance, a Waqf sign says “The Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyard and everything in it is Islamic property.” Today Jews are barred from praying on the Mount and are not even allowed to carry any holy articles with them. With Muslim observers supervising visits, Israeli police have frequently arrested Jews for various violations, such as singing or reciting a prayer even in a whisper.

This week, a Jewish woman was arrested following claims by police and Waqf officials that they noticed she was praying on Temple Mount. Why is it a crime for a Jew to mention God’s name on Temple Mount? And why is the State of Israel complicit in enforcing this anti-Semitic rule?

European autocrats and the global media are also trying to downplay the Jewish connection to the site. Jewish archeologist Gabi Barkai stated that “it’s a lie more terrible than the denial of the Holocaust, yet connected to it.” UN and EU funded textbooks in the Palestinian areas all repeat the canard denying any Jewish legitimacy in the “Noble Sanctuary.”

The World Council of Churches, the largest umbrella for the Protestant Churches, in its “Promised Land” conference in Switzerland denied any Jewish connection with the Mount. Recently, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Vatican’s Council for Interreligious Dialogue, just asked to place some Israeli holy places around Temple Mount under Vatican or international authority...

Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama’s plan also designates the Old City as an “international zone.”

Is commentary even necessary?

Today we're off to Haifa.

Cross-Posted at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers

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Richard Silverstein gets fooled, takes pride in getting fooled

2011-12-29T15:45:00.000-08:00

DOODAD

(hat tip Harry's Place)

I suspect most of us know what an unwholesome guy Dickie Silverstein is based on his hate of Israel and love of Hamas et al. That's why it is so funny that he fell for a trap set up by blogger Aussie Dave. The whole thing is too long to quote here so I suggest you read it. Basically, Aussie Dave set up Silverstein by posting false clues knowing Silverstein would then try and out Aussie's REAL name and address. Silverstein did exactly that. Had the info been true it would have exposed Aussie and his family to the crazies out there and put them in harm's way. Is it any wonder that Silverstein is known in the community as the Kapo?

Obama Gives Hugo Et Al Cancer

2011-12-28T16:07:00.000-08:00

DOODAD

Israel Matzav reports that Hugo Chavez figures Americans have been giving him and other Latin American leaders cancer.

"Although he said he did not want to make "reckless" accusations, President Hugo Chávez on Wednesday hinted that the cancer that he and four other Latin American presidents have suffered or are suffering may have been caused by a "technology developed by the United States.""It seems very strange that cancer has hit (Paraguayan President Fernando) Lugo, (Brazilian President) Dilma (Rousseff), then me, and within a few days (Brazilian former president Luis Inácio) Lula (da Silva), and now (Argentinean President) Cristina (Fernández de Kirchner)," Chávez said at the ceremony of Christmas and New Year salutation to the Armed Forces. "It would be hardly surprising that they have developed a technology to induce cancer and that it is known only 50 years later."Venezuela's Head of State based his suspicions on the tests and experiments with chemical weapons that the US Army secretly conducted in Guatemala in the fifties.Finally, Chávez asked his counterparts in Ecuador and Bolivia, Rafael Correa and Evo Morales, respectively, to take care of their health."

This should put to rest any idea that Obama is a Commie. Also, since Bibi et al have not contracted cancer obviously Obama does love Israel.

/snark

Democracy Derangement Syndrome

2011-12-28T10:48:00.000-08:00

DOODAD

Anti-Israeli forces have been having a field-day with the suggestion that Israel's democracy is falling apart. Even normally Pro-Israeli forces from the left have been swept up in this accusation (although it is surely due to their hatred of the right wing rather than any anti-Israel sentiment.) Here, Barry Rubin questions the reality of the accusation.

"It is truly amazing how anti-Israel forces generate so many false stories every day. At a time when revolutionary Islamists are taking over most Middle Eastern countries and the democracy dream in the region is collapsing, one would think that the main threat and evil force in the region is Israel. After all, we live in a time when Thomas Friedman, court jester for Middle East issues, can openly write antisemitic canards in the New York Times (the Israel lobby bought a standing ovation for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Congress!). What is even more remarkable is how new anti-Israel themes are generated without any evidence whatsoever.

The new one is the idea that Israel, and its democracy, are in danger (moderate version) due to internal extremism or are (radical version) falling apart altogether. At least two new commercially published books make this claim, as do scores of articles and even a speech by the secretary of state. The New York Times publishes an op-ed saying that gays are persecuted in Israel while, of course, they aren’t but are murdered in every other county in the region. Yet what actual evidence can be accumulated for all of this campaign?

The Knesset had a bill to supervise foreign money received by non-government organizations, a law not so dissimilar from those in Western democracies. And? And? What else happened? Well, nothing at all.

Oh yes, a bus driver took it upon himself to tell a woman to sit in the back of a bus because her sitting elsewhere might disturb Haredi men. She took it to court and, of course, won. A Haredi man in a town spit at an eight-year-old girl, apparently he belongs to some extreme sect or is somewhat disturbed. Even the strictest reading of Jewish law does not justify such an action. There were huge demonstrations against the actions of this one person or tiny sect. President Shimon Peres publicly called for protests and Jerusalem’s police chief asked rabbis to condemn such behavior. The state and the public is clearly against any violation of democratic norms......."

'Ron Paul wishes Israel didn't exist'

2011-12-26T17:46:00.000-08:00

DOODAD

No wonder some Kossacks like this guy.

"Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul negates Israel's right to exist, Eric Dondero, who served as a senior aide to the 76-year-old Texas congressman for over 12 years, said on Monday.

In a blog posted in Rightwing News, Dondero said that while Paul was, in his opinion, neither a racist nor an anti-Semite, he is very much anti-Israel...according to Dondero, the elderly congressman "wishes the Israeli state did not exist at all."

The congressman's former aide insists in his blog that Paul expressed the controversial sentiment "numerous times in our private conversations." Paul's view, he said, "is that Israel is more trouble than it is worth, specifically to the America taxpayer. He sides with the Palestinians, and supports their calls for the abolishment of the Jewish state, and the return of Israel, all of it, to the Arabs."

No surprises here. Sounds like many a Kossack we have heard from over the years.

UPDATE

Link to original article where Paul is described as believing:

"he strenuously does not believe the United States had any business getting involved in fighting Hitler in WWII. He expressed to me countless times, that “saving the Jews,” was absolutely none of our business."

Rolling Out

2011-12-26T10:37:00.000-08:00

Karam

Well, I am outa here, folks.

As Laurie and I get ready to hit the road, I am pondering some writing ideas, both short term and longer term. In the short term, I think I may write about how the Obama administration's hositility toward Israel and general failure in foreign policy may lead to a significant split in the American Jewish community. On the longer project, I will probably write on the administration's failure in regards the Arab war against the Jews from the beginning of his administration until the present moment.

However, before I do any of that, let me leave you with a Barry Rubin quote from an article that he published at the Jerusalem Post, yesterday:

Perhaps the most incredible aspect of all this is the numerous attempts by the Obama administration and its apologists –including Jews – to pretend that its policy is really good for Israel. Over and over again such people and their writings always ignore the regional strategic aspect of the damage that it is doing.

So what if the US government gives Israel military aid, which mostly consists of maintaining old programs? The Obama administration is building up the threat Israel faces to unprecedented levels. “I love Israel” statements don’t solve this huge strategic problem.

Indeed, the "regional strategic aspect." It doesn't much matter to me how many high-ranking Israeli officials say nice things about Barack Obama. And the fact that Israel and the United States maintain a high level of military cooperation is not surprising. What is surprising, or at least disappointing, is that the administration, like the progressive-left more generally, is turning a blind eye to the rise of the Jihad throughout the Middle East. What the administration should be doing about this very serious development is open to question, discussion, and debate, but what is not open to much question is the fact that this administration is simply denying reality.

There is no recognition that the "Arab Spring" is really the "Islamist Spring" and the administration is apparently standing by its contention that the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Islamist forces in the region, is something akin to the American Revolution and / or the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

I would like to suggest that Obama is probably just a tad mistaken on that question and that there is nothing to indicate that he has even the slightest awareness of this mistake.

Well, the Jewish people have been around for over 3,500 years and I feel reasonably confident that we will survive this administration, as well.

And, with that, I am off.

Laurie and I head to Israel for a little while in our Quest for the World's Best Falafel. Some say Gina's in Tel Aviv while others insist upon Moshiko's in Jerusalem. We shall see, but I am still pulling for my friendly local food-truck guy at the Grand Lake farmer's market in Oakland.

We shall see.

(Cross-Posted at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers)

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Kossacks Who Stand Up For Hamas

2011-12-26T08:35:00.000-08:00

DOODAD

Why do Kossacks hate Bibi more than Hamas? Sure seems like they do when you look at the dKos diary titled
IP: Bibi now says he WILL NOT have talks on peace unless he determines who represents Palestinians.

Sigh. Same old crowd with the same old message. It's all Bibi's fault. Hamas was ELECTED...bla bla bla bla. Never mind that Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organization dedicated to the end of Israel; some Kossacks have their back. And some wonder why I hate that swamp.

And a Very Merry Christmas to All

2011-12-24T17:01:00.000-08:00

Karam

I like Christmas.

When I was a kid I would basically celebrate both, often spending Christmas morning with Christian neighbors and their kids.

I come out of the Reform tradition, for me it was all just one Big Holiday Season and I loved it.

Peace.

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Obama's Support Tanking Among Jews (And Others)

2011-12-24T10:40:00.000-08:00

Karam

A Gallup poll from September shows that Barack Obama's support among Jewish people has dropped 29 points since January 2009.

This reflects decline of support across the board and not merely with Jewish people. Among the general population support for Barack Obama has declined 25 points, from 66 percent to 41 percent.

My impression has been that Barack Obama will likely win next year's election, in part because the Republican field is something other than inspiring. Nonetheless, with disgust toward the president rising in all quarters, perhaps I am wrong to think that Obama is a shoo-in.

Speaking strictly for myself, I would vote for a hot pastrami sandwich on rye, with mustard, onion, and melted swiss, before I would vote for Obama, again. That much is certain.

Nobody who feels that they have the right to dictate where Jews may or may not live in Jerusalem can possibly deserve the support of the Jewish people.

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Still More Dr. Rubin Discussing Obama's Capitulation to Radical Islam

2011-12-24T09:31:00.000-08:00

Karam

Here

"Clinton claims:

'Not all Islamists are alike. Turkey and Iran are both governed by parties with religious roots, but their models and behavior are radically different. There are plenty of political parties with religious affiliations—Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim—that respect the rules of democratic politics. The suggestion that faithful Muslims cannot thrive in a democracy is insulting, dangerous, and wrong. They do it in this country every day.'

Let’s review

–True, Not all Muslims are alike but all Islamists are alike.

–By the same token, not all Russians are alike but all Communists under Lenin and Stalin were alike.

-And, not all Germans were alike but all Nazis were alike.

–Not all organizations composed of Caucasians are alike but all members of the Ku Klux Klan are alike.

–The fact that European Christian Democratic and Israeli religious parties respect the rules of democratic politics has no connection with whether the Muslim Brotherhood will do so.

Is that clear?

What’s striking about the administration’s position is the lack of the most basic logic. True, a political party with religious affiliations might “respect the rules of democratic politics.” But that doesn’t mean parties favoring a Sharia state in which, say, Muslims who convert to another religion are sentenced to death, fall into that category. There is no proof that Islamist parties “respect the rules of democratic politics” except their willingness to run in elections. The Nazis and Communists also ran in elections. So what?

And what is a moderate Muslim? He might be a conservative traditionalist; liberal reformer; Kurdish or Berber nationalist; tribal loyalist; etc. But that doesn’t apply to an Islamist, someone who wants to fundamentally transform the existing society into one governed by Sharia law under a hardline interpretation, wiping of Israel off the map, subordinating Christians and women; and driving Western influence out of the region.

Winning an election and forming a government is only the first step. What does that government do? It passes laws that enforce an Islamist conception of society; puts its people into the bureaucracy, rewards imams who are radical and fires those who are moderate; rewrites textbooks and what appears on the media, chooses judges and the commanders of the armed forces; and sponsors terrorism against other states.

It would be something else completely for the U.S. government to say: We will accept the Muslim Brotherhood in government if it takes power in an election, but we will do everything possible to stop that from happening. That would be a proper U.S. interests’ policy.

Clinton did set some conditions but in no way hinted that any Islamist party might violate them:

'Parties committed to democracy must reject violence; they must abide by the rule of law and respect the freedoms of speech, religion, association, and assembly; they must respect the rights of women and minorities; they must let go of power if defeated at the polls; and in a region with deep divisions within and between religions, they cannot be the spark that starts a conflagration. In other words, what parties call themselves is less important to us than what they actually do.'

Where to begin?

–The Islamists do not reject violence. The Muslim Brotherhood supports terrorism against Israel, Americans, and Iraqi Shia. It will soon be backing violence, at least covertly, against Christians, secularists, and others. That is their doctrine.

–Abide by the rule of law. Well, they will democratically change the law into a repressive dictatorship. The Communists and fascist regimes also had laws that they enforced

–Freedom of speech. No speech that criticizes Islam, their interpretation of Islam, or themselves, as we already see in Turkey where a former general was just sentenced to prison on the charge of having criticized the judgment in conversation with a villager.

–Freedom of religion. No building or repair of churches, no equality of treatment for Christians. In Turkey a great historic church is now being converted into a mosque.

–Association and assembly. Even now, look what happens if Christians try to demonstrate in Cairo.

