Original articles on Israel and related issues written by Steven Plaut, a professor at an Israeli university.
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The Left is Having Conniptions over Being Monitored and Exposed:
http://counterpunch.com/makdisi10182007.html
"Academic colleagues, get used to it," warned the pro-Israel activist Martin Kramer in March 2004. "Yes, you are being watched. Those obscure articles in campus newspapers are now available on the Internet, and they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you've also posted, will be scrutinized. Your Web sites will be visited late at night."
pro-Terrorists
Tel Aviv University - The Terrorist-Financed NGO Gisha run by Tel Aviv U.
Law Professors Kenneth Mann and Sari Bashi
Lee Kaplan, www.IsraCampus.Org.il
3/7/2009
.It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for law, so much as a respect
for right.. - Henry David Thoreau
If you want to get to know Tel Aviv University Law Professors Kenneth Mann
and Sari Bashi, you need also to discuss the NGO, Gisha, which they
founded and for which they list themselves as legal counsels. As leaders
of Gisha, Mann and Bashi are two of the many lawyers in Israel who are
working diligently to death and hasten realization of the goals and
political agenda of the Palestinian Arabs. In particular, this is
manifested in their latest work opposing the Jewish states security
procedures in Gaza, better known as Hamastan.
Until very recently on leave from Tel Aviv Universitys Law School in order
to serve as Israel's first Chief Public Defender, Professor Kenneth Mann
has also held the positions of distinguished visiting professor at Rutgers
Law School and was a senior research associate at Yale Law School. At TAU
he has taught criminal procedure, evidence, trial practice, and supervised
a legal-aid clinic in criminal law. Part of Manns ideological commitment
to aid the .Palestinians. may have been gleaned at the University of
California at Berkeley, where he earned his BA and, then an M.A. from the
Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley. He earned his J.D.
from Berkeleys Boalt Law School which includes quite a few radical and
anti-Israel faculty members. Sari Bashi is an American-Israeli attorney
who teaches currently at TAUs law school and graduated from Yale Law
School in 2006. She co-founded Gisha with Mann shortly after her
graduation.
Gishas mission, according to Mann and Bashi, is as a legal NGO whose
purpose is "litigation and advocacy that aim to help individuals exercise
their right to freedom of movement while working for systemic change in
military practices and abuses at Israeli border-crossings and
checkpoints.exploiting "untapped potential for law reform effectuated
through intensive engagement with the military bureaucracy." It has an
emphasis on "the Gaza Strip, a severely underserved area whose viability
depends on the ability of people and goods to move in and out of its
borders." Prior to founding Gisha, while in Israel under a Fellowship
grant, Sari Bashi worked at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, a
leftist anti-Israel NGO masquerading as a .human rights organization..
ACRI has even programs to encourage IDF soldiers to desert or refuse to
serve. Mann now serves as Gishas Legal Adviser and Chairperson of its
Advisory Committee.
Gisha uses the Israeli courts to sue the Jewish state for taking security
measures. Mann and Bashi feel that the same 1.5 million Arabs who elected
and cheer on Hamas and Fatah terrorism are victims of .collective
punishment. by the Israeli government, and suffer under .restricted
movement..
The alternative to such .collective punishment. is to sit back passively
while thousands of rockets are fired at Israeli civilians. Israel needs to
control the Gaza borders and entry points and has a right to do so under
international law. Israel deported 8,000 Jews before it left Gaza as a
price paid for peace, and what it received in return was Islamofascist
terror. Mann and Bashi evidently blame Israel for all that and have filed
suit against the Israeli government over security micro-procedures. In
other words, people with expertise in law think they have the right to
second-guess the militarys own leadership on questions of how to fight
terror.
Gisha receives the majority of its funding from Echoing Green, another NGO
that also funds such openly pro-terror groups as the International
Solidarity Movement. As an indication of their bias, Echoing Green named
ISM co-founders and leaders Adam Shapiro and Huwaida Arraf (both of whom
have admitted they consider suicide bombings .legitimate resistance. and
the latter has openly admitted she works with Hamas, PFLP and Palestinian
Islamic Jihad) as among the ten best .social entrepreneurs of the year,.
and awarded them a $90,000 grant. Arraf only yesterday was arrested at sea
by the IDF Navy while trying to smuggle goods into Gaza for Hamas and to
open up a sea-borne weapons smuggling route for Iran. This was Arrafs
seventh voyage and she even received a medal from Hamas for her efforts.
Gisha and Sari Bashi received over one million dollars from Echoing Green
for Gishas project to ease the .movement. of Palestinians, .movement. that
so often facilitates terrorist atrocities. Meanwhile. Echoing Green, the
source for Gishas funding, gets money from Saudi Arabia.
Kenneth Mann gave a law lecture on .Israeli apartheid. for the venomously
anti-Israel Alternative Information Center, itself with close ties to the
ISM and .anarchist. groups. Bashi obsessively uses the words .apartheid.
and .collective punishment. in describing Israeli security procedures.
Gisha makes little attempt to hide its political agenda and bias. In an
interview with the Jerusalem Post ("One on One: 'Control Creates
Responsibility'", Feb. 6, 2008), Gisha Director Bashi, called Israels Gaza
policy "illegal, dangerous and stupid." Bashi was sharply challenged by
Avraham Bell's January 2008 article (International Law and Gaza: The
Assault on Israel's Right to Self-Defense, Jan. 2008). In response, Bashi
simply repeated standard one-sided claims without providing a serious
legal analysis regarding the historical status of Gaza.
Gisha has a highly selective interest in applying international law to the
Middle East conflict. On March 2, Gisha issued a statement that called on
.both sides of the conflict. to .remove civilians from the cycle of
combat.. How nice, except there is no .cycle of conflict. and only the
Palestinians cynically use civilians as political pawns to get media
points. While noting that .the Hamas organization and militants in Gaza
must immediately stop the firing of rockets on towns in southern Israel.,
Gisha drew a parallel between these attacks and Israels response,
condemning Israel's .undifferentiated firing into crowded population
centers.. Gisha did not condemn Hamas practice of launching rockets from
within civilians areas (behind human shields), a practice that is clearly
a violation of international law.
Mann frequently drifts into anti-Israel ranting. According to Mann,
.The Israeli government's definition of a humanitarian crisis would
require human deaths. Now, there have been deaths -- among the chronically
ill, who were not permitted to leave the Gaza Strip for medical care that
is not available (or no longer available) there, due to the closure. There
have been deaths among those who are trying to bring the necessities of
daily life in through the tunnels. And, of course, there were many deaths
during Operation Cast Lead -- including an unusual spike in maternal and
neo-natal deaths due to lack of care, as the UN has reported. It is not as
if nobody knew. Many experts have stated that this policy of collective
punishment against an entire civilian population under a belligerent
military occupation is illegal under international law..
A humanitarian crisis among the Palestinians actually consists of a
situation in which the terrorists do not having any foreign aid money to
steal. Meanwhile Mann laments as part of his .humanitarian crisis. the
deaths among those .who are trying to bring the necessities of daily life
through the tunnels.. The necessities of life these people bring in are
explosives and rocket components. If Mann wants his Palestinians to have
easy access to civilian supplies, maybe he should get them to stop
shooting rockets and release Gilad Shalit.
For Gisha and its lawyers a one million dollar grant must help alleviate
any potential guilt pangs about their serving as apologists for the
misbehavior of Palestinians. Sari Bashi mentions that her family in Israel
used to yell at her over for what she does, but now they just avoid the
subject and invite her over for family gatherings. It would be interesting
to learn what they will say about her funding coming indirectly from Saudi
Arabia and from groups that want the end of the Jewish state and to excuse
the murder of Israelis as .legitimate resistance..
Its troubling to think that the next generation of Israeli lawyers
responsible for litigating in arenas of international law are being taught
by such radicals.
2.
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial%20-%20Judith%20Nusbaum%20-%20TAU%20PsychoActive%20conference%20Eyewitness%20report.htm
PsychoActive conference at Tel Aviv University - Yet another TAU
"academic" exercise in one-sided Israel-Bashing
Eyewitness report by Judith Nusbaum
1/7/2009
College of Management Academic Studies . Law Professor Orna Bar-Naftali
uses .Law. to Bludgeon Israel
Lee Kaplan, www.isracampus.org.il
28/6/2009
College of Management Academic Studies . Law Professor Orna Bar-Naftali
uses .Law. to Bludgeon Israel
Lee Kaplan, www.isracampus.org.il
28/6/2009
.There's no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of
law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the
truth..-Jean Giraudoux
The pursuit of personal political agendas has reached into even the law
schools in Israel and America, where international and humanitarian law is
supposedly debated and taught. A case in point is law professor Orna
Bar-Naftali, the head of the law school at the College of Management and
Academic Studies in Israel, one of the Jewish states larger institutes of
higher education. Bar-Naftali earned her law degree at Tel Aviv
University, then went on to earn other graduate degrees in America,
including a PhD in Law. She is now the Dean at the College of Management,
which boasts exchange programs with Fordham University in the US.
Orna Bar-Naftali has been working assiduously with leftist lawyers in
Israel and abroad to suggest that Israel routinely violates .international
law. and .human rights.. An examination of the womans background and legal
discourse becomes quite revealing of an agenda to smear Israel and drown
the Jewish state in a malaise of her legal .interpretations,. as well as
to provide propaganda against the Jewish state by certain NGOs that have
an anti-Zionist and even anti-Israel agenda.
We learn that Bar-Naftali is on the executive board of directors for
BTselem, an anti-Israel far-leftist NGO which pretends to be a human
rights watchdog agency, and one that accepts Arab rumors and statistics as
fact to damn the Jewish state. For example, BTselem in the past has
reported Arabs who were killed in suicide bomb attacks or armed terrorists
fighting the IDF as .civilian casualties.. The problem is that BTselem
sees no human rights violations when Arab terrorists murder Jews, only
when Jews try to defend themselves from such murderers. It has repeatedly
shown itself to be less than honest in reporting alleged .humanitarian
violations. by the IDF or by .settlers,. and is hardly a credible or
reliable neutral source of information.
