Original articles on Israel and related issues written by Steven Plaut, a professor at an Israeli university.
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Sunday, February 29, 2004
Dan Pipes now reports that Barry Chamish has cancelled his plans to appear
as the Israeli speaker at a Nazi Holocaust Denial conference in
Sacramento (http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/189). This rare demonstration
of good sense on Chamish's part is welcome.
Meanwhile, Chamish discovers that Peres is a spy for the Jesuits.
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=38&contentid=889
Not clear if he thinks the Jesuits run the Council on Foreign Relations,
are run by them, or both are run by the UFOs.
Chamish, in his own words:
"Peres, educated in his youth at a Jesuit school in Poland, is the
highest ranking operative run by the Jesuits in Israel and his task is
spreading chaos ending with national destruction. The destruction of the
Jews is a primary goal of the Jesuits and I am presenting proof of this
assertion through a book that collected the facts brilliantly but missed
the most obvious conclusions. I speak of "Unholy Trinity" by Mark Aarons
and John Loftus."
Note, the Chamish piece shares the same page with Neturei Karta "Rabbi"
and other conspiracy nuts.
I am a little offended though. As you may recall, Chamish once
circulated a "discovery" scoop of his that I am in fact an agent in Israel
for the Federal
Reserve Bank, this on the basis of the fact that back in the 80s I was
once a visiting scholar at the Fed and as such worked on some nefarious
projects, such as a research paper comparing water policy in Israel and
California. From this we learn that the Fed has agents (not just bank
examiners), and some are in
Israel, and I want to know why I have never gotten paid these many years.
But beyond this
prime example of the uncanny detective powers of Chamish and his research
credibility, I want to know why he has not declared me to be a Jesuit
also. After all, last fall I gave some lectures at a university in
Lisbon, whose
economics department is housed in a lovely old Jesuit building. Right
next to an old Jesuit Chapel. And I went to grad school with a Jesuit
priest doing a PhD in Econ (Really!) and had coffee with him several
times. Should not that entitle me to be a Jesuit agent in Israel as well?
Thursday, February 26, 2004
The Left's Anti-Semitic Chic
By George Will
Washingtonpost.com | February 26, 2004
It used to be said that anti-Catholicism was the anti-Semitism of the
intellectuals. Today anti-Semitism is the anti-Semitism of the
intellectuals.
Not all intellectuals, of course. And the seepage of this ancient poison
into the intelligentsia -- always so militantly modern -- is much more
pronounced in Europe than here. But as anti-Semitism migrates across the
political spectrum from right to left, it infects the intelligentsia,
which has leaned left for two centuries.
Here the term intellectual is used loosely, to denote not only people who
think about ideas -- about thinking -- but also people who think they do.
The term anti-Semitism is used to denote people who dislike Jews. These
people include those who say: We do not dislike Jews, we only dislike
Zionists -- although to live in Israel is to endorse the Zionist
enterprise, and all Jews are implicated, as sympathizers, in the crime
that is Israel.
Today's release of Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ" has
catalyzed fears of resurgent anti-Semitism. Some critics say the movie
portrays the governor of Judea -- Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect
responsible for the crucifixion -- as more benign and less in control than
he actually was, and ascribes too much power and malignity to Jerusalem's
Jewish elite. Jon Meacham's deeply informed cover story "Who Killed
Jesus?" in the Feb. 16 Newsweek renders this measured judgment: The movie
implies more blame for the Jewish religious leaders of Judea of that time
than sound scholarship suggests. However, Meacham rightly refrains from
discerning disreputable intentions in Gibson's presentation of matters
about which scholars, too, must speculate, and do disagree. Besides, this
being a healthy nation, Americans are unlikely to be swayed by the movie's
misreading, as Meacham delicately suggests, of the actions of a few Jews
2,000 years ago.
Fears about the movie's exacerbating religiously motivated anti-Semitism
are missing the larger menace -- the upsurge of political anti-Semitism.
Like traditional anti-Semitism, but with secular sources and motives, the
political version, which condemns Jews as a social element, is becoming
mainstream, and chic among political and cultural elites, mostly in
Europe. Consider:
A cartoon in a mainstream Italian newspaper depicts the infant Jesus in a
manger, menaced by an Israeli tank and saying, "Don't tell me they want to
kill me again." This expresses animus against Israel rather than twisted
Christian zeal.
The European Union has suppressed a study it commissioned, because the
study blamed the upsurge in anti-Jewish acts on European Muslims -- and
the European left.
Nineteen percent of Germans believe what a best-selling German book
asserts: The CIA and Israel's Mossad organized the Sept. 11 attacks.
On French television, a comedian wearing a Jewish skullcap gives a Nazi
salute while yelling, "Isra-Heil!"
If Israel is not the Great Satan, it is allied with him -- America.
European anti-American demonstrations often include Israel's blue and
white flag with a swastika replacing the star of David, and signs
perpetuating the myth, concocted by Palestinians and cooperative Western
journalists, of an Israeli massacre in Jenin: "1943: Warsaw / 2002:
Jenin."
Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University, writes in the New Republic
that much of what Hitler said "can be found today in innumerable places:
on Internet sites, propaganda brochures, political speeches, protest
placards, academic publications, religious sermons, you name it."
The appallingly brief eclipse of anti-Semitism after Auschwitz
demonstrates how beguiling is the simplicity of pure stupidity. All of the
left's prescriptions for curing what ails society -- socialism, communism,
psychoanalysis, "progressive" education, etc. -- have been discarded, so
now the left is reduced to adapting that hardy perennial of the right,
anti-Semitism. This is a new twist to the left's recipe for salvation
through elimination: All will be well if we eliminate capitalists, or
private property, or the ruling class, or "special interests," or
neuroses, or inhibitions. Now, let's try eliminating a people, starting
with their nation, which is obnoxiously pro-American and insufferably
Spartan.
Europe's susceptibility to political lunacy, and the Arab world's
addiction to it, is not news. And the paranoid style is a political
constant. Those who believe a conspiracy assassinated President Kennedy
say: Proof of the conspiracy's diabolical subtlety is that no evidence of
it remains. Today's anti-Semites say: Proof of the Jews' potent menace is
that there are so few of them -- just 13 million of the planet's 6 billion
people -- yet they cause so many political, economic and cultural ills.
Gosh. Imagine if they were, say, 1 percent of Earth's population: 63
million.
De-fund Middle East studies
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DANIEL PIPES Feb. 24, 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
US government financial support for teaching exotic languages and cultural
skills has failed.
Here's a prime example, one which involves me personally, of how the
radical Left and the Islamists, those new best friends, readily deceive.
It has to do with a proposed piece of US legislation passed by the House
of Representatives, the "International Studies in Higher Education Act of
2003" (known familiarly as H.R. 3077), and waiting action by the Senate.
H.R. 3077 calls for the creation of an advisory board to review the way in
which roughly US$100 million in taxpayer money is spent annually on area
studies (including Middle East studies) at the university level.
This board is needed for two reasons: Middle East studies are a failed
field, and the academics who consume these funds also happen to allocate
them a classic case of unaccountability.
The purpose of this subsidy, which Congress increased by 26 percent after
9/11, is to help the US government with exotic language and cultural
skills. Yet many universities reject this role, dismissing it as training
spies.
Martin Kramer pointed to the need for Congressional intervention in his
2001 book, Ivory Towers on Sand. Stanley Kurtz picked up the idea and made
it happen in Washington, testifying at a key House hearing in June 2003.
My role in promoting this advisory board? Writing one favorable sentence
on it eight months ago, based on an expectation that the board would
create some accountability and help Congress carry out its own intent.
While hoping the Senate passes H.R. 3077, I have otherwise done nothing to
praise or lobby for this bill.
Well, that's the record. But why should mere facts get in the way?
Seemingly convinced that turning H.R. 3077 into my personal initiative
will help defeat it in the Senate, leftist and Islamist organizations have
imaginatively puffed up my role.
THE AMERICAN Civil Liberties Union accuses me of "enlisting the aid of the
government" to impose my views on academia.
The American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee titles its alert "Academic
Freedom Under Attack by Pipes and Big Brother."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations states that I am "actively
pushing" for the advisory board.
This deception prompted campus newspapers (e.g., at Columbia, CUNY,
Swarthmore, Yale) to link me to the bill, as have city newspapers
(Berkshire Eagle, Oregonian), websites, and listservs.
What these folks missed is my skepticism about the advisory board's
potential to make a major difference. It is important symbolically and it
can throw light on problems. But odds are it won't be able thoroughly to
solve them.
I say this because unlike comparable federal boards, this one has only
advisory, not supervisory powers. It also has limited authority, being
specifically prohibited from considering curricula. Professors can teach
politically one-sided courses, for example, without funding consequences.
More broadly, such federal boards generally do too little. I have sat on
two other ones and find them cumbersome bureaucratic mechanisms with
limited impact.
Will a new board improve things? Sure. But Congress should consider more
drastic solutions. One would be to revoke post-9/11's $20 million annual
supplement for area studies at universities, using this money instead to
establish national resource centers to focus on the global war on terror.
They would usefully combine area expertise with a focus on militant Islam.
A second solution would zero-out all government allocations for area
studies. This step would barely affect the study of foreign cultures at
universities, as the $100 million in federal money amounts to just 10
percent of the budget at most major centers, funds those centers could
undoubtedly raise from private sources. But doing this would send the
salutary message that the US taxpayer no longer wishes to pay for
substandard work.
Either step would encourage younger scholars to retool in an effort to
regain public trust and reopen the public purse.
If the advisory board is not the ideal solution, it is the best to be
hoped for at the moment, given the power of the higher education lobby.
I am ready to give H.R. 3077 a chance. But should the board not come into
existence or fail to make a difference, I'll advocate the better solution:
defunding, and work to spread these ideas among the public and in
Congress.
My opponents will then learn what happens when I truly am "actively
pushing" for Congress to adopt a measure.
The writer is director of the middle east forum and author of Miniatures.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This article can also be read at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1077608443246
By George Will
Washingtonpost.com | February 26, 2004
It used to be said that anti-Catholicism was the anti-Semitism of the
intellectuals. Today anti-Semitism is the anti-Semitism of the
intellectuals.
Not all intellectuals, of course. And the seepage of this ancient poison
into the intelligentsia -- always so militantly modern -- is much more
pronounced in Europe than here. But as anti-Semitism migrates across the
political spectrum from right to left, it infects the intelligentsia,
which has leaned left for two centuries.
Here the term intellectual is used loosely, to denote not only people who
think about ideas -- about thinking -- but also people who think they do.
The term anti-Semitism is used to denote people who dislike Jews. These
people include those who say: We do not dislike Jews, we only dislike
Zionists -- although to live in Israel is to endorse the Zionist
enterprise, and all Jews are implicated, as sympathizers, in the crime
that is Israel.
Today's release of Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ" has
catalyzed fears of resurgent anti-Semitism. Some critics say the movie
portrays the governor of Judea -- Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect
responsible for the crucifixion -- as more benign and less in control than
he actually was, and ascribes too much power and malignity to Jerusalem's
Jewish elite. Jon Meacham's deeply informed cover story "Who Killed
Jesus?" in the Feb. 16 Newsweek renders this measured judgment: The movie
implies more blame for the Jewish religious leaders of Judea of that time
than sound scholarship suggests. However, Meacham rightly refrains from
discerning disreputable intentions in Gibson's presentation of matters
about which scholars, too, must speculate, and do disagree. Besides, this
being a healthy nation, Americans are unlikely to be swayed by the movie's
misreading, as Meacham delicately suggests, of the actions of a few Jews
2,000 years ago.
Fears about the movie's exacerbating religiously motivated anti-Semitism
are missing the larger menace -- the upsurge of political anti-Semitism.
Like traditional anti-Semitism, but with secular sources and motives, the
political version, which condemns Jews as a social element, is becoming
mainstream, and chic among political and cultural elites, mostly in
Europe. Consider:
A cartoon in a mainstream Italian newspaper depicts the infant Jesus in a
manger, menaced by an Israeli tank and saying, "Don't tell me they want to
kill me again." This expresses animus against Israel rather than twisted
Christian zeal.
The European Union has suppressed a study it commissioned, because the
study blamed the upsurge in anti-Jewish acts on European Muslims -- and
the European left.
Nineteen percent of Germans believe what a best-selling German book
asserts: The CIA and Israel's Mossad organized the Sept. 11 attacks.
On French television, a comedian wearing a Jewish skullcap gives a Nazi
salute while yelling, "Isra-Heil!"
If Israel is not the Great Satan, it is allied with him -- America.
European anti-American demonstrations often include Israel's blue and
white flag with a swastika replacing the star of David, and signs
perpetuating the myth, concocted by Palestinians and cooperative Western
journalists, of an Israeli massacre in Jenin: "1943: Warsaw / 2002:
Jenin."
Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University, writes in the New Republic
that much of what Hitler said "can be found today in innumerable places:
on Internet sites, propaganda brochures, political speeches, protest
placards, academic publications, religious sermons, you name it."
The appallingly brief eclipse of anti-Semitism after Auschwitz
demonstrates how beguiling is the simplicity of pure stupidity. All of the
left's prescriptions for curing what ails society -- socialism, communism,
psychoanalysis, "progressive" education, etc. -- have been discarded, so
now the left is reduced to adapting that hardy perennial of the right,
anti-Semitism. This is a new twist to the left's recipe for salvation
through elimination: All will be well if we eliminate capitalists, or
private property, or the ruling class, or "special interests," or
neuroses, or inhibitions. Now, let's try eliminating a people, starting
with their nation, which is obnoxiously pro-American and insufferably
Spartan.
Europe's susceptibility to political lunacy, and the Arab world's
addiction to it, is not news. And the paranoid style is a political
constant. Those who believe a conspiracy assassinated President Kennedy
say: Proof of the conspiracy's diabolical subtlety is that no evidence of
it remains. Today's anti-Semites say: Proof of the Jews' potent menace is
that there are so few of them -- just 13 million of the planet's 6 billion
people -- yet they cause so many political, economic and cultural ills.
Gosh. Imagine if they were, say, 1 percent of Earth's population: 63
million.
De-fund Middle East studies
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DANIEL PIPES Feb. 24, 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
US government financial support for teaching exotic languages and cultural
skills has failed.
Here's a prime example, one which involves me personally, of how the
radical Left and the Islamists, those new best friends, readily deceive.
It has to do with a proposed piece of US legislation passed by the House
of Representatives, the "International Studies in Higher Education Act of
2003" (known familiarly as H.R. 3077), and waiting action by the Senate.
H.R. 3077 calls for the creation of an advisory board to review the way in
which roughly US$100 million in taxpayer money is spent annually on area
studies (including Middle East studies) at the university level.
This board is needed for two reasons: Middle East studies are a failed
field, and the academics who consume these funds also happen to allocate
them a classic case of unaccountability.
The purpose of this subsidy, which Congress increased by 26 percent after
9/11, is to help the US government with exotic language and cultural
skills. Yet many universities reject this role, dismissing it as training
spies.
Martin Kramer pointed to the need for Congressional intervention in his
2001 book, Ivory Towers on Sand. Stanley Kurtz picked up the idea and made
it happen in Washington, testifying at a key House hearing in June 2003.
My role in promoting this advisory board? Writing one favorable sentence
on it eight months ago, based on an expectation that the board would
create some accountability and help Congress carry out its own intent.
While hoping the Senate passes H.R. 3077, I have otherwise done nothing to
praise or lobby for this bill.
Well, that's the record. But why should mere facts get in the way?
Seemingly convinced that turning H.R. 3077 into my personal initiative
will help defeat it in the Senate, leftist and Islamist organizations have
imaginatively puffed up my role.
THE AMERICAN Civil Liberties Union accuses me of "enlisting the aid of the
government" to impose my views on academia.
The American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee titles its alert "Academic
Freedom Under Attack by Pipes and Big Brother."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations states that I am "actively
pushing" for the advisory board.
This deception prompted campus newspapers (e.g., at Columbia, CUNY,
Swarthmore, Yale) to link me to the bill, as have city newspapers
(Berkshire Eagle, Oregonian), websites, and listservs.
What these folks missed is my skepticism about the advisory board's
potential to make a major difference. It is important symbolically and it
can throw light on problems. But odds are it won't be able thoroughly to
solve them.
I say this because unlike comparable federal boards, this one has only
advisory, not supervisory powers. It also has limited authority, being
specifically prohibited from considering curricula. Professors can teach
politically one-sided courses, for example, without funding consequences.
More broadly, such federal boards generally do too little. I have sat on
two other ones and find them cumbersome bureaucratic mechanisms with
limited impact.