–Respect the rights of women and minorities. Laws will be changed to take away women’s rights because Sharia will govern.

–And what will the U.S. government do if these democratic practices don’t happen? Might it ot be too late?"

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I find this all very unusual. On the one hand we have an organization, The Muslim Brotherhood, the granddaddy of the Radical Jihad, virtually taking over the country of Egypt, which is, of course, one of the most important countries in the Middle East. The Brotherhood has an ideological provenance that goes to the Koran, but also to Nazi Germany. Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza. It is thus a genocidal organization.

On the other hand we have an administration that is complicit in the rise of the Jihad in the Middle East. It should be clear by this point to all that the current US administration has no real concern about preventing a Sharia take over throughout the entire area. The Muslim Middle East is rank with homophobia, gender apartheid, and genocidal Jew hatred and the US Secretary of State believes that standing against this kind of malice is insulting toward Muslims.

And, finally, on the third hand we have a political movement in the US out of which the president came, i.e., the progressive movement, that has not the strength of stomach to even discuss the fact that it is implicitly supporting a movement that stands in direct opposition to everything that it allegedly stands for. The progressive movement tells the world that it supports Gay rights, yet this movement has abandoned Gay people in the Middle East entirely.

The progressive movement tells the world that it supports women's rights, yet this movement has abandoned women in the Middle East entirely.

The progressive movement also tells the world that it is anti-racist, yet it constantly displays a condescension toward people of color, particularly Arabs, and tends to blame Jews for the attacks against us.

What is most galling, however, is that the progressive movement, as a rule, is so painfully politically correct that they cannot even bring themselves to honestly discuss what is the single most significant foreign policy development since the end of the Cold War. The fact that the Jihad is taking over country after country in the Middle East is treated as irrelevant. Part of the reason for this, of course, is that the Obama administration has sent a signal that they are OK with these developments, despite the genocidal nature of the Jihad.

And, of course, merely to even the raise the issue, as I am doing here, marks one as a "racist" or an "Islamophobe" or a hard-line right-wing warmonger. In other words, if an imam screams for the blood of Jews in a mosque and I say, "Hey, that imam is calling for the murder of Jews" it makes me the bad guy in the self-righteous, morally vacuous world of the progressive-left.

What a shame.

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The University of Pennsylvania Rejects BDS

2011-12-23T14:00:00.000-08:00

Karam

Penn Statement on Planned BDS Conference

University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann:

A campus student group, Penn BDS, is planning a national conference in February that will encourage boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

This is not an event sponsored by the University. The event is being sponsored by a registered student group, as is permitted of any student group on campus.

The University of Pennsylvania has clearly stated on numerous occasions that it does not support sanctions or boycotts against Israel. Indeed, Penn has important and successful scholarly collaborations with Israeli institutions that touch on many areas of our academic enterprise.

Penn has always supported free expression and the free exchange of ideas. These are essential elements of a great university. These principles apply to this event, as they would any other student event, whether or not we agree with or condone the message BDS seeks to communicate.

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Seems reasonable enough to me. The university rejects the BDS and a few students get to a hold an anti-Israel hate-fest. What counts, though, is that the university, via the office of the president of that school, has made a stand.

Oh, and by the way, "Gutmann," huh? University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann.

Well, I guess this is why it is good that we make little Jewish kids study hard.

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Dr. Rubin and Obama's Capitulation to Radical Islam, Continued

2011-12-23T11:58:00.000-08:00

Karam

Dr. Rubin writes:

"It (the Obama administration - editor's note) has also sided with the enemies of the PA, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. It has sided with the enemies of democratic forces in Iran, Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon. Indeed, the U.S. government is working to empower the most dangerous enemies of democracy in the Middle East.

What’s especially remarkable is that this strategy is based on no evidence. All Clinton can cite is a single case—Turkey—that proves the exact opposite of what the Obama Administration claims.

Here are five examples on the other side:

–The Oslo peace process was based on the belief that the radical nationalist PLO would be moderated by being given power, guns, and money. Has the result been peace and moderation?

–The U.S. government favored the participation of Hamas in the Palestinian election. It won and then staged a coup. Today Gaza is ruled by a radical regime that foments war on Israel and openly proclaims its intention to commit genocide on Jews.

–Hizballah participated in the Lebanese elections, won, and while it cannot institute a Shia Islamist regime in a country where 70 percent aren’t Shia Muslims and its opponents are armed, it is doing all it can to make that country a dictatorship that will attack Israel when it thinks the timing is right.

–In Egypt, we have seen the descent into anarchy and violence; the persecution of Christians, the unleashing of fanaticism. Where is the debate in the Muslim Brotherhood to indicate moderation? Where is the renunciation of past extremism? Where is the reinterpretation of Islamic texts to justify a totally different worldview? These things don’t exist.

–Turkey, the great role model, is seeing democracy wane as the Islamists arrest their enemies, take over the media, and adopt an anti-Western foreign policy that backs radical Islamists elsewhere.

March of folly indeed. This is a sprint."

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The problem here is not that the Obama administration should be expected to dictate the outcomes of the various riots and uprisings that comprise the Islamist Spring, but the very least we should expect from the President of the United States is some recognition that what is currently going on throughout the Arab world is something other than the Civil Rights Movement in the US circa the 1950s.

It is beyond obvious that Obama was ridiculously wrong when he suggested that the revolt in Tunisia was in any way comparable either to the Revolution of '76 or to Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement. It's fairly mind-boggling that he made that suggestion because anyone with two brain cells to rub together knew to wait before making any proclamations about the nature of these movements.

At the time, I did not know that the "Arab Spring" would actually be the "Islamist Spring," but I certainly knew enough to withhold judgment until things began to pan out. What I do not understand is why Barack Obama, who they tell us is a pretty bright guy, did not have the basic commonsense to wait before declaring the rise of the Jihad to be a good thing and he still has not corrected himself.

The first thing that needs to be done now is simply to acknowledge the error and begin to figure out how we, the United States and the west, intends to deal with the fact that the entire Arab Middle East seems to be going for the Jihad. That it is happening is beyond doubt, but what, if anything to do about it is a question that is being entirely ignored, particularly on the progressive-left and seemingly within the Obama administration, as well.

Noticing this development is neither right-wing nor left-wing, neither conservative nor liberal, but strictly commonsensical.

There are, by the way, reasons why the political left has stuck its head in the sand viz-a-viz the Jihad. Part of it has to do with social pressure and political correctness and part of it has to do with the Bush administration using its trademarked War on Terror to bolster its own political fortunes and to move funds in various directions for the purposes of corporate enrichment.

But, again, if George W. Bush says that it's raining, this does not mean that small children and ponies are prancing in the sunshine.

If some on the political right, such as, for example, Pamela Geller, are too strident in ringing the fire bell on this issue, the progressive-left is essentially a corpse. Neither the movement, nor the President of the United States, is on this issue, which is a shame considering that it is, in fact, the foremost foreign policy question facing the world today.

Yet they choose to keep their eyes, mouths, and ears almost entirely shut.

And that being the case, it should be fairly obvious that this president is not serving the country very well... and this, too, must be acknowledged.

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"It’s Official: Obama Administration Promotes Islamist Regimes; Insists They are Moderate"

2011-12-22T10:54:00.000-08:00

Karam

By Barry Rubin (Nov 8, 2011)

"Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech justifying Obama Administration Middle East policy changes everything. True, it isn’t surprising. I’ve been writing for almost three years about how the current U.S. government thinks this way.

Do not underestimate this speech’s importance. It isn’t a reluctant acceptance that Islamists might win elections and take over coutries. It is an enthusiastic endorsement of that idea.

But now there can be no doubt that Obama’s Middle East policy is engaged in what might be the biggest blunder in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Millions of people will bemoan it as delivering their countries into the grip of repressive dictatorships.

The speech can be summarized as follows:

Islamist regimes—at least those whose “behavior” is proper–are good. If Islamists exercise political power they will be moderate. Thus, the United States will not merely tolerate but will actually support Islamists taking power.

The Obama Administration is now on the side of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizballah, and the Taliban (“moderate” wing). It is the equivalent of an American government telling you that Communism and fascism are no threat because they can be tamed by participating in elections and being in power.

Thus, the Obama Administration has openly sided with Israel’s enemies. I don’t mean the Palestinian Authority (PA) or Saudi Arabia. That would be tolerable. We’re talking here about openly genocidal, antisemitic groups."

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The Hillary Clinton speech that Professor Rubin refers to is one that she gave last fall wherein she said the following:

“Not all Islamists are alike. Turkey and Iran are both governed by parties with religious roots, but their models and behavior are radically different. There are plenty of political parties with religious affiliations—Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim—that respect the rules of democratic politics. The suggestion that faithful Muslims cannot thrive in a democracy is insulting, dangerous, and wrong. They do it in this country every day.”

The Obama administration, according to Professor Rubin, is now on the side of the Muslim Brotherhood and, essentially, the Radical Jihad more generally.

One must wonder why this would be? Does the Obama administration want to promote the Islamist tendency in the Arab world? I doubt it. It's not that Obama wants to see the rise of al-Sharia, Muslim religious law, it's that as a progressive he doesn't see it as a problem, period. In a certain way his attitude is reflective of the progressive movement, more generally.

Because the Muslims of the Middle East are an oppressed people, or so the narrative goes, we, as kind-hearted, well-meaning, progressive westerners, must condescend to their desires even if those desires include the oppression of women, Jews, and Gays. Multiculturalism is more important than universal human rights and therefore if Egypt and Turkey and Tunisia and Morocco and Libya go the genocidal Radical Jihadi route... well?... who are we to say "no"?

And it is in this way that the Obama administration, wanting nothing but the best for everyone, sells the Jewish state directly down the river.

In any event, we are in fact seeing the rise of Radical Islam in the Muslim world and this is going to be viewed by historians as a very important part of the Obama administration's legacy. The Obama administration will go down in history as the American government under which Iran developed nuclear weaponry and in which political Islam finally came into its own as a world power.

Any political movement that succeeds in taking over the governments of so many countries must be seen as a world power and it is under the Obama administration that after so many decades Radical Islam (or political Islamism, or whatever terminology one might want to use) has come to the fore in the Arab world.

Sayyid Qutb, one of the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood and the author of such estimable works as, "Our Struggle Against the Jews" must be very, very happy in whatever warm climate he may currently reside within.

What we need to do, however, as people who care about the Jewish state and the Jewish people is hold this administration responsible for its behavior. It's not merely that the Obama administration is allowing the rise of the Jihad, but it is positively encouraging it.

As Jewish people we need to know when to stand up and make our voices heard. We need to be able to stand up and say "NO" to an administration that would so easily point a gun at our heads. Is that line hyperbolic? Sure. Is it false? Not really. The developments that we are now seeing in the Arab world represent an obvious threat to the Jewish people because we are so outnumbered and because the Jihad, which this administration has bolstered, is genocidal in nature.

This is a big, big problem, but do not expect western progressives, Zionist or otherwise, to yank their heads out of the sand long enough to object.

They won't and I say this as someone who came out of that movement.

There is tremendous social pressure within progressive and liberal circles to remain silent on this question. Anyone who so much as refers to this development is lambasted as a fascist or a racist. They will throw everything that they have at you for even discussing this material.

It's a terrible shame, really, particularly given how many progressives are Jewish, but the only thing that we can do is face reality as it is and as it is right now the Arab world is seething with a genocidal intention that outweighs anything that we've seen previously. We do not need to go running around like chickens with our heads cut off, but we absolutely must acknowledge the obvious.

And even that seems too much to ask sometimes.

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Report: Saudi Textbooks Teach Annihilation of Jews

2011-12-22T09:13:00.000-08:00

Doodad

Well, they are still at it in the Arab world; educating their youth to annihilate Jews.

"State-funded books in Saudi Arabia continue to teach kids that 'hour (of judgment) won't come until Muslims fight Jews and kill them,' Fox News reports

The news network, which was able to obtain translated copies of the recently-printed books from the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington, DC, said that the books teaches ninth graders that the annihilation of Jews is imperative...."The hour (of judgment) will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them," one part reads. "There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him."

The books also target homosexuals and recommend amputations for thieves.

And some people think there will be peace. Yeah, and Hell will freeze over. Oh wait, perhaps there will be peace when all those Jews are killed off and Israel is wiped out. Silly me, I have been looking at this whole peace thing the wrong way.

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Barack Obama and the Rise of the Radical Jihad

2011-12-21T21:31:00.000-08:00

Karam

One of the best analysts of the ongoing Arab war against the Jews, although I do not know that he would put it quite in those terms, is Professor Barry Rubin of Rubin Reports. Dr. Rubin is "a professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, the Director of the Global Research and International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, and a Senior Fellow at the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism. Rubin has written and edited more than 40 books on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, with publishers including Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge University Press."

Last November 8, Rubin published an article entitled, "It’s Official: Obama Administration Promotes Islamist Regimes; Insists They are Moderate." I want to go through this article slowly over the coming days because it seems obvious to me that one of the major screw-ups of the Obama administration has been in the welcoming of the rise of the Radical Jihad during the early weeks and months of the misnamed "Arab Spring." There is little doubt that the "Arab Spring" is really either the "Islamist Spring" or perhaps the "Arab Winter," but what it is not shaping up to be is a widespread movement for secular democracy in the Arab world. The "Facebook Kids," or whatever they were dubbed at the time, fizzled to no one's great surprise.

Instead what we are getting are politicians, like Obama, and any number of newspapers or journals suggesting that the Jihad maybe isn't so bad, after all. The Muslim Brotherhood is a "moderate" organization we are told by high level Obama officials like Eric Holder. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggests that some Islamists are better than others and that therefore some Jihadis are OK.