Bar-Naftali worked between 1993-1996 as a legal United Nations Staff
Member of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York. Working
for the UN might have helped her develop her anti-Israel biases and legal
interpretations. The United Nations is anything but impartial toward
Israel and its peacekeeping mission was even responsible for aiding the
abduction and killing of Israeli soldiers, one an American, by Syria in
October of 2000. In Lebanon, most recently, the UN did all but nothing to
prevent the rearming of Hizballah.
Of particular interest is how Bar-Naftali, the lawyer, has declared the
.occupation. as being against international law and humanitarian law. The
word .Occupation. itself, according to anti-Israel radical leftists, is a
loaded word with dual meanings. Depending on the audience, it can mean
just Gaza, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) but increasingly what it
really means is all of Israel. To which .occupation. does Naftali refer
when she opines that Israels occupation is .illegal. per international
law?
It is this selective one-sided interpretation of .law. always against
Israel by Bar-Naftali that is particularly troubling. If one reads or
listens only to Bar-Naftalis .interpretations. of law, one might subscribe
to the notion that Israel does indeed violate international law and human
rights. However, it is the reverse that is true. A lawyer like Bar-Naftali
who leaves out historical or current facts to promote a cause or person in
court has an agenda, not a goal of participating in using law to uncover
truth and justice. Bar-Naftali may be a law professor at an Israeli
university, but she functions as an advocate for those who want to destroy
Israel, especially through disinformation. She has an impressive
curriculum vitae (she holds several advanced degrees from US
universities). Nevertheless, one has to scratch ones head about someone
who spent a life in academia studying law on two continents, yet uses that
training to support the goals of the most vile and anti-law groups
imaginable, the terrorist organizations and leadership of the PLO and
Hamas. At every turn Orna Bar-Naftali finds fault with Israel and some of
Israels Jews to aid a society that still practices honor killings and
promotes anti-Jewish blood libels.the Palestinian Arabs.
Most recently, Bar-Naftali lent her .expert. opinion to a lawsuit filed in
Canadian courts against a Canadian company for doing business with and
helping to build a Jewish community in the West Bank. Being an .expert. in
.international law,. Bar-Naftali provided support for the weekly rioters
in Biilin by advising the Canadian Supreme Court that Israel (a country
whose future lawyers she is teaching) has no jurisdiction over the
occupied territories.
Mind you, it is .International Law. that helped create the Oslo Accords in
the first place. In fact, Israel has conceded a .legal entitlement. to the
Palestinian Authority to create a Palestinian state if it would just stop
terrorism against Israelis. Israels Supreme Court has been used by PA
Arabs to sue Israel and in many cases the Arabs have won. But that isnt
good enough for Bar-Naftali. She thinks Israels Supreme Court is
illegitimate (no doubt because Israel itself is also) and she wrote the
Canadian court that:
.I have been advised that in the case of Biilin vs. Green Park Intl Inc.
et al., the defendants have filed two motions
with the Quebec Superior Court on issues res judicata, justiciability, and
forum non-convenience. I have been asked to
provide an opinion on the issue of justiciablity and to answer the
following question:
Is the issue alleged by the plaintiffs of violation of International
Humanitarian Law and Canadian Domestic Law
justiciable before the Israeli courts, and are those courts willing to
adjudicate on the question of the legality of settlements in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories in this case?
In my opinion, the answer is negative. The core question of the legality
of the establishments of settlements is non-justiciable before the Israeli
Courts..
Naftali goes on to state, The Plaintiffs (hereafter Biilin) have brought
suit against the corporate defendants and their registered director
(Hereafter Green Park Companies) under the provisions of the Geneva
Convention Act, R.S. 1985,
C G3, and the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act S.C. 2000 c. 24.I
understand those statutes have been incorporated into Canadian Domestic
Law and that they incorporate principles of International Humanitarian Law
as found at article (49) (6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention dated August
12, 1949...
The .Plaintiffs,. as Bar-Naftali refers to hooligans, thugs, and rioters
in Biilin, should be redefined for what they really are: weekly
international anarchists rioters from the International Solidarity
Movement and their Arab irredentist friends. The Geneva Conventions apply
to established nations who signed an agreement to be followed in the event
of war. This does not apply to violent rioters and vandals.
Bar-Naftali is .fishing. for international condemnation and isolation for
the Jewish state abroad, using, or rather misusing, law to justify her
actions. A recent ruling in a US court requires the PA to pay damages to
American families whose children were killed in PA sponsored terrorist
attacks. The PA .defense. that this was in time of war and not subject to
legal action fell on deaf ears when the judge pointed out that there is a
peace process, not a war. This might also come as news to Bar Naftali. And
why does Bar-Naftali have nothing at all to say about the Palestinian
refusal to release Gilad Shalit? On the one hand, Bar-Naftali erroneously
cites the Geneva Conventions (a frequent ruse of the PLO) to bludgeon
Israel, while on the other has nothing to say about the treatment of
Shalit under the same Geneva Conventions and Red Cross guarantees.
In the legal mind of Orna Bar-Naftali, Israel has no jurisdiction over
Judea and Samaria, no matter what international law says (see the writings
of Prof. Louis Rene Beres on this matter). What a pity this woman hasnt
the time to use international law and the courts to tackle the issue of
honor killings in the PA, or the land law on the books there that
condemned an Arab to death for selling land to a Jew.
But wait, there is more:
Quoting Bar-Naftali and a co-author in another article in the Berkeley
Journal of International Law:
.The intrinsic legality of an occupation is to be measured in relation to
three interrelated fundamental legal principles: (a) Sovereignty and title
in an occupied territory is not vested in the occupying power; under
contemporary international law, and in view of the principle of
self-determination, said sovereignty is vested in the population under
occupation; (b) The occupying power is entrusted with the management of
public order and civil life in the territory under control. In view of the
principle of self-determination, the people under occupation are the
beneficiaries of this trust. The dispossession and subjugation of these
people is thus a violation of this trust, and (c) The occupation is
temporary, as distinct from indefinite. The violation of each of these
principles, as distinct from the violation of a specific norm which
reflects an aspect of these principles, renders an occupation illegal.
Further, these principles are interrelated: the substantive constraints on
the managerial discretion of the occupant elucidated in principle (a) and
(b) respectively, generate the conclusion that it must necessarily be
temporary, and the violation of the temporal constraints expressed in
principle (c) cannot but violate principles (a) and (b), thereby
corrupting the normative regime of occupation. This occupation is illegal.
This is the nature of the Israeli occupation. The extrinsic legality of an
occupation is to be measured by its exceptionality. Once the boundaries
between the exception and the rule are blurred, the occupation becomes
illegal..
Note that what is missing here is a discussion of .occupation. when the
enemy forces are still trying to annihilate the .occupier. or where the
.occupied lands. actually rightfully belong to the .occupier.. In the case
of Israel, the .occupied. territories are its historic heartland. Also
missing are territories owned by victors and taken away from aggressors in
wars the latter started.[1]
And as usual, Bar-Naftali leaves out the important information to damn the
Jewish state when it suits her. In a bit of irony the above by Bar-Naftali
unintentionally makes a case for Israels control of its .occupied. lands:
Point of fact: there were 25 Jewish communities in Gaza, Judea and Samaria
prior to the Arab attacks on the new Jewish state in 1948. Overrun by
armies of the Arab Nation at that time, Egypt and Jordan, the land these
were based on was legally purchased. Despite this, the Arab armies took
the land (and even murdered the occupants after the Armistice as in Kfar
Etzion). Using Bar-Naftalis own arguments, the land was thus occupied by
Arabs against international law and certainly the murder of 35 Jews in a
pit in Gush Etzion was a .humanitarian. crime.
But the fact that Israel regained this property in 1967 in a defensive war
means nothing to Bar-Naftali, because she is only interested in Israel
being decreed guilty of violating .international law. and .humanitarian
rights.. Going a step further, settlements established by Israel in Gaza,
Judea and Samaria after 1967 are at worst disputed territories, since they
are in areas illegally held by Jordan or held in trust by Egypt and not
owned by those countries. In most cases they are on lands purchased
legitimately by their .occupants.. In other cases they were built on
ownerless sand dunes or desolate empty areas.
Even worse, she does not even support Israel in having a right to defend
its own people from terrorism. It should come as no surprise that
Bar-Naftali also found fault with Israels Operation Cast Lead that she
also declares as supposedly being in violation of Humanitarian Law (unlike
the firing of missiles at schoolchildren in Sderot). When Israel used
International law to justify Operation Cast Lead into Gaza after the
southern part of the country endured over 7,000 missiles attacks by Hamas,
Bar-Naftali took strong exception to this.
In discussing Israeli operations in Gaza, Bar-Naftali complains that
international law, her field, is bankrupt, and the results of the IDF
operation in Gaza only reinforces her opinion. .Today, this discipline is
utilized only to justify the use of force,. she said. .It has ceased to
exist, because there is a clear inconsistency between the rules and the
reality to which they are applied. Distinctions between types of conflicts
or between civilians and combatants no longer exist in the field, and one
can put forward weighty and serious reasons that will justify almost any
action. The implication is to validate the use of almost unlimited force
in a manner that is totally at odds with the basic goal of humanitarian
law. Instead of legal advice and international humanitarian law minimizing
suffering, they legitimize the use of force..
If one uses the logic of Orna Bar-Naftali, the use of force is always a
violation of Humanitarian Law; accordingly the allies in World War II were
in violation of Humanitarian Law for using force to end Hitlers reign.
Arab terrorism never seems to interest her. The early Oslo Accords
stipulated there would be an independent Palestinian state by 1998 only if
the Arabs would stop terror against the Jews. Instead, they escalated the
terror. In Bar Naftalis opinion, evidently there is no lesson to be drawn
from that
The joking definition of chutzpah is said to be a man who murders his
parents then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an
orphan. That seems to be a good parable for the type of legality promoted
by Orna Bar-Naftali. It involves using the law to indict Israel for being
the victim of the most brutal and lawless groups of Islamofascist
criminals on the planet, and for daring to defend its own population.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Something of note that few readers would know, the law school at UC
Berkeley actually encourages lawbreaking when it comes to Israel and even
provides office space at California taxpayer expense to the Arab boycott
and divestment movement on campus. The office of the Law Students for
Justice in Palestine devotes all its time to proving that Israel, founded
by the UN in 1948 under international law is, in fact, an .illegal. state.