Will a new board improve things? Sure. But Congress should consider more
drastic solutions. One would be to revoke post-9/11's $20 million annual
supplement for area studies at universities, using this money instead to
establish national resource centers to focus on the global war on terror.
They would usefully combine area expertise with a focus on militant Islam.
A second solution would zero-out all government allocations for area
studies. This step would barely affect the study of foreign cultures at
universities, as the $100 million in federal money amounts to just 10
percent of the budget at most major centers, funds those centers could
undoubtedly raise from private sources. But doing this would send the
salutary message that the US taxpayer no longer wishes to pay for
substandard work.
Either step would encourage younger scholars to retool in an effort to
regain public trust and reopen the public purse.
If the advisory board is not the ideal solution, it is the best to be
hoped for at the moment, given the power of the higher education lobby.
I am ready to give H.R. 3077 a chance. But should the board not come into
existence or fail to make a difference, I'll advocate the better solution:
defunding, and work to spread these ideas among the public and in
Congress.
My opponents will then learn what happens when I truly am "actively
pushing" for Congress to adopt a measure.
The writer is director of the middle east forum and author of Miniatures.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This article can also be read at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1077608443246
Sunday, February 22, 2004
The following are the basic principles upon which all public debate must
be conducted if you wish to be a true progressive leftist and politically
correct:
1. Leftists should be free to call everyone else nasty names, but no one
should be permitted to call leftists back nasty names.
2. For a leftist to call someone nasty names shows social concern and
awareness. For someone to call a leftist a nasty name back is immature and
impolite and avoiding the issues.
3. Leftists need never document their claims.
4. Whenever a leftist is presented with documentation of facts that
contradict the leftist's theology, the leftist must insist that no facts
have been presented at all.
5. No scientific sources that presents facts contradicting leftist
theology are admissable.
6. All arguments may be settled by telling a non-leftist that he reminds
you of Rush Limbaugh.
7. Never ever take an economics course.
8. Never recognize the fact that every idea of Marx's was debunked over
150 years ago. Never read any social science written since Marx. Never
admit that you know that Marx was a racist and anti-Semite.
9. Never visit the library.
10. Never study statistics or public policy analysis.
11. Insist that you truly believe 10% of humans are gay and that gay
people are not abnormal.
12. Always say "people of color" so everyone will know you care.
13. Recycle.
14. Pretend that you do not care about material things, but never sell
your VCR or cellular phone or condo.
15. Never admit that life ever involves tradeoffs. After all, when there
are tradeoffs it is harder to feel righteous.
16. Always support proposals that make real problems of the world worse as
long as they make you feel caring and righteous.
17. Never admit that anything could be positive about the United States.
18. Always insist that there are few world problems that could not be
improved through the destruction of Israel.
19. Always insist that you have no idea what political correctness is.
20. Always use the female pronouns half the time or more. That way
everyone will know you are egalitarian.
21. Insist that you are more caring and compassionate than anyone else.
22. Remember, you would rather that poor people in the Third World starve,
rather than that they should embrace capitalism and live like you do.
23. Other people must always be required to relinquish their material
things so that you may feel idealistic.
24. Your property is scared; other people's property is to be used for
social engineering and doing good.
1. Reality Imitates Parody:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=6061
2. Hours after Ariel Sharon announces that he will be tearing down
portions
of the Israeli "Security Wall" to make the anti-Semites happy, and to make
it just a bit easier for Palestinian nazis to mass murder Jews, yet
another bus is blown up in Jerusalem, the same Jerusalem the
Islamofascists pretend is holy to them. I guess they did not
take Arik's goodwill offer in the way he intended.
Meanwhile, Israeli leftists are
out demanding that no security fence be erected at all lest it make it
hard for
Palestinians to murder Israeli children. And teams of Israeli leftists
are in the Hague to lend support to the anti-Semites there trying to
"indict" Israel for trying to protect those children. Finally, every day
new Israeli leftists are making hajj to the mass murderer of children, Naif
Hawatme, from the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of
Palestine, because he claims he seeks a new "front" that will combine Israeli
leftists and Arab fascists. He is the man who ordered the mass murder of
children in Maalot in 1974. The Left likes him because he pretends to
speak about the need for "two states for two peoples". The only problem
is that the two peoples he has in mind are the Palestinian people an dthe
Jordanian people (neither of course really being a "people" at all).
3. Highlights from Ariel Sharon's Career
Many out there are amazed to discover that Ariel Sharon the Prime Minister
is just another visionless Israeli demagogue.
But anyone who followed his career in the past would not be so surprised.
To raise the national spirits, I am here posting sections from my very
first newspaper article about Ariel Sharon, printed in the Jerusalem Post
on Oct 16 1984. Sharon at the time was the Minister of Industry and Trade
in the Shamir Incompetocracy:
Toilet Economics
By Steven Plaut
Readers with a highly developed sense of delicacy are warned not to read
this commentary. We will be dealing with a HIGHLY indelicate subject. We
will be discussing a central concern of the latest version of the
governments economic policy.
It seems the major issue for that policy is the matter of those large
round ceramic household fixtures through which water passes intermittently
and which back in kindergarten days we used to call Happy Johnnies. There,
I have said it. Yes, the government of Israel has decided to fight the
continuing deterioration of our economy by crusading against imported
Happy Johnnies.
In recent days Ariel Sharon on behalf of the government announced that he
was totally banning all imports of Happy Johnnies and 54 other items for a
period of six months. These items were enumerated in what was called a
"list of luxury goods". Now THINK about that for a moment. Happy Johnnies
are LUXURY goods?
The fact that Ariel Sharon so regards them says volumes about his own
lifestyle and perhaps his early toilet training. It is one thing to fight
foreign reserve losses by prohibiting shaving cream imports, ALSO on the
list of prohibited items. After all, what is wrong with Jews growing
beards? But Happy Johnnies? That is really hitting the public below the
belt!
In fairness, one should point out that it was only imports of CERAMIC
Johnnies that were prohibited. No one said anything about, say, wooden
ones. But I, for one, am opposed to those. After all, how would it be if
Israel became known as the Birch John Society? Ariel Sharon gets a grade
for his polices of 00!!
History has tended to attach labels to the economic programs of various
administrations. Roosevelt had his "New Deal". Johnson had the "Great
Society". Aridor had "Correct Economics". Well, Ariel Sharon will go down
in the history books as the father of Toilet Economics.
Friday, February 20, 2004
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12276
PLO Propaganda Film "Jenin, Jenin"
By Lee Kaplan
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 20, 2004
From San Francisco State to Columbia University, "Palestinian film
festivals" are becoming one of the major propaganda venues for those
seeking to dismantle Israel.[1]
The most widely seen of these films is "Jenin, Jenin," shot by an
Israeli-Arab actor named Mohammed Bakri. "Jenin, Jenin" purports to be a
documentary on the aftermath of the Jenin battle between the Israel
Defense Forces and PLO terrorists that took place in `Jenin in 2002. The
film has become standard fare at such screenings. There's one major
problem: the film is a fraud.
A common misrepresentation used by the Palestinians is that Jenin is a
"refugee camp." It is, in fact, a city. And its casbah has been a hiding
and breeding ground for terrorists whose goal is to murder Israelis. Even
the Palestine Authority Police was afraid to enter it.
Besides various armed individual terrorists, such as members of Islamic
Jihad, the PFLP and Hamas, the area housed many of the bomb making
factories where suicide bombers obtained their lethal cargos. In April,
2002 one suicide bomber from Jenin blew up a hotel in Netanya where
Israelis were celebrating Passover, killing 29 Israelis -- including many
Holocaust survivors -- and maiming many more.[2] Up to that point, the
West Bank and Jenin were not occupied and Israel had withdrawn all troops
as a demonstration of goodwill. Following this incident, the IDF went into
Jenin to close down the bomb factories.
But to an uninformed audience (the kind the Palestinians prefer), Jenin
would appear to be a place where simple Arabs live, some even in tents.
The film instructs viewers that these noble "natives" are besieged by
Jews, who want to deprive them of their homeland. The Passover Massacre
isn't mentioned at all, just that the Jews won't let the Arabs live in
peace, and for some unknown reason attacked them. It should be noted the
word "Jew" is used consistently throughout this film, rather than
"Israeli" or the euphemism "Zionist." The reason is that the word "Jew"
will elicit a more violent response from the rest of the Arab world where
this film is screened -- thus earning Bakri a fortune.
The film opens with a shot of an elderly Arab man in a hospital with a
bandaged hand and foot. He claims the Israeli soldiers held out his hand
then shot it. When he protested, they shot him in the foot. The old man,
however, is lying. He was treated by an IDF doctor in Jenin, and the old
man's wounds were not bullet wounds, nor were they caused by activities in
any way related to the battle. They weren't even inflicted by Israeli
soldiers. It is, in short, a staged scene. The entire film consists of
Palestinians claiming events and atrocities that did not occur.
For example, multiple claims are made of F-16's attacking the city and of
killing thousands of people. But no F-16's or jet fighter aircraft
attacked Jenin. In fact, the Israeli government, eager to avoid civilian
casualties, insisted that the IDF use young infantry soldiers in
house-to-house fighting instead -- to avoid the risk of bombing the city
by air. This is a job one F-16 could have done. Instead, young men risked
their lives to destroy the bomb factories. The result? Twenty-three
Israeli boys died in close hand-to-hand combat.
Another "eyewitness" describes the carnage as worse than Vietnam. Hardly.
Despite claims that there was "not a single person in the camp who did not
suffer," aerial photographs show the combat zone where the bomb factories
were destroyed as roughly the size of a football field -- a very small
section of Jenin.
Another interview subject is a ten-year-old girl who tells the filmmakers
she wants to "go home, but the "Jews won't let her." She is referring to a
once Palestinian area inside Israel's 1948 borders. Obviously, she was not
alive in 1948 (nor, most likely, were her parents). In what sense was a
village two generations removed her "home"?
But the tour de force performance is done by Dr. Abu Rali of the hospital
in Jenin. Interviewed on camera, he claims the Israelis "attacked the
hospital and completely destroyed its west wing with F-16's."[3] As
mentioned, no F-16's were used to attack Jenin. But of even more interest
is the fact that the hospital in Jenin has no west wing, nor was any part
of the hospital building attacked or destroyed during the battle; Bakri's
film shows no such damage post-battle.
The good doctor further accuses the Israelis of cutting off water and
electricity to the hospital when the IDF brought water in for the hospital
and even set up a portable generator to assure the hospital had
electricity. What he doesn't say on film is that he rejected the blood
supplies the IDF brought in from Israel on the grounds that he refused to
mix "Jewish blood" with "Arab blood." The Israelis to solve the impasse
actually had to import blood from Jordan to supply the hospital.[4]
Numerous "eyewitnesses" then tell tales of women being raped, of parents
being stripped naked and summarily executed, and then having their
children executed. They say that Israeli soldiers went into kitchens and
urinated into cooking pots (a terrible insult in the Arab world); another
claims the Israelis "did not leave one building standing." (A mere 99.9
percent of the city of Jenin remained.)[5]
Of course, attacking President Bush and America is de rigueur. One
"witness" states that President Bush, through Israel, has killed "hundreds
of millions of Arabs." Other than such first person accounts, the only
other actual battle footage in the film shows Israeli tanks guarding
captured terrorists at the close of the battle. Another Palestinian then
claims, minutes after the footage ends, that his people were all run over
and crushed by the tanks, "killing thousands."
The Palestinian Authority's official death toll from the Jenin battle was
56, of whom 48 were armed combatants.[6] In their own media, the
Palestinians claim the battle was a great example of their bravery against
the Jews. But in the Western world, they suffered a massacre.
This film makes its way around the Arab world inciting hatred against Jews
and Israel. Rather than promoting peace, it merely serves to intensify the
conflict. That is the real goal of "Jenin, Jenin": to slander Israel in
the eyes of the international community, to isolate and weaken her, and
ultimately to destroy the Jewish minority in the Middle East. To that end,
the film is now being widely circulated on American campuses. And by
inflaming its uneducated viewers, it may one day succeed in achieving its
goal.
ENDNOTES:
1. http://www.dafka.org/NewsGen.asp?S=4&PageID=57
2. http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/893012/posts
3. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=2240
4. http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/blood.htm
5. http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ll60
6. http://www.rense.com/general24/dt.htm
2. From Middle East Quarterly:
Review of: Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli
Invasion, edited by Ramzy Baroud, Cune Press, Seattle, 2003, no price
stated.
Reviewed by Steven Plaut
Imagine if someone were to publish a book about how Germans were
brutalized and terrorized by American racist GIs who unjustly occupied
their country in 1945 for no reason at all besides anti-German bigotry.
Imagine that this same book never quite got around to mentioning that the
brutal Americans had occupied Germany only after Nazi Germany launched
World War II, which produced 55 million deaths. Imagine that this book
ignored Auschwitz and Dachau.
Well, if you can imagine such a book, then you are only partly on
your way to understand Searching Jenin, a vile shallow propaganda screed
that makes the PLOs Covenant look like a masterpiece in cool impartial
analysis. The book is published by Cune Press, a small propaganda outfit
based in Seattle that produces the sorts of Far Left anti-American and
pro-Arab books of which Osama bin Laden would approve, and with a special
interest in printing sycophantic volumes about Syria.
Following the waves of suicide bombings in Israel and especially the
Netanya Passover Seder massacre, Israel at long last launched Operation
Defensive Wall in 2002. As part of that military operation Israeli forces
entered the towns of the West Bank and Gaza to flush out terrorists. In
most cases the operations went smoothly and with few casualties to either
side, other than to the terrorists being hunted down and killed or
captured. In Jenin, whence many of the suicide bombers had come, the
fighting was more severe and a relatively large number of Israeli troops
were killed there in an ambush in an alley.
After the battle of Jenin, the Arab propaganda machine went into high
gear and issued bloodcurdling reports of mass atrocities by Israeli troops
against Arab civilians in Jenin. The Arabs and their amen choruses
referred to the events in Jenin as downright genocidal . The same people
who cheer every time an Arab terrorist perpetrates a war crime suddenly
denounced Israels incursion in Jenin as a war crime. Many in the Western
media repeated these allegations credulously. Eventually a UN
investigation reported what everyone in Israel already knew: There were
no mass killings at all of Arab civilians in Jenin. Shimon Peres himself,
hardly an Israeli rightwing settler, confirmed that - at most 20 - Jenin
civilians had died in the house-to-house fighting, far less than in the
single Netanya suicide bombing that had triggered the incursion in the
first place.
But Israel-bashing propagandists have never let facts get in their
way. A series of books and a movie came out, repeating the medieval blood
libels about the Israeli war crimes during the incursion into Jenin. In
Jenin Jenin by Israeli film producer Muhammed Bakhri, Arab witnesses
describe how Israel destroyed a hospital wing that had never in fact
existed. Another Arab describes how Israeli troops simply walked up to
him and shot him in the leg for no reason, while the film ignored the
Israeli MD who had treated the same Arab at the end of the battle when he
had no bullet wounds. And so on.
Searching Jenin is an even more pathetic and a less believable
hodgepodge of anti-Israel testimonies by alleged residents of Jenin than
Bakhris documentary. The book is written by Arab propagandist Ramzy
Baroud, contains a foreword by the Khmer Rouges apologist Noam Chomsky and
a jacket endorsement by professional Arab propagandist James Zogby. On
the back cover is an endorsement by Norman G. Finkelstein, where he
demands to know What exactly happened in Jenin?, this from the very same
historian whose research is routinely cited by Neonazis and Holocaust
Deniers to prove that there was never any Holocaust of the Jews and that
all Jews claiming to be Holocaust survivors are lying thieves.
As one would expect from this genre of propaganda, one never learns in
the book why Israel launched Operation Defensive Wall in the first place,
although if you search very carefully with a magnifying glass in the
chronology contained in one section, you can find the odd mention of a
handful of Palestinian suicide bombings. You will of course never hear
how the UNs own investigators proved there was no massacre at all in
Jenin. You will never hear about how so many Israeli troops were killed
there because they were risking their lives NOT to harm any innocent
Palestinians. And you will never learn that Jenin was crawling with mass
murdering terrorists and those who had organized suicide bombings against
Jewish civilians.
The book begins by telling us the tragic saga of photojournalist
Mahfouz Abu Turk, who - Baroud insists - mysteriously disappeared in the
middle of the Jenin battle, implying that he was murdered by the rampaging
Israelis. Only in the appendix will you discover that Abu Turk is alive
and well, was never injured, and I guess disappeared only in the sense
that Baroud did not know where he was for a few hours.