Needless to say, this trend in Obama's foreign policy is a catastrophe as it legitimizes the Jihad and therefore also, by necessity, legitimizes Jihadi genocidal Jew hatred. This was not Obama's intention, merely his effect, and it is one of the major reasons why we need to work against his reelection. Jews are running for the hills out of the Democratic Party and this president may prove dangerous to the Jewish state, if not the Jewish people, if he wins a second term.

No US president who stands by and watches as Iran goes nuclear and urges the rise of Radical Islam in the Middle East can possibly be considered a president that is good either for America or for the Jewish people. Could that not possibly be more obvious?

Anyway, on to Professor Rubin tomorrow.

Heck, I may end up writing some of this on a plane, because Laurie and I head to Israel within the coming week.

Happy Chanukah to all.

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'Abbas putting extremist murderers on pedestal'

2011-12-21T11:58:00.000-08:00

Doodad

Well, dear old peace partner Abbas is at it again, loving up to terrorists.

"Netanyahu slams Abbas after he meets 11 prisoners freed in Schalit deal in Turkey, among them terrorist Amna Muna. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was "disappointed" by what he termed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's "unfortunate decision" to meet with freed Palestinian terrorist Amna Muna in Turkey on Wednesday. Abbas met with Muna along with ten other Palestinians freed and exiled to Turkey as part of the deal to release kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Schalit in October. Muna, the so-called "Internet Murderer" was serving a life sentence for luring 16-year-old Ofir Rahum to Ramallah where he was murdered in 2001.....The PA president, according to a statement released by his office, "praised the prisoners for remaining steadfast in the face of Israeli wardens' mastery."

No doubt streets will be named after them soon; but, it is settlers/Hilltop Youth that are the problem, right? You can expect to hear NOTHING about this from the UN or Obama et al. They know who is really to blame; Israel. It makes me ill. This disgusting charade that Abbas is interested in peace must stop.

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Was Obama Right to Support the Radical Jihad?

2011-12-21T09:42:00.000-08:00

Karam

This is an important question for the upcoming election.

Should the American president support the genocidal Jihad or oppose it? The reason for my concern is that I do not believe that the progressive movement is opposed to the Nazi-inspired Islamist movement. What is a greater danger to the Jewish people... I wonder to myself aloud... Orthodox Jewry or genocidal Jihadis?

Or is it more or less equivalent?

My suspicion is that the genocidal Jihadis, that is the millions of Muslims who favor martyrdom in the killing of Jews and infidels, are probably a little more problematic than are some conservative Jews in Israel. I could be wrong about that... and I realize that it is "Islamophobic" for Jewish people to concern ourselves with an Islamic ideology that would like to see us dead... but I very much suspect that those who want to kill Jews might be a tad more worrisome than Jews, themselves, even of the sexist Orthodox variety. When Barack Obama took office radical Islam could boast the control of the Gaza strip, Lebanon, and Iran (and perhaps Darfur), but now this violently anti-Semitic movement is in the process of taking over the entire Middle East with the blessing of the president of the United States who told the world that they were the contemporary equivalent of the founding fathers or Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement.

Either Barack Obama is right or Barack Obama is wrong:

There are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat. So it was in Tunisia...

So it was in Tunisia... where they just elected a theocratic government that is entirely hostile to the Jews and to the Jewish state. How in this world are we supposed to convince Jewish people that Radical Islam is a good thing and that Barack Obama was right to support it? I suppose that is a question for the 2012 election. How is it that Obama was not tragically wrong about his cheer-leading for the genocidal Jihad?

That's a good question. Another good question is what to do about this little problem?

The first thing, of course, is that it must be acknowledged in the west. You cannot even begin to deal with any kind of problem until such a time as you are willing to acknowledge it. So, that's the first thing. Instead of promoting Jihad, Barack Obama needs to acknowledge it as a problem. Until such a time as the president of the United States takes his head out of the sand, then we can never deal with what is potentially a very, very serious security threat not only to the Jews, but to the west. A nuclear armed Iran, or a nuclear armed terrorist, could easily spell disaster not just to Tel Aviv, but to any of the major capitals of the western world.

That much is obvious. Progressives don't care, but it remains obvious, nonetheless.

Thus, if we want to hold back the spread of the Jihad among the Middle East governments then we must counter the rise of the "strong horse." If Iran gets the bomb then it will be clear to the governments of the Arab Middle East who is in charge. Part of the reason that so many governments are currently going Islamist is because the peoples of the Arab world see who is winning and who is not. We are not. As Iran marches inexorably toward nuclear weapon status it means that the ayatollahs are taking greater and greater leadership in that part of the world.

Thus it should be the highest priority for the US government to prevent Iran from getting the bomb. We can do so if we have the will. The problem is that we do not have the will and a big part of the reason for that is because the progressive-left simply doesn't care if Iran goes nuclear. The Obama administration is, thus, indifferent, as well and a few piddling sanctions from the EU or the US is not going to prevent Iran from going nuclear.

In any case, if we wish to slow or halt the rise of genocidal Islamism then we must prevent Iran from getting nuclear weaponry. There are other things that we can do, involving infiltration and undermining, but stopping Iran from going nuclear needs to be priority one.

But do not look to Barack Obama to accomplish this.

It is clear that he will not.

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Missiles? No comment. Graffiti? Obstacle to peace!

2011-12-21T08:55:00.000-08:00

So goes the comment on an article in the JP about the latest UN bashing of Israel. Really, the comment says it all. We all know the UN is obsessed with condemning Israel. We all know the track record. Sure, every once in awhile it will pooh pooh Palestine for missiles but generally criticism is as rare as hen's teeth. Don't ever expect the UN to speak the truth about the real obstacle to peace; Arab/Muslim hatred of Jews and their mere presence on "their," lands.

Israel pulled out of settlements in Gaza and got, not peace, but missiles; LOTS of them. So much for the settlements are the problem theory. Anyone who buys that theory is perpetuating the Narrative; a false Narrative. Listen to what they say in Arabic; look at the flags they produce which show NO Israel. Then you will know what they really want and what the real problem is; Israel itself-the biggest "settlement." I personally will not assist their false narrative by ascribing to the "settlements are the problem," red herring. Neither should anyone. Settlements are an ISSUE to be resolved at final negotiations.

dKos has 2 diaries up on the UN move and they are as you could expect FOR the typical UN blame Israel position and mocking the US for basically saying nothing. ie The US didn't stand up for Israel, merely said nothing. It doesn't surprise me that Kossacks think the US should be like all these other Israel bashing countries. They hate Israel and want their country to as well.

A speech by Yossi Klein Halevi on Threats to Israel and the Jewish People

2011-12-20T15:43:00.000-08:00

By oldschooltwentysix

Since I have become more involved and knowledgeable about the Arab-Israeli conflict, I also get to see how others relate to it. My experience is that most people have insufficient knowledge or do not care enough beyond the one fact that there is a conflict and each side should just stop and make peace. If only life were so cut and dried.

Over at Daphne Anson's blog, an important voice from "down under," my attention was drawn to a speech by Yossi Klein Halevi at The David Project. Though some knee-jerk anti Israel crusaders have impugned Daphne Anson's site, I question why a Jew standing up for Israel and against hate and discrimination targeted at Israel and the Jewish people gets them so bent? I suppose they imagine that Jews cannot be victims and that it is impermissible to expose abusers (including themselves) unless one is fighting in "solidarity" for "justice" and Israel is the target.

Halevi's speech was given on November 3, 2011 in Newton, Massachusetts, and concerned delegitimization efforts against Israel and prospects for the future.

According to his bio, Halevi is a contributing editor of The New Republic magazine, and frequent contributor to the op-ed pages of leading American newspapers, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.

Among his activities, he is active in Middle East reconciliation work, and serves as chairman of Open House, an Arab Israeli-Jewish Israeli center in the town of Ramle, near Tel Aviv. He was one of the founders of the now-defunct Israeli-Palestinian Media Forum, which brought together Israeli and Palestinian journalists.

For those that question The David Project's information, here is his bio at Wikipedia.

In truth, I did not know who Halevi was. Which is nothing new. I am constantly introduced to new people and ideas. I liked what Daphne wrote about the speech, which she named: The Green Flag Of Jihadism Waving In Every Direction; aka Which Existential Threat Keeps You Awake At Night? So, I watched the video and decided to write a post and have embedded it below.

I think Halevi's speech is well worth the time to watch, hear and learn. He not only speaks about delegitimization, but about the Jews as a people, what that means, and the attempts going on to erase Jewish narrative from history, and thus the Jewish people.

He suggests that other religions cannot comprehend that Jewish is more than a religion. If it only was the latter, then how can there be Jewish atheists? Of course, he goes deeper into this and is far more insightful and interesting than anything I offer here. And he provides some valuable advice for both the Left and the Right.

If you have gotten this far, I do hope you will watch the speech, especially if you would like a deeper understanding of the issues. You may not agree with all that he says, but it is important to hear from many sides and to consider a wide range of information, especially for those who believe the simple proposition that both sides are equally at fault and should just stop and make peace.

(Crossposted at oldschooltwentysix)

Hitler Admired in PLO Youth Magazine

2011-12-20T09:54:00.000-08:00

Karam

Hitler tells a Palestinian girl in her dream: "I killed them [the Jews] so you would all know that they are a nation which spreads destruction all over the world."

I would suggest that this kind of thing is literal, not rhetorical, not in jest, but real. And, needless to say, this is just one quick example. I could have come up with literally hundreds of other examples of Arab media bolstering the genocidal Jihadi ambition against Jews.

The Jews of the Middle East are about 5.5 million people strong. They are surrounded by an Arab population of between 300 and 400 million people that, for the most part, does not want them there and that has shown a willingness to incite violence against them. In the early stages of the Arab War Against the Jews of the Middle East they tended to riot and sometimes murder Jews with their bare hands as we saw in Hebron in 1929. In November of 1947 they launched a bloody civil war which the Jews, fresh from the Holocaust, needed to be put down before they could defend themselves from the larger Arab nations.

The '48 war, as Benny Morris would tell you, was motivated by Jihad. It was primarily a religious war because in Muslim theology (al-Sharia) non-Muslims must never hold sovereignty on any land that was at any time under Muslim sovereignty.

The biggest problem that Israel has going forward is obviously not pro-Israel American conservatives like Glenn Beck, nor pro-Israel Israeli conservatives like Avigdor Lieberman, nor even ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews who think that men and women should mainly be segregated in public.

No.

The main problem that Israel has is that there are millions of people around the world who think that it shouldn't exist and who are ready to use violence against it.

Noticing this little fact is neither fascist, nor rhetorical. It is called facing reality. Not reality as we might like it to be, nor reality as progressive ideology likes to suppose, but the cold fact of the genocidal nature of the Radical Jihad which is now rising up from the misnamed "Arab Spring."

Country after country in the Middle East is falling to Islamism as the west sticks its head in the ground, playing ostrich. Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Iran, Lebanon, Darfur, and Gaza. Barack Obama literally told us to view the "Arab Spring" as we might have viewed the American Revolution or Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The negligence and irresponsibility of such a statement is almost criminal. It is so wrong-headed and so unjust that I am frankly amazed that he was able to say it without his tongue falling out of his head entirely.

Here is the direct quote:

There are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat. So it was in Tunisia...

Can you imagine if when Hitler was coming to power if FDR told Americans that this was the "German Spring" and that it represented the very best traditions within the progressive movement? Hard to imagine, isn't it?, but this is essentially what Obama has done.

We have an obligation as people who care about Israel, and about our fellow Jews, to acknowledge what should be obvious. And what is obvious here, what is obvious today, is that the Radical Jihad is rising and that can only mean violence directed at Jews.

I do not like it any more than do you, but it is they who represent the hardest challenge that Israel faces because the nature of this movement, the Islamist Spring, is genocidal. We can keep our heads in the sand or we can face what is obvious, but in either case the enemy is not our fellow Jews.

Left, right, or center, conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, the problem here is not our fellow Jews and saying so does not make one a fascist.

Cross-posted at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers.

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Obama is Not a Friend to Israel or the Jewish People, So Let Him Search His Own Soul

2011-12-19T13:05:00.000-08:00

Karam

At a White House meeting in March Obama told a collection of Jewish leaders:

"You must speak to your Israeli friends and relatives and search your souls to determine how badly do you really want peace. Israelis think this peace business is overrated; their life is good, their economy is good, and things are quiet.”

We need to search our souls?

The Jewish people are perhaps the most self-reflective people on the entire planet and no one wants peace more than we do.

And "things are quiet"? Sure. Except for the rocket attacks and the dead Israeli Jews, everything is quiet.

1,300 years of dhimmitude followed by a century of war and Obama is not sure that the Jews want peace? Is he serious?

"Israelis think this peace business is overrated..."

They do, do they?

No one who would say the above can possibly be considered a friend to the Jewish people or to the state of Israel.

That much should be entirely obvious.

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Meet the Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers

2011-12-19T11:41:00.000-08:00

Karam

A short while ago I did a panel discussion, along with Volleyboy1 and Michael Harris of Stand With Us, on the influence of the Obama administration viz-a-viz I-P at a synagogue in Berkeley. As a result of that panel discussion I met a number of people involved with various groups, including some folks who participate at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers.

Because I think that it is important to encourage discussion throughout the pro-Israel blogosphere about just what is going on with the liberal acceptance of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism, I want to introduce you guys to that blog.

People who care about the Jewish people and the Jewish state need to come together.