========================================
Patriots, Refugees, and the Right of Return
By Steven Plaut
<http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-plaut112101.shtml>http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-plaut112101.shtml
The American government, in a sudden leap onto
the PLO "refugee suffering" bandwagon, has come
out for some kind of solution for the Palestinian
refugees. The only problem? Obama now seems to
think this is somehow the responsibility of Israel.
He might be better off looking at the U.S. model of solving refugee problems.
Consider the following: When the War of
Independence began, it quickly assumed the nature
of a civil war. Those opposing the declaration of
statehood fought alongside the organized armies
of their kinsmen, which invaded the territory of
the infant state from all directions. The
fighting was bloody, and the opponents of
independence used terrorism against the
population defending statehood. The country was
partitioned between the areas of the new state
and those territories still under the rule of the
foreign invaders. As the fighting dragged on, the
opponents of independence began a mass exodus. In
most cases, they left because they feared the
consequences of staying on as a political
minority or because they simply opposed the new
political entity on principle. In some cases,
they refused to live as a religious minority
under the rule of those practicing an alien
religion. And, in some cases, they were expelled
forcibly. They fled across the frontiers, moving
their families to live in the areas controlled by
the armies of their political kin. From there,
some joined the invading forces and launched
cross-border raids and terrorist atrocities. When
the fighting ceased, most of the refugees who had
fled from the new state were refused permission to return.
The previous paragraph is not about the
Palestinians. The events described did not
transpire in 1947-49, but rather in 1775-1781;
and the refugees in question were not Arabs, but
Tory "loyalists" who supported the British
against the American revolutionists seeking
independence. During the American War of
Independence, large numbers of loyalist refugees
fled the new country. Estimates of the numbers
vary, but perhaps 100,000 refugees left or were
expelled a very significant number given the
sparse population of the 13 colonies.
While there are many differences, there are also
many similarities between the plight of the
Palestinians and that of the Tory refugees during
the first years of American independence. The
advocates of Palestinian refugee rights, are in
fact clearly in the same political bed as were
King George's allies, who fought against America democracy and independence.
Like all wars of independence, both Israel's and
America's were in fact civil wars. In both cases,
religious sectarianism played an important role
in defining the opposing forces, although for the
Americans, taxation was even more important.
(Israelis suffered under abominable taxation only
after independence.) One cause of the American
revolution was the attempt to establish the
Anglican Church, or Church of England, as the
official bishopric of the colonies. Anglicans
were the largest ethnic group opposing
independence as were Palestinian Muslims
although in both cases, other religious and
ethnic groups were also represented in the anti-independence movement.
Those fearing the possibility of being forced to
live as minorities under the tyrannical religious
supremacy of the Anglicans and Muslims,
respectively, formed the forces fighting for
independence. The Anglicans and Palestinian
Muslims hoped to establish themselves with the
armed support of their coreligionists across the
borders. New England was the center of patriotism
largely because of the mistrust felt toward the
Anglican Church by the Puritan and
Congregationalist majorities there. And the later
incorporation into the Constitution of the
separation of church and state was largely
motivated by the memory of Anglican would-be
establishmentarianism. Among the leaders of the
Tory cause were many Anglican parsons, perhaps
the most prominent being one Samuel Seabury, the loyalists' Arafat.
In both wars, the anti-independence forces were a
divided and heterogeneous population, and for
this reason lost the war. In the American
colonies, the Tories included not only Anglicans,
but other groups who feared for their future
living under the rule of the local political
majority among them Indians, Scots, Dutch, and
Negroes. Tory sympathy was based on ethnic,
commercial, and religious considerations. Where
loyalist sentiment was strong enough-namely, in
Canada the war produced partition, as in
Mandatory Palestine, with territories remaining
cut off from the newly independent state.
When independence was declared, the populations
of the opposing forces were about even in both
wars. In Palestine in 1947, there were about
750,000 people on each side. The exact
distribution of pro- and anti-independence forces
in the American colonies is not known, but the
estimate by John Adams is probably as good a
guess as any namely, one-third patriot,
one-third loyalist, and one-third neutral. The
number of colonists fighting actively alongside
regular British forces is estimated at about half
the number fighting under Washington.
When fighting broke out, civilians were often the
first victims in both wars. The Tories formed
terrorist units and plundered and raided the
territories under patriot control. The
southwestern frontier areas of the colonies, like
the southwestern border of Palestine, were scenes
of particularly bloody terrorism. In South
Carolina, the Tory leader Major William
Cunningham (known as "Bloody Bill") became the
Sheikh Yassin of the struggle, conducting
massacres of patriot civilians. Tory and
anti-Tory mob violence became common. General Sir
Henry Clinton organized many guerrilla raids upon
patriot territory. Loyalists also launched
assassination plots, including an attempt to
murder George Washington in New York in 1776.
(Among the terrorists participating in that plot
was the mayor of New York City.)
There were loyalist insurrections against the
patriots in every colony. Tory military activity
was particularly severe in the Chesapeake, on
Long Island, in Delaware and Maryland, and along
the Virginia coast. As violence escalated and
spread, the forces of the revolution took
countermeasures. Tories were tarred and
feathered. Indiscriminate expulsions sometimes
took place. Tory areas could be placed under
martial rule, with all civil rights, habeas
corpus, and due process suspended. Queens County,
New York a loyalist stronghold was put under
military administration by Continental troops,
and the entire population was prohibited from
traveling without special documents. General
Wooster engaged in wholesale incarceration and
expulsion of New York Tories. The Continental
Congress called for disarming all loyalists, and
for locking up the "dangerous ones" without
trial. New York loyalists were exiled to
Connecticut and other places; some were used in forced labor.
Loyalists were kidnapped and held hostage. In
some colonies, expressing opposition to the
Revolution was grounds for imprisonment.
Loyalists could be excluded from certain
professions, such as law; frequently, they were
stripped of all property rights and had their
lands confiscated. In colony after colony, Acts
of Banishment forced masses of loyalists to leave
their homes and emigrate. The most common destiny
was the Canadian Maritimes, with others going to
the British West Indies, to England, and to Australia.
In both the Israeli and American wars of
independence, anti-independence refugees often
fled to areas under the control of their
political allies. However, some who opposed
independence nevertheless stayed put. After the
war ended, these generally found the devil was
not as bad as they'd feared, and were permitted
to live as tolerated political minorities, with
their civil rights restored and protected. (This
was in spite of the fact that many refused to
recognize the legitimacy of the new state, sometimes for decades.)
The American colony-states that had banished
loyalists refused to allow their return, even
after a peace treaty was signed. There was a fear
that returning Tories could act as a sort of
fifth column, particularly if the British took it
into their heads to attempt another invasion.
(Such an invasion eventually took place, in
1812.) Like Israel, the newly independent country
initially resolved many of its strategic problems
through an alliance with France.
The Tory refugees were regarded by all as
Britain's problem. The American patriots allowed
small numbers to return; others attempted to
return illegally, and were killed. But most
languished across the partition lines in eastern
British Canada, mainly in what would become Nova
Scotia and New Brunswick. The refugees would
never be granted the "right to return," and in
most cases, they would never even be granted
compensation for property. (Benjamin Franklin was
among the leading opponents of any such compensation.)
At this point, of course, the similarity between
the Palestinian refugees and the Tory loyalists
breaks down. The British, unlike the Arabs, did a
great deal to settle their refugees, rather than
force them into festering camps, and allotted $20
million for their resettlement. The Tory refugees
quickly became a non-problem, and played no
subsequent role in British-American relations.
Nevertheless, an interesting thought experiment
might be to imagine what would have occurred had
the British done things the Arab way. Tory
refugees would have been converted into terrorist
cadres and trained by British commandos. They
would begin a ceaseless wave of incursions and
invasions of the independent states, mainly from
bases along the Canadian frontier. The British,
Hessians, and their allies would begin a global
diplomatic campaign for self-determination for
the loyalist Americans. They would set up an
American Liberation Organization (ALO) that would
hijack whalers and merchant marines, crashing
them into harbor facilities, and assassinate
diplomats of the United States. Perhaps Benedict
Arnold would be chosen the chairman and
president-in-exile, and would write the Tory
National Charter, incorporating parts of the
Stamp Act, under the nom de guerre of Abu Albion.
The British would organize underground terrorist
cells among the loyalist population that had not fled.
The Tories would then declare an Anglican jihad.
Britain and her empire would boycott the new
country commercially, pressuring others to do the
same. She would assert that the national rights
of the loyalist people were inalienable and
eternal, no matter how many years had passed
since the refugees fled. Britain would accumulate
arms in astronomical quantities, awaiting the day
of reckoning. International pressure would be
exerted on the United States to give up much of
its territory, and to internationalize Philadelphia.
The American administration now insists that the
Palestinian refugees should be granted the "right
to return" in some form, and that Israel is
liable for the suffering of the refugees and
should be responsible for their resettlement. The
state department is exhibiting loyalist Tory
sympathies. Perhaps a large portrait of Benedict
Arnold should grace the offices of every "Arabist" in Foggy Bottom.
<http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/39905>http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/39905
By: Steven Plaut
Date: Wednesday, July 01 2009
I am about to deliver a lecture in a glamorous
building in Riga, one of the best examples of the
Art Nouveau architecture style that makes the
capital of Latvia so famous. The large seminar room is filled beyond capacity.
"This seminar is going to be a strange one for
two reasons," I begin. "The first is that
everyone in the room knows more about the topic I
am about to discuss than I do. The second is that
I want to begin by telling you about the Latvian roots of my family."
* * *
That story began in Dvinsk. Today the town,
renamed Daugavpils, is the second-largest city in
Latvia and an industrial eyesore produced by
Stalinist planning. Back in the 19th century it
was included within the borders of czarist
Belarussia. The city joined Latvia when it
achieved political independence after World War I
for the first time in modern history.
Dvinsk's sizable Jewish community was best known
for Rabbi Meir Simcha, one of the greatest Torah
sages of his generation who was popularly called
the Ohr Sameach after the name of his most famous book.