I suspect Barouds next project is to prove that the brutal Americans
attacked the innocent al-Qaida and Taliban in Afghanistan for absolutely
no reason at all except their racism and blind aggression.
3. Unilateral Frogs:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12250
Thursday, February 19, 2004
ZOA suing State Dept: http://www.zoa.org/pressrel2004/20040210b.htm
Nice Piece on Michael Freund:
http://jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=3411
Thomas Friedman - Jewish Uncle Tom:
http://jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=3412
The Magazine that Out-Tikkuns even Tikkun:
http://jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=3405
Lying Frenchmen: http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12247
Microsoft Mucks up Mideast:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12228
Oy, the racism: http://www.dailyorange.com/news/609194.html?mkey=278497
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Subject: The Girl from Transylvania
http://jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=3407
The Girl From Transylvania
By Steven Plaut
?You will never see your land of Israel, your precious Jerusalem, your
Carmel, your Galilee. It will never happen. You will never leave Romania.?
The Securitate agent glared at her in anger.
The Romanian Securitate was the feared secret police, the foundation block
of the totalitarian regime imposed on Transylvania by Stalin, and it
controlled Romania until the fall of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Years
later, after Russia itself had junked its rusty communist regime, the
methods and secrets of the Securitate would be exposed, its files opened
and scrutinized. There were files on millions of ordinary Romanian
citizens. More than 700,000 people had been employed as informants.
?You will tell us everything you know about the Zionist underground in
Romania. You will tell us the names. Or you will never see the sun again.?
She was born Magdalena Fisher in 1920 inside Hungary, but while she was
still a toddler her parents moved to the Transylvanian town of Brasov.
Hungarian Jews, including those in Transylvania, were a heterogeneous lot.
They ranged from the ultra-Orthodox in their black coats to the modernist
secularists. Large numbers belonged to the ?Neolog? movement, something
roughly analogous to the Reform and Conservative movements in the United
States.
While Jews had been murdered and brutalized by the Romanian fascists during
World War II, especially those from the Iron Guard, most survived the
Holocaust years. Jews from the northern part of Transylvania had been
deported to the death camps by the Hungarian fascists. But Brasov was in
southern Transylvania and most of its Jews had survived the war.
Transylvania: The name conjures up late-night horror movies and Count
Dracula. But in fact Transylvania had been a center of culture, including
Jewish culture, for centuries. The first Jews had settled there in Roman
times. The Khazars probably had contact and influence with Transylvanian Jews.
Transylvania became a multicultural wonderland, a mix of Magyars,
Romanians, Vlachs, Tartars, Gypsies, Swabian Germans, and Jews. Many of the
Transylvanian Jews were Magyarized, migrants from other Hungarian areas,
while others were German-speaking, and there were also communities of
Sephardim mixed among them.
World War I found Hungary still under the Habsburg rule, and so on the
losing side of the war. The Trianon Treaty of 1920, which officially ended
the war, stripped Hungary of many of its territories and awarded
Transylvania to Romania. It remained an enclave of predominantly Hungarian
speakers within the Romanian state. The resentment at this played a role in
Hungary aligning itself with Hitler in World War II.
A Leader Of Betar
Magdalena?s father was a Czech-born engineer who worked with the sugar
factories concentrated in Brasov. They were modern Jews, Neologs. The
Jewish day school went only up to the fourth grade, after which she
attended Catholic school, excused from the religion classes, and with
classes in Judaism with the local rabbi, Dr. Deutsch, after school. She was
an only child. Her classmates would argue over what they were ? Hungarians,
Romanians, Transylvanians, Magyars ? but for her the question was easy. She
was a Jew.
Her father, one of the early leaders of the Betar movement of Transylvania,
raised her not only as a Jew, but as a militant Zionist. In 1923, the
mainstream Zionist movement had been split when Vladimir Jabotinsky
resigned from the Zionist Federation, which was dominated by socialists
seeking to create a Jewish state through cooperation with the Arabs.
Jabotinsky was a skeptic and a realist. He correctly expected the Arabs to
oppose any form of Jewish sovereignty and concluded that the Jewish state
must be created through uprising and armed struggle by the Jews. He
expounded his views in his most famous essay, ?The Iron Wall.?
Jabotinsky had set up his own dissident Zionist movement outside the
Zionist Federation. He named it Betar, a play on words. Betar had been one
of the last holdouts in the Bar Kochba revolt against Rome, but it was also
the acronym for Brit Trumpeldor, the Covenant of Joseph Trumpeldor, named
for the martyred hero of the Zionist militias in the Ottoman Galilee.
Jabotinsky called his movement ?Revisionist Zionism? ? revisionist in the
sense that it wanted some revisions in the British Mandate for Palestine,
such as restoration of Transjordan, which had been stripped away from what
Jabotinsky regarded as the Jewish homeland. Betar grew to a mass movement
in Eastern Europe. Its Romanian headquarters were in Bucharest. Brasov in
Transylvania had a large chapter. Its members leafleted, organized,
lectured, published, harangued.
From the time she was in high school, Magdalena was one of the central
leaders in Betar in her town. It was one of the high points in her life
when Jabotinsky himself came to Romania. She and the other leaders met him
in Bucharest. Asher Diament, the chairman of Betar in Braslov, introduced
her to Jabotinsky as the most effective leader in the local chapter, the
leader who ?works with her heart,? and her face beamed with pride.
Before World War II, Romania had the third largest Jewish population in
Europe, after the Soviet Union and Poland. At the start of the war, the
Romanian government, headed by Ion Gigurtu, introduced draconian
anti-Jewish legislature, which was openly inspired by the Nazi Nuremberg
Laws. Antonescu, who followed Gigurtu as leader of the nation, created the
?Legionnaire State? in coalition with the Iron Guard. Many Jews sought ways
to escape to Palestine.
She continued her Zionist work at the university in Bucharest, until all
Jewish students were expelled in 1943. Jews were also being barred from a
long list of professions in Romania. In June of 1941, the Iasi pogrom had
taken place. After false rumors that the local Iasi Jews were collaborating
with Soviet paratroopers, the Romanian police had carried out a massacre of
Jews, the worst in Romania during the war.
Meanwhile, Jabotinsky had died in the United States and was buried in the
Catskills. (Jabotinsky?s remains would not be moved to Mount Herzl in
Jerusalem until after David Ben Gurion, Israel?s first prime minister and a
bitter opponent of Revisionist Zionism, left office.)
The war ended when Romania was liberated by the Red Army, but in a wink of
an eye the Soviets had imposed a totalitarian communist regime on the
country. The Romanian king was forced to resign. The Romanian communist
party, which had perhaps a few hundred members before the war, was
installed as the single political party, with a monopoly on the state.
Industry was nationalized, agriculture collectivized, rival parties banned,
gulag camps set up.
Magdalena had not planned to marry until she reached Israel, but she met
Ladislau (Laszlo) Rosenberg, an engineering student. He was a member of the
rival socialist Zionist movement, a cause of some early ideological debates
between them, but she agreed to his proposal of marriage anyway. Some of
her Betar comrades were displeased, preferring that she had chosen an
ideologically purer mate. Together they dreamed of moving to Israel
Communist Harassment
Ironically, the Zionist movements had been legal in fascist Romania during
World War II. Now the communist regime banned them altogether. She
continued her work with Betar. She ran the local Keren Kayemet fund. She
was the liaison of the movement for ?Aliya Bet,? the illegal smuggling of
Jews out of Europe and into Palestine in defiance of the British White
Paper and its restrictions on entry of Jews into the Jewish homeland.
She would get a call late at night that several spaces on a ship had come
open. People chosen for the ordeal had to leave before dawn the next
morning, leaving behind everything except a small handbag.
The passage was dangerous. Even if they reached the ships safely, there was
no guarantee ? several had already sunk en route to Palestine, their human
cargos drowning. She sent out not only Betar activists, but any Jew
prepared to go. Her goal was to send one more Jew to Israel, and one more,
and then one more.
The very first time the Securitate confronted her, she and Ladislau were at
home. The agent barged in and informed her that she would have to report to
Securitate headquarters the next day. But he began the interrogation in
their home. We understand there are Zionist organizations that operate in
Brasov, he said, reciting the names of all the movements except Betar.
She smelled a rat. Yes, she said, those are all Zionist organizations, but
you left out one, an organization named Betar. The Securitate man grinned.
?You are a very lucky young woman,? he said. ?Had you not volunteered the
name of Betar, you would already be under arrest and would never have been
heard from again.?
The interrogations at Securitate headquarters took place about once a month
for the next two years. We demand the names of the Zionist leaders, they
would repeat. She would give them names, lots of names, but only those of
local Zionists who had already left Romania and were in Israel. As for
those left behind, she would sigh and complain to the interrogators about
how selfish it had been of those leaders to just abandon the simple folks
left behind, people with no leaders at all.
She risked her life by refusing to name the actual leaders still operating
in the Zionist underground. One day the interrogators demanded that she
tell them everything she knew about Moshe Fogel, one of the local Betar
leaders. The Securitate claimed he was planning to blow up a local factory.
We have a problem, she said. You see, every Jew has two names ? one modern
or ordinary, in Hungarian or Romanian, and one Jewish name. If you do not
believe me, just go to the synagogue and ask the people there if this is
so. I am afraid I only know people by their Jewish names and so, alas, I do
not know whom you are talking about.
The Securitate interrogators were not amused. When she denied she knew what
?Irgun Zvai Leumi? (the name of the Betar militia in Palestine) meant,
their anger grew. She had said it so convincingly that even her husband
momentarily thought it was true. If you tell Fogel we asked about him, you
will be imprisoned, they threatened. The next day, Ladislau met Fogel in an
alley and warned him of the investigation.
You will never be allowed to leave Romania, they promised. Emigration of
Jews from Romania had begun, allowed in trickles, mainly people with
immediate relatives abroad. She corresponded with those Betar leaders from
her town now in Israel. Her mother managed to get an exit visa and was
already living in Israel. They had hoped this would be a sufficient ?family
reunification? basis for obtaining a visa, but the regime was being
vindictive with those who had been Zionist activists.
Home At Last
For eleven years Magdalena and her husband waited. They sang songs of the
Jewish homeland from their small apartment on Stalin Street. They dreamed
of setting up house some place in the Land of Israel. She learned that one
of the leaders from Romanian Betar was now in Australia. He had gone there
to settle the affairs of an aunt who had died, then stayed on, and she
asked him to file an affidavit to sponsor their immigration to Australia.
It worked.
They got papers to allow them to leave Romania, to go to Australia. They
left for Austria as if they were en route to Australia, and the first thing
they did in Vienna was to contact the Jewish Agency, in charge of
immigration to Israel. It was 1960. We want to go home, they announced.
They were moved to the port in Italy from which they would embark. They
could not believe their eyes. An indescribably lovely white ship was
waiting for them ? a ship called the Theodore Herzl, no less. They were on
their way home at last.
On the ship, they were ?processed? by the absorption bureaucrats. The
clerks were sending everyone to the depressed Negev town of Dimona. They
had had their share of experiences with bureaucrats before. Ladislau wanted
to set up his own factory using some of his know-how, and Dimona obviously
was not the place. Diament, the Betar commander from Transylvania, invited
them to live in Tel Aviv near him. When the ship landed in Haifa, they
looked up at the green mountain. By hook or by crook, they swore, we will
live in this lovely town.
They agreed to forgo the nearly-free housing offered them in Dimona. They
decided to pay their own way and live in Haifa. They set up a small
furniture workshop, in which they both worked 16-hour days. They never had
any children. Israel was their family and Haifa was their home. The Carmel,
about which they had sung in the Transylvanian underground, was now theirs.
***************
Israel is a country of modest apartments and simple ordinary doors, behind
which quietly live the most extraordinary of people. She bites her lip in
pain as she limps across the floor. Ladislau died many years ago, and she
lives alone, 83 years old, with a helper from Romania. She has been
handicapped since a careless bus driver last year started the engine while
she was only half on board, knocking her down and breaking her thigh.
But she is as energetic and optimistic as she had been back in Transylvania
as a young girl. She lives every single moment that the state of Israel
lives; she celebrates every moment of triumph and she suffers from every
moment of tragedy.
There is only one thing I do not understand, my dear next-door neighbor,
she says to me as I make notes for this article. The Chanukah candles are
still flickering as we chat.
I am just an ordinary person, a girl from Transylvania, a Jew and a Zionist
who loves all Jews and who loves her land and her country with all her
heart ? a simple Jewish woman whose life is of no interest. Why on earth do
you think my story is worth telling?
Steven Plaut is a professor at Haifa University. His book ?The Scout? is
available at Amazon.com. He can be reached at steven_plaut@yahoo.com.
***
Personal Request from Plaut-Listers:
If you found the previous story moving, please take a moment and send a
picture postcard from wherever you are to Mrs. Rosenberg, at
Magdalena Rosenberg,
49 David Pinski Street, Haifa 34354 Israel. She is alone in
the world, no kids or grandchildren, no siblings, and now has been maimed
by a reckless Egged bus driver. In the postcard, tell her you read her
story and were moved and inspired by it, and that you wish her good
health. Do NOT offer her
money as she is very proud and would be offended. You get 13 mitzvah
points if you send one off. Many thanks. She reads Hebrew, English,
German, Hungarian and Romanian.
1. When Ariel Sharon and his people signed the insane "hostage exchange"
recently,
according to which Israel put some 450 murderers back on the streets in
order to procure the bodies of three POWs who had been murdered by the
Hizbollah and one civilian whom the Hizbollah was holding ever since he
entered Lebanon illegally and with forged papers, I opposed the deal and
denounced the moronic politicians who forged it. At the time it appeared
that the live civilian was merely a common criminal, possible a drug
runner.
In recent days, bits and pieces of a new picture are emerging. I
emphasize that I have no inside information and am just forming this
impression from gleanings from the press (for example, in Hebrew:
http://nfc.msn.co.il/archive/001-D-40565-00.html?tag=14-05-19&au=True), it
is sounding like the citizen
Tannebaum, who forced Israel's hand into releasing the 450 murderers, may
have entered Lebanon seeking to sell Israeli intelligence secrets to the
Hizbollah terrorists. I have no independent source that confirms this and
am only repeating what the press is winking and implying. If I am wrong,
I will later issue an apology. If this impression is right, the decision
by Sharon to capitulate to the Hizbollah and buy back Tannenbaum for
hundreds of released terrorists is a hundred times even stupider than I
previously painted.
2. Protecting Undiversity at the University:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12209
3. Crackpot who Claims Israel Blew up Convicted of Tax Fraud
Man Who Alleged that Israel and Others Orchestrated 9-11 Convicted of
Trumped-Up Tax Charges!
(Manchester, NH) From 1996 through 2002, Steven A. Swan of Manchester, New
Hampshire was a follower and promoter of the income tax theories of
nationally-known income tax protester Irwin Schiff. In January of 2002,
15-20 armed I.R.S. Special Agents executed a search warrant at Swan's home
and informed him that he was the target of a criminal investigation by the
Justice Department for alleged violations of the internal revenue laws. In
March of 2003, Swan was indicted by a federal grand jury on 18 felony
counts. Swan has pleaded "not guilty" to all of the charges against him
and he intends to represent himself at trial, which is scheduled to
commence on February 3, 2004 in Concord, New Hampshire.
After reviewing some of his writings prior to the I.R.S. raid on his home,
Swan finally "realized" why he was being prosecuted. Within the months
after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Swan widely distributed his
belief that the Israeli Mossad and members of the Bush Administration who
place Israel's interests above those of the United States (e.g., Richard
Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, Eliot Abrahms, Douglas Feith,
David Frum, Ari Fleischer, CIA Director George Tenet, FBI Director Louis
Freeh, ) orchestrated or assisted in orchestrating the September 11th
terrorist attacks and its subsequent cover-up as a way to drag the United
States into wars with all of Israel's enemies.
On Friday, February 6th, Swan's trial began in Concord, New Hampshire.
Swan was defending himself at trial, without a lawyer. On Thursday,
February 12th, the jury found Swan guilty of all 18 felony charges. Swan
is free on personal recognizance bail until his sentencing on May 19,
2004. He expects to receive a sentence of between 5 and 8 years in federal
prison.
His crackpot "theories" are being promoted by the Indymedia network of web
sites for leftist fascists. Can Barry Chamish's "theories "be far behind?