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And This Too is the Progressive Left

2011-12-19T01:11:00.000-08:00

Karam

Get back to me when the US sponsors the Taliban (0+ / 0-)

to the tune of $3billion a year and defends the Taliban in the UN every chance it gets, instead of bombing and hounding the Talibans in a 10 year war.

by icemilkcoffee on Sun Dec 18, 2011 at 06:49:44 PM PST

We must face the fact that a significant portion of the Democratic Party and the progressive left is hostile to the Jewish state and friendly toward the Radical Jihad.

We need to say it because it happens to be true.

Lying for peace doesn't work.

Let's defend our families first.

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This is the Progressive-Left

2011-12-18T14:22:00.000-08:00

Karam

This is your political movement, not mine.

The fact is that Israel is a country founded on bigotry. Whether you agree it has benefits, perhaps even necessary, or not, a "Jewish state" is no less bigoted than a "Christian state" or a "Hindu state", when only those officially chosen are allowed the primary privileges. - DocGonzo

What compassion DocGonzo must have for the Jewish people. After all, we spent 2,000 years getting our ass kicked all culminating in the Holocaust in which 1/3 of our number were slaughtered because we were the wrong "race."

And, then, when we come together to protect ourselves, morons like this guy declare us to be "racists."

This is a voice of the progressive left. This is not the right-wing, but the left-wing, and it is not an anomaly. On a daily basis people like DocGonzo tell the world how horrific the Jews of the Middle East are.

Racist.

Imperialist.

Colonialist.

Fascist.

Apartheid.

This is what we hear on a daily basis coming from the left.

The progressive movement and the grassroots / netroots of the Democratic Party have embraced anti-Semitic anti-Zionism as part of the larger coalition and, yet, we put up with it.

We don't have to and I recommend that we stop supporting a political movement in which the defamation of the Jews is seen as OK.

Let's defend our families first.

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"No Thank You" to the New York Times, Twice.

2011-12-17T09:24:00.000-08:00

By oldschooltwentysix

The Jerusalem Post had a story yesterday that Prime Minister Netanyahu was invited by the New York Times to write an opinion piece, but respectfully declined. His senior adviser, Ron Dermer, wrote a letter explaining the decision to pass up the opportunity from the "paper of record."

The letter referred initially to an op-ed from Mahmoud Abbas published by the paper in May in which he stated:

"Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened."

According to Dermer, not to mention others, this was demonstrably false.

Then, after providing some other examples, Dermer gets to the heart of the matter:

Not to be accused of cherry-picking to prove a point, I discovered that during the last three months (September through November) you published 20 op-eds about Israel in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. After dividing the op-eds into two categories, “positive” and “negative,” with “negative” meaning an attack against the State of Israel or the policies of its democratically elected government, I found that 19 out of 20 columns were “negative.”

The only "positive" piece was penned by Richard Goldstone (of the infamous Goldstone Report), in which he defended Israel against the slanderous charge of Apartheid.

Yet your decision to publish that op-ed came a few months after your paper reportedly rejected Goldstone's previous submission. In that earlier piece, which was ultimately published in the Washington Post, the man who was quoted the world over for alleging that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza, fundamentally changed his position. According to the New York Times op-ed page, that was apparently news unfit to print.

Your refusal to publish “positive” pieces about Israel apparently does not stem from a shortage of supply. It was brought to my attention that the Majority Leader and Minority Whip of the U.S. House of Representatives jointly submitted an op-ed to your paper in September opposing the Palestinian action at the United Nations and supporting the call of both Israel and the Obama administration for direct negotiations without preconditions. In an age of intense partisanship, one would have thought that strong bipartisan support for Israel on such a timely issue would have made your cut.

Good for Netanyahu for showing that, in this regard, with regard to bias, the NY Times acts much like The Manchester Guardian, winner of the 2011 Dishonest Reporting Award from Honest Reporting.

The second "No thank you" referred to in the title? That was from me! After it started to make most people pay for content, the Times curiously gave me a complimentary subscription. It ends on December 31. Rather than continue, and give this one sided enterprise money to print editorials about Israel at a 95% negative rate, like Netanyahu, I respectfully declined.

(cross posted at oldschooltwentysix)

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Christopher Hitchens Dead at 62

2011-12-16T21:52:00.000-08:00

Karam

Hitch is gone.

Whatever anyone might say about Hitchens, he was a true public intellectual.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall at the Nation Magazine in early 2003, if for no other reason then to listen to Katrina vanden Heuvel and Hitch fight it out over the Iraq War.

I was with Katrina.

Nonetheless, sad to see this guy go.

Peace, please, Christopher Hitchens.

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Jewish Progressives and Kos (Updated)

2011-12-16T10:09:00.001-08:00

Karam

I feel bad for Jewish progressives. It cannot be easy being part of a political movement that has absolutely no interest in the well-being of one's own people. That's the situation for liberal Jews who engage in the grassroots / netroots of the Democratic Party or who participate on progressive-left blogs like Daily Kos or the Huffington Post. Most of the people who run those blogs and who participate on them are not, by any means, racist against Jews. In fact, as I have insisted upon repeatedly, the progressive-left, as a group, as a political movement, is not anti-Semitic. It isn't.

The problem with the progressive-left, and thus the problem for progressive Jews, is that the great majority of progressives or liberals do not really understand anti-Semitism and they could hardly care less. That's the problem. They don't get it and they don't care. And it is for this reason that anti-Semitism tends to flourish in progressive venues. Furthermore, because they don't get it, and generally don't care, the tendency is to circle the wagons when anti-Semitism does come to the fore.

This is one of the major reasons why I, myself, have opted out of the progressive movement and the Democratic party. Instead of dealing with anti-Semitism when it arises the tendency among progressives is to make excuses for it or deny that it is there or simply blame conservatives or Republicans for making much ado about nothing. This is precisely what we saw during the recent Occupy Wall Street nonsense. A few people in the movement were caught on tape screeching about the Jews and when confronted with that material progressives tended to downplay the problem or deny that there is a problem and then blame the messenger rather than honestly dealing with the message.

The result of the entire dynamic, which I have seen time and time again, is that Jewish liberals find themselves the object of disdain among non-Jewish liberals for daring to raise the specter of progressive-left anti-Semitism. Again, it is not that most progressives are anti-Semitic. They aren't. It's that they don't get it, they don't care, and they very much want you to shut the fuck up.

That's the problem and that is why Markos Moulitsos, the owner of Daily Kos, has run into a little issue with the Daily Kos pro-Israel Jewish contingent. One of the pro-Israel Jews on Daily Kos, fizziks, referenced a story about rape in Norway among Muslim immigrants and how, apparently, at least one Norwegian official either somehow blamed it on Israel or suggested that Israelis are getting a hardy laugh out of Norway's increasing problem with Muslim immigrant rape of blondie women.

Personally, I suspect that the story is largely hogwash and I do not particularly blame Kos for saying so. In response Kos has yanked ratings privileges from a number of (mainly Jewish) Kossacks who had "uprated" fizziks and is threatening fizziks with a possible banning. None of this would be particularly interesting except for the fact, as is pointed out in the comments beneath Kos's remark, that he lets much worse commentary stand without so much as a peep. Kos, of course, cannot be expected to read everything on that site because it is far too big, but there is no question that one of the major themes within Daily Kos I-P is the anti-Semitic notion that Jews or Zionists or Israelis secretly run the US government via the nefarious offices of AIPAC.

This kind of thing is directly out of the Protocols and is precisely what the Nazis thought about German Jews directly before they slaughtered them.

And this is why the Jews on Daily Kos are getting more and more pissed-off and alienated. They recognize the hypocrisy. They speak out against it and all they get for their troubles is the back of the hand.

So, is Markos an anti-Semite?

The answer to that question is "no." There is nothing in the record to suggest that Markos Moulitsos is in any way an anti-Semite. The problem with Markos is the problem with the progressive-left more generally. They don't get it and they don't care. What they want is for Jewish people who do object to anti-Semitism to shut the fuck up.

Believe me, if you shut the fuck up you will not have a problem.

However, if you insist upon calling out anti-Semitism when it arises you will be viewed as nothing so much as a trouble-maker and a sincere pain in the ass.

Good luck with that, guys.

Speaking for myself, it's really no longer my problem because the progressive-left is no longer my movement... and thank G-d for that.

{Gee, I wonder what it feels like to actually vote for a Republican? I've never had that experience before. As I recently said to a friend, political sands are shifting and old assumptions no longer hold true.}

Time to move on.

Update:

fizziks banned from Daily Kos.

And yet another liberal Jew bites the dust on a liberal website.

They're just knocking us off like flies.

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This is Your Movement, Fellahs

2011-12-15T15:14:00.000-08:00

Karam

"It sounds like they are torturing children to me. (0+ / 0-)

Par for the course for all of the racist regimes of Israel. Since ethnic cleansing won't get itself done.

A democratic come back

by Dont Call It on Thu Dec 15, 2011 at 02:32:47 PM PST"

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This is not the right-wing, but the left-wing.

This is your movement.

This is a voice of the political movement that you support and he is not an anomaly. Not a day goes by where we do not hear these voices throughout progressive-left media.

He says that it "sounds like" the Jews are torturing children.

He says that Israel is "racist" and seeks "ethnic cleansing."

Now, tell me, just how is this so different from the Jewish defamation in journals like Der Sturmer, prior to the Holocaust?

Don't you recognize that the defamation and demonization of the Jewish state, today, essentially mirrors the defamation and demonization of the Jewish people in that generation? It is in progressive-left venues like Daily Kos wherein we see today's efforts to cast the Jews as evil.

And, yet, you support this political movement, a movement which currently peddles the most horrific anti-Semitic notions and that may very well end up bringing misery to your own family and people.

I just find it sad... not to mention entirely stupid.

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Are Hilltop Youth et al Terrorists?

2011-12-15T13:14:00.000-08:00

Doodad

Bibi says no. Our friend Volleyball says yes:

"This said... the Israeli government STILL will not call these extremists terrorists though that is exactly what they are"

I disagree. What they did is bad and they should be punished; just like British youth who rioted and OWS'ers who did bad stuff. No one is calling those people terrorists.

I know what terror looks like. It looks like: 9/11; Leon Klinghoffer; the Fogel Family; Israeli pizza parlors; etc.

Big difference. Let's try and call things by their proper name.

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Are the Palestinians a "Real" People?

2011-12-15T11:45:00.000-08:00

Karam

Newt Gingrich's recent impolitic reference to the contemporary invention of the Palestinian people has progressives (aka, faux-liberals) clutching at pearls all over the internet and throughout liberal publications. The funny thing is that virtually no one, outside of some Palestinians, themselves, actually deny that what Newt said was true. Here is the exact quote, again:

Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. We have invented the Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab people, and they had the chance to go many places.

This off-the-cuff and inconveniently true comment has people in an absolute tizzy, despite the fact that almost everyone acknowledges that it is largely true. There was never a state of Palestine and there still is no state of Palestine. If the "Palestinians" would finally agree to one then maybe they would get a state. That might be nice.

And, of course, the Palestinians are an invented people. All peoples, all nations, are invented in the sense that they are social constructs or, as Benedict Anderson famously said, "imagined communities." The difference is that the "Palestinian" community was only imagined about a quarter past last Tuesday and was so imagined out of the Long Arab War Against the Jews. This war, which the Arabs launched in the early 1920s, has been ongoing ever since and, thankfully, the Arabs have lost.

They haven't given up the fight, however and, really, why should they? The religion of Islam forbids any land that was at any time Islamic to ever be anything else. This is part of al-Sharia. The Arab conflict with the Jews is thus grounded in theocratically-based race-hatred toward the Jewish people and non-Muslims. Furthermore, given that Arabs outnumber Jews by about 100 to 1, why should they stop fighting? It may be horrific for us, or at least for the half of us surrounded by enemies in the Middle East, but only a tiny percentage of Arabs will pay a significant cost for their ongoing war against the Jewish people.

That tiny percentage is, of course, the "Palestinians" who were created as a people, by Arafat in collusion with the Soviet Union, to be the front-line offensive against Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land. While a few Arab intellectuals and elites early in the twentieth century began the process of Palestinian nationalism, most Palestinians did not consider themselves to be Palestinian until the 1960s, if not the 1970s. Not until Arafat and the Soviets started yammering about the "national liberation of the Palestinian people" did we ever hear of any such Arab people as "Palestinians." before that the "Palestinians" mainly referred to the Jews in that area, which is why the Jerusalem Post used to be called the Palestine Post.

So, what Newt said was largely correct. The Palestinians represent the world's newest nation and they are a nation that emerged out of the greater Arab nation to fight against Jewish sovereignty on historically Jewish land.

What I find most hysterical, however, is just how uncomfortable progressives (faux-liberals) are with anything that resembles the truth unless it bolsters their ideological predispositions. They despise Newt Gingrich not because his claims, in this regard, are false, but because he is the political opposition which therefore must be smeared and demeaned and whose character must be dragged through the mud at every opportunity.

Personally, I find progressive (faux-liberal) smear tactics to be revolting. Heck, I didn't even like it when I was a progressive. Can you believe that these people actually blamed the Tucson shooting last year on Sarah Palin? The cruelty, irresponsibility, and just plain malice of that episode boggled my mind.

In any case, the truth is the truth. Truth is not dependent upon politics. Something doesn't become untrue merely because it is spoken by the political opposition or because it is a politically inconvenient fact. Just because someone like, say, George W. Bush says that it is raining, this does not automatically mean that children and ponies are prancing in the sunshine.

Here's a truth: the Palestinians, like the rest of us, are "invented."