Zayde was born Samuel Shaeffer in Dvinsk. In the
last decade of the 19th century the wealthy
Jewish banker Baron Maurice de Hirsch had
purchased lands in Argentina, and Jews from
Eastern Europe were fleeing there from the
pogroms that were growing in viciousness during
the dying days of the Russian empire.
Samuel's parents were among those who signed up
to go. They packed up their meager belongings,
took their young son and his two sisters, and
hopped on the horse-drawn wagon to make their way
to the port. But, alas, the horse was too old for
the task at hand and they literally missed the
boat because of her. They returned to the poverty of Dvinsk.
Things only got worse. An order came for Samuel
to report for conscription for a 25-year term of
service in the czarist army. He decided to flee
the country for his life. A Jewish teenager in
the town had recently died but his passing had
not been officially recorded. Samuel took the
papers of the dead youth, adopted the latter's
last name of Steinman, and smuggled himself out
just ahead of the czarist secret police.
With a few coins in his pocket he escaped Latvia
and made his way by foot all the way to Hamburg.
He had been a tailor's apprentice back home (a
profession he never liked much) and would work as
a tailor in towns he traveled through for food
money. From Hamburg he took a steamer to America,
landing in Ellis Island in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.
He settled in Philadelphia, married a young
Jewish woman from Galicia, and set up a tailor
shop. He kept planning to change professions, but
never did. Back in Dvinsk he had been examined by
the local doctor before he left. A complete
physical examination in those days consisted of
checking the patient's tongue. The quack told him
he thought he would be unable to father children.
Samuel decided to prove him wrong, and had nine
of them. The eighth of the nine is named Ida - my mother.
They spoke Yiddish at home. I picked up some
expressions, but to my regret never learned it
properly. Mom later married a refugee from
Germany who did not speak Yiddish. They met in
the middle of Israel's war of independence when
Mom worked at the offices of the Magen David Adom
and Dad came to donate blood. Our family joke
always was that it was love at first stab.
Zayde spent endless days sitting in the small
tailor shop, sneaking away from work whenever he
could to read Josephus. He did not trust the
police. He told his children that when they came
home late at night they should walk rather than
run down the street, lest the police mistake them for thieves and attack them.
Some of my best early memories were of spending
time with Bubbe and Zayde in the rooming house
they favored on their visits to Atlantic City. It
was their chance to get away from the tedious
tailor work. I remember the first time I saw the
ocean there as well as my efforts to get Zayde to
explain to me what made the waves move and hump.
Zayde had strong likes and dislikes. He despised
Frank Sinatra and would refer to him only as
"that bum." He was convinced that the comedian
Jerry Lewis was personally responsible for
anti-Semitism in America. He adored Franklin
Roosevelt and had a large poster of him hanging
in his living room. (I shudder to think what he
would make of my own free-market economics.)
Meanwhile, Bubbe struck up a friendship with
Bertha Cosby, the mother of superstar Bill Cosby.
This was long before Bill became world famous and
wealthy. They lived not far from the tailor shop.
Our family used to hire Bill's struggling mother
to help out in the house. She frequently worked
as my babysitter, and helped out with the food at
my bar mitzvah party. Bill was invited but did
not come - he had a date. Dad sold Bill his very first suit.
By the late 1950s Zayde's family had grown so
large that we often had to rent out ballrooms in
hotels to hold Passover Seders. The first time I
asked the Four Questions I mispronounced the
words of the last one, believing it was referring
to some mysterious Mrs. Bean (instead of
"misubin"), and Zayde impatiently corrected me.
But of course he could be very patient too, as
when he came to my first violin recital and
gallantly pretended not to be bored.
And then there was the violent anti-Semite who
lived down the block and who would torment him
and the family, especially around Easter. One
year the harassment was getting out of hand. At
the Passover Seder, Zayde read the Ten Plagues
and spilled out an unusually generous portion of
wine after each one. He saved the "makos wine"
from the Ten Plagues in a safe place and later
knocked on the door of the anti-Semite, informing
him our family was celebrating a holiday and that
he'd brought him a large glass of wine so he could share in the festivities.
The neighbor downed the glass happily. A few
weeks later the neighbor's wife left him, and
before the year was over he died of a heart
attack. Zayde always claimed the Plagues wine had
done the trick. I do not have the slightest doubt he was correct.
Zayde died when I was a teenager. His last words
were to demand that his sons empty his pants
pockets of change lest the hospital staff steal it.
* * *
The Stockholm School is the leading academic
institute in post-communist Latvia. It is an
elite university, a highly prestigious school,
and the president of the country sits on its
board of governors. Students come here to study from other parts of Europe.
The professors at the school know that an
economist in Israel has been conducting research
on the real estate market in their own city of
Riga, and they are greatly flattered by this.
Latvia is a country with only two million people,
almost half of them not ethnic Latvians, so by
comparison Israel seems a huge cosmopolitan center.
Prior to my visit I had become something of an
expert on Latvian housing economics. That sounds
more impressive than it really is, because I am
just about the only academic on earth who has
studied the subject. I have published a paper on
Riga housing together with a Latvian graduate
student of mine who took courses with me in
Budapest and was able to obtain some usable data.
Central Riga is charming, its beauty outlasting
its long ordeal under communism, with a
well-preserved set of fascinating architecture.
They've put me up in an apartment in the building
next to that in which the philosopher Sir Isaiah
Berlin grew up. It has plaster Art Nouveau
sphinxes in front of it and they probably go back
to when Sir Isaiah was a yeshiva boy.
Riga is a bit off the tourist beaten tracks.
Israeli tourists, who seem to appear almost
everywhere else on the planet, rarely make it to
Riga. Its medieval guild houses, damaged badly in
the war, have been rebuilt close to their
original designs. A Museum of Terror, documenting
Latvia's twin nightmares under Nazism and
Communism, stands in the city center.
I tour Riga and spend Shabbat in the one
remaining active synagogue, located inside the
town's walled Old City. The local Chabad rabbi
has graciously offered to feed me. The language
of communication for Jews living in Riga is
Russian, which is also the first or second
language for everyone else in Latvia. I manage to
communicate with the older ones in my pidgin
half-Yiddish-half-German. Some of the younger Jews speak Hebrew fluently.
The synagogue makes a lavish kiddush after
Shabbat prayers and the big attraction seems to
be the generous glasses of vodka. In fact, I get
the feeling some people come to services just for
the shnapps served afterward. Two old timers at
my table get into a noisy quarrel over which of
them should get the unclaimed glass of vodka on
our table. I bring about peace by offering them
my own glass so they will not have to bicker.
"But what about you?" they ask. I twirl my finger
around my head to show what the extra-strong vodka does to it.
Outside the walled city one is shown the location
of the town's onetime Jewish center, including
the Great Synagogue, today nothing but rubble, a
park that is "home" to homeless dredges. The
city's large urban market is held in old World
War I zeppelin hangers. The large music hall has
Jewish stars on its windows, placed there by the
local Jewish philanthropists who raised the funds
for the building before the war.
Visiting Israeli academics are so unusual in Riga
that the Israeli consul himself decides to come
to the lecture. Besides the graduate students and
professors present, there are also some Rigan
bankers and developers. It is the largest turnout
for an academic seminar they ever had, I am told.
The crowd in the room settles down. "I am going
to tell you about the economic structure of the
Rigan housing market," I begin. "But before that
I am going to tell you about my zayde, my grandfather, Samuel Steinman."
I have a couple of old photographs of him as a
boy with his family in Dvinsk and have converted
them to electronic PowerPoint slides for the occasion.
I tell them the story of my family's Latvian
roots, about Zayde's escape from the Czar's
secret police just as they were closing in, and
about his journey to America. Once in America, he
hoped to save up money to pay for his own
parents' escape. Alas, they - my
great-grandparents - died of starvation and
disease before that was possible. Meanwhile
Dvinsk was renamed Daugavpils and was
incorporated into the briefly independent
interwar republic of Latvia. It was devoured by
Stalin as part of the Ribbentrop-Molotov deal with Hitler to divide up Europe.
Following the genealogy, I launch into the
academic lecture. I explain to them what is
unusual about Rigan housing markets, and
especially about the role of architecture in its
pricing. I am the only one in the room who cannot
pronounce the names of the neighborhood districts
of Riga that I am analyzing, but they do not mind.
Toward the end, I introduce them to Israeli
humor. I tell them this is going to be the only
seminar they ever attend in which they are shown
a slide of (former Soviet president) Brezhnev and a slide of a toilet.
The photo of the old geezer Brezhnev, who is
still the butt of jokes in post-communist
countries, is background to a slide with a table
of statistical estimates concerning the effects
on pricing of the "Brezhnev-era architectural
design" in Riga. The slide with the toilet
contains a table showing the effects on pricing
of adding an extra bathroom to the design of housing units in the city.
The school's provost attends the lecture and asks
a lot of questions. When the talk is finished, he
approaches me. "Some of the senior professors at
the school and I would like to take you out for a
dinner in your honor," he says.
I hesitate for a moment. "That sounds wonderful,"
I say, "but I wonder if you would mind if we go
eat at the kosher restaurant near the campus."
(There is a small modest kosher restaurant in the
basement of the Riga Jewish community center, underneath a theater.)
I experience a moment of anxiety as I recall the
mocking and snideness of some of my
ultra-secularist university colleagues in Israel
whenever someone requests that departmental lunches be held in kosher eateries.
The provost considers my request for a moment. As
he does, I see in my mind images of my
grandfather sneaking through the alleys and back
roads, fleeing for his life as a fugitive, and
then of the 20th century's decades of horror for Latvian Jews.
The provost breaks into a smile. Of course, he
says, let's go there, we love that place.
So the cream of the Latvian academic elite spends
the evening in the little kosher restaurant with
me, eating matzah ball soup and shashlik,
drinking kosher wine, spinning academic yarns,
listening to Yiddish and Hebrew songs playing in the background.
And I sense my Zayde looking down, remembering
his own terrors in his flight out of Latvia a century earlier.
He is no doubt amused by the sight of his nerdy
little grandson who once squeaked away on a
violin and who raised a dozen cats all named
George (including the females), now the honored
guest from Israel being toasted and hosted by the
Rigans, celebrating with the Latvian professors in the little kosher bistro.