4. This is NOT a spoof: A synagogue in Westwood, California, is offering
a course in Torah-learning which centers around themes presented on The
Simpsons. The Simpsons from Sinai: A New Look at God, Judaism and the
Torah will "have students watch one episode each evening and then discuss
its theological components."
http://www.jewsweek.com/bin/en.jsp?enPage=BlankPage&enDisplay=view&enDispWhat=ob
5. Thought this was amusing:
http://www.andante.com/article/article.cfm?id=23120
Monday, February 16, 2004
1. Pre-Purim Spoof:
A Passionate Plea to the Citizens and Legislators of the Great State of
Massachusetts
Forwarded to the world by Steven Plaut
The great state of Massachusetts has decided to approve the
official acknowledgement of gay marriage, and henceforth there will
be no difference in the state between marriage of two members of the
same gender and two members of opposite genders. Having taken this first
step in the
direction of enlightenment and toleration, we think the Massachusetts
legislature did not go far enough. There are other oppressed minorities in
America in need of recognition and sympathy, including other groups
stigmatized by bigots as practicing abnormal sexual habits. The time has
come for the people and leaders of Massacusetts to recognize these other
non-traditional families and relationships.
It would be sending the right signal to Vermont, Hawaii and other
progressive states and groups of people.
We represent the members of the last sexually-repressed sexual
minority in America, the necrophiliacs. We are mad and we are tired of
being victimized and discriminated against. Necrophilia activist groups
have been spouting up all over, and signal the emergence of the last great
oppressed sexual minority from the closet. And the time has come for the
marriage reform movement to welcome us into your hearts and scout troops.
"Why should not we be free to marry whom we choose?" asks our
spokesperson Roger Mortis, who heads a necrophilia encounter group in
Tombstone, Arizona. "Remember there was a sorry time in America when
cross-racial marriage was illegal? After all, who are we hurting? And
besides, who says people have to live in old-fashioned Ozzie and Harriet
traditional family structures, with their rigid role models? Who says a
person's lover must be ALIVE?"
We necrophiliacs are demanding that our freedom to choose our own
partners be recognized in law. In particular, we object to that part of
the marriage vow that states, Until death do us part. What kind of
bigotry is THAT?
Our leading militant activist group, PROP UP, has been lobbying for
necrophiliac marriage to be recognized in all states. In particular, we
necrophiliacs demand to have our rights recognized in all that is involved
in pensions, insurance, and employee benefits. "How come Social Security
only grants benefits to insure SURVIVORS? What kind of arbitrary
discrimination is that?", asks Mortis. "And you should have seen the
problems I had when I tried to take my partner with me on a plane to Club
Med. I was told I had to leave behind
my girlfriend Christine - I actually call her Corpus Christie - and so I
told the snooty ticket agent, 'Over My Dead Body.'"
We necrophiliacs claim we are victims of long-time prejudice and
misinformation. We are often called nasty names and regarded as
mentally unstable. But who is to say what is normal? The fight against
necrophobia has been adopted by all politically correct movements and
progressive individuals.
Since necrophilia activism has emerged on the American scene, many of
us are coming out of the closet, or - as we prefer - out of the morgue.
Including some Hollywood celebrities.
Meanwhile, necrophilia activists have been approaching various
religious communities with the request that their rights be recognized.
Already radical Unitarians agree to officiate at necrophiliac marriage
ceremonies. The Episcopalians will debate later this month whether
necrophiliacs, or those romantically involved with the Life-Challenged -
as many prefer to be
known, can serve as Church ministers. We also expect the PC branch of
the Reform Synagogue movement to join in and to officiate at marriage
ceremonies for the unliving, as well as some more radical Jewish groups.
When asked how such a position could be advocated in light of traditional
Jewish opposition to such abominations, Rabbi Michael Moonbeam, author of
the scholarly Tikkun Guide to Great LSD Trips in the Bible (it explains
the REAL meaning of that Biblical story about how Moses DROPPED two
tablets), has observed, "Since when does being a good Rabbi have anything
to do with Judaism?"
Meanwhile, assorted services and institutions are cropping up to serve
this
long-neglected community. Some lawyers are now offering a package deal
in which they do probate for clients and get a marriage license at the
same
time. Assorted Las Vegas chapels have cropped up to perform necrophiliac
weddings. At one we visited, background muzak for the guests played the
old Beach Boys hit, the Monster Mash "It was the mash, it was the monster
mash, it was the mash, it was a graveyard smash." Another chapel
specialized
in conducting the ceremony in a hearse, with theme song taken from the old
Mister Ed show: "A hearse is a hearse, of corpse of corpse, and you can
get hitched in a hearse, of corpse."
Other cultural impacts of necrophiliacs are being felt, along with a
revival of 1960's rock and roll music, specially adopted for those with
romantic ties to the Non-Living. "Each night I ask the stars up above, why
must I be a cadaver in love," or "Yummy yummy yummy I'm in love with a
mummy," and an entirely new meaning for the song "Roll over Beethoven and
give Tchaikovsky the news."
Necrophiliacs have become welcome guests on all the popular TV chat
shows. We have also taken on the medical and psychological communities.
"Who are they to prejudge us?" says Mortis indignantly. Necrophiliac
activists have adopted a different use of the term "straight" and use it
to describe those who have relations with the living. So for a
necrophiliac,
a regular homosexual is called "straight gay" and a heterosexual is
"straight straight." We have also been lobbying the medical research
community to change its priorities. "After all," says Mortis, "they are
spending hundreds of billions on finding a cure for AIDS, but hardly
a dime for finding a cure for rigor mortis." The most outrageous
insult to our pride was from Hillary Clinton and the reps at the
International Women's Conference in Beijing a few years back, where they
proclaimed the official existence of five genders. Necrophiliacs claim
they are the sixth gender and they are tired of being overlooked.
For now, insists Mortis, I will just live a quiet life with my
partner, and in order to keep a bit of her presence with me wherever I go,
I
intend to keep a stiff upper lip.
We therefore demand that the State of Masschusetts end its intolerable
bias and bigotry and recognize necro-marriages at ONCE.
Thank you.
Posted on behalf of the Organization G.H.O.U.L.S., = Generosity and
Heartfelt Openmindedness for Un-Living Sex
2. COURT ORDERS MERETZ ACTIVISTS TO PAY LAND-OF-ISRAEL DEMONSTRATORS
THEY ASSAULTED
Susie Dym, spokesperson -- CITIES OF ISRAEL (Mattot Arim)
sddym@bezeqint.net
Three Meretz activists were ordered by a Haifa court to pay damages of
75,000 NIS to two Land of Israel activists, Dr. Eli Buchinder and Dr.
Renen
Adar, whom they assaulted in the course of a Haifa streetcorner vigil
being
held by the latter in support of Israel's Yesha communities.
The three Meretz activists, clothed in Meretz T-shirts, attacked
Buchbinder
and broke his jaw.
Buchbinder was hospitalized for a week and suffered
permanent jaw damage requiring surgical intervention. Dr. Adar, who
witnessed the attack, ran after the three, who had fled to a cafe
populated
by other Meretz activists, and tried to photograph them. The three
assailants then turned on Dr. Adar, beating him and kicking him in an
attempt to dissuade him from photographing them.
[Summarized from a Hebrew language report distributed by Aviad Visoly of
Haifa's Land of Israel headquarters.]
3. Subject: Can't He Just Make It Float Away or Something?
Uri Geller bitter over anti-Semitic graffitiUri Geller has spoken of the
"bitter feeling" he experienced after seeing anti-Semitic graffiti daubed
outside his British home.
The Israeli star who has lived in the village of Sonning, Berkshire, for
20 years, was out walking his dog along a towpath along the river Thames
earlier this week when he saw racists had sprayed the word "Jew" on his
fence.
4. While he and his Meretz comrades did more than their fair share to
stoke
world anti-Semitism, here is a fine piece by ex-Meretz cabinet minister
Amnon Rubinstein:
Worse than anti-Semitism
By Amnon Rubinstein
In November 2003, Neil Mackay, one of the editors of the Scottish Sunday
Herald, published an article in which he recycled claims made in some Arab
circles - that Mossad agents in the United States knew in advance of the
terror plot to attack the Twin Towers, and did nothing to prevent it. Up
to now this insane accusation was limited to extremist Arab propagandists
and neo-Nazis. The Glasgow newspaper found it proper to repeat this
canard, without citing its source, as an expression of faith in its
accuracy.
The article shocked Labor MP Jim Murphy and Lord Greville Janner, Jewish
leaders who protested, asking the paper's editor to print a correction.
The editor refused, saying the report was based on verified sources. In
his letter to Lord Janner, the editor asked him not to fall into the trap
of Ariel Sharon, by condemning everyone who disagrees with him as an
anti-Semite, even though Janner's letter contained no such accusation.
As an example of Mackay's self righteousness, the paper's editor cited
articles Mackay had written condemning anti-Semitism. He failed to
mention, for some reason, that some of his best friends are Jews. The
simplest way to answer the editor of the Sunday Herald is for the State of
Israel to sue the paper for libel, which the Foreign Ministry is now
considering.
But the problem is that the article in the Scottish newspaper is only one
extreme example of the wild and hysterical attacks on Israel, and not only
because of the occupation and the settlements. In such attacks, Israel is
portrayed virulently, as a monstrous country capable not only of harming
Palestinians, but of not preventing mass murder in New York if it serves
its base interests.
Anyone who knows Israel even a little knows that of course the country is
nothing how it is reported in some important newspapers, and that such
lies contravene every rule of journalism. The reports in these papers
ignore the complexities of its society and present Israel as a caricature
- the same as appears in the Arab press, where every Israeli is a monster
stomping on an unfortunate Arab.
Things reached the point where, during a conference on anti-Semitism
organized by Minister Natan Sharansky two weeks ago, a Jewish delegate
from Sweden expressed satisfaction over the incident in which the Israeli
ambassador in Sweden damaged an exhibit he interpreted as praising the
woman suicide bomber of Haifa's Maxim restaurant. He was pleased, he said,
because through it many Swedes heard for the first time about terror
against Israeli civilians.
Is there anti-Semitism in all of this? Anti-Semitism certainly aids
writing villainously against Israel, but it doesn't explain everything.
Something more serious may be afoot. Traditional anti-Semitism did not
accept Jews in Christian society, but it usually did not negate their
right, at least in principle, to separate existence. Before Kristallnacht
- the night of broken glass in Germany - even the Nazis preached "Jews to
Palestine."
The anti-Semitic tone of newspapers like the Sunday Herald negates the
Jewish right to separate existence by delegitimizing the State of Israel,
which is described - also with the assistance of Israeli academics - as a
Nazi apartheid state.
The logical conclusion of the Sunday Herald's libelous article is that a
democratic country that knows about a plan to commit mass murder in New
York and does nothing to prevent it has no right at all to exist. This is
worse than anti-Semitism.
This is negating the right of the Jewish people to self-determination.
When such views are accompanied by a rise in anti-Semitism, it takes us
back as Jews to dark days.
5. From the mother of democracies:
Jews targeted in UK
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/02/15/njew15.xml&sShe
t=/news/2004/02/15/ixhome.html
Prominent Jews in Britain are being targeted in a wave of anti-Semitic
harassment by far-Right and Islamic fundamentalist organisations.
6. Help Berkeley?
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12197
and
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12198
7. http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12194
You Want Us to Do What?
By Tony Stevens
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 16, 2004
Everyones had a professor they know to be extremely liberal or
conservative. Some professors simply wear their political beliefs on their
sleeves without even knowing it. Usually their political views dont make
their way into the classroom. However, if it happens, it should be done in
such a way that would not be construed as an attempt at the political
indoctrination of the students in the class. Of course, sometimes those
political biases inappropriately make their way into the classroom, as has
recently occurred at my school, California University of Pennsylvania,
near Pittsburgh.
Im a public relations student at Cal U and am attending with the ultimate
goal of working in the motor sports industry after I graduate. Like other
majors, there are a number of required courses for PR majors to complete
in order to graduate. Included in the lineup of required courses for PR
students is one called PR Cases and Problems, which I enrolled in this
semester. It meets once a week on Wednesday nights with Dr. Dencil Backus.
While the first class seemed fair enough--Dr. Backus seemed to be one of
those professors that would make us work hard--he made a few comments in
class that simply oozed with hate for those on the Right, the military,
and big business. As long as these comments didnt seep into the course
work, I just chose to treat them with a grain of salt. But in subsequent
classes, the professors political views have seeped into the course work
in a manner that I feel is inappropriate.
The second class saw the State of the Union address become a topic of
discussion, with Dr. Backus going off on a tangent about how much he
despised President Bush and how he was the biggest liar weve ever had as a
president. Dr. Backus then proceeded to say how Bush lied about the war on
terror, everything in Iraq, and other things that Im sure I probably
missed. I spoke up and disagreed, telling him I would bring evidence to
support my arguments. I thought no more of it except to print out my stack
of stuff and bring it to him the next class.
During the third class we discussed our assignments and assorted other
coursework. But as class was winding up, Dr. Backus distributed a two-page
email he had received concerning the far Left group MoveOn.orgs political
commercial contest and their issues with CBS, which couldnt run the
contest winner during the Super Bowl because MoveOn.org missed CBS
deadline for purchasing airtime. After distributing the e-mail to the
class, Dr. Backus asked if anyone knew was familiar with the situation. I
was the only one.
Dr. Backus also asked if anyone had seen the commercial and, again, I was
the only one. I mentioned that I thought the commercial was silly and why
I felt that way. The professor and I debated the commercials merits, or
lack thereof, only when he insisted I say what was on my mind.
After our exchange on the subject, Dr. Backus told the class that our new
assignment was to design a campaign around MoveOn.orgs commercial and how
the organization might be able to convince CBS (and probably anyone else)
to air its message. I told Dr. Backus that since I was not a supporter of
MoveOn.orgs agenda, I instead wanted to design a campaign that was
anti-MoveOn.org, one that was more in step with my beliefs. Dr. Backus
refused, saying words to the effect of "Well, guess what, you just
failed."
He then seemed to briefly consider canceling the assignment, but decided
to proceed with it over my objections and continued to refuse to allow me
to turn in the assignment as I saw fit to complete it. He then explained
the assignment again, dismissed the class, and asked to speak with me
following class. Now, during the entire course of study in the PR field at
this university, it is branded onto your brain that if you dont agree or
have a moral conflict with an assignment in the real world, that youve got
a few options that include quitting, asking to be reassigned, doing the
work, or simply being fired.
During the course of our after-class conversation, Dr. Backus stated that
he didnt want everything in the class becoming a clash of ideas
culminating in an incident like the one wed just had. I agreed. He then
went on to say that its real damned easy to speak up against a job in
college, but not when it affects the food on the table and a family in the
real world. I said that yes, he was right, but just because it was harder
doesnt mean I havent done it before. Ive left various jobs, volunteer
groups, etc. because of things that were going on that seriously
conflicted with my values and what I believed was right. He had no
response for that except, Well, its real damned easy here. Real damned
easy.
I personally feel that my proposal isn't a very hard one to accept. Its
the same assignment, just coming from the opposite side of the fence. Ive
interpreted his response(s) to my suggestion as one that says I will have
to live with him pushing only his political agenda. Dr. Backus mentioned
that he doesn't want every class to become something where there's a
commotion over content, but I have a feeling it will become so because
this professor is pretty open about his agenda. His office door is
plastered w/ Anti-Bush bumper stickers and the like, which in itself is
fine because it's his office and he can say what he wants there. However,
when he begins bringing that agenda into the classroom, I have a huge
problem with it.
Approximately three months of this class remain before the semester is
over. The said assignment is going to be handed in from the opposite side
of the fence approximately two hours after this article is penned.
Whether Dr. Backus will choose to allow and accept such an assignment, or
impose only his political worldview on the class has yet to be seen.
However, if hes like many other liberals in the World of Academia, I have
a feeling that this incident is far from over. Only time will tell.
Sunday, February 15, 2004
1.
1. I have been reading an interesting article,
Still Losing the Race? by John H. McWhorter
in the February issue of Commentary. It is quite a good piece and
definitely worth reading. It concerns the assaults by the liberal media
on black conservatives, and is written by a very eloquent Berkeley black
professor of linguistics.
McWhorter describes how those black intellectuals who defy the
accepted doctrines of the organized black community, who oppose things the
establishment thinks are good for blacks, like affirmative action quotas
and endless welfare expenditure increases, are dismissed by the media as
Uncle Toms and Rent-a Blacks who serve the racist enemies of blacks.
Black conservatives who challenge the truisms of the black community
generally find they are unable to get a slot in major magazines or Op-Ed
pages to express their opinions. The uniform permissible expression of
black opinion in the liberal media is the promotion of self-interest as
understood by the black establishment.