Here's another truth: the Palestinians, unlike the rest of us, were invented only decades ago.

Here's yet another truth: if these people would give up on their Jew Killing Policy then they could raise their children in decency and potential prosperity.

But the truth is just so darn inconvenient isn't it?

Much better to lie for peace despite the fact that those lies... such as the lie that Barack Obama is advancing something that we can call a "peace process"... never actually result in peace.

I say that we tell the truth and see how that serves us.

What Barry Rubin calls "lying for peace" sucks and... here's a news flash... it doesn't work.

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Open Thread

2011-12-15T00:32:00.000-08:00

Karam

That's me around 2006 or 2007.

Laurie snapped that shot as we were getting ready to march toward Civic Center in San Francisco in opposition to the wars.

My, how times have changed.

This is before I noticed Swastikas entwined with Stars of David showing up at "peace" rallies.

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Daily Kos Comment of the Day

2011-12-14T15:09:00.000-08:00

Karam

"this is a serious question (6+ / 0-)

A woman was executed this week in Saudi Arabia for practicing witchcraft.

That was a deliberate, pre-meditated, state act by a totalitarian government against their own citizens, violating any notion of human rights.

Now certainly, that should qualify as something that should register with those concerned with "A Just Middle East"... shouldn't it? But the group entitled "A Just Middle East" responded with complete silence. So why are the diaries from the group supposedly about "A Just Middle East" concerned only with the I/P conflict, and demonizing Israel?

Even the massacres and torture of children and thousands of others in Syria has gotten no attention from "A Just Middle East". Yes, you republished a diary by someone else, but you didn't write your own. Instead it is all Israel criticism, all the time. There are 200 million people in the middle east, and maybe 8 million of them live in Israel and Palestine. That's 4%.

Why is "A Just Middle East" defined so narrowly? Obviously, we all know the answer to that, but I would like to have it articulated.

I think it is fraudulent and misleading to call this group "A Just Middle East" when all you do is criticize Israel. Just please be honest and call it the "We don't like Israel" group.

by fizziks on Wed Dec 14, 2011 at 01:59:07 PM PST"

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The reason, of course, is that the progressive-left does not actually care about social justice or human rights.

Haven't we already established this fact?

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The Palestinian Theft of Jewish History

2011-12-14T10:06:00.001-08:00

Karam

The Palestinians have been engaging in the theft of Jewish history since the local Arabs became "Palestinians" toward the end of the 20th century. Palestinian Media Watch has been doing considerable archival work on this and below is what they have to say on the matter.

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Rewriting the history of the Land of Israel in order to deny Israel's right to exist is central to Palestinian Authority (PA) policy. Long before it started the PA Terror Campaign (the "Intifada," 2000-2005), the PA was fighting a history war – erasing Jewish history and replacing it with a fabricated Palestinian history. This rewriting has two central goals:

1- Erase the Jewish nation's 3,000 year history in the Land of Israel.

2- Invent ancient Palestinian, Muslim and Arab histories in the land.

The goal of this historical revision as a political strategy was first expressed publicly at a conference of Palestinian historians in 1998, when rewriting history was linked to the political goal of denying Israel's right to exist:

"Dr. Yussuf Alzamili [Chairman History Department, Khan Yunis Educational College] called on all universities and colleges to write the history of Palestine and to guard it, and not to enable the [foreign] implants and enemies to distort it or to legitimize the existence of Jews on this land... [History lecturer Abu Amar] clarified that there is no connection between the ancient generation of Jews and the new generation." [Al-Ayyam, Dec. 4, 1998].

Erasing Jewish history in the land of Israel is followed by the PA’s invention of ancient and modern histories that support its political ideology and claim to the land of Israel. The Holocaust and other aspects of Jewish history are alternately denied, downplayed or distorted. Another distortion is to hide from Palestinians that Jesus was a Jew who lived in the Land of Judea/Israel. PA leaders repeatedly define Jesus as a Palestinian who preached Islam, thus denying not only Jewish history, but also the history and legitimacy of Christianity.

Citing numerous examples, this section will document that these and other historical revisions are an integral part of Palestinian policy and are used to create political ideology.

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I would invite anyone interested in the Palestinian theft of Jewish history to follow the link above to see the numerous examples of how this is done. Palestinian dictator Mahmoud Abbas once said that the Palestinians "are the owners of history." Well, if the Palestinians are the "owners" of history then I guess they can do whatever they want with it, including making stuff up out of whole cloth.

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Good News, Karma

2011-12-13T16:32:00.000-08:00

Doodad

"YidWithLid writes that Jewish political organizations that place progressivism before Jewish values are experiencing a significant drop in donations. Two Jewish Organizations that put progressive politics before their mission, the ADL and The AJC have seen their donations plummet during the past five years. Apparently the money is shifting toward single-issue organizations especially Israel advocacy groups.....The organizations on the rise include AIPAC, The Israel Project, and Stand With Us. All Israel advocacy groups."

Looks like we might be winning.

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ZionTruth Has Some Words

2011-12-13T13:48:00.000-08:00

Karam

From here.

I am frontpaging this mainly because I applaud Ziontruth's uncompromising defense of the Jewish people. I hope that he doesn't mind, but anyone who posts here must expect for their words to find themselves on the front page now and again.

He's also correct about Arab and Muslim imperialism, a taboo subject among progressives.

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"All peoples are an invention, which is to say that all peoples are a social construction who come to know themselves in time and with a starting point, however vague in our understanding."

Peoples are normally formed through a process of evolution, one so gradual it might take centuries to be perceived. Ethnogenesis happens when a group branches away from its parent bloodline and becomes sufficiently differentiated from it—whether in culture, language or genetics is immaterial—to be considered no longer part of the former whole.

In modern times, it seems a lot of "peoples" have deviated from that norm and instead have been created by human fiat, usually in response to some external force. Africa had had many real peoples before the European conquest, but the various "nations" of Africa today have nothing to them but the borders drawn by none other than the Western powers. In the Middle East the situation is the same, and the faux-Palestinian "nation" is like the Lebanese "nation" in its members having nothing common except opposition to an enemy.

The real nations in the Middle East are as follows (most probably a partial list, but still a wide coverage): Arabs, Circasians, Copts, Druze, Kurds, Jews, Persians, Samaritans and Turks. Those are the nations in the ME formed in ethnogenesis as it has always been in human history, while all the rest are anti-colonial or post-colonial creations. It is quite ironic that the Progressives, of all people, effectively advocate the perpetuation of the damages of Western colonialism with their insistence that the contrived nations are real.

"The Palestinians as a people emerged out of the greater Arab nation in its conflict with the Jews toward the conclusion of the twentieth century."

They didn't emerge. That's exactly the problem: People are calling for their treatment as a real nation, but they fail to see this "nation" does not pass the requirements of such. No "Palestinian Arab" has branched out of the greater Arabian nation any more than there is a "Baltimorian American" nation. Beyond trivialities, nothing in the way of cultural, linguistic or racial differentiation has yet occurred with the Arabs residing in Palestine.

"The American people emerged as a people in our conflict with the English during the 17th century."

The American nation took a long time after 1776 until it really formed national consciousness. In the 18th century there was the proto-concept of a "shining city on a hill," but the whole 19th century had to be spent, with the expansion westward and the Civil War, until there could be something like a stable American national identity. Some historians say (though I don't agree with them) it was only after World War One that American nationalism came to be a serious force.

"In contrast, the Palestinians emerged as a people in their struggle to abort Jewish nationalism."

It would be more accurate to say that's been the goal of Islamic and Arab imperialism from the 1890s onward, when Jews from abroad arrived with no intention to live as dhimmi subjects, but rather as free people. As an imperialist goal does not sit well with world opinion, there needed to be some way of inverting the roles of David and Goliath in this conflict. That's where all the talk about a non-Jewish "Palestinian nation living on the land from time immemorial" ultimately comes. It's a PR stratagem, nothing more, nothing less.

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These Are Your Friends

2011-12-13T13:27:00.000-08:00

Karam

Israel will destroy itself. It is inevitable. (0+ / 0-)

The Palestinian birthrate dwarfs that of Israeli Jews. Once the population figures favor Palestinians enough, the Zionist project will finally be over and done with.

by OccupyWallStreetNotPalestine on Mon Dec 12, 2011 at 07:40:12 AM PST

This is a common voice from the progressive-left.

He is looking forward to the demise of Jewish self-defense, something which can only result in rivers of Jewish blood.

This is not a right-winger, but a left-winger.

This is your political movement.

Not mine.

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The Invention of the Palestinian People

2011-12-13T08:51:00.000-08:00

Karam

Newt's reference to the "invention" of the Palestinian people has caused quite a shitstorm, yet almost no one is getting the larger point. Of course, Gingrich is correct when he says that the Palestinian people are an invention. It's a simple fact, politically correct nonsense not withstanding. All peoples are an invention, which is to say that all peoples are a social construction who come to know themselves in time and with a starting point, however vague in our understanding.

The Palestinians are no different in this regard. The Palestinians as a people emerged out of the greater Arab nation in its conflict with the Jews toward the conclusion of the twentieth century.

This should not be the least little bit controversial as it happens to be a fact. The Palestinians are not the remnants of the Canaanites and however much Palestinian leadership likes to make up history, the truth is that the Palestinians are a brand new people. Peoples often emerge as a distinct group in conflict with some other group. The American people emerged as a people in our conflict with the English during the 18th century. The Palestinian people emerged as a people in their conflict with the Jews during the 20th century.

The main difference, and from what I can tell thus far I am the only person to reference this fact, is that the Americans emerged as a people in their struggle to create a state for this nation. In contrast, the Palestinians emerged as a people in their struggle to abort Jewish nationalism. The reason that the Palestinians do not have a state for themselves is because that was never their aspiration, which is why they have turned down offer after offer.

The Palestinians, as a people, were born from their efforts to destroy the Jewish national home.

That's a fact. A sad fact, true, but a fact, nonetheless.

Furthermore, as these self-righteous "progressives" point the trembling finger of blame at Newt Gingrich, calling him a racist, it shows the rest of us just how much their conception of truth is based entirely around politics rather than facts.

There is such a thing as truth and it is not dependent upon one's political views.

The Palestinians were "invented." Get over it.

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Another Day, Another Rocket Attack

2011-12-12T11:02:00.000-08:00

Karam

Qassam rocket fired from Gaza explodes in Shaar Hanegev regional council in Israel

Meanwhile our "friends" on the progressive-left blame the Jews for Arab attacks upon us. They "know," despite the centuries' long Arab animosity toward, and domination of, the Jewish people that their hatred toward us, and thus violence toward us, is our own fault.

Israel is mean and therefore the saintly "indigenous" population... who, for the most part, happen to come from elsewhere... has no choice but to try to kill us.

That is essentially the stance of the progressive-left on the Arab conflict with the Jews of the Middle East.

And, yet, we support them.

{Why does the phrase "Jewish liberal wussie" come so readily to mind?}

I mean, really, if we will not stand up for ourselves... because progressives have convinced us that it is politically incorrect to do so... then who will stand up for us?

Nobody. That's who.

Oh, and by the way, Barack Obama is no friend to either the Jewish state or the Jewish people. No one who would tell Jews where we may be allowed to live in Jerusalem can possibly consider himself a friend to the Jewish people.

It simply doesn't work that way.

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Israel Builds World's First Rocket-Proof Kid's Hospital

2011-12-12T09:28:00.000-08:00

Karam

Israel's first rocket-proof hospital for children - and the first children's hospital in the periphery - will be ready in three years.

Well, this is an affront to the Palestinians, for sure. The Israelis are so racist that they actually feel it necessary to build a rocket-proof children's hospital.

This is clearly an insult to the Palestinian people and Israel, an illegal and illegitimate country, should be charged with war crimes (why the hell not?) for even thinking about building this illegal Apartheid hospital.

Perhaps Israel should consult with Barack Obama so that he can tell them just where they may be allowed to build it, but they won't, will they?

Jews have no shame.

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"Deception: Betraying the Peace Process"

2011-12-11T18:02:00.001-08:00

By oldschooltwentysix

A new book by the director of Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), Itamar Marcus, and Nan Jacques Zilberdik, Deception: Betraying the Peace Process, explores how the PA responded to commitments put forth by the Quartet: to espouse nonviolence, to recognize the Jewish State of Israel, and to accept it as a partner for peace.

Sadly, predictably, in a recent Jerusalem Post article about the book's release, Marcus indicated the "overwhelming conclusion" was "a total abrogation" of commitment.

The book details hundreds of examples that promote messages of hate among Palestinians and undermine the peace process with Israel, cataloged and contextualized according to the PA’s policies of glorifying terrorism, demonizing Israelis and Jews and rejecting Israel’s right to exist.

One of the first posts at oldschooltwentysix concerned Robert Bernstein, chairman of Advancing Human Rights and founder of Human Rights Watch. At the New York press conference launching the book on December 6, as reported in the PMW's press release, he declared Deception a must-read for anyone looking into why after nearly two decades the Oslo peace process has failed to produce a final status agreement. He said:

This book is important because it is not advocacy but a factual catalog of public statements and activities showing that the Palestinian leadership teaches its children to hate, to deny Israel's right to exist and to envision a world without Israel.

Until the PA starts preparing its children for peace and teaches them to see Israel as a legitimate neighbor, peace will remain an illusion.

Deception should be read as a warning. Government-sponsored hate speech is incompatible with peace.

Also at the New York launching was Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, who said:

Well documented, Deception confronts a disturbing discovery; Palestinian texts contain scandalous anti-Semitic pages. They incite young children to hate Jews not only in Israel but wherever they live. They must be denounced by all students of history.