2.
<http://frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35403>http://frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35403
The Seven Reasons behind Leftist Anti-Semitism:
Seven Reasons for Leftist Anti-Semitism
By: Don Feder / GrassTopsUSA.com
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
----------
A disturbing number of left-wingers believe "them Jews" control the world.
Old joke: Walking down a street, a rabbi is
accosted by an anti-Semite who tells him "The
Jews are to blame for all of our problems." The
rabbi replies, "You're absolutely right. It's all
the fault of the Jews – and the redheads."
Puzzled, the anti-Semite asks, "Why the
redheads"? The rabbi responds, "Why the Jews"?
But for the left, anti-Semitism makes perfect
sense – almost as much sense as socialized
medicine. Except for Islam (with which it's
increasingly allied), the left has a near-monopoly on organized anti-Semitism.
Last month, that geriatric Jew-hater Jimmy Carter
was in Gaza condemning the "devastation" wrought
by Israel's military incursion to stop Hamas
rocket attacks. "The citizens of Gaza are treated
more like animals than people," the man who put
the ayatollahs in charge of Iran intoned.
At the American International School in Gaza,
damaged by Israeli bombs, Carter told citizens of
Hamas-istan, "I have to hold back the tears when
I see the deliberate destruction that has been
wrecked against your people." That Hamas
deliberately located a missile battery near the
school is irrelevant to our pathetic ex-president.
The author of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid –
who's become the most prominent Western apologist
for the Hitlerites of Hamas ("first of all, Hamas
has to be accepted by the international
community") – Carter has never shed a tear for
the Israelis killed by Palestinian rocket and
mortar attacks from Gaza or those murdered or
wounded by Palestinian suicide bombers over the past decade.
Next stop on Jimmy's trail of tears – the S.S.
cemetery in Bitburg, where he'll weep for the
devastation wrecked against the German people,
who were treated like animals by the Allies in World War II.
For Carter, the political is also personal. In a
2006 story in the Jewish Forward, Carter was
quoted telling senior aides prior to the 1980
election "If I get back in, I'm going to (expletive deleted) the Jews."
James von Brunn, another octogenarian
anti-Semite, is charged with the murder of a
guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum on June 10.
The left was quick to blame everyone from Rush
Limbaugh to FOX News for the crime. But a perusal
of the alleged shooter's website reveals that he
not only
<http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35192>hates
Jews, but also Christianity (which he considers a
"Jewish hoax") and capitalism. Von Brunn wrote,
"Socialism represents the future of the West."
Von Brunn sounds a lot like Obama's former pastor
and spiritual mentor – the Rev. Jeremiah A.
Wright Jr. In a note he was carrying at the time
of his arrest, von Brunn wrote that "Obama was
created by Jews. Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do."
At about the same time, Wright complained to a
reporter that "them Jews" had denied him access to his disciple.
"Them Jews ain't going to let him talk to me ….
He's got to do what politicians do. And the
Jewish vote, the AIPAC (American Israel Public
Affairs Committee) vote that's controlling
him…that's talking this craziness on Israel
because they're Zionists, they will not let him
talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is.
Ethnic cleansing is going on in Gaza (I thought
it was apartheid. Maybe it's both.) – the ethnic
cleansing of the Zionists is a sin and a crime
against humanity." The Zionists are in good
company. As Rev. Michael Pfleger (another Obama
bud) put it in a sermon at Wright's church,
"America is the great sin against God." "God damn
America!" the Rev. Jeremiah responds.
Wright later apologized for his "them Jews"
comment, claiming he meant to say "the Zionists"
not "the Jews." Usually, anti-Semites say
"Zionists" when they mean "Jews." and not the reverse.
Obama does a full-waist bow to the King of Saudi
Arabia, denies the Jewish people's historic ties
to the land of Israel, equates Palestinian
"suffering" to the Holocaust, believes it's his
mission to fight "Islamophobia" and has a Middle
East-team that could have been assembled by
Carter. Sure, Obama is controlled by the Jews –
the way he's controlled by the National Rifle Association.
Wright isn't the only member of the Democrats'
blame-the-Jews club. A May poll by two Stanford
University professors showed a third of
Democratic voters buying into one of the oldest
anti-Semitic myths – world domination by Jewish bankers
The survey asked respondents if "the Jews" were
responsible for the current financial crisis.
Of self-identified Democrats, 32 percent blame
Jews "a moderate amount" to "a great deal" for
our economic woes, versus 18.4 percent of
Republicans. In other words, almost twice as many
Democrats as Republicans believe sinister Jews
are responsible for the collapse of the financial
house of cards constructed by Congressional
Democrats on a foundation of sub-prime mortgages.
Ah, the Democrats, so tolerant, so minority friendly – except for Jews.
Pat Oliphant agrees with Wright that "them Jews"
are engaged in a genocidal campaign against hapless Palestinians.
Called the most influential editorial cartoonist
in the world by the New York Times, in March,
Oliphant produced a masterpiece worthy of Der
Sturmer, depicting a sword-wielding giant
goose-stepping as he wheels a fanged Star of
David toward tiny, huddled figures of a woman and child labeled Gaza.
The Magen Dovid is the international symbol of
Jewry. (The Nazis forced Jews in occupied Europe
to wear it on arm bands.) Oliphant's message was
unmistakable: "Them Jews" (the same who are to
some degree responsible for the financial crisis,
according to almost a third of the Democratic
Party) are engaged in apartheid, ethnic-cleansing
and genocide in Gaza. When he contemplates the
cruelty of it all, Jimmy Carter has to fight to hold back the tears.
Oliphant is a party-line leftist who loathes both
America and Christianity. In a 1993 cartoon, he
had a frightened elephant labeled GOP being
dragged by rodents into a building with an
electric Cross that read "Religious Right."
Oliphant chose interesting imagery for
conservative Christians. Nazi propaganda films
often juxtaposed scenes of Jews at prayer with
rats swarming out of a sewer. If the left doesn't
keep reminding us of how tolerant it is, we're apt to forget.
On January 30, armed thugs invaded a Caracas
synagogue, occupied the building for three hours,
desecrated the Torah scrolls and scrawled
graffiti like, "We don't want Jews here," and "Jews get out."
Before the rise of Hugo Chavez, anti-Semitism was
unknown in Venezuela, a nation with a Jewish
population of 15,000. Now, it's almost a daily
occurrence. Abraham Levy Ben Shimol, president of
Venezuela's Jewish community, says: "You probably
hear of many anti-Semitic incidents, but where we
live, the anti-Semitism is sanctioned: it comes
from the president (Chavez), through the government and into the media."
In his 2005 Christmas Eve speech, Chavez charged:
"The world has wealth for all, but some
minorities, the descendants of the same people
that crucified Christ…have taken over all the
wealth of the world." (Emphasis added.)
When a state prosecutor and Chavez ally was
killed in a car-bombing in 2004, the president
sent Venezuelan security forces to raid a private
Jewish school in Caracas. Agents with
sub-machineguns terrorized students, while a
weapons search was conducted. You can't be too
careful when dealing with adolescent Christ-killers.
Chavez (who calls himself a lifelong Maoist) is
enabled by prominent Democrats. A 2006 commentary
by Ed Laskey in The American Thinker
(<http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/09/democrats_and_the_antisemitism.html>"Democrats
and the Anti-Semitism of Hugo Chavez") notes the
Congressional fan club of the Latin Goebbels
includes John Conyers, Jr. (D. MI), William Delahunt and Ed Markey (both D-MA).
The People's Republic of Bay State is a bastion
of Hugo-ism. Former Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy
III (whose granddad, Ambassador Joseph P.
Kennedy, Sr., thought Hitler was misunderstood),
current head of the Citizens Energy Corporation, gets cheap oil from Chavez.
This allows Kennedy to play Lord Bountiful to
low-income households and build political capital
while paying himself a six-figure salary. In
return, Kennedy does PR for the Caracas regime.
His cheap-oil commercials all note that the
heating oil comes from "our friends in Venezuela" – i.e. Chavez.
On January 8, at an anti-Israel demonstration in
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, organized by the
leftist group ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End
Racism), a lady in a hijab shouted at Jewish
counter-demonstrators "Go back to the oven" (in
reference to the Holocaust), and "You need a big oven, that's what you need."
Instead of condemning hijab-lady, Emmanuel Lopez,
ANSWER's Florida coordinator, assured us that the
"vast majority of demonstrators," do not want to
cremate Jews. In an effort to be even-handed,
Lopez went on to call the Jews who were told to
"go back to the oven," barbaric, racist, Zionist
terrorists." (Lopez: "Zionism in general is a
barbaric racist movement that really is the cause
of the situation in the entire Middle East.")
The anti-war movement tolerates anti-Semitism,
when it isn't openly embracing it.
A Hamas flag flew from the speakers' podium at
ANSWER's 2002 National March for Palestine,
Against War and Racism. Either ANSWER is so
clueless that it doesn't know Hamas is virulently
anti-Semitic or it doesn't care. (A character on
a Hamas kids show, broadcast on Al-Aqsa TV, urges
children to "Wipe out the Jews.")
Even the Jewish left acknowledges this reality.
In 2007, the San Francisco ADL held a conference
(Finding Our Voice), described by the Jewish
Telegraph Agency as "aimed at empowering Jewish
progressives to respond to anti-Semitism of the
left" – a project destined to be as successful as
Ayatollahs for Fair Elections.
Here are seven reasons for leftist anti-Semitism:
* Jew-hatred has deep historic roots in the
movement. Karl Marx, who came from a Jewish
family that converted to Christianity, was a
raving anti-Semite. "What is the Jew's foundation
in our world? Material necessity, private
advantage," Marx wrote. Also: "What is the object
of the Jew's worship? Usury. What is his worldly
god? Money." Marx's hatred of Jews went beyond
the class struggle. He described Polish Jews as
"the smarmiest of races," called his opponent,
Ferdinand Lassalle, a "Jewish Nig---" and
disclosed that the Ramsgate section of London was "full of Jews and fleas."