None of this is new. But what occurred to me is how diametrically
OPPOSITE the Jewish community, including the Israeli Jewish community, is
from the black community in the United States. Whereas the liberal
establishment and its captive media are of the opinion that only
leftist-liberal blacks, spouting quotas and preferences and the terms of
black self-interest as understood by that establishment are legitimate,
while all others are rent a blacks to use McWhorters term, among Jews the
situation is the exact opposite.
In recent years, the only Jews and the only Israelis regarded as
legitimate by the Western media are the leftist rent a Jews, serving the
enemies of their people. Jewish intellectuals are guaranteed prominent
coverage and Op-Ed banner headlines, as long as they are promoting the
interests of the enemies of their people. Those actually promoting the
self-defense and self-interest of Jews are denied access to the media.
An Amos Oz endorsing return of Israel to its pre-1967 Auschwitz borders is
guaranteed the top slot on the NY Times Op-Ed. Michael Lerner, a Rent a
Jew of the Marxist anti-Semitic Left, or a Henry Siegler or a Leonard
Fein, are all guaranteed prominence at papers like the LA Times and get
celebrity coverage from the rest of the media even when they actually do
not represent even some legitimate sub-school of Judaism. The worst
anti-Semites among Israels tenured traitors are guaranteed celebrity
treatment and media celebration, just as long as they come out as
justifying Palestinian terror, unconditional Israeli capitulation, and the
refusal by leftists in Israel to serve in the military. Only Jews
promoting the agenda of the enemies of Jews, never Jews promoting the Jews
own self-interest, are acceptable in the liberal establishment Op-Ed
pages.
In short, those blacks who challenge the perceived self-interest of
the black community as understood by its leaders, are delegitimized and
demonized, dismissed as rent a blacks. Those rent-a-Jews, Uncle Tomming
it up for the anti-Jewish Left, who spend their careers apologizing for
and justifying anti-Semites and terrorists, are guaranteed to be hailed as
courageous and moral, as the only true representatives of Jewry and Jewish
ethics.
2. Angelo Codevilla is one of the great minds in contemporary America:
from CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS -- Winter 2003
Angelo Codevilla is a visiting professor of
politics at Princeton University, a fellow of its
Madison Institute, a professor of international
relations at Boston University, and a senior fellow
of the Claremont Institute.
VICTORY WATCH
NO VICTORY, NO PEACE
by Angelo M. Codevilla
I fear that we shall crawl out on a limb to reap
the odium and practical disadvantages of our
course, from which a11 countries will then hasten
to profit. Such is internationalism today. Why, oh
why do we disregard the experience and facts of
history which stare us in the face?
--Joseph C. Grew
U.S. ambassador to Japan, 1937
IN OCTOBER 2003, HAVING OCCUPIED Afghanistan and Iraq, imprisoned
some 2,000 foreigners, refocused U.S. law enforcement,
reorganized the U.S. government, and made "security specialist"
the biggest new endeavor in America, President Bush claimed that
"the world is more peaceful and more free under my leadership and
America more secure."
In 1966, Daniel Boorstin's The Image: A Guide To The Pseudo Event
In America, showed that advertising by government as well as
business aims to counter reality. If the toilet tissue really
were "soft," there would be no need for an ad campaign to
persuade us that it is. Russians knew when their government
trumpeted good harvests that they had better hoard potatoes. By
the same token, if contemporary Americans felt victorious and at
peace, claiming credit for that feeling would be superfluous.
Since reality tells us otherwise, such claims recall Groucho
Marx's story of the husband caught in flagrante: "Who you gonna
believe, me or your own eyes?" In short, as 2004 loomed, there
was no peace from terror, and no prospect of any, because there
was no victory.
On October 16, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld secretly asked
his top lieutenants to think about why. The questions were not
well thought out. The most specific, how America could cause
Islamic schools to turn out more moderates and fewer extremists,
recalled the foolishness of the CIA's corrupt, counterproductive,
covert cultural activities of the 1950s. No one could imagine why
any Muslim should accept American atheists as arbiters of what is
and is not properly Islamic. Rumsfeld's main request, for better
"metrics" of success, was reminiscent of Robert McNamara's effort
quantitatively to define victory in Vietnam in terms of
operations successfully carried out. Nevertheless, Rumsfeld's
questions properly pointed to the heart of the matter: Why have
all our massive efforts not produced better results? What else
can we do?
Why Isn't It Working?
THE ROOT OF RUMSFELD'S FRUSTRAtion was that the Bush team--though
pulled in different directions by its principals' conflicting
priorities--had ended up doing pretty much all the things that
all its members had wanted.
The Doves, Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director
George Tenet, plus Tom Ridge and the FBI, had argued for waging
"the war" with a combination of foreign diplomacy and domestic
security. They got their way. Bush put his heart and soul not
only into wooing the U.N. and "the Europeans" but also into
securing help from Arab states such as Syria and Saudi Arabia.
Bush even incurred serious political costs at home by publicly
hiding information detrimental to the Saudis. He angered his own
supporters by financing Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian
Authority, while shielding it from Israel's wrath. Yet none of
this brought solidarity with America. Syria mocked us, and
ostentatiously helped Iraqi fellow-Ba'athists kill Americans.
Saudi Arabia continued to be the mainstay of Arab
anti-Americanism. The P.A. showed that all Bush's words and money
were unable to shake its status as the focus of anti-Western
jihad. As for the U.N. and "the Europeans," nothing dispelled the
impression that they were circling the Bush team like vultures
eager for it to stumble. Nor did the billions of dollars, the
legislation and regulations devoted to "homeland security," the
captives "brought to justice" for association with terrorists,
bring any more solace. The Bush team knew that for every captive,
many more enemies of America were laughing proudly at the fact
that they were the reason why every day at airports, a million
Americans were taking off their shoes and being frisked.
At the same time, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld himself, the
advocates of offense, of "regime change," also had gotten their
way They had thought that rolling into Kabul and setting up
command posts in Saddam Hussein's palaces would ignite a
democratic revolution in the Middle East, which would make
terrorism impossible. They turned out to be mistaken as well.
The reason why operations, each arguably successful in itself and
all together covering much of the spectrum of the possible, had
brought America no closer to peace is that war does not consist
of operations any more than love consists of intercourse. In both
cases, all depends on your intentions and on having the proper
object. Always, the proper question is what ends do the means
serve, and how appropriately do they serve them? What do your
operations actually do? In war, the question that gives meaning
to all operations is who is the enemy whose death gives us peace?
Never, ever, had the Bush team dealt with this question. Here was
the root of the Bush team's problems, the reason why it had done
a lot, done it wrong, and wound up worse off than before.
Doing "the war" right would have meant not bothering much with
al-Qaeda. Evidence of its central role in anti-American terror
was always weak, and came from Arab sources that do not wish
America well. Most of all, because neither it nor any other
organization is the source of hate and contempt for America,
wiping it out does America little good. What then is the source
of anti-American terror what leads people to think that fighting
America is profitable and has a future? The answer, as New York
Times columnist Thomas Friedman learned from this series of
essays, and as the Bush team had yet to grasp fully is that 98
percent of terrorism is what regimes want to happen or let
happen.
It's The Regime, Stupid!
REGIMES, AS SERIOUS PEOPLE KNOW, ARE a lot more than governments.
They are the priorities, standards, ways of life, embodied by the
most prominent persons in the land, and very much by their
henchmen. For our purposes, the question is: who makes
antiAmerican violence the standard for others; who are the people
whose deaths would diminish it?
By that standard, the Taliban regime was of scarce relevance. The
Taliban, like other Afghans, know little and care less about what
happens on the other side of the mountain, much less the ocean.
Yet the Taliban had developed a symbiotic relationship with a
group of Arabs who, with Saudi money, had partially financed them
and helped them against their domestic enemies. In return, the
Taliban provided these "Afghan Arabs" a base for intrigues they
carried on with the regimes and intelligence services of
their homelands. Only in this third-hand way were the Taliban
part of America's terrorist problem. Once America helped other
Afghans sweep the Taliban away, the Afghan tribes realigned with
little bloodshed and virtually annihilated the "Afghan Arabs."
Al-Qaeda then became scattered individuals, whose importance
depended exclusively on the Arab regimes that continued to use
them, and others.
These Arab regimes, and nothing else, are the entities that gave
and give people the means and above all the hope of success that
make antiAmerican terrorists.
That is why invading Iraq was, potentially, so very useful in
convincing those inclined to fight America that there is no
future in doing so. But what, in the way that the Bush team
fought this battle, convinced America's enemies of the opposite?
What did the Bush team do that made these regimes less afraid of
us than before; that tilted the balance of fear against us more
than ever?
In a nutshell, the Bush team mistook Saddam Hussein's top echelon
for the regime itself. Second, it proved unwilling to help Iraqi
enemies of the regime pull it up by the roots, or even to allow
them to do it, Third, unpardonably, it placed the U.S. armed
forces and America's Iraqi collaborators in the deadly position
of static defense-sitting on bayonets pondering the Marine "Small
Wars Manual" while being shot at. All this, combined with dovish
diplomacy vis-a-vis the rest of the Arab world, told enemy
regimes that, once again, America would let a battle won turn
into a war lost.
As previously explained in these pages, the dictatorial regimes
of the Arab world consist of some 2,000 men, while the Saudi
regime is perhaps twice that size. In such places, where regimes
exist by brutalizing opponents, changes in regime necessarily
involve the bloody settling of bloody scores. Unless and until
the "outs" brutalize at least this number of "ins," the regime
has not really changed. In such places, "who rules" really means
who brutalizes whom unto death or submission. Vengeance, a human
drive everywhere, is especially compelling in the Arab world. The
Eumenides is not part of Arab literature. Hence the dream of many
Americans -- Norman Podhoretz expressed it in the Fall 2002 issue
of this publication -- of a gentle imperialism that would hold Iraq
together, spreading liberal democracy from it to the rest of the
Middle East, is impossible. Most impossible was it in Iraq
because its unusual racial and religious divisions further
complicate the previous regime's unusual brutalities.
In sum, around the world, as in Iraq, being pro-American was
likelier to get you killed than was being part of an
anti-American network. Hence, in the third year of the War on
Terrorism, America found itself on the short end of the balance
of fear. Turning that balance to the enemy's disfavor is the
primordial task of our war.
Our War
NO ONE SHOULD DECLARE WAR WITH out being clear against whom it is
being declared: who the enemy is whose demise will give us peace.
In October 2003, mortar shells fell into the Baghdad compound of
the Coalition Provisional Authority, giving U.S. bureaucrats an
epiphany. Reversing a decade's worth of CIA judgments, they
concluded that elements of Saddam's regime were working together
with religious extremists. That was equivalent in perspicacity to
cruise ship passengers noticing humidity in the ocean. Saddam's
political victory in the Gulf War had consisted precisely of
using enmity to America to transcend the many divisions among
Arabs, indeed Muslims, and of putting himself at the head of that
enmity. Hence his regime, which lived by quotidian, bloody
persecution of Islam, became the vanguard of what Saddam
effectively defined as the new defining element of Islam;
anti-American action,
The spreading sense throughout the Islamic world that
anti-American action was good and safe, and that opposing it was
bad and dangerous, became a mortal threat to America. This deadly
phenomenon took on a life of its own. Like any disease not
countered in its early stages, countering it would require ever
more radical exertions.
Beginning right after the Gulf War, Saddam's intelligence service
put him at the head of otherwise disparate elements. The Soviet
Union had left behind a network of mostly secular, nationalist
terrorist groups. Iraq's and Syria's Ba'ath parties were parts of
that network, as were the P.A. and its various offshoots, e.g.,
the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. These were
headquartered either in Damascus or Baghdad. But third-world
nationalism made sympathy with all the above politically
significant from Morocco to Pakistan. In most cases these
elements were wellconnected with the secular governments of the
Islamic world. They had pressured those governments to support
Saddam against America. On the religious side of the Islamic
world's greatest divide were the Islamists-everywhere except in
Iran (and for other reasons in Jordan and Morocco) enemies of
their governments as well as of the West. The number of Islamist
organizations vas legion, including both Sunni and Shi a. Then
there was the divide between the groups that were sponsored by
well-financed Saudi Wahabis and the rest of Islam.
The great event of the 1990s was that violence against Israel and
America-correctly perceived as successful-went a long way toward
effacing the differences amongst the Islamic world's activists.
Daily veneration of the Palestinian struggle, daily rituals of
hate against the West, Jews, Israel (and the American devils
behind it), brightened millions of miserable Iives. Images of
Israel being bloodied, and of America being bloodied, and of
Muslim potentates safely offering their observations on the
carnage, became a paradigm for a generation of Muslims. Any
regime that, assuming it had been inclined to do so, put
restrictions on anti-American, or antiIsraeli speech or action
did so at its own peril.
America's war would have to consist of reversing that paradigm.
Victory for America would be on the way when Muslims around the
world would see every evening on the news those to whom they had
looked up being tried, discredited, and executed by Muslims for
crimes against Muslims, when television audiences would gasp at
crowds of Iraqis and Syrians physically dismembering the Baathist
thugs who had slaughtered the party's political enemies, when
Arab news magazines would detail the corrupt, un-Islamic lives of
the entire Saudi royal family, when good Muslims, victims of the
Wahabi heresy, would detail how the heretics had defiled Islam.
What a paradigm-shift it would be were Palestinian members of
families victimized by Arab thugs publicly to take vengeance on
their tormentors. Such events would change the Muslim world's
agenda and place regimes that advocated or allowed anti-American
propaganda, the organizations or "charities" that have produced
anti-American terrorism, at peril.
To produce such results, America's operations of war would have
to destroy regimes-not build nations nor export democracy.
Whereas doing away with Saddam Hussein in 1991 might well have
convinced the Muslim world that antiAmericanism had no future, by
2003 evidence that worldwide Muslim elements were helping an
Iraqi "resistance" to bleed America, even as the supposedly
united efforts of Islam were bleeding Israel, was energizing
terrorists. By this time, nothing less than the bloody demise of
the most egregious anti-American regimes would convince the
others not to foster or allow terrorism. Only this would give us
peace.
What Is To Be Done?
IN SHORT, THE REGIMES WHOSE DEATH would give us peace have
enemies who are eager to kill them. U.S. forces cannot possibly
police foreign lands, much less force gentler, kinder ways upon
them. Experience in Iraq should have made this plain. Only
locals, not foreigners, can do that. Their methods are unlikely
to be kind and gentle. Democracy may not be part of their agenda,
and liberalism surely will not be. That is their business. It is
enough for our peace that there be people who have their own
reasons for destroying the people and culture -the regimes-that
are the effective causes of violence against us. U.S. military
operations can and should make it possible for them to do it.
In Iraq, the U.S. government should do in 2003-04 what it should
have done in earlier years. Having destroyed Saddam's main
armies, Americans should arm the 80% Shi'ite and Kurdish parts of
the population, and wish them well. Most surely, they would
destroy the remnants of the Ba'athist regimes. Though they have
more detailed knowledge than we possibly could have of who is
who, they would be far less careful than we of killing only the
strictly guilty.
It is no business of America's whether the people who live
between the Persian Gulf and the Black Sea decide that there
shall be an Iraq or not. We should have learned from experience
in Bosnia that crafting the fiction of a state that does not
exist in the hearts and minds of its supposed members-who think
themselves not Bosnians but rather Muslims, Croats, and Serbs -is
an expensive way of gratifying folks in the State Department who
should know better. Nor should Americans care that the Saudi
royal family and Sunni Arabs in the Gulf would not like an
independent or semi-independent group of 15 million Shi'ites near
the head of the Gulf because they might ally with Shi'ite Iran.
Being Arabs, they probably would not. But whether or not they did
would be no problem of America's.
America's interest would be secured by the fact that the regime's
anti-American priorities would die with its members. The foreign
Islamic fighters would die in ways even more discouraging to
anyone inclined to follow in their footsteps.
All too hazily, in 2003 the Bush team perceived that Yasser
Arafat's P.A. somehow energized all Muslim terrorism. But Bush
sought to remove this regime as a negative factor by negotiating
some kind of accord between it and Israel. Wrong. The P.A.
regime's interest is entirely incompatible with peace, because
the regime lives not by serving its people but-on the contrary-by
serving as a part of a broader Arab and Muslim anti-Westernism.
The only way to remove it as a major energizer of that movement
is to do away with it, as a way of crushing that movement.