Co-author Zilberdik said:

Unless the PA stops presenting terrorists as role models, and Jews and Israelis as inherently evil, and unless they stop educating their people to imagine a world without Israel, there is no chance of achieving authentic peace.

The PA portrays itself to the world as pursuing peace while the international community turns a blind eye to the fact that it teaches its people to never live in peace with Israel.

"There’s a denial by the Western press that this is happening," Bernstein said. "They don’t read Arabic."

Interestingly, back in 2008, Hillary Clinton promoted the research of PMW on Capitol Hill.

Some of her words:

These children deserves an education that instills respect for life and peace instead of glorifying death and violence. The videos we viewed at that Senate hearing were a clear example of child abuse.... Children were encouraged to see martyrdom and armed struggle and the murder of innocent people as ideals to strive for.

These textbooks do not give Palestinian children an education; they give them an indoctrination. When we viewed this report in combination with other media that these children are exposed to, we see a larger picture that is disturbing. It is disturbing on a human level, it is disturbing to me as a mother, it is disturbing to me as a United States Senator, because it basically, profoundly poisons the minds of these children.

Hate has no place in the curriculum of schools, and the glorification of violence has no place in the education of children.

Some people sort of downplay the importance of words. But words really matter. Because in idealizing for children a world without Israel, children are taught never to accept the reality of the State of Israel, never to strive for a better future that would hold out the promise of peace and security to them, and is basically a message of pessimism and fatalism that undermines the possibility for these children living lives of fulfillment and productivity.

This has dire consequences for prospects of peace for generations to come.

Yet today, speaking for the Administration, Clinton seems to have forgotten the Palestinian incitement she talked about as she, and others, hector and pressure Israel to meet Arab demands, get to the "damned" table, and act more democratically, while the USA cozies with the Muslim Brotherhood with its new official branch, Hamas, not to mention playing nice with the OIC, as it seeks to curb through the UN any intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization based on religion or belief, such as criticism of Muhammad or Islam itself. The OIC's attempt is an infringement on the universal right to right to freedom of expression that includes freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.

One might almost think that the world in which we live is replete with deception.

(cross-posted at oldschooltwentysix)

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Palestinian Identity and the Holocaust

2011-12-11T10:21:00.000-08:00

Karam

Elsewhere in the progressive-left Jewish blogosphere, a liberal Jew is screaming at another liberal Jew that the second liberal Jew is a vicious racist for daring to wonder about the origins of Palestinian national identity. As I have noted on this blog there is a long laundry list of things that one must not be allowed to discuss lest that discussion undermines the "Palestinian narrative" of total victimhood:

Anonymous said...

Just as Holocaust deniers raise "questions" about historical facts, and just like antisemitic opponents of Israel "question" whether Jews are truly a people, you and your ilk try to undermine the legitimacy of the other side by raising "questions" about the Palestinians as a people. Your motive is just as obvious as are the motives of holocaust deniers. You fool no one.

December 11, 2011 6:34 AM

The problem with "anonymous" is that he or she thinks that truth is a function of politics rather than something unto itself. What is true for anonymous is what promotes his or her political worldview and if something contradicts that worldview then the person doing the contradicting must be a "racist" or some immoral person, which is what is indicated above with the word "ilk." Only immoral people have an "ilk." Everyone else has colleagues and partners and friends, and so forth. If one is accused of having an "ilk," however, than obviously one is being accused of a low moral character, which is a standard response to anyone daring to encroach upon the "Palestinian narrative."

Anonymous, of course, is clearly suffering from a significant case of Jewish Stockholm Syndrome. He thinks that merely questioning the "Palestinian narrative" represents "racism" whereas the truth of the matter is that the "Palestinian narrative" itself is entirely racist against Jews and promotes the view that the Jewish residents of the Middle East are racist, colonialist, imperialist, monsters. In this way the "Palestinian narrative" contains the blood-libel directly within it, but if anyone points that out they are accused of "racism."

It's a very sick game, but there is one simple way of getting around it. Stick with the truth. If what the other side has is propaganda and lies, than what we have is a truthful understanding of history. This is why anonymous' correlation between Holocaust denial and the question of Palestinian national identity is little more than so much anti-Jewish nonsense.

The Holocaust happened. Around 6 million Jews were slaughtered for the crime of being Jewish. The problem with Holocaust denial is that it seeks to undermine our understanding of an actual historical event. It is in this way anti-historical.

Questioning Palestinian national identity is just the opposite. It is not anti-historical to do so, but an attempt to understand the actual historical truth. When did the Palestinians begin to identify themselves as a people? When did the majority of Palestinians begin to do so? These are questions that professional historians ask themselves when they want to understand the origins of any people, including the Palestinians. So long as we actually stick to the historical record, there is no reason why not to question either Palestinian national identity or, for that matter, the Holocaust.

But stick with what we know. We know for a fact that around 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and we know for a fact that the great majority of the local Arab population did not consider themselves "Palestinian" until very recent decades. If saying so is "racist" then the historical record is, itself, "racist." And if the historical record is racist then this says much more about the accuser than the accused.

The fact of the matter, of course, is that the Palestinians are a brand-spanking new people and claiming otherwise flies in the face of the truth. But, hey, if you think that truth is a function of politics then the historical record probably does not mean a whole lot to you.

Clearly it means nothing to "anonymous."

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UC Berkeley's Jewish Student Union Rejects J Street

2011-12-11T08:38:00.000-08:00

Karam

At a Nov. 16 general meeting, the union voted to deny membership to the Berkeley chapter of J Street U, the college division of the left-leaning and often controversial Israel lobby.

This cannot be a very good sign on the long-term viability of this group. If they cannot even get support from Berkeley's Jewish students then just who on G-d's green earth is going to support them?

Jacob Lewis, co-president of the pro-Israel student group Tikvah and one of those casting a “no” vote, said, “J Street is not pro-Israel but an anti-Israel organization that, as part of the mainstream Jewish community, I could not support.”

I do not know that J Street is "anti-Israel" so much as they are stuck in the 1990s, praying that the Oslo "peace process" is still in effect and that the Palestinians actually want peace and a negotiated settlement rather than victory over the Jews.

Lewis, 20, said he had been suspicious of the group ever since attending a J Street U event last year. The guest speaker was Assaf Sharon of the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement in Israel, which aligns with east Jerusalem Arabs who claim Israel is encroaching on their neighborhoods.

What's this? J Street backed Arab claims over Jerusalem above Jewish claims? That's hardly surprising, actually, since J Street wants to give the eastern section of Jerusalem to the PLO as a base for operations and as a capital of its forthcoming terror state. Tell me, is there any Palestinian organization that actually advances Jewish claims over Palestinian claims? Of course, not. Jewish progressives are the only people on the planet who tend to favor their rivals over their own people... because they think it is the right thing to do.

Writing from his perch at Ha'aretz, Bradley Burston clutches at his pearls in an article entitled "When Jews in Berkeley vote to cut support for Israel." Needless to say, Jews in Berkeley did not vote to cut support for Israel. They voted to cut support for J Street precisely because they, like many, many Jewish people around the world, do not consider J Street to be a pro-Israel organization at all.

Burston writes:

The choice is up to you -- you can be welcomed as a Jew, or you can speak your mind on Israel.

What hogwash.

Thankfully Zach, of the Huffington Post Monitor, has some words for Mr. Burston:

This is left-wing victim cringing at its best. No one is disbarring any Jew from being part of the JSU as individuals from being welcomed, they are rejecting J Street as an organization. Like other left-wing bloggers before and after him, Burston is saying that every viewpoint on Israel must be honored and given encouragement, no matter how outside the mainstream. And if you disagree with him about that, you're a fascist.

I was never particularly comfortable with J Street and I am not the least little bit surprised to find that the organization is sputtering in preparation for its final demise.

Or so we shall see.

{One can hope.}

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Another Day, Another Rocket Attack

2011-12-10T15:37:00.000-08:00

Karam

4 rockets hit Israel Saturday morning.

And if Israel fights back then they're the bad guy.

Why do western "liberals" think that Arabs have some incontestable right to murder Jews? I mean, they must think that otherwise they would not scream bloody murder whenever Jewish Israelis seek to defend themselves.

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Progressives, Palestinians, and the Truth

2011-12-10T09:23:00.001-08:00

Karam

Progressives are not always comfortable with the truth and this is nowhere more certain than in progressive-left I-P discourse. Recently presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich said the following:

Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. We have invented the Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab people, and they had the chance to go many places.

This, needless to say, has both Palestinian and progressive heads exploding all over the place.

In response Palestinian leader Salam Fayyad claimed "our people have been here since the very beginning and are determined to stay on their land until the very end."

Let's see if we cannot determine which of these two statements comes closest to anything that we might consider THE TRUTH.

Let's take Salam Fayyad first. He claims that the Palestinians have been "here" since the very beginning. Well, if that is true then the Palestinians must have a long and distinguished history that anyone can verify simply by walking into a library and reading a book on that history. One would learn about various Palestinian leaders throughout the ages, their struggles and their wars. One would learn about Palestinian contributions to the arts and the letters and the various twists and turns of Palestinian culture century upon century. One would read about Palestinian scientists and their contributions. One would learn about the great Palestinian statesmen and the great Palestinian musicians and the great Palestinian this, that, and the other.

And, yet, somehow, when I go into the library I can find no such books. How is this possible? How is it that if the Palestinians are a people with such a long and rich history, no one has ever written that history and, in fact, the Palestinians themselves do not even have a tradition of oral history in which they pass that history down generation upon generation? Are the Palestinians a secret people with a secret history?

That seems rather unlikely.

If one has any interest in that little thing which we like to call THE TRUTH one would have to conclude that the Palestinians are a people of very recent origin and that as a people they are little different from Jordanians or Syrians or the Arabs local to that area, more generally.

Now let's look again at what Gingrich said:

Remember, there was no Palestine as a state.

This is, of course, true. There has never been a state of Palestine. Ever. There is a long and rich Jewish history in the region, but no "Palestinian" history until near the end of the last century. This is not a matter of interpretation, but a matter of fact.

It was part of the Ottoman Empire.

Indeed, prior to the Ottoman defeat in World War I, the region of "Palestine" was a small part of the greater Ottoman empire. This, too, is not a matter of interpretation, but a matter of fact.

We have invented the Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab people...

This statement is partly true and partly false. It is certainly true that the Palestinians are Arabs who live in that region and they have been historically part of the Arab people. They consider themselves to be ethnically Arab. They speak the Arabic language and share a common religion with the great majority of other Arabs. They eat Arabic cuisine and have an Arabic culture.

Where Newt is entirely wrong is when he says that "we" invented the Palestinian people. The truth, of course, is that the Palestinian people invented the Palestinian people. All peoples are social constructs. All peoples therefore have a starting point. For the Jewish people our starting point was around 3,500 years ago. The starting point for Americans was sometime prior to the Revolution. For the Palestinians it was a quarter past last Tuesday.

The truth of the matter is that the Palestinians emerged as a people only toward the end of the 1960s and it is for this reason that Newt can say, rightly, that the Palestinians are an "invented" people. Of course they are an invented people because all peoples are "invented." It's just that the Palestinians were invented very recently and that their emergence as a people was a response in opposition to the Jewish national project. The Palestinians emerged out of the greater Arab nation for the purpose of opposing the Jews.

This is one of the differences between the Palestinian emergence as a people and the American emergence as a people. The Americans emerged as a people in conflict with the British and the Palestinians emerged as a people in conflict with the Jews. The difference is that the Americans were seeking to fulfill their national aspirations through the creation of an American state while the Palestinians were trying to prevent Jewish national aspirations by endeavoring to destroy the Jewish state.

That may be an uncomfortable fact, but it is a fact.

So the truth is that Newt is not wrong so much as he is being impolitic by speaking the truth. Virtually no one speaks the truth on this question and certainly no politicians ever would... except Newt.

Good for him!

{I like him better, already.}

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The Settlement Ruse.

2011-12-09T06:32:00.001-08:00

Doodad

Israel Matzav points out :

"In an interview with the Arabic radio station As-Shams two weeks ago, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said that based on an aerial photograph provided by European sources, the settlements cover only 1.1 percent of the West Bank.So if settlements cover only 1.1 percent of the West Bank, why does the entire West deem them the main obstacle to peace? Because admitting that settlements aren’t the main obstacle to peace would force it to confront an unpalatable truth: that the real obstacle to peace is Palestinian unwillingness to accept a Jewish state in any borders."

Amen.

Any doubt? Well, consider:

"The Advertising Standards Authority has upheld a complaint against the Palestinians' diplomatic mission to the UK for displaying a map which included the whole of Israel as part of Palestine."

We hear about this map kind of thing all the time, so no one should have any illusions about the real Palestinian plan.

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Open Thread: Nadia G. is in the House!

2011-12-08T23:39:00.000-08:00

There has never been a cooking show like Bitchin' Kitchen.

Good for Nads.

She built it from cooking skill combined with hilarity, intelligence, and balls.

Good for her.

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'I got used to being called a dirty Jew'

2011-12-08T08:57:00.001-08:00

DOODAD

Oceane Sluijzer, 13, describes her recent attack by 5 Muslim girls. It was horrific but more horrific was the police response.

"The police suggested that I keep quiet about the incident. They asked me, 'Don't say that it's anti-Semitism,'" Oceane reveals. "They even suggested that I avoid going to the hospital." According to her father, Dan, "The police said they would collect the five girls' testimonies and settle for that. If they attack her again in the future, they promised to act differently. The police wanted to bury this affair as soon as possible."