* The left is anti-capitalism – Accurate or
not, there's a longstanding identification of
Jews with capitalism – going back at least to the
Rothschilds. This is bolstered by Jewish success
in business and the professions. Judaism and
later Christianity, validated private property
honestly acquired and material progress. Islam
doesn't share this perspective, which is why
wealth in the Muslim world is acquired (from
oil), not earned. This also explains leftist compatibility with Islam.
* The left is obsessed with equality – The
left finds the idea of a "chosen people" (in
reality, chosen to advance certain values) wholly
repugnant. In Israel, the Jews succeeded where
others of the region have failed since ancient
times. For the left, this can't be due to unique
talents or God's plan, but exploitation – another
charge against the Jews from the Romans to the
Bolsheviks to the Nazis. On the same basis, the
left has decided that American preeminence in the
post-war world must be due not to our talents,
entrepreneurship or democracy, but to exploitation.
* The left loves conspiracy theories – Oliver
Stone, Michael Moore, the Kennedy assassination
nuts, energy prices set by oil companies, foreign
policy run behind the scenes by industrialists –
the left insists that dark and sinister forces
manipulate world events, making them susceptible
to the longest-running conspiracy theory of all:
the International Jewish Conspiracy, which blames
"the Jews," for wars, depressions, economic
downturns and the common cold. The distance isn't
that great between multinational corporations
running the world and "international Jewry" dominating world events.
* The left equates Jews with Israel – With
all of the tyranny in the world – especially in
the neighborhood Israel inhabits – the left has
made the region's one democracy (the only nation
to give away territory acquired in wars forced on
it), the unique focus of its ire. In 2006-2007,
the neo-Marxists who run the UN General Assembly
couldn't find time to comment on Darfur, but
condemned Israel on 22 separate occasions. There
was a time when the left insisted you could be
anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic.
Increasingly, neo-Marxists are forced to conclude
that because "them Jews" support Israel (along
with most Americans and evangelical Christians)
there must be something inherently wrong with
members of the tribe. Thus anti-Israel morphs easily to anti-Jew.
* Solidarity with the Muslim world – It seems
counter-intuitive, but the self-avowed
secularists of the left embrace Islamacist
theocrats, who find the former's social positions
appalling. Muslims fit neatly into the left's
division of humanity into exploited and
exploiters, imperialists and subjugated peoples.
Israel is seen as an extension of European
imperialism, the continuation of centuries of
Western domination. In solidarity with their
allies in the Moslem world, the left is at the
very least willing to tolerate the anti-Semitism
of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Authority,
Syria and Iran (all viewed as revolutionary
movements or regimes), but increasingly prone to
indulge in the age-old evil itself.
* The left is at war with God – From its
inception during the French Revolution, the left
has seen religion as the primary impediment to
the realization of its utopian dreams.
Christianity is indicted as the principal support
for capitalism, the "patriarchal family,"
misogyny and homophobia. Without Judaism, there
would be no Christianity – and, by extension, no
America, a reality which hasn't escaped leftist
totalitarians, from Marx and Lenin to Hitler and
Hugo Chavez. Der Fuhrer (who also blamed the Jews
for "inventing" Christianity) believed that if he
killed enough Jews, he would ultimately kill the God of Israel.
All of the left's hatreds, manias and phobias
have brought it to this magical moment. The
expression "Islamo-fascist" has become so
commonplace it's easy to forget that Allah's
storm-troopers aren't the only fascists out there.
This article originally appeared on
<http://GrassTopsUSA.com>GrassTopsUSA.com and is
reproduced here with the author's permission.
3. Discover the
Network:
<http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=834>http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=834
4. Dersh on legal prosecution of Israel:
<http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35414>http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35414
5. Leonard Cohen: http://frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35400
It seems that a Jewish settlement filed a libel suit against Maariv, Israel's second largest print daily, and won. Maariv had falsely reported in a news story that the settlement of Maale Rehav'am in the West Bank was sitting on land illegally expropriated from Palestinian Arabs. That turned out to be a lie. Residents of the settlement successful sued. The Jerusalem Magistrate's Court ordered Maariv to pay 13,000 NIS in damages to the settlers and issue a public apology. The whole settlement has 30 people living in it and it is one of those that Obama is demanding that Israel evacuate.
So let us hope this case serves as a grand legal precedent: Tell a lie about settlers and pay!
2. For years I have been claiming in postings, blog entries and articles that the ex-Chief Justice of Israel, Aharon Barak (he is not a relative of Ehud) is an anti-democratic anti-Israel leftist extremist moonbat. Barak was the leading proponent in Israel of the anti-democratic doctrine of "judicial activism," which should be called judicial tyranny, under which non-elected judges make up laws and dictate governmental policy about just about everything. Barak also insisted that anyone who happens to sit on the Israeli Supreme Court should issue rulings based on "enlightened opinion," which means whatever Aharon Barak personally thinks in any given week, and that those same sitting judges should perpetually select other judges by themselves to sit on the Supreme Court and other courts, regardless of what the Israeli voter wants.
When I would slap around Barak in my postings, many people objected that I was showing disrespect to Israel's Chief Justice, and was exaggerating his anti-democratic tendencies. Last week Barak had the kindness to step forward and prove that I was correct, and in fact showed I was underestimating his political biases and dislike for democracy.
Last week, Barak took off his muzzle, now that he is retired, and launched a malicious broadside against Israel, Zionism, and "settlers." The most outrageous thing he said was that the Jews were plotting to throw the Arabs into the sea. The truth of course is that the Arabs are trying to throw the Jews into the sea, but Orwellian inversions are the favorite tactic of leftist cranks. Barak also criticized Israel's presence in Judea and Samaria as an "occupation," and said the Israeli presence there leads to human rights offenses and racism elsewhere in Israel. Barak's presence on the Supreme Court produced anti-democratic restrictions to freedom of speech and to the trashing of any form of checks and balances on the court's "activism," and led to an explosion in anti-Jewish racism by Israeli Arabs and Jewish leftists.
There are numerous news reports on the Barak outburst, but try these:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3737416,00.html
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3736984,00.html
3. LA Times runs a pro-settlement column!:
Opinion
In defense of 'settlements'
Jews belong in Judea and Samaria as much as Palestinians who stayed in Israel.
By Yisrael Medad
June 28, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-medad28-2009jun28,0,6267445.story
No one, including a president of the United States of America, can presume to tell me, a Jew, that I cannot live in the area of my national homeland. That's one of the main reasons my wife and I chose in 1981 to move to Shiloh, a so-called settlement less than 30 miles north of Jerusalem.
After Shiloh was founded in 1978, then-President Carter demanded of Prime Minister Menachem Begin that the village of eight families be removed. Carter, from his first meeting with Begin, pressed him to "freeze" the activity of Jews rebuilding a presence in their historic home. As his former information aide, Shmuel Katz, related, Begin said: "You, Mr. President, have in the United States a number of places with names like Bethlehem, Shiloh and Hebron, and you haven't the right to tell prospective residents in those places that they are forbidden to live there. Just like you, I have no such right in my country. Every Jew is entitled to reside wherever he pleases."
We now fast-forward to President Obama, who declared on June 15 in remarks at a news conference with Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, that Jewish communities beyond the Green Line "in past agreements have been categorized as illegal."
I believe the president has been misled. There can be nothing illegal about a Jew living where Judaism was born. To suggest that residency be permitted or prohibited based on race, religion or ethnic background is dangerously close to employing racist terminology.
Suppose someone suggested that Palestinian villages and towns in pre-1967 Israel were to be called "settlements" and that, to achieve a true peace, Arabs should be removed from their homes. Of course, separation or transfer of Arabs is intolerable, but why is it quite acceptable to demand that Jews be ethnically cleansed from the area? Do not Jews belong in Judea and Samaria as much as Palestinians who stayed in the state of Israel?
Some have questioned why Jews should be allowed to resettle areas in which they didn't live in the years preceding the 1967 war, areas that were almost empty of Jews before 1948 as well. But why didn't Jews live in the area at that time? Quite simple: They had been the victims of a three-decades-long ethnic cleansing project that started in 1920, when an Arab attack wiped out a small Jewish farm at Tel Hai in Upper Galilee and was followed by attacks in Jerusalem and, in 1921, in Jaffa and Jerusalem.
In 1929, Hebron's centuries-old Jewish population was expelled as a result of an Arab pogrom that killed almost 70 Jews. Jews that year removed themselves from Gaza, Nablus and Jenin. The return of my family to Shiloh -- and of other Jews to more than 150 other communities over the Green Line since 1967 -- is not solely a throwback to claimed biblical rights. Nor is it solely to assert our right to return to areas that were Jewish-populated in the 20th century until Arab violence drove them away. We have returned under a clear fulfillment of international law. There can be no doubt as to the legality of the act of my residency in Shiloh.
I am a revenant -- one who has returned after a long absence to ancestral lands. The Supreme Council of the League of Nations adopted principles following the 1920 San Remo Conference aimed at bringing about the "reconstitution" of a Jewish National Home. Article 6 of those principles reads: "The administration of Palestine ... shall encourage ... close settlement by Jews on the land, including state lands and waste lands." That "land" was originally delineated to include all of what is today Jordan as well as all the territory west of the Jordan River.
In 1923, Britain created a new political entity, Transjordan, and suspended the right of Jews to live east of the Jordan River. But the region in which I now live was intended to be part of the Jewish National Home. Then, in a historical irony, a Saudi Arabian refugee, Abdallah, fleeing the Wahabis, was afforded the opportunity to establish an Arab kingdom where none had existed previously -- only Jews. As a result, in an area where prophets and priests fashioned the most humanist and moral religion and culture on Earth, Jews are now termed "illegals."
Many people insist that settlements are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention. But that convention does not apply to Israel's presence in Judea and Samaria and the Gaza district. Its second clause makes it clear that it deals with the occupation of "the territory of a high contracting party." Judea and Samaria and Gaza, which Israel gained control of in 1967, were not territories of a "high contracting party." Jewish historical rights that the mandate had recognized were not canceled, and no new sovereign ever took over in Judea and Samaria or in Gaza.