Destroying the P.A. is easier done than said. The regime lives
physically by daily infusions of cash from American and European
sources that can be cut off in an instant, as well as by
communications, electricity, and other utilities that Israel can
cut off almost as quickly. Moreover, its leaders are mostly
marked men under Israeli surveillance. Perhaps more important,
they have lots of Arab enemies who have saved up much vengeance
for them. If Americans and Israelis decide to eliminate the
regime's main force, to make clear that death and destruction is
to be the lot of anyone who even looks like he might follow the
old regime, its enemies are more than likely to finish the job.
This is not to say that a generation of Palestinian young people
schooled in a culture of death would learn new ways instantly.
But regimes are all about a complex of incentives-moral, social,
and material. Surely, though liberal democracy would likely not
reign among Palestinians any more than love for Jews, undoing the
regime that waged the Arab-Israeli conflict would remove the drug
that has done so much to stimulate a generation of antiAmerican
terrorism.
THE SAUDI REGIME IS THE NURSERY OF the Wahabi heresy that for two
centuries has vied for leadership of Islam. It is also the source
of the billions of dollars by which, since the 1970s, the Wahabis
have spread their influence farther than ever before.
Anti-American terror would hardly be conceivable without
widespread Wahabi influence. The Bush team's belief that the
Saudi regime is anything other than an enemy (indeed the reason
why Bush excluded the Saudis from the list of those to whom he
those to whom he proposed freedom in lieu of stability) is based
on the supposition that the regime can control Wahabism. But the
regime is Wahabism's enabler and full partner. There is no way to
stop anti-Western terror so long as Wahabism is prestigious,
secure in its base, and wealthy. There is no way to make it
otherwise except to undo the Saudi regime.
At the end of 2003, some kind of insurgency was under way in
Saudi Arabia. The only certain things about it were that it
involved some members of the regime against others, and that it
involved Wahabism. It was also certain that there were countless
Muslims, in and outside the Arabian Peninsula, who wished that at
the end of the day the Saudi oil fields would no longer be
providing the means by which the Wahabis had troubled the life of
Islam, even more than that of America. All this is to say that
the necessary undoing of the Saudi regime would not be difficult,
and that there was no shortage of Muslims who would approach with
alacrity cleansing the peninsula of the peculiarly Saudi
combination of heresy and fraud. This cleansing was likely to
happen without American involvement. Indeed, only the Bush team's
illusion that it may be possible to save the regime as a vehicle
for democracy was likely to stand in the way of this healthy
development.
Our Peace
AMERICANS, NO LESS THAN FOREIGNERS, ARE the only ones who can
determine the character of their regime, the way they live. Only
we can determine what kind of peace will be ours -- what we will
put up with and what not.
The titles of America's first post-September 11 operation,
"Enduring Freedom," as well as of its first major piece of
legislation, the "Patriot Act," suggest Boorstin's The Image as
well as any of George Bush's speeches. As I've argued previously,
attacking Afghanistan was not calculated to preserve any of
America's freedoms, while the Patriot Act's criminalization of
association with any entity declared "terrorist" by executive
action seems, on its face, not patriotism but rather a
double-violation of the United States Constitution. Since the Act
did not bite and the invasion of Afghanistan produced exciting TV
images, and "the war" was at its beginning, the public found no
reason to question the reality behind the titles.
That is, until after the invasion of Iraq. Then Americans there
began dying in noticeable numbers without any prospect that the
dying would stop. The ease with which irregulars carried out
their attacks on Americans and their collaborators in Iraq
reminded Americans of how easily terrorists could cause havoc on
American streets, and of the fact that neither the Bush team's
homeland security nor any number of "patriot acts" could stop it.
Once again, it became clear that there is no such thing as a
phony war, a war with limited liability. Once blood is spilled,
the previously existing order, the previous peace, is broken
forever. What peace will prevail in the end depends on who, by
killing and willingness to be killed, can force the other to
accept his version.
And so, after the invasion of Iraq had raised the stakes, the
American people were closer to realizing that what they wanted
out of the war was a certain kind of peace, and that to get it
they needed a certain kind of victory. This would involve
identifying their enemies and doing away with them. Otherwise,
there would never be peace.
Beginning just after September 11, I have sought to show that
America's peace depends on America's victory, and to show that
the path to victory is the destruction of the main regimes
without which terrorism would not exist, pour encourager les
autres. The obstacles to our peace, our victory, flow not from
the strength or cleverness of our enemies, but rather from the
tendency of America's leaders to deal with images rather than
with reality.
3. Kerry with Hanoi Jane:
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040211-123002-8027r.htm
4. We are everywhere:
Adopted Name - Real Jewish Name
Joey Adams ..................Joseph Abramowitz
Eddie Albert .................Eddie Heimberger
Woody Allen..................Allen Konigsberg
Lauren Bacall ................Joan Perske
Jack Benny ..................Benny Kubelsky
Milton Berle .................Milton Berlinger
Ernest Borgnine............Effron Borgnine
George Burns ...............Nathan Birnbaum
Joan Blondell................Rosebud Blustein
Joyce Brothers ..............Joyce Bauer
Mel Brooks ...................Melvin Kaminsky
Joey Bishop ..................Joey Gottlieb
Charles Bronson ...........Charles Buchinsky
Rona Barrett .................Rona Burnstein
Cyd Charisse ..... .........Tula Finklea
Tony Curtis ....................Bernie Schwartz (daughter is Jamie Lee
Curtis)
Joan Crawford ...............Lucille Le Sueur
Dyan Cannon ...............Samile Friesen
Kirk Douglas ................Isadore Demsky (son is Michael Douglas)
Bob Dylan ....................Robert Zimmerman
Rodney Dangerfield.............Jacob Cohen
Douglas Fairbanks,Jr..! .......Douglas Ullman
Joel Grey ........................Joel Katz (father of Jennifer Grey)
Elliott Gould .................Elliott Goldstein
Zsa Zsa Gabor ...............Sara Gabor
John Garfield ...............Jules Garfinkle
Judy Garland ...............Frances Gumm
Paulette Goddard .........Paulette Levy
Eydie Gorme.................Edith Gormezano
Cary Grant ...................Larry Leach
Lorne Green ................Chaim Leibowiz
Judy Holliday ..............Judith Tuvin
Leslie Howard .............Leslie Stainer
Buddy Hackett ............Leonard Hacker
Jill St. John .................Jill Oppenheim
Danny Kaye.................David Kominsky
Alan King ....................Irwin Kniberg
Larry King....................Larry Zeiger
Tina Louise..................Tina Blacker
Ann Landers................Esther Friedman (sister of Abigail Van Buren)
Dorothy Lamour ..........Dorothy Kaumeyer
Michael Landon ...........Mike Orowitz
Steve Lawrence ...........Sidney Leibowitz
Hal Linden...................Hal Lipshitz
Jerry Lewis .................Joseph Levitch
Karl Malden ................Aiden Sekulovitch
Ethel Merman ..............Ethel Zimmerman
Jan Murray .................Murray Janofsky
Walter Matthau ...........Walter Matasschanskayasky
Lilly Palmer .................Maria Peiser
Jan Pierce....................Pincus Perelmuth
Roberta Peters..............Roberta Peterman
Eleanor Parker..............Ellen Friedlob
Joan Rlvers ...................Joan Molinsky
Tony Randall .................Sidney Rosenberg
Edward G. Robinson .....Emanuel Goldenberg
Dinah Shore ...................Fanny Rose
Shelly Winters ..............Shirley Schrift
Gene Wilder...................Jerome Silberman
Dennis Kovler................Dennis Kovler
More Jewish Stars Over Hollywood
There are hundreds of other Jews in Hollywood "stardom" - far too numerous
to list them all here.
However the following are Jews whom many think are Gentiles:
Ed Asner, Bea Arthur, Gene Barry, Richard Benjamin, Kevin Costner, Lee J.
Cobb, Joan Collins, Richard Dreyfus, Ted Danson, Peter Falk (Columbo),
Eddie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Richard Gere, Betty Grable, Sharon Gless,
Steven Segall, Dustin Hoffman, Monty Hall, Amy Irving, Jack Klugman,
Leonard Nimoy, Ken Olin, Ron Perlman, George Segel, William Shatner, Peter
Strauss, RodSteiger, Jane Seymour, Barbara Walters, Debra Winger, and
Bruce Willis.
The following are "half-Jewish",
Joan Collins, Goldie Hawn, Paul Newman, Robert DeNiro and Geraldo Rivera.
5. In case you were unable to open the photo of teh Palestinian children
crowding the terrorists firing on Israelis, try:
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/images/printed/P120204/a.0.1202.20.2.9.jpg
6. Chutzpah in Gaza:
www.thejewishweek.com/top/editletcontent.php3?artid=3273
7. You know how everyone whines that Israel is being insensitive when it
searches PLO "ambulances"? Well:
Red Crescent nurse caught aiding terror
JPost.com Staff The Jerusalem Post Feb. 12, 2004
Israel News : Jerusalem Post Internet Edition
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1076559706716
Security forces have arrested a nurse with the Palestinian Red Crescent
organization on suspicion of helping terrorists hiding out in Yasser
Arafat's Ramallah Mukata headquarters to organize attacks against
Israelis.
The woman, arrested Wednesday, was identified as Sadah Said Ahmed
Abdullah, 27, from Ramallah, Israel Radio reported.
She is divorced, the mother of a child, and is a Jerusalem resident.
During her interrogation, she reportedly admitted helping a senior Fatah
Tanzim fugitive and known murderer, Khaled Jamal Shuwish, plan terrorist
attacks for the past few months.
Shuwish is known to be hiding at the Mukata.
Abdullah was Shuwish's go-between with Hizbullah contacts in Lebanon, who
were financing and planning attacks against Israeli targets, according to
Israel Radio.
She reportedly told interrogators that Shawaish was planning a suicide
bombing against Israelis in the near future.
Israeli security sources said that other Tanzim members were similarly
planning attacks, using Arafat's headquarters as their base of operations.
The sources said that the Tanzim is preparing terrorist cells with
Hizbullah and Iranian financing.
8. Cal Thomas: The Gaza Capitulation:
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20040214-112850-5661r.htm
Friday, February 13, 2004
1. Haaretz, the newspaper for the "thinking Israeli" mindless leftist,
proved to all its great journalistic integrity and intellectual depth and
seriousness yesterday. In a news piece on the light earthquake Israel had
this week, Haaretz carried as a serious news story the "fact" that an
Israeli was sitting on her sofa with her cat on her lap, and just moments
before the earthquake the cat jumed to the floor and started caterwauling.
This, insists Haaretz, proves cats have supernatural uncanny powers of
detecting earthquakes. Because, as you know, cats never jump off laps
and meow on the floor unless an earthquake is coming.
2. The Left's Threats to the Jews:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12094
The Left's Threat to the Jews
By Murray Friedman
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 13, 2004
Early this year, I was a panelist in a program at a leading Episcopalian
Church in Philadelphia. The topic was a discussion on the public policy
postures of the various faith groups. When the subject got around to
Israel and the Intifada, I noted that many within this upper class group
seemed hostile to Israel. The acts of suicide bombers, some felt, were a
response to the imperialistic designs of the Jewish State. What
alternatives do the Arabs have? one member of the audience asked.
The incident underlined my feeling that there has been a marked shift on
the part of the Left with regard to many issues of concern to Jews,
especially Israel. In the period following World War II, Jews were aligned
with liberal church groups and others on the Left in the fight to end
poverty and gain greater equality for societys disadvantaged, as well as
by their mutual support for the State of Israel. In recent years, however,
the Left no longer stands by the side of Jews in Middle East struggles;
the Right, in fact, has emerged as a more reliable ally to Israeli
interests. How did this shift come about? And what does it portend for the
future?
The beginnings of the shift can be traced to the racial disorders of the
l960s and the transformation of the civil rights movement into a race
revolution. As racial upheavals in major American cities spread across the
land, reaching a crescendo of violence following the murder of Martin
Luther King, Jr. in Watts in l968, a new group of African-American leaders
arose who challenged the integration strategies of King and other Black
moderates. They argued the civil rights gains achieved by King did not
reach down deeply enough into the smoldering ghettos of urban America, and
that new approaches must be tried. The radicals, including Malcolm X,
Stokely Carmichael (who later called himself Kwame Toure) and Carl
Foreman, head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),
urged separation from hitherto white allies and demanded Black Power. They
called also for African-Americans to identify with the struggle of colored
peoples throughout the world against colonial imperialism. In this new
paradigm, Israel came to be seenand portrayedas an outpost of Western
imperialism in the Middle East. All this came to a head following Israel's
stunning victory in the Six Day War in 1967.
The date for the split between the Left and Israeli interests can almost
be set precisely. Concerned about the impending fragmentation within the
Left, a number of progressives, including Martin Peretz, publisher of the
New Republic, convened a Conference for a New Politics in Chicago over
Labor Day weekend l967. The meetings quickly became a fiasco. Peretz, who
had funneled hundreds of thousand of dollars into the civil rights and
peace movements, was not allowed to speak, even though he was on the
events steering committee. The conference keynoter, Martin Luther King,
Jr, was jeered by black militants shouting, Kill whitey! Along with
Peretz, he stormed out. The conference went on to adopt a number of
resolutions, the most troublesome of which condemned the imperialist
Zionist war. The Palmer House conference marked the last serious effort to
forge a national, interracial, coalition of the Left.
Other collisions further highlighted the Lefts meltdown. In l968, under a
plan developed by the WASP-led Ford Foundation, devastating school strikes
took place in New York City, as Black militants seized control of the
community-controlled Ocean Hill School District in Brooklyn and fired
thirteen Jewish teachers. In the l970s a furor broke out over the use of
racial preferences, or quotas, as critics called them, in university and
professional school admissions. And in l979, Andrew Young, King's chief
aid who had been appointed by President Carter to serve as American
ambassador to the UN, was forced to resign following his meeting with a
PLO official in New York City.
Before l967, most mainline Protestant religious groupsa term used for the
United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the
Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Church of
Christ among othershad backed Israel. The creation of a Jewish State was
seen as atoning for the Holocaust and part of a progressive ideology.
Israel's military success, however, transformed its image from an
embattled and isolated state into an occupying power, a vehicle of Western
colonialism. In July l967, the Executive Committee of the General Board of
the National Council of Churches released a statement concentrating mainly
on the plight of Palestinian refugees. Deplorable as the problem was, the
statement ignored its context. The refugees had been urged to leave during
the war by invading Arab nations who promised they could return as soon as
the war was won. Mainline church groups seemed unaware that unlike Israel,
which had taken in significant numbers of Jewish refugees from Arab
countries following its creation, Arab countries have used the
Palestinians as pawns in their efforts to destroy the Jewish state.
While these church bodies maintain that they continue to endorse Israel's
right to exist and support the end of suicide bombings, they have been
critical of the military measures taken by the Jewish State to protect its
citizens and have urged an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied
territories. A statement by the United Methodist Council of Bishops in May
2002, for example, deplored the disproportionate use of force by the
Israelis, assuming that the all-out war currently underway can somehow be
fought without casualties to innocent people. The governing body of the
Lutheran church in August 200l went so far as to call for the U.S.
government to withhold military aid to Israel.
There is an ambivalence [among] Lutheran churches as to just how
productive it would be to have speakers not willing to see both side of an
issue, Del Leppke, a convener of the Middle East Working Group for the
Chicago branch of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America declared
recently. With mainline Protestant groups clearly in mind, Church
historian Martin Marty has pointed out Being anti-Israel has become part
of the anti-Establishment gospel, the trademark of those who purport to
identity with the masses, the downtrodden and the Third World.
It is not just mainline Christian churches that have joined in highly
charged criticism of the tactics employed by Israel in its war on
terrorism and the Intifada. A number of Left-leaning Jews have identified
with these criticisms as well. The main function of a new organization,
Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel, has been organizing rallies
backing the PLO. There are many American Jews who are flat-out embarrassed
by the fact that the prime minister of Israel is guilty of war crimes, the
groups executive director has said. Like the mainline churches, most of
these pro-Palestinian Jewish groups maintain that they continue to remain
supporters of the Jewish State. However, figures such as Noam Chomsky and
Norman Finkelstein have denounced Israel harshly. In a December 200l
speech in Beirut, Lebanon, Finkelstein compared Israeli behavior to Nazi
practices during World War II.