The school?

"The educational system's response was similar. Oceane returned home that day and didn't leave her house for the next 10 days, but no one at the school even bothered to check on her. Her schoolmates disappeared too. "A week later, the principal called and asked me to visit his office with Oceane's mother," the father says. "He said he had decided to suspend the girls' leader. I informed him that my daughter would not be returning to a school which is incapable of protecting her. As far as he was concerned, it was enough. It was the ideal solution."

Shame on Belgium.

So Open Minded

2011-12-07T21:24:00.000-08:00

Karam

that her marbles must have fallen out of her head entirely.

After the panel discussion the other night a number of people approached the table for commentary and chit-chat as I was packing away my papers. It was all very pleasant and very nice except for one woman who said to me, "I was offended at your insistence on the Nazi influence in the Muslim Brotherhood."

"Offended? Were you offended?," I asked. "But it's historical fact. The Muslim Brotherhood, as an organization, was directly influenced by Nazi Germany."

She said, "Some of them. Not all. Only some of them."

I stopped, stood back for a moment, and looked this woman in the eye.

"They rallied in Tahrir Square the other day," I said. "They were calling for death to the Jews."

"Some of them," she said.

Some of them.

Indeed, as far as I know not every fascist member of the Muslim Brotherhood was in Tahrir Square calling for blood. That woman was absolutely correct and, yet, somehow, I am failed to be impressed by that fact. What's more, I do not understand the inclination of so many liberal Jews to give our enemies a pass.

I suspect that part of it is that liberal Jews are entirely uncomfortable with even the notion of "enemies." How could anyone be our enemy? We only want what is right and fair for everyone involved, right? We don't have enemies. Even the very worst of Qaeda or Hamas or the Brotherhood are potentially friends if we are just nice in the right kind of way.

This is the progressive mindset. Everyone is more or less alike and everyone wants more or less the same thing. We, all of us, want nothing more than to build a decent life for ourselves and our children and if we would simply recognize that this is true for the genocidal maniacs of Hamas then everyone would get along just dandy.

The only problem with the above, of course, is that it is hogwash.

When the Muslim Brotherhood gathered in Tahrir Square and called for the genocide of the Jews it wasn't because what they really want are better jobs and thus better lives for themselves and their families. They call for the genocide of the Jews not because it helps them in any way or because Israel has done this, that, or the other, but because of 14 centuries of theocratically embedded Jew Hatred within Arabic and Muslim cultures.

The reason that they hate Jews is because of al-Sharia, Islamic Law, Allah's Law, and at the center of al-Sharia is dhimmitude. The reason that the Brotherhood is upset is not because sometimes Palestinians have to walk through check-points in Judea and Samaria, but because the Jews have actually managed to slough off so many centuries of second and third class citizenship and now have sovereignty on Jewish land that was once under Arab military occupation.

The inclination among liberal Jews is to assume that the problem is really with us. They try to kill us because we are bad and if only we would stop being bad then they would stop trying to kill us. This notion is at the very heart of liberal Jewish thinking on the Arab-Israel conflict. What can we do to appease these people so that they will want to stop fighting and, instead, seek to raise their children without inciting hatred toward us?

What hoop must we jump through so that they will be nice to us?

The reason that liberal Jews tend to think this way is because it offers the illusion of control. If the problem is really with us then we can fix the problem. We can fix ourselves or we can get rid of those Jews who are causing such grief. If only we got rid of Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman and "the settlers" who insist on living on Biblical lands. We can't do anything about the Palestinians, but we can do something about ourselves and what we need to do about ourselves is pretty much what the Palestinians tell us. They don't like the idea of Jews living in Judea? Barack Obama doesn't like the idea of Jews living in Judea, either? Well, then those Jews are trouble-makers, aren't they?

They are illegal, illegitimate "settlers" and I hear that they do bad things. I am told that they rip Holy Palestinian Olive Trees out of the ground with their bare fangs. I hear that they are violent and fanatical and racist toward their peaceful Palestinian neighbors. It is they, the Bad Jews, who are the problem. As Good Jews we need to oppose the Bad Jews in order to find peace. This is the liberal Jewish mindset. The problem can never really be with the Palestinians or with the larger Arab and Muslim world, but must be with us, because only if the problem is with us can we possibly fix it.

Thus well-meaning liberal Jewish "peace processors" waste their time looking for the watch they lost in the ally under the lamppost nearby because the light is so much better there. They'll never find the damn thing, which remains in the dark ally nearby, but it beats doing nothing.

And thus that woman at the panel the other night could not accept that the Brotherhood is actually a genocidal, fascist organization with an historical provenance that goes to Nazi Germany. If she were to accept that proposition... a proposition that those of us less corrupted by Politically Correct nonsense like to refer to as THE TRUTH... then it would scare the holy daylights out of her.

And that is why she insisted that only some of the Brotherhood are essentially Nazis.

And, when it comes right down to it, who can blame her? I don't like it any more than she does. I guess when they stop screaming for Jewish blood then I will stop saying that they are screaming for Jewish blood.

I wish that I could do so beforehand, but I can't.

What we are witnessing in this historical moment is the rise of Muslim fascism throughout the Middle East as facilitated by the president of the United States and the Democratic Party. It's not just that we are failing to oppose this development, but that the government of the United States is actively encouraging it by suggesting that some Islamists are better than others and, therefore, some are not so bad and can be reasoned with.

Like I said, some people are so open-minded that their marbles have fallen out of their heads entirely.

What's a few marbles if losing them will bring some peace of mind? Whatever else it might bring we will have to wait and see, but at least Hillary Clinton can breathe easily for the moment. The Muslim Brotherhood is moderate, after all.

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Yes, Democrats Are Becoming Anti-Israel

2011-12-07T13:22:00.001-08:00

Doodad

We argue about it don't we? Some of us here knew it; elsewhere, they argue that it isn't so. Well here's the proof of where the Democratic party is headed. Perhaps it's this which gave wings to the recent three stooges orgy of Panetta, Hilary and Gutman.

"Two of the Democratic Party’s core institutions are challenging a bipartisan consensus on Israel and Palestine that has dominated American foreign policy for more than a decade.

The Center for American Progress, the party’s key hub of ideas and strategy, and Media Matters, a central messaging organization, have emerged as vocal critics of their party’s staunchly pro-Israel congressional leadership and have been at odds, at times, with Barack Obama’s White House, which has acted as a reluctant ally to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government.

The differences are ones of tone – but also of bright lines of principle – and while they have haven’t yet made any visible impact on Democratic policy, they’ve shaken up the Washington foreign policy conversation and broadened the space for discussing a heretical and often critical stance on Israel heretofore confined to the political margins.

The daily battle is waged in Media Matters’ emails, on CAP’s blogs, Middle East Progress and ThinkProgress and most of all on Twitter, where a Media Mattters official, MJ Rosenberg, regularly heaps vitriol on those who disagree as “Iraq war neocon liar” (the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg) or having “dual loyalties” to the U.S. and Israel (the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin). And while the Center for American Progress tends to walk a more careful line, warm words for Israel can be hard to find on its blogs......

“Like segregation in the American South, the siege of Gaza (and the entire Israeli occupation, for that matter) is a moral abomination that should be intolerable to anyone claiming progressive values,” wrote Matt Duss, a CAP policy analyst and the director of Middle East Progress, last year, after an Israeli raid on a flotilla challenging the blockade of Gaza turned violent.

The two groups’ push is part of a larger revival of the liberal American Israel lobby, though one that has yet to make a policy impact. Stalwarts of the anti-settlement movement like Peace Now have new, more politically engaged counterparts like J Street and see their views reflected increasingly in the party’s central institutions. They represent – they hope – the Democratic Party’s future, if not its present, and have taken heart from recent criticism of Israel by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton....

“There’s two explanations here – either the inmates are running the asylum or the Center for American Progress has made a decision to be anti-Israel,” said Josh Block, a former spokesman for AIPAC who is now a fellow at the center-left Progressive Policy Institute. “Either they can allow people to say borderline anti-Semitic stuff” – a reference to what he described as conspiracy theorizing in the Alterman column – “and to say things that are antithetical to the fundamental values of the Democratic party, or they can fire them and stop it.” (Alterman called the charge "ludicrous" and "character assassination," noted that he is a columnist for Jewish publications, and described himself as a "proud, pro-Zionist Jew.")...

The participants in the endless, bitter Israel policy arguments all demand a variety of labels: pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian, pro-American. Everyone argues that his case is win-win. But the new tone in Washington is also one that straightforwardly pro-Palestinian voices see as a welcome change, if one that has yet to be accompanied by a shift in American policy.

“What is actually happening is that the discourse that lot of people in the Palestine solidarity community and activists have been engaging in is starting to break down the walls of the Washington bubble,” said Ali Abunimah, a longtime activist and the co-founder of the site Electronic Intifada. “But political intimidation from Israel’s supporters is still a much more powerful force than any change in thinking at the CAP.”

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Note: (Updated)

2011-12-07T12:08:00.001-08:00

Karam

I am in the process of trying to add nested comments to Israel Thrives and the process seems to have accidentally deleted comments.

Do me a favor and try to comment under this post so that I can see just what is going on with this.

Thanks,

Karam

Updates:

The new comments system seems to be working just fine.

The "recent comments" list is functioning again and I was able to restore the comments from previous weeks.

One significant difference is that in the comments, the most recent comments are at the top of the page rather than at the bottom of the page. I do not think that this is a problem, tho.

If you guys have any questions or concerns please let me know.

Second Update:

It seems as if the "recent comments" list is only accepting my comments for some reason. I'll work on it.

Third:

I switched "Recent Comments" to a Disqus widget which seems to have resolved the problem. In fact, the "recent comments" list is much improved, in my opinion.

I believe that we are good to go.

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Is Celtic Merlin a Nazi?

2011-12-07T10:35:00.000-08:00

Karam

I suppose it depends on how one defines "Nazi." To my mind, if someone perpetually spits hatred at the Jewish state while suggesting that Jews enjoy harming perfectly innocent Palestinian waifs then, yes, one is acting as a Nazi, i.e., acting in a defamatory manner towards Jews consistent with what we saw in Der Sturmer during the 1930s.

I do not thank you for the mental images of children in chains and leg irons. That is a disturbing thing that "the National State and Homeland of the Jewish people ®" has chosen to do to children.

Why not just claim that we Jews use the blood of babies in the cooking of matzoh and be done with it? It's essentially the same thing, the Blood Libel. Here Celtic Merlin is on a progressive-left political blog telling the world that the Jews are cruel to innocent children, that we literally place them in chains and irons. In this way Celtic Merlin, as well as his anti-Semitic friend "soysauce," is promoting violence toward us. When a little Jewish kid gets beaten up in Paris for the crime of being Jewish or when an Arab teenager sneaks into a Jewish home and chops the head off of a three month old Jewish baby girl, it is because people like Celtic Merlin have told the world how vile the Jews truly are.

This is your movement, guys.

Jewish people have long been a significant part of the progressive movement in the west, but that movement has betrayed the Jewish people because it now accepts anti-Semitic anti-Zionists, as we see with Celtic Merlin, as part of the larger constituency. Well, I am sorry, but they cannot have it both ways. One cannot be open to Jewish participation if one is also open to anti-Semitic participation.

The progressive-left, and the grassroots of the Democratic Party, is no place for any Jewish person who maintains a smidgen of self-respect.

Hey liberal Jews! Stop being dhimmis and stand up for yourselves. They will never respect you so long as you allow "liberals" to kick your ass on a daily basis and make no mistake, that is precisely what is happening. On a daily basis, throughout progressive-left venues around the world, the Jews are getting their asses kicked by anti-Semitic anti-Zionists while the rest of the progressive constituency either watches, while munching on their popcorn, or simply turns a blind eye to the ongoing abuse of one of their core constituencies.

I say that it is long past time to stand the fuck up and fight back.

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Progressive-Left Racism

2011-12-07T09:22:00.000-08:00

Karam

It is one of the great sickening ironies of today's political moment that the movement which describes itself as "anti-racist," that is the progressive-left movement in the United States and in the west, is far and away more racist than is either the Republican Party or the conservative movement. The grassroots / netroots of the Democratic Party, and the activist base of the progressive movement, is absolutely crawling with the most vicious self-deluded racists that anyone would hate to meet.

As a movement, as a whole, the progressive-left is invested in projecting hatred toward Israel and in an imperialist condescension to people of color, particularly Arabs and, even more so, Palestinians. The left's problem with anti-Semitism and it's problem with Arab bigotry mirror one another in ways that are upside-down and opposite. For example, while most progressives, as individuals, are not anti-Semitic, most are, in fact, bigoted concerning Arabs and Muslims. While the relatively small amount of anti-Semitism found on the progressive-left represents the spreading of hatred, the far larger degree of bigotry pointed at the Arab and Muslim world is defined more by the old 19th century imperial attitude of "White Man's Burden." Because the left tends to view people of color as backward, helpless, and weak (and because they carry around the burden of historical colonial guilt) they do not expect, and thus do not encourage, non-white people outside of the west to meet common standards of basic human decency.

If Arabs in Pakistan kill their daughters out of a sense of abused honor or if Muslims in Iran hang Gay people from cranes, well, what can anyone expect from people who have suffered under the heal of western imperialism for centuries? If they do little things like blow up their own children in suicide bombings or plough liner jets into tall buildings in the United States, it just must be our fault or, more likely, the fault of the Jews in the Middle East. The people who actually commit these crimes are never held responsible by progressive-left racists who do not see them as fully human adults and thus fully responsible for their own behavior.