Obama has made his objections to Israeli settlements known. But other U.S. presidents have disagreed. President Reagan's administration issued a declaration that Israeli settlements were not illegal. Support for that position came from Judge Stephen M. Schwebel, former president of the International Court of Justice, who determined that Israel's presence in Judea and Samaria did not constitute "occupation." It also came from a leading member of Reagan's administration, the former dean of the Yale Law School and former undersecretary of State, Eugene Rostow, who asserted that "Israel has a stronger claim to the West Bank than any other nation or would-be nation [and] the same legal right to settle the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem as it has to settle Haifa or West Jerusalem."
Any suggestions, then, of "freezing" and halting "natural growth" are themselves not only illegal but quite immoral.
4. Well, the main headline involving political clashes between the "Chareidi" ultra-Orthodox in Jerusalem and the rest of the population there these days is about a parking garage operating on Shabbat. However there is another bizarre confrontation that has been less noticed. It was triggered because of an idiotic attempt to prohibit imports of fur into Israel.
Ronit Tirosh, a backbencher member of the Knesset from the Kadima Party, decided to try to drum up some votes for Kadima among animal rights nuts and people who think fur is murder. The problem is that a lot of the black-coated ultra-Orthodox guys wear fur "streimels," those archaic round fur hats that were in fashion in Poland 400 years ago and that some of the Chareidim think make them look more pious. Trust me, Moses and King David did not wear streimels.
But dubious taste in haberdashery aside, there was no reason to antagonize the Chareidim with a silly anti-fur law designed to appease animal rights nuts. After suggesting that the Chareidim just use synthetic furs, Tirosh and her cronies seem to be backing down now.
Which is good, because I have a confession to make. I have a streimel made out of fur. Actually it is a Davy Crocket hot with a raccoon's tail down the back of it, and I only wear my streimel on Purim and once in a while to spook my students. But on this I am with the Chareidim – and am telling Kadima politicians: Hands off my Tennessee-fur Streimel!
By the way, in all his new performances, Cohen insist on wearing this dorky "Rat Pack" style fedora hat.
2.. I happen to be one of those people who think that death does not get someone off the hook for having dabbled in anti-Semitism. With the whole world of pop and preadolescence in shock over the death of singer Michael Jackson, it behooves us to remind you all that Mikey also was prone to outbursts of anti-Semitism. This was many years before the reports that he was getting interested in Islam and building a mosque in Bahrain. (I am sure his interest in Islam was as genuine and deep as the interest by Madonna and Roseanne Barr in ka=BBBAAAALLLL-la – as they mispronounce it.)
A few years back Jackson took time off from riding the roller coaster with his 10 year old friends in "Neverland" and recorded a nasty anti-Semitic song with lyrics that included, "Kick me, Jew me," and similar sentiments. He also referred to Jews as leeches and other metaphors.
Here are some web items about Mikie's little problem with members of the chosen people who were over the age of 10:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4466038.stm
http://www.byroncrawford.com/2005/11/michael_jackson.html
http://www.arlenepeck.com/column_archives_1.htm#jacko
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/moonbatcentral/2005/06/michael-jackson-and-hollywood.html
Jackson even pretended at one point to have some interest in Judaism. When that story was in the media, I posted this (http://www.conservativetruth.org/opinionet/archives2/ccsp/ccsp8.htm in the year 2000):
Michael Jackson's Judaism
There are reports out this week that yet another Hollywood entertainer is suddenly interested in Judaism. The newest one though is none other than Michael Jackson. This is the same Jackson who recorded a couple of years back a song featuring the words "Kike Me, Jew Me," which triggered a storm. At the time the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Abe Foxman, added Jackson to his list of Hollywood anti-Semites being granted papal absolution by Foxman, earning him his current nickname, the Twentieth Century Foxman.
Jackson's sudden interest in Judaism comes after the other highly publicized cases of entertainers taking an look into Jewish mysticism, including Madonna and Roseanne Barr. It is all part of a larger wave of Hollywood airheads getting "into" religion, which includes Richard Gere's adoption of Buddhism and John Travolta's levitating the molecules in his butt over to the Scientology "church". In Jackson's case, he has reportedly approached the controversial Rabbi Shmuel Boteach for "spiritual counseling". Boteach used to be a Rabbi at Oxford University, with ties to the Lubavitch movement, but is most famous these days for his saucy popularizing and discussing of Jewish attitudes towards sex (including an interview in Playboy).
Jackson's sudden interest in Judaism raises a number of questions, not least regarding the anti-Semitic song he recorded earlier. SO let me give you my reading of this new "Jewish" Michael Ben-Yaakov.
First of all, Mikey's "Kike Me, Jew Me" song appears in retrospect to be a desperate call to Reb Boteach to connect him to Judaism. Jackson=s constant grabbing of his crotch while singing has to do with his contemplation of that rite of passage necessary for any male to join Judaism and the fears it must arouse. Suppressed for decades is the fact that the REAL original unabridged name of the Jackson Five was the Jackson Fivebooksofmoses. And all that hanging around with twelve year olds that earned Jackson his reputation as a pederast? Why, he was just attending with them Bar Mitzvah lessons, that is all.
And what about Jackson's famous series of surgeries and medical douches, the ones that have produced of him a creature of ambiguous racial and gender identity? Friends, this was nothing more than the consequence of Jackson studying the Scroll of Ruth from the Bible and then, well, deciding that he wishes to look like Ruth.
3.. In Israeli academia nary a week goes by without some university holding a malicious one-sided anti-Israel "conference" consisting of hate propaganda misrepresented as scholarship. The participants in these "conferences" never seem to include anyone who thinks Israel has the right to exist and to defend itself. The conferences are pluralistic and balanced in the sense that they include both Jewish and Arab anti-Semites, and may contain a whole range of communists from different splinters.
Well, this coming week Tel Aviv University will once again show its disdain for academic standards and serious scholarship. It is to host yet another Bash-Israel one-sided indoctrination "conference," this one purporting to debate and discuss the Psychological Influences of Service in the Territories. In other words, it will be a pseudo-academic litany of rantings about how Israel's "occupation" of the "occupied territories" causes devastating psychic damage to both the "Palestinian" inhabitants of those areas and to the Israelis serving there in the security services.
Now I can absolutely guarantee you that not a single speaker at this grand academic event will mention any psychic damages caused to Jews from having thousands of rockets fired at their children by genocidal Islamofascist terrorists. There will also be no discussions of the psychological stress caused to those Jew civilians blown to smithereens by suicide bombers, or murdered by snipers. In fact, no one will even mention the psychic damages caused to Jews by Arab terrorists whose violence makes it necessary for Jews to give up their time to do reserve duty and otherwise help prevent the terrorists from murdering Jews. No one at all will mention any psychological damages done to Jews from Arab fascists demanding that Jews be mass murdered, or when Arab leaders deny there ever was a Holocaust or claim that Jews drink the blood of gentile children for Passover.
Here is the official description of the conference (I think the main difference between this Tel Aviv University event and the Holocaust Denial conference in Iran was that the coffee was better in Tehran). This North-Korean re-education "conference" will take place Sunday, June 28, 2009 at Tel-Aviv University in the Hall of Justice, the Trubowicz Law Faculty Building
Official conference announcement:
Conference: "The Psychological Influences of Service in the Territories" - June 28th
Israeli society imposes on its soldiers serving in the army the role of control over another nation - the Palestinian people living in the Territories; these soldiers serve as the almost exclusive contact between Israeli society and Palestinian society. In this conference we will examine the psychological influences of the army service in the occupied territories, both on the soldiers themselves and on the Jewish society in Israel, that avoids direct contact with the Palestinians in the Territories, but sends and receives back its sons and daughters in their army service there. We will examine how open these influences are and how they are spoken about in our society, army, and mental health personnel.
Convention and Registration
09:00-09:30 Greetings on behalf of Tami Shteinmetz Center: Ephraim Lavi
Machsom Watch (seditious anti-Israel pro-terror propaganda group --- SP): Reva Bachrach - psychoactive.
09:30-11:30 First Session: Witnesses.
Reva Bachrach - Machsom Watch (seditious anti-Israel pro-terror propaganda group --- SP) Chairman – psychoactive: Barrier - salt of the earth? Soldiers' atrocities in the Intifada: Perspectives from the soldier, the company, the army and society.
Yoel Elitzur - Hebrew University: "To See if I'm Smiling" segments from Tamar Yarom's film.
Tal Ben Sira-Morag - one of the film's participants.
The cruelty of Givati (an IDF army brigade), and Liberal Morals (now THERE is an objective title for a lecture! – SP)
Zvi Bekerman - Hebrew University
11:30-11:45 Coffee break
Second Session: Cover-ups, Silencing and Silence
Chairman: Uri Hadar (anti-Israel post-Zionist extremist – SP) - Tel Aviv University, Psychoactive
Nisim Avishar - Herzelia Interdisciplinary Center: Blurring, Denial and Silencing from Close-up: The psychologists in the army and the first Intifada. Psychoactive
Edna Lomsky-Feder (one of the thesis advisors for that infamous thesis claiming that Jewish soldiers do not rape Arab women because the Jews are such racists --- SP) - Hebrew University: Psychological Talk and Normalization of the effects of the Occupation
Arnona Zahavi - Beyt Berl College: Dangerous empathy - silence and silencing in the psychological treatment of soldiers who killed and injured (not a word about sucicide bombers? – SP)
13:30-14:15 Lunch break
14:15-15:45 Small group discussions: The presence [lingering effects] of the Occupation in my personal and professional life
15:45-17:00 Final session
Chairman: Nachi Elon - psychodrama
Daniel Bartal - Tel Aviv University (who says that the Jews refusal to abandon Zionism is the real obstacle to peace and that Jews are racists but Arabs are not --- SP): The psychological impact of the Occupation on the Jewish society in Israel, and the price it pays for it.
Participation in the Kenes is free of charge
For details and registration: kenes@psychoactive.org.il Roni Shalit:0546-466582, Tami Cohen: 0544-628618
What is Psychoactive?
Behind the name "Psychoactive" stands a group of mental health men/women who have taken upon themselves to be involved in social-political subjects in general, and in the Jewish-Arab conflict in the territories in particular. The group acts out of recognition of the basic rights of a person, as a person, to spiritual well-being, alongside physical well-being.