A leading figure here has been Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun and
long-time supporter of the Israeli Left. Lerner likes to argue that he is
pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian and seeks to avoid rhetoric demeaning to
Israel, but his actions and associations show otherwise. In 2002, he
announced the creation of the Tikkun community, a multi-issue national
organization of liberal and progressive Jews, to help bring about, among
other things, broader concessions by the Israelis (meaning giving up
territory) to gain peace. Two months after its founding, however, Lerner
along with militant Black activist and Princeton professor Cornel West
(described as its co-chair) took out a full-page Tikkun community ad in
the N.Y. Times attacking the Jewish State's oppressive occupation of the
territories and congratulating Israeli reservists who said they would not
serve there. The ad, which said nothing about Palestinian terrorism,
featured a cartoon of a hook- nosed, disreputable-looking Jew. Israel was
described as a Pharaoh, while Israeli troops were likened to Nazis blindly
following orders" in a brutal occupation that violated international law
and human rights.
Complaints against anti-Israel bias on the part of the liberal media have
increased since the outbreak of the second intifada in 2002. Terrorists
are often described as militants in leading newspapers like the N.Y. Times
and the Philadelphia Inquirer. NPR, America's foremost, publicly-funded
radio network, has been charged frequently with exhibiting a subtle,
Left-wing bias. Unsupported and anecdotal Palestinian charges of Israeli
misconduct are routinely aired without any balance or counterpoint. Thus,
NPRs Peter Kenyon devoted an entire Morning Edition segment on January 9
of this year to the grievances of Palestinians in Nablus following Israeli
military action there. Among other things, Israel was accused of
demolishing houses, killing unarmed bystanders, damaging ancient walls and
streets," delaying Palestinian firefighters as they try to "save burning
buildings and wrecking water and sewer pipes in the city. Kenyon did not
provide a single Israeli speaker to convey the necessity for operations in
Nablus to disrupt the citys terrorist violence, which has produced a
quarter of all Palestinian suicide bombers in the last three years.
It has been on college campuses, however, where the Left is most deeply
entrenched and has contributed most heavily to anti-Israel and anti-Jewish
sentiments. For example, Die Jew, die, die, die, die, die. Stop living,
die, die, DIE! Do us all a favor and build yourself [an] oven, was an
expression found recently in a student newspaper at Rutgers. A tenured
professor at Georgetown asks, How have Judaism and Jews, and the
international forces all permitted Zionism to become a wild, destructive
beast capable of perpetrating atrocities? In addition to such harsh
rhetoric, radical professors at many upper-class universities have
cooperated with Arab students to urge their institutions to divest from
the apartheid state of Israel.
In contrast, much of the support Israel has received in recent years has
come more from conservative groups and the Right. Even as mainline
Protestant groups began to shift ground following the Six Day War,
Israel's victory dramatically intensified its positive image among many
evangelical leaders. The latter began to call increasingly for greater
U.S. support for the Jewish State. For the variously estimated forty to
sixty million evangelicals, Israel's success in l967 was seen as a sign of
God's favor. Critics charge such support has more to do with their
theologythat the second coming of Jesus will be linked to the return of
Jews to the Holy Land. While this may influence some, a poll taken by the
International Fellowship of Christians and Jews released in 2002 indicated
more than half supported Israel because it is a democracy and an important
U.S. ally. Besides, as the late Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz asked,
Why should Jews care about the theology of a `fundamentalist preacher who
speaks with no authority as to God's intentions? And what did such
theoretical abstraction matter when the preacher is vigorously pro-Israel?
As a result, beginning in the l980s, a number of Jewish bodies, including
the American Jewish Committee, began reaching out to evangelicals. In
l983, Yechiel Eckstein, a young, Orthodox rabbi who once worked for the
ADL, founded the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews in
Chicago in an effort to cement ties with evangelicals. Claiming, True
Christians are the Jews' best friends, Eckstein also inaugurated the
Center for Judeo Christian Values in Washington, D.C. The group sought to
find common religious ground and establish moral standards and a greater
sense of personal accountability in society. Significantly, Senators
Joseph Lieberman (D., Conn.) and Dan Coats (R., Ind.), widely seen as more
centrist or conservative in their respective parties, were the
organizations original co-chairs. In 2002, Eckstein reported American
evangelicals had quietly given over $l00 million over the previous seven
years in humanitarian assistance for needy Jews world-wide, including
resettlement costs, housing, food, and medical aid.
In what has been perhaps the most astonishing development, in the last two
or three years, we have witnessed a significant shift by Jewish leaders in
their response to the Christian Right. Just a few years earlier they had
attacked it as anti-Semitic and criticized it for engaging in missionary
activity among Jews. But in the summer of 2002, a regional branch of the
Zionist Organization of America in Chicago honored Christian Coalition
head Pat Robertson at its annual Salute to Israel Dinner. And on May 2,
2003, the Anti-Defamation League, which had sharply criticized Robertson
and other Christian Right leaders in a widely commented upon l994
pamphlet, took out an ad in the Los Angeles Times and N.Y. Times featuring
Ralph Reed, former spokesman for the Christian Coalition. Reed called
Israel's continued survival proof of God's sovereignty.
Criticized for this, ADL head Abe Foxman remained unrepentant, saying: I
am proud to have Ralph Reed as a friend and as an advocate on Israel.
Foxman was only sorry, he added, that politically liberal Christians
tended to be weaker in their support for Israel.
Meanwhile, the seeds of the Lefts criticism of Israel that came to light
at the New Politics convention in l967 have continued to sprout. In 1991,
following a period of relative calm after the rioting of local African
Americans against Chasidim Jews living in Crown Heights in Brooklyn (due
to a traffic accident that took the life of a black child and resulted in
the murder of a Chasidic scholar), black-Jewish tensions heightened again.
In the off-year congressional elections in 2000, two African-Americans in
the House of Representatives in Washington widely seen as anti-Israel,
Reps. Earl Hilliard (D.,Ala.) and Cynthia McKinney (D., Ga.)the latter
given to conspiracy theories about Jewslost their seats in the Democratic
primaries following an intense campaign against them by pro-Israel
elements. Conflicts between blacks and Jews were exacerbated also when a
significant number of the members of the Black Caucus in the House voted
against or listed themselves as present when a pro-Israel resolution came
up for a vote.
Significantly, even as the Left has become less reliable, support for
Israel has grown within the political Right in Congress and elsewhere.
Early in July of last year, Tom DeLay, the House majority leader (and a
leading evangelical) visited Israel and addressed the Knesset. He pledged
continued backing for the Jewish State and opposition to President Bush's
roadmap for peace if it meant coercing the Jewish state into making
concessions that would harm its security.
The President himself, unlike his father, has given many signs of his
strong backing for Israel. He has refused to meet or permit government
officials to meet with Yasir Arafat, the head of the Palestine Authority,
who Bush feels has been unreliable as a peace partner. His strongest
statement was delivered in a landmark address on the Middle East in the
White House Rose Garden on June 24, 2003. In it, he declared that the
Palestinians would only achieve their goal of statehood if they initiated
new leadership, new institutions, and new security arrangements. He urged
Palestinians to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror and
indirectly accused Arafathe did not use his nameof leading an authority
that was rife with official corruption. Last month, the Jewish Telegraphic
Agency reported that the Bush Administration, overcoming some reluctance,
was preparing a brief for a hearing before the International Court of
Justice in the Hague on behalf of Israel's decision to erect a West Bank
security barrier, a measure widely criticized by the Left.
What, finally, can be said about the shifts described here? While Jews can
still be characterized as liberals and will continue to vote heavily for
Democratic candidates, it is a chastened liberalism at best. The safety
and security of Israel and the war against terrorism remain central keys
to Jewish political behavior today. As former New York Mayor Ed Koch, a
life-long Democrat who continues to disagree with much of the Republican
domestic program, wrote in the Forward on January 9, 2004, President Bush
has earned my vote because he has shown the resolve and courage necessary
to wage the war against terrorism. Koch added: v I am prepared, as an
American and a Jew, to make the well being of Israel my primary concern,
Gary Rosenblatt, the highly respected editor of the New York Jewish Week
recently said, believing that a government that protects a democratic ally
in danger shows the greatest understanding and compassion for human rights
and values. A poll released by the American Jewish Committee covering the
period from November 25 to December 11 suggests that this view may be
gaining ground in the Jewish community. It showed that while Jews are
still predominantly Democrats, Bush would get 3l percent of the Jewish
vote in a match up with most of the aspiring Democratic candidates with
the exception of Senator Lieberman. This is a figure about three times
greater than in the national election in 2000. As the Left continues to
waffle or worse with regard to what Jews feel to be their most fundamental
concerns, we may well see the beginnings of the long-predicted Jewish
shift to the Right.
Murray Friedman is the director of the Feinstein Center for American
Jewish History at Temple University in Philadelphia. His upcoming book,
tentatively titled The Neo-Conservative Revolution, will be published by
Cambridge University Press early next year.
3. Mrs. Kerry finances terrorists and other leftists:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12187
4. A new kosher winery has opened in Portugal, under the supervision of
Rabbi
Elisha Salas. Those who read my recent piece on Belmonte Portugal will
remember him as the star of that article. Anyway, if you have any
interest in ordering wine, contact Rabbi Elisha at elishamai@hotmail.com
Thursday, February 12, 2004
1. Campus Fascists disrupt Pipes lecture in Berkeley:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=5925
(See also http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=5896)
2. Ed Koch on Anti-Semitic Jews:
http://jewishworldreview.com/0204/koch_2004_02_12.php3
Could there be any more out there?
3. Cal Thomas on Sharon's new "idea":
http://jewishworldreview.com/0204/thomas_2004_02_12.php3
and also
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/thomas_2003_11_11.php3
1. Ever wonder how come so many Palestinian minors get injured or killed
when Israelis shoot back at the terrorists?
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Take a look at the last
picture on the web page at site
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/393633.html
The article is in Hebrew but the picture speaks for itself. This picture
is from Today's Haaretz, showing mobs of Palestinian children and youths
crowding the masked terrorists who are firing at Israelis and egging them
on. And naturally when fire is returned, and some of these guttersnipes
are injured or killed, it will be all the Jews' fault. Ohm the upper
picture on the same web is one of the children injured when fire was
returned.
2. Betselem is a Far-Leftist anti-Israel group that claims to be a human
rights watchdog, although it denies that Jews have the human right to
defend themselves from terrorists and it is never particularly upset by
abuse of human rights of Arabs when they are trampled by the PLO.
On the other hand, Miki Gabrielov is one of the best singers in
Israel and one of my favorites. Gabrielov is best known for popularizing
Turkish folk music in Israel, of all things, and many of his hits are
Hebrew renditions of Turkish songs.
Well, it seems that Gabrielov and Betselem have a bit of a legal battle
going and it has to do with the refusal of Betselem to respect the human
rights and copy rights of Gabrielov. Actually, it has to do with Betselem
engaging in piracy.
One of Gabrielov's songs is the putting to music of a poem by Israeli
poet Natan Alterman entitled "Take off the Sunglasses, not gloomy, not
happy". (It sounds better in Hebrew.) Betselem stole the song and
rewrote the lyrics to make a "clip" and promote its own extremist
political agenda, and then manufactured 100,000 disks -
all without permission from Gabrielov. Gabrielov was not amused. Neither
will be the magistrate that hears the suit. (Haaretz Feb 12)
So here we have the spectacle of Radical Leftist Piracy of the music of
a great Israeli artist. By the same sorts of people who screamed it was
horrid that the Israeli Ambassador to Sweden "vandalized" the "art"
celebrating a suicide bomber mass murderer because art is sacred.
3. Nice piece by Scott Shore:
http://intellectualconservative.com/article3106.html
4. This is not a spoof:
Zeev Calling for Knesset Dress Code
12:48 Feb 10, '04 / 18 Shevat 5764
(IsraelNN.com) Shas MK Nissim Zeev is calling for a Knesset dress code,
explaining in his letter to the Knesset Speaker that in all parliaments in
the world, a non provocative dress code is expected and the same should
apply in Israel. A copy of the letter was also sent to the Knesset
Committee.
A decision must now be made if the matter will be discussed by the Knesset
Ethics Committee.
*** My proposal is striped prison garb, like the sort Elvis wore in
Jailhouse Rock. -- SP
5. This IS a spoof:
MANIC-DEPRESSIVE PALESTINIAN SUICIDE BOMBER KILLS SELF OVER FAILURE TO
EXPLODE
(West Bank, Israel) -- Palestinian mental health experts are alarmed at
the sharp increase in suicides by suicide bombers when their bombs fail to
explode. In the past two weeks, seven Palestinian suicide bombers
committed suicide when their bombs turned out to be duds. The most recent
victim was Ali bin Salaam, 17, an honor student from the town of
Bethlehem. Salaam was said to suffer from manic-depression and was said to
be upset that his girlfriend was recently stoned to death for fornication
when she accidentally displayed her left ankle in public.
"It's just so tragic," said Dr. Gamal ali Turiq, head of psychiatry at the
West Bank General Jihad Hospital. "So many young Palestinians see their
lives go up in smoke when their bombs fail to explode. I blame it on the
arms dealers who are selling my people inferior gunpowder and plastic
explosives. Is there no honor among these merchants of death?"
In related news, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan announced today that he
is establishing a special committee to investigate whether the Israeli
government has been playing a part in the recent rash of failed suicide
bombing attempts. "If Israel is found to be interfering with the right of
Palestinians to blow themselves up and kill hundreds of innocent
bystanders there will be serious consequences," said Annan at a news
conference yesterday. "The State of Israel might find itself excluded from
the invitation list of the UN's annual Christmas/Kwanzaa/Ramadan party."
William Grim for Iconoclast
Do Prisons Have Avon Ladies? ....
I writing to inquire if any of your readers knows whether or not cosmetics
(lipstick, eyeliner, face powder, etc.) are allowed in prison? I may be
spending a lot of time there in the near future, and I am quite worried
about whether or not I will be able to bring my makeup kit with me.
I don't mean to sound vain, but I really can't live without my makeup. If
I don't put on a good three coats of foundation in the morning I look like
a nose-less corpse with no chin!
I don't think I could live that way.
I'd probably scare off all my little friends.
What? It was all my little friends who got me in this mess in the first
place? But how could that be, I love little children...
Sorry, my lawyer is telling me to stop talking. He's already representing
Scott Peterson, so I guess he knows what he's doing (isn't terrible the
way California prosecutors persecute an innocent man, just cause he likes
to go fishing on Christmas Day?). Anyways, when I asked him about the
makeup issue, he had no clue.
If any of your readers are cross dressers, and have experience with
cosmetics in men's prisons, I hope they'll drop me a line.
Sincerely,
Michael Jackson
Neverland
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
1. Subject: Amram Mitzna Won the Last Election
In the last Israeli elections, Laborite Leftist Amram Mitzna ran on a
platform for unilateral Israeli withdrawals from the"occupied
territories" with no quid pro quo from the PLO in any form. Mitzna was
beaten in the largest election landslide in Israeli history.
Or was he?
In fact, Amram Mitzna won that election. Ariel Sharon's proposals for a
unilateral withdrawal/surrender in the Gaza Strip shows that Amram Mitzna
may have lost that election but he was victorious in imposing his suicidal
policies on Israel through Ariel Sharon. Sharon's new "Gaza First" plan is
nothing more than the implementation of the first stage of Mitzna's
platform. Gaza First? First before what?
Yes, Sharon is posturing that by evicting the Jews from the Gaza Strip in
an Israel-imposed ethnic cleansing of Jews there, he will indirectly be
strengthening the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Balderdash.
Why not acknowledge the logical conclusion from Sharon's proposal. If
driving the Jews out of Gaza strengthens those in the West Bank, then it
will only be a short time before Sharon and his people are negotiating
returning Haifa to the Arabs who left it, restoring to them lands and homes
they claim, all as a way to protect Israeli claims to Tel Aviv. Why not a
unilateral withdrawal by Israel from Haifa with no quid pro quo from the
PLO for that either? That in any case is, without a doubt, how the PLO
will interpret Sharon's sudden "generosity".
Shimon Peres, the man who did more to destroy his own country than any
other in the past century, has congratulated Sharon on having adopted the
Labor Party's platform as his own. Peres is correct for once.
2. Scandinavians Demonizing Jews:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/392461.html
3. Stupidity Awards for 2003. Memorable quotes:
"If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his
tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to
her in her old age."
- Charles Pierce in a January 5 Boston Globe Magazine article. Kopechne
drowned while trapped in Kennedy's submerged car off Chappaquiddick Island
in July 1969, an accident Kennedy did not report for several hours.
CBS's Lesley Stahl: "Today you have broadcast journalists who are avowedly
conservative....The voices that are being heard in broadcast media today,
are far more - the ones who are being heard - are far more likely to be on
the right and avowedly so, and therefore, more - almost stridently so, than
what you're talking about."