It is for this reason that progressive-left racism towards Arabs and Muslims takes the form of imperial condescension. In the progressive-left imagination 300 hundred million weak and impoverished Arabs must be protected from those vicious militarist Jews and if some of those Arabs perpetually shoot rockets at Israeli townships or if some of them sneak into Jewish homes and chop the heads off of babies, well?, whose fault is that, really? The only reason that some Arabs behave this way, or so progressives would have you believe, is because the Jews of the Middle East (as well as their supporters in the diaspora... which basically means all of us) are just flat-out mean and we pretty much deserve whatever we get.

It is for this reason that if you read the ongoing conversation around the Arab-Israeli conflict in progressive-left venues, such as Daily Kos, you find constant hatred spit at the Jews and perpetual apologetics in defense of Arab or Muslim misbehavior. If one only received one's information on the conflict from such venues, one would soon conclude that the 5.5 million Jews of the Middle East are essentially evil and that the 300 to 400 million Arabs of the Middle East are the victims of those 5.5 million Jews. The Arabs are always and forever the misunderstood victims and the Jews are always and forever the rapacious victimizers.

This is the default position of the progressive-left on the Arab-Israeli conflict and it is racist to the core. The progressive movement, as it constitutes itself today, is a horrific caricature of what it once was. They still claim to stand for anti-racism even as they spread poisonous hatred toward the Jews of the Middle East and infantilize people of color all over the world. The only progressives who seem not to fall into this trap, generally, are the so-called "progressive Zionists," but that's just because they happen to usually be Jewish supporters of Israel and therefore have not swallowed the Palestinian narrative of perpetual victimhood whole. They've usually swallowed too much of it for my liking, but they neither spread hatred toward Israel nor condescend to Arabs, Muslims, or Palestinians.

It's too bad about the Progressive movement and the Democratic Party. There was a time when that movement and that organization helped move Americans away from the old-fashioned racist tendencies of the Jim Crow era. Today that movement and that party is absolutely crawling with truly corrosive forms of hatred towards Israel, or at best indifference toward hatred spit at that country from their ideological peers and allies, and vile condescension towards Muslims, Arabs, and people of color.

The progressive-left is thus dead as a movement. By choosing the multicultural ideal over universal human rights, progressives and Democrats threw their very reason to be into the toilet and now stand for nothing.

The movement is dead and I wish someone would bury it because it's stinking up the joint. It certainly stunk-up downtown Oakland recently, that much is certain.

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Muslims Slice Themselves Up

2011-12-06T09:40:00.001-08:00

Karam

Millions of Muslim Shiites worldwide take part in traditional mourning procession; whip their backs with chains, cut flesh with knives, swords to commemorate death of Prophet Muhammad's grandson

Is it wrong for me to comment on this practice?

Millions of Shiites, who constitute the minority sect in most Muslim countries, went out on the street for the traditional mourning procession, in which they beat their chests, whip their backs with chains, and cut themselves with swords and knives until blood is shed.

This is Lebanon:

And that is a kid. Look how happy he looks.

Below we see some activity in India:

Yikes! What the hell is that weapon this guy is wielding?! I gotta get me one of those... to keep Laurie in line!

And here is what is going on in Baghdad:

I wonder what the Prophet would say about all this?

And have I just committed some horrible sin by publishing an image of Mohammed? Have I just put my life at risk? Thankfully this blog is such small peanuts that, for some reason, I do not think that the Taliban is going to take much notice.

Also on Tuesday, a series of suicide attacks aimed against Shi'ites rocked Afghanistan, killing some 60 people.

One of the attacks, which took place in a crowded shrine in Kabul, was the most lethal incident in the Afghan capital since an attack on the Indian embassy in 2008 and an act of sectarian violence unprecedented since the fall of the Taliban government in 2001.

Muslims suicide bombing other Muslims. Among the very many human rights abuses that progressives do not care about, the foremost is Muslim on Muslim violence. Absolutely nobody cares about Muslim on Muslim violence. The progressive-left doesn't care. The United Nations human rights council doesn't care. Even most other Muslims do not seem to give a shit.

I have to say, though, that I am not real thrilled with the Radical Jihad, i.e., the efforts on the part of some Muslims to restore the Caliphate by any means necessary, including the shedding of lots and lots of blood... Jewish blood being particularly valuable for such purposes... or so they constantly screech at us from mosques throughout the Middle East.

However, if Shiites want to beat the holy crap out of themselves in commemoration of the murder of the Prophet's grandkid then who am I to say "no"?

Here are some of the comments from the Y-Net article:

Very civilized

Sheesh. When you are willing to spill your own blood, its not so hard to spill anothers.

David S (12.06.11)

Indeed.

G_d is not in any of this, Satan is.

Ken Quinn, Amsterdam (12.06.11)

Well, I do not know about Satan, but this practice of blood-letting does not look very kosher to me. In fact, not to disparage anyone's religious practice, but this is just plain grotesque.

This shows love and devotion.

It is only unimaginable in the minds of those who dont understand i.e. the ignorant and arrogant. proplefrar what they dont understand. are you sure you want to go up agains Iran??

Holy Warrior, UK (12.06.11)

Love and devotion. The funny thing is that I am sure that this commenter is absolutely correct. I have no doubt that many of the millions upon millions of Muslims who are beating the holy crap out of themselves, slicing themselves with knives and swords or whipping their own backs into a grotesque and bloody mess, do so out of love and devotion.

I do not doubt their sincerity for one moment.

BEATING AND BASHING, FLOGGING

Beating the meat, bashing the bishop, flogging the frog, slapping the monkey. All violent and leads to poor eyesight and hairy palms.

LAWRENCE, SAFED ISRAEL (12.06.11)

:O)

And that, my friends, speaks for itself.

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Open Thread

2011-12-05T10:37:00.001-08:00

Karam

We had our panel discussion last night at Nativot Shalom in Berkeley and I think that it went very well. The question that we discussed was whether or not the Obama administration has been good for Israel.

My answer, needless to say, was "no," of course this administration has not been good for Israel. I gave three reasons why this is the case.

1) Obama screwed up any potential peace deal by demanding "total settlement freeze" as a precondition for talks. He thus drove Mahmoud Abbas up a tree, where the Palestinian dictator resides to this day.

2) It has encouraged, or allowed, the rise of Political Islam. Before coming into office the Radical Jihad could lay claim to Gaza, Hezbollah, Iran and, I suppose, Darfur (I am not entirely sure just when that country went Islamist). Today, in measures greater and smaller, we need to add Libya, Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt. This development is both historic and exceedingly worrisome, yet I get the distinct impression that very few people on the progressive-left really notice or care.

3) The ongoing failure to deter Iranian nukes. If Zionism means anything, it means that Jews will no longer allow ourselves to live or die according to the whims of non-Jews. If Iran gets the bomb then, yet again, Jews will live or die according to the whims of non-Jews and that is simply unacceptable.

The conversation went very well because people were willing to disagree without being disagreeable.

Also, our facilitator, Rachel Eryn, was top-notch and Michael Harris, of Stand With Us, is always an interesting guy. The third panel member, who argued that the Obama administration is, in fact, good for Israel, was Volleyboy1. (I am reluctant to post Volleyboy's actual name for obvious reasons, so I will not do so here.)

VB and I have a "gentlemen's wager" concerning the Jewish vote in the next presidential election. While about 80 percent of Jews voted for Obama in '08, I am betting that he will receive 65 percent or under in the next election. The stakes are dinner and cocktails.

We shall see.

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Israel-the Finger In The Dike.

2011-12-05T09:44:00.001-08:00

Doodad

We all remember the story of the little boy who put his finger in the dike and saved his village from sure destruction. As an idiom, the story translates to taking an emergency measure to avert disaster. I've recently wondered if it is Israel which performs that major function in the world today. For example, if Israel disappeared tomorrow, what would happen?

Rational thinkers realize that peace would not immediately break out in the middle east because most of the turmoil there is unrelated to Israel. Certainly the "Arab Spring," and all that harbingers has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with the various competing and opposing forces within the middle east today. Dictators, economies, Islamists, Sunni/Shia, etc. There is enough strife and animosity to keep that part of the world busy for a long time without any need to mention Israel.

But mention Israel happens now all the time. Actually, as we see in the news and on blogs everywhere, Israel somehow gets blamed for it all eventually. Oh yes, sometimes the Big Satan and the West in general gets a lambasting; but, for the most part, Israel is the fall guy. One of the reasons we sane people give is that it helps the despots keep the mobs distracted by giving them an enemy so that they can't think about their real oppressors. I agree with this; but, there is another thing as well.

So, let's say Israel disappears, the dike breaks; then what? It won't be water that rushes in but the harsh reality of the actual middle east. With no Israel to focus on what will the world see? Islamic governance and hegemony. With no Israel to hate, human rights activists will be forced to deal with that world. Extrapolate that and we end up with a real clash of civilizations to an extent no one wants. Even Bush went to extremes to claim, "This is not a War against Islam." Obama has said, "As Americans we are not - and never will be - at war with Islam." Yes, no one wants to face that. Thanks goodness Israel can be the scapegoat.

Consider the recent three stooges effect of Panetta, Hilary and Gutman. Basically it's another chapter in the Obama administration blaming Israel for the coming deluge promised by the Arab Spring they backed. For Panetta and Hilary it was more couched in anti-Bibi language but the ultimate effect was blame Israel....look over there, Israel sucks....ignore the rest, nothing to see, now move on. It's bad enough when Arab despots do it; it's worse when Obama et al do it.

As moral human beings, we need to make sure that dike never breaks; but, for G-d's sake we need to to save that little boy. He should not be sacrificed for the cause.

The mentality of Arab states illustrated

2011-12-04T22:42:00.001-08:00

by oldschooltwentysix

As is circulating in the blogosphere, on Friday, according to Ynet, 133 states voted at the UN General Assembly in favor of an Israeli proposal to make farming technology more accessible to developing African nations.

The article says that around 75% of the world population lives in poverty and depends on agriculture for survival. Israel's proposal aims to empower women in rural areas, promote food security and farmer education, and slow down the effects of climate change, all in line with UN policy to eradicate hunger and poverty.

No matter. Arab states led a group of 35 that abstained from the vote, but not before expressing objection and claiming the proposal was to exploit the developing world's needs for political gains and mask "illegal and destructive" Israeli policies.

Israeli Ambassador Prosor thanked the General Assembly and noted that the support indicates international recognition of Israel's contribution to the world, particularly in the technology field. He noted that Israel acts to promote progress and technology, while opposing nations make efforts to preserve "rhetoric and ignorance."

This episode goes to show how the Arab states, in the international arena and elsewhere, again and again put politics before people. For them it's more important to quash the Jewish state than hunger and poverty. Yet, again and again, anti-Israel activists who proclaim to wear the largest "humanitarian" hats, not only fail to see such an obvious distinction between the sides, but to attribute responsibility despite what the positions rather clearly illustrate.

(cross-posted at oldschooltwentysix)

The risks of self-criticism, apostacy and "defamation" of religion

2011-12-04T14:48:00.000-08:00

By oldschooltwentysix

I am curious why Muslims, ex-Muslims or Arabs that self-criticize Islam or Arab cultures are almost always disparaged by anti-Israel advocates and extremists. Do the latter simply know better? Often, these voices, such as Ayan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, and Ibn Warraq, and others who join them in criticism, like myself, are called "Islamphobes" or even worse by anti-Israel activists across the board, arguably to squander speech, such as that which is directed at their behavior. They act as if the critics are the opponents of universal human rights despite that we speak about widespread violations to the rights of women, children and others, no matter where they occur, while they remain virtually silent unless it involves Palestinians. This is one instance where the picture is as Orwell feared.

In France, a new voice has arisen. AFP reports a French minister of Arab origin, Jeannette Bougrab, recently said "I don’t know of any moderate Islam." Ms. Bougrab, Secretary for Youth and Community Life was also the the Chair of the High authority for the struggle against discrimination and for equality (HALDE), France’s official anti-discrimination body which "has the right to judge all discrimination, direct or indirect, that is prohibited by law or an international agreement to which France is a signatory." She was a member of the Socialist-led SOS Racism before she joined the ruling party. In other words, she is a LEFTIST!

She was reacting to electoral successes of religious political parties, Ennahda in Tunisia, the Justice and Development Party in Morocco and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Here, in an interview in Le Parisien newspaper (in French, and partially translated here), she explains why:

The rule of law is measured…on the degree or respect for the rights of women and I don’t accept the idea that we can base a constitution on Sharia law, because such a religious system is fundamentally unequal. Democracy is not a supermarket where we can take only what we like….There are no half measures with sharia…I am a lawyer and you can make all the theological, literal or fundamental interpretations of it that you like but law based on sharia is inevitably a restriction on freedom, including freedom of conscience, because apostasy is prohibited. It is not possible to convert. Mixed marriages are not recognized. A Muslim woman cannot marry a non-Muslim. In the eyes of some, it may not be of importance if the women must now be veiled or if tomorrow they no longer have the same rights. Not for me. I do not compromise on this issue of legal equality.

Ironically, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan also said that "There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that's it." (Source: Milliyet, Turkey, August 21, 2007.) Odds are, however, that Ms. Bougrab will join the ranks of those who, instead of being supported for speaking out against discrimination and inequality, end up being demonized by the "humanitarians" that act like the experiences of victims and those who leave Islam or "defame" the religion mean nothing. Then again, I suppose it's better to ignore, dismiss or disparage, rather than kill them for apostasy or blasphemy.

(Cross-posted at oldschooltwentysix)