We recruit the tools at our disposal as men/women involved in the treating professions, to deepen the understanding and awareness of the subject of occupation, and the continuing war between the two nations, and its repercussions in the populations on both sides of the conflict. These tools also serve us in advancing healing processes and advancing the psychological welfare of the individual, which is influenced by the societal-political reality in which he lives.
The group is made up of Israeli Arabs and Jews, and contacts are made with Arab mental health personnel from the Palestinian Authority. Members come from the social work professions, both from the field and from the academic community.
The group serves as a laboratory for developing initiatives in these subjects, according to the personal initiatives of the members of the group. The group meets every few weeks in different parts of the country, and is in constant touch through an Internet list.
Our activity
…
Safety searches in Ben Gurion airport of Arab citizens: Writing of letters of protest against humiliating treatment of Arab citizens in searches in Ben Gurion airport. (They prefer that bombs go off on planes --- SP)
The psychological repercussions of the second Lebanon war: Writing and distributing petitions during the Lebanon war, that warn against the psychological repercussions on Israeli and Lebanese citizens. (Yeah, right, with no mention of the impact of 4000 katyusha rockets fired at the Jews)
A Study Day by PsychoActive Group 28.6.09
Mental Health Professionals for Human Rights
The Psychological Effects of Military Service in the Occupied Territories on Soldiers and on Israeli Society
Israeli society entrusts the task of controlling and administering another nation, the Palestinian people, to the soldiers who serve in its army. These soldiers constitute the more or less exclusive interface between Israeli society and Palestinian society in the Occupied Territories. Their encounter with Palestinian residents - at the military checkpoints, carrying out arrests, and while undermining freedom in diverse other forms – takes place from a position of power, authority and control and very often involves infringements of basic human rights.
This study day will offer an opportunity to consider the psychological effects of Israeli military service in the occupied Palestinian territories, from the point of view of the soldiers themselves, and from that of Jewish Israeli society as a whole, which, while avoiding any direct encounter with Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories, dispatches its conscripted sons and daughters to serve there . We shall also look into the question of the extent to which these effects are dealt with and discussed in Israeli society, within the army, and among mental health professionals.
Our activities have included (here are some neutral academic research projects --- SP):
• Protest against the manner in which Majid Kna'ane's trial was conducted. Kna'ane, an intern in psychology at the Jaffa Mental Health clinic, was accused and found guilty of committing security violations.
• Writing up and distributing a petition during the war in Lebanon, calling for its immediate end, as well as explaining its consequences for the mental state of the citizens of Israel and Lebanon.
• Co-organizing a public event during the Israeli offensive on Gaza: A Gathering to Mourn and to Protest: Grieve together & reject the massive killing of civilians.
• Gathering testimonies of current occurrences in Gaza and their distribution.
By Steven Plaut
I have something to confess.
For well over four decades now I have fantasized
about punching Leonard Cohen in the
mouth. Sometimes the punch is followed by a pie
in the face. Sometimes by a wedgie.
I raise this matter of cosmic interest because I
was taken back to the 60s as a result of the
news story this week that Cohen will be coming to
town, and by town I mean "Palestine." This week
it was announced that Cohen, with his musical
posse, will be arriving in late September to
perform in Israel and then in PLO-occupied
Ramallah, where he is to be hosted by terrorists
from the Fat'h militia. His Ramallah performance
will be nominally sponsored by the Israel-bashing
terrorist-appeasing Amnesty International. One
Kadura Fars, a Fat'h sidekick of jailed
mass-murderer Marwan Barghouti, is to serve as
Cohen's local impresario and host in
terror-occupied Ramallah. . In an interview
about his coming hajj to Terrorland, Cohen
pontificated (see
<http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3737035,00.html>http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3737035,00.html
for report in Hebrew) that in that land there
live two equal peoples equally entitled to a state each.
Yeah sure there are.
So Cohen is trying to pull a Daniel Barenboim without the baton.
Leonard Cohen became "in" back in the mid-1960s,
at least he was "in" among certain varieties of
Sixties characters and beatnik-wannabes who
slouched about the dingy alleys of my home town
of Philadelphia. I recall that he became "cool"
at just about the same time that super-comedian
Alan Sherman released his delicious record album,
"My Son, the Folksinger." For those of you below
the age of 40, a record album is a wheel made of
vinyl plastic that makes music on prehistoric
contraptions called record players. If you have
never heard Alan Shepherd do his "folk singer"
shtick, you can see some clips of his old
materials on Youtube. They are mind-blowing (if
you excuse that Sixtiesism). I always assumed
Cohen was the real target of Sherman's mocking of folksingers.
Anyhow, Cohen himself, born 1934, grew up in a
Jewish home and a Jewish school in the Jewish
part of Montreal. He was into poetry and started
writing songs in the 50s. Judy Collins, a
peace-and-flower-power folk singer with a lovely
voice but atrocious politics, made Cohen famous
by singing some of his songs. (Collins was a
regular sidekick to Stalinist folksinger Pete Seeger.)
Meanwhile, in my own Philly urban circles in the
mid-sixties, Cohen was becoming de rigueur among
all the "Beautiful People." In the Sixties
Woody Allen was still funny ("My wife is so
immature; she keeps coming in and sinking my bath
toys!"). Dobie Gillis was the best thing on the
black-and-white TV. Atlantic City had no
casinos. Cohen could have been a San Fran flower
child in a 60s Love-In or a Berkeley street performer.
The "Beautiful People" were the insufferable
twits who ran around using the word "beautiful"
instead of punctuation marks, describing every
experience and every person they could as being
"really beautiful." Most of the "Beautiful
People" were actually chicks, although they were
followed about by pimply young guys willing to
pepper their own speech with the phrase "really
beautiful" in the hope of touching the chests of
some of the Beautiful-People chicks. I say
chests, because back in the mid-1960s teenagers
(at least the ones I knew in Philly) seemed only
vaguely aware of the existence of additional
bases surpassing that comprising second
base. Even worse, I went to an all-boys high
school, which means that few of my friends had
ever gotten even to "first base." We had heard a
rumor about a girl in one of the local Catholic
high schools who had to quit school because she
had gotten pregnant, but we were not too clear on how that worked.
I guess the best way to sum up the cultural chasm
between then and now is to note that the word
"cop" today is a noun that can take the
accusative or objective case within a sentence
and the word "feel" is a transitive verb, but
back in my Sixties all-boys high school it was
the exact grammatical opposite. If I lost you
on that, I am afraid I cannot elaborate without
risking my GP rating as a family incitement service.
Overall, when I became acquainted with his music,
I thought Cohen was a bit of an "over-Beautiful"
jerk, although I must admit that even I was
willing to hum "Susanne Takes you Down" if it
would get me a Saturday Night date. Nay, I
confess, it was even worse than that. Later, as
an undergraduate, when I earned my lunch money by
giving guitar lessons to some younger Phila.
souls, I distinctly remember teaching the chords
and words to "Susanne" and to a few other Cohen songs.
Aside from the peace-love-and-flower-power
posturing of the "beautiful" Leonard Cohen, I
guess what I really found insufferable enough to
motivate my fantasy of punching him in the face
was his obnoxious lyrics about Jesus. What was a
nice Canadian Jewish poet, one named Cohen no
less, doing writing Jesus lyrics and other songs
with Christian themes? And they were not even
very good, so my guess is my Christian 60s
friends found them irritating as well. Cohen
does occasionally use imagery from the Tanakh,
that Testament you'd think a Cohen would want to
use, like in a song about Isaac or another about
King David (see
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOI5ApiaYw0>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOI5ApiaYw0)
, although he mangles the stories and the images
there. He has also dabbled in Buddhism and wrote
a book called Beautiful Loser (catch the
Beautiful, guys? And he was not even trying to
undo a chick's bra when he wrote it!), which
supposedly contains his Zen "ideas."
Cohen came to Israel and appeared before Israeli
troops during the Yom Kippur war, but his cozying
up to Palestinian terrorists these days douses
any credit he might still be enjoying for
that. There is a rumor he met Ariel Sharon at
the time. But his interest in Israel was
fleeting, while his politically correct leftist
goofiness has stayed with him for decades.
Still, there was a quiet amusement, together with
some nice chord sequences, in some of Cohen's
songs, and I can still tolerate listening to up
to 3 or 4 of his songs every few months. Cohen
was never a superstar, in spite of the moron
writing in one of the Israeli newspapers
recently, who put him up on the same pedestal
with Dylan and the Beatles as 60s icons. Yeah sure he was.
Well into his 70s, starting in 2008 Cohen
returned to perform, and still sings and does
some concerts, although his voice has become
rather weak. Other people sometimes make it big
recording Cohen songs. The accompanying Cohen
background singers and instruments have not
changed much in 40 years. I happened to catch
him on an Israeli cable channel recently when the
wife selfishly would not let me change the
channel to watch the Simpsons. The main change
that I noticed was that Cohen these days is
obnoxiously politically correct and sings
atrocious political songs. One of his newer
numbers proclaim,s with a military beat that
sounds like a German marching song, that soon we
will bring democracy to America. In other words,
America is not democratic at all and needs us 60s
Beautiful People who know how to undo bras while
sniffing tulips to conduct a revolution and make
it democratic. Another even worse-sounding
Teutonic marching song proclaims, "First We'll
Take Manhattan and then We'll Take Berlin."
More beautiful people with flowers in their hair
bringing enlightenment to the barbarians, I guess.
Cohen probably thinks that the Palestinian
terrorhoids who will be hosting him also spend
their days reading Zen, talking to flowers,
listening to Joan Baez, and trying to undo the
bras of the Really-Beautiful People. He probably
has not heard about those thousands of PLO
rockets landing on the beautiful Jews who live in
Sderot and Netivot. And I am sure it very
occurred to him to protest Obama's plans to expel
the beautiful settlers from their beautiful homes
in beautiful Judea and Samaria.
All of which is why I would still really like to
punch him in the face, throw a pie at him, give
him an atomic wedgie, or maybe even a whirly.*
* Alas, those of you who do not know what a
whirly is will have to look it up: see
<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Whirly>http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Whirly
– a dictionary for other archaic expressions of the 1960s.