Host Cal Thomas: "Can you name a conservative journalist at CBS News?"
Stahl: "I don't know of anybody's political bias at CBS News....We try very
hard to get any opinion that we have out of our stories, and most of our
stories are balanced."
- Exchange on Fox News Channel's After Hours with Cal Thomas, January 18.
"I decided to put on my flag pin tonight - first time. Until now I haven't
thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for
everyone to see....I put it on to take it back. The flag's been hijacked
and turned into a logo - the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism....
"When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in
China when I saw Mao's Little Red Book on every official's desk,
omnipresent and unread. But more galling than anything are all those
moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while
writing books and running websites and publishing magazines attacking
dissenters as un-American....I put this on as a modest riposte to men with
flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington
think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don't have to
make it....I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we
should do to the people of Baghdad what bin Laden did to us."
- Bill Moyers on PBS's Now, February 28.
"A friend of mine here at CNN has a theory about the Bush administration.
They're convinced that everything Bill Clinton ever did was wicked, bad and
awful, and so they want to do the opposite....Clinton wanted to save all
that wilderness area in Alaska; and Mr. Bush wants to drill for oil there.
Clinton fussed about clean air; this president wants to ease new
restrictions on coal-burning power plants.... Clinton, my friend noted, had
surpluses. Obviously, the Bush administration thinks those are evil,
because what they want is deficits -- big ones, maybe the biggest ever."
- CNN's Bruce Morton on Late Edition, February 9.
"The size of the demonstrators, at least here, at least in Europe, seems to
underscore, Chris, that there are now perhaps two world superpowers.
There's the United States and then there are those millions of people who
took to the streets opposing U.S. policy."
- MSNBC's David Shuster to Hardball host Chris Matthews, February 17.
"Senator Hillary Clinton is at Ground Zero this morning to attend the
September 11th anniversary ceremony, and she joins us now. Good morning,
Senator Clinton....You've fought so much for the heroes of 9/11. You have
sought money for firefighters, you've taken the EPA to task for toning down
their report on air quality at Ground Zero. Has enough been done for the
heroes, the people who fought so bravely on that day?"
- CBS's Hannah Storm to Hillary Clinton on The Early Show, September 11.
"This week we were surprised to see several hundred artists and writers
walking through the streets of Baghdad to say thank you to Saddam Hussein.
He had just increased their monthly financial support. Cynical, you could
argue at this particular time, but the state has always supported the arts,
and some of the most creative people in the Arab world have always been
Iraqis. And whatever they think about Saddam Hussein in the privacy of
their homes, on this occasion they were praising his defense of the
homeland in the face of American threats."
- ABC's Peter Jennings in Baghdad, concluding the January 21 World News
Tonight
Mike Taibbi in Baghdad: "While the end to the Saddam regime means a return
to long-denied freedoms for all Iraqis, it may also mean at least a
temporary rollback of some hard-won freedoms for millions of Iraqi
women.... While Saddam's regime brutalized women - rape, torture, even
beheadings - his secular government also gave women more rights than their
counterparts in many other Islamic countries."
- NBC Nightly News, April 22.
"You became First Lady like no other First Lady before you. You had your
own interests, you got involved in public policy. No First Lady had done
that without being severely criticized. Did you realize what you were
getting into?....I don't think people realize how strong your faith is.''
- Barbara Walters to Sen. Hillary Clinton in a June 8 ABC special promoting
her book, "Living History."
"It was a party a hundred thousand strong, flowing haltingly below the
slated mansard roofs of Paris's stately avenues, accompanied by balloons
and banners and vendors selling foot-long hot dogs and fries. If there is
one thing the French know how to do, it is how to conduct a demonstration.
"Ladies in stiletto heels and fur-fringed jackets, fathers pushing
strollers trailing McDonald's balloons, drably dressed union members,
students in face paint and carnival clothes - all turned out to make some
noise. Yet despite the gay atmosphere beneath a brilliant blue sky, the
message was stark, even dark. " 'The United States is a barbarian country,'
shouted some. 'Bush, let's murder,' shouted others. One group chanted,
'Bush, Blair, Sharon, Putin, Chirac: Justice in Palestine, don't touch Iraq.' "
- Introduction of Craig Smith's February 16 New York Times story, about
anti-war protests in Paris, headlined, "Throwing a Party With a Purpose."
"This is the worst president ever. He [George W. Bush] is the worst
president in all of American history."
- Hearst White House columnist Helen Thomas at a Society for Professional
Journalism banquet, as quoted by the Torrance, California Daily Breeze's
John Bogert in a January 19 story.
Idiotic quotes from the media's most foremost idiots in 2003, courtesy
"This Year's Best Notable Quotables,"
Reseach Center (MRC)
Monday, February 09, 2004
Lest we all take ourselves too seriously, here is a humor break:
A list of politically incorrect bumper stickers:
National Suicide is Not a Peace Process
An entire Generation will Now Have to Pay for THEIR Stupidity
No Leftists, No Treason
The Solution is Empowerment (with big photo of electric chair)
Impeach Aharon Barak
Turn off their Lights
Envision Denazification
Teach Yassir to Debka at the End of a Rope
End the Illegal Palestinian Occupation of Israeli Lands
The Illegal Palestinian Occupation of Israeli Lands Corrupts
Take a Jewish Settler to Lunch
Put a Post-Zionist in a Cage
The Lobotomy Clinic - I am not just the Owner, I am also a Customer (with
photo of Peres)
Solve the Parking Congestion in Ramallah
Send Avrum to Ramallah but Don't Let Him Back
Pigskins!
Remove Palestinian Settlements from Israeli Lands
Send the Palestinian Settlers Back Home where They Came From
I Love the Smell of Napalm in the Morning
Protect Laboratory Animals: Put a Leftist in a Cage
Remember CHamor the Son of Shchem!
Send Arik Viagra
Let Yassir Try Tamar Gozinsky's Shaving Cream for a Change
Kick the Suicide Terrorists out of the Labor Party
Daisy Cutters for Gaza
Send Amir Peretz to Cuba
You bring the Tar and I'll Bring the Feathers
Haaretz - Black and White and Red all Over
Pillory for Peace
The Peace of the Brave (with photo of gravestone on which is engraved
Yassir - Lived Too Long)
Suha Looks Good in Black
Take the Mapai out of the Likud
Let 'Em Have a State in Guantanamo Bay
Tanks A Lot
For Every Jew a B-52
Defund the Kibbutzim
Kick 'em Out of Ramat Aviv and Send 'em Home to Yesha
IQ Tests for Seating Knesset Members Now
End the Axis of Evil between the Jewish Left and Arab Fascism
Bulldoze Orient House
Peace is Harmful for Flowers and Other Living Things
Another Soccer Mom for the Death Penalty
Fricassee 'Em
Jibril McNuggets
Buy Avrum a REAL Yarmulka
Let's Start with Corsica and Scotland
Reconstructionists have a Gaylord
Guns Don't Kill Terrorists, Jews Kill Terrorists
If You See this Police Van for Interrogating Palestinians A-Rocking, Don't
Come A-Knocking
Palestinian Refugees? Fuggedabowdit!
Give Beilin Cause for Wailin
De-Activate "Activists"
What Part of Denazification don't you Understand?
No Tenure, No Leftism
Is that a Feminist or a Bushido Wrestler?
Peace Now - Just Pretend that War Does Not Exist
Netsarim is our Stalingrad
The New Ayalon Highway - Send Ami Ayalon to Chechnya
Foreskin Implants for Meretz Voters
Hillary would look good in a chador.
No more Ahmed Tibi Heebie Jeebies
Honored Beloved Sir, I am a senior officer in the PLO and I would like to
offer you one third of the loot if you help me steal the money in the
coffers of the Palestinian Authority so please email me your bank account
information.
Other matters:
1. Ford Funding Terror:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11793
2. Welcome to the University of Duh:
http://israelnn.com/news.php3?id=57391
3. Hopw moderate are Islamist Moderates?
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12037
4. Boobacrats:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12055
5. Lehigh University goes Left-Bonkers:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12022
6. The Animal Rights Nuts are Back:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12072
7. Penn pro-Israel Professor being targeted for being politically
incorrect:?
Take a look and consider helping him out:
http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~fjgil/open.htm
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12095
8. Thought this was amusing:
Leave it to Robin Williams to come up with the perfect plan. What we need
now is for our UN Ambassador to stand up and repeat this message.
Robin Williams' plan...(Hard to argue with this logic!)
I see a lot of people yelling for peace, but I have not heard of a plan
for peace. So, here's my plan:
The US will apologize to the world for our "interference" in the affairs
of other countries, past & present. You know, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo,
Noriega, Milosovich, Saddam and the rest of those 'good ole boys.' We will
never "interfere" again.
We will withdraw our troops from all over the world, starting with
Germany, South Korea and the Philippines. They don't want us there anyway.
We would station troops at our borders and allow no one to sneak through
holes in the fence.
We will allow all illegal aliens 90 days to get their affairs together and
leave this country and will give them a free trip home. After 90 days the
remainder will be gathered up and deported immediately, regardless of who
or where they are. I'm sure France would welcome them.
All future visitors will be thoroughly checked and limited to 90 days,
unless given a special permit. No one from a terrorist nation would be
allowed in. If you don't like it there, change it yourself and don't hide
here. Asylum would never be available to anyone. We don't need any more
cab drivers or 7-11 cashiers.
No "students" over age 21. The older ones are the bombers. If they don't
attend classes, they get a "D" and it's back home, baby.
Energy wise, the US will make a strong effort to become self-sufficient.
This will include developing non-polluting sources of energy but will
require a temporary drilling of oil in the Alaskan wilderness. The caribou
will have to cope for a while.
Offer Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries $10 a barrel for
their oil. If they don't like it, we go some place else. They can go
somewhere else to sell their production. (About a week of the wells
filling up the storage sites would be enough.)
If there is a famine or other natural catastrophe in the world, we will
not "interfere." They can pray to Allah or whomever, for seeds, rain,
cement, or whatever they need. Besides, most of what we give them is
stolen or given to the army . The people who need it most get little or
nothing.
Ship the UN Headquarters to an isolated island some place. We don't need
the spies and fair weather friends here. Besides, the building would make
a good homeless shelter or lockup for illegal aliens.
All Americans must go to charm and beauty school. That way, no one can
call us "Ugly Americans" any longer.
The Language we speak is ENGLISH.....learn it...or LEAVE...
Now, ain't that a winner of a plan.
"The Statue of Liberty is no longer saying 'Give me your poor, your tired,
your huddled masses." She's got a baseball bat and she's yelling, 'You
want a piece of me?'"
9. Solution for Demographic Problem with the Palestinians?:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1537&ncid=1537&e=6&u=/afp/20040206/wl_uk_afp/greece_britain_air_040206124057
10. The Return of Anti-Semitism:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12111
See also:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1076233682575&p=1006953079865
Sunday, February 08, 2004
I was just informed that the Toronto Zionist Council has issued the
following statement, which I would like to bring to your attention:
Subject: copy of our letters to BGU/Toronto/Montreal /Isarael
Mr. Sydney Chelsky, President Toronto, February 9, 2004
Canadian Friends of Ben Gurion University
1000 Finch Avenue West, Suite 506
Downsview, ON
M3J 2V5
Dear Sir,
In the matter of the suit brought by Dr. Neve Gordon, an academic of Ben Gurion University against Dr. Steven Plaut, a professor of economics at the University of Haifa, we wish you to note the following:
Dr Gordon's, suit contends that Dr. Plaut called him an anti-Semite and therefore claims libel. Dr. Plaut in his response claims that Dr. Gordon has repeatedly called Israel a fascist country which engages in state terrorism that does not differ morally from the atrocities committed by Palestinian terrorists. An Internet search did not turn up a single piece in which Dr. Gordon sympathized with Israeli victims of terror or the Israeli government's search for a way to protect its citizens. A listing of his articles showed that most of them have been published in pro- Palestinian and leftist political journals rather than in academic publications.
Dr. Gordon's libel suit against Dr. Plaut is based on two sets of comments that Dr. Plaut published on the Internet. In one, Dr. Plaut described Dr. Gordon as a "groupie" of Norman Finkelstein, an American author who has been denounced as a Holocaust denier and an anti-Semite by many publications, including the Washington Post, and by such luminaries as Elie Wiesel, Alan Dershowitz, Dennis Prager, and Jonah Daniel Goldhagen. The New York Times compared Mr. Finkelstein's book, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
A second comment by Dr. Plaut is also cited by Dr. Gordon in his suit. Dr. Plaut noted that Dr. Gordon, as a member of Taayush, a radical group made up of Israeli leftists and Arabs, visited Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat in early 2002 in Ramallah when the latter was protecting Palestinian terrorists who had murdered Tourism Minister Rachavim Ze'evi from being arrested by Israeli troops. Dr. Plaut called those Israelis acting as human shields "Judenrat wanna-bes," explaining that they had appointed themselves representatives and liaisons to mass murderers of Jews. Dr. Plaut has also described Dr. Gordon as a fanatic anti-Semite.
At a time when anti-Semitism is rampant and Israel is being vilified for the mere fact of trying to defend her citizens from terrorism, Dr. Gordon's writings support the position of our enemies.
When Canadian supporters of Ben Gurion University, will be made aware of Dr. Gordon's activities, they will be justified in being outraged that this respected institution - named after David Ben Gurion, a true Zionist and founder of the Jewish State - continues to employ Dr. Gordon, an outspoken anti-Zionist, defender of terrorists and supporter of Holocaust deniers.
Dr. Gordon is going way beyond the canons of academic freedom and reducing debate to harassment suits; he is harming the very essence of university freethinking. The suit by Dr. Gordon is both mischievous and destructive and we at the Toronto Zionist Council request that you, Canadian Friends of Ben Gurion University, decry his actions and take a stand against his suit in particular and the danger to free speech in general.
Sincerely,
Toronto Zionist Council,
Joseph Winter, President,
Dr. Marvin Maurer, Education Director
cc. Prof. Avishay Braverman
President of Ben Gurion University
Friday, February 06, 2004
"The Nation" is a Far Leftist anti-Israel political rag published in the
United States. Among its featured columnists is Neve Gordon, the
political science lecturer from Ben Gurion University who is suing me in a
SLAPP suit for "libel"
because I dared to criticize his political articles and his public
political behavior. SLAPP stands for
Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation and SLAPP suits are
anti-democratic "libel suits" intended to suppress the freedom of speech
of one's critics.
Gordon's home magazine The Nation this week ran an openly anti-Semitic
article (not by Gordon). Here it is, so you can make up your own mind:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040216&s=hirst
Thought for the Year:
Zephaniah Ch. 2; verses 4-7 (addressed to the nations in the Land of
Israel):
4. For Gaza shall be forsaken Hebrew pun: aza... azuvah], and Ashkelon a
desolation; they shall drive o[ut Ashdod at the noonday, and Ekron shall
be rooted up [Hebrew pun: Ekron... tei'aker].
5. Woe unto the inhabitants of the sea-coast, the nation of the
Cherethites [Hebrew Pun: Kreitim; part of the Philistine nation; from the
word to cut off, tear away]! the word of HaShem is against you, O Canaan,
the land of the Philistines; I will even destroy thee, that there shall be
no inhabitant.
6. And the sea-coast shall be pastures, even meadows for shepherds, and
folds for flocks.
7. And it shall be a portion for the remnant of the house of Judah,
whereon they shall feed; in the houses of Ashkelon shall they lie down in
the evening; for HaShem their G-d will remember them, and turn their
captivity.
1. Might the ex-Israeli "artist" in Sweden who made the "sculpture"
celebrating the suicide bomber be using a false name for his new
masterpiece? http://www.local6.com/news/2815142/detail.html
2. God Bless Bernard Lewis:
A Historian's Take on Islam
Steers U.S. in Terrorism Fight
Bernard Lewis's Blueprint --
Sowing Arab Democracy --
Is Facing a Test in Iraq
By PETER WALDMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Bernard Lewis often tells audiences about an encounter he once had in
Jordan. The Princeton University historian, author of more than 20 books
on Islam and the Middle East, says he was chatting with Arab friends in
Amman when one of them trotted out an argument familiar in that part of
the world.
"We have time, we can wait," he quotes the Jordanian as saying. "We got
rid of the Crusaders. We got rid of the Turks. We'll get rid of the Jews."
Hearing this claim "one too many times," Mr. Lewis says, he politely shot
back, "Excuse me, but you've got your history wrong. The Turks got rid of
the Crusaders. The British got rid of the Turks. The Jews got rid of the
British. I wonder who is coming here next."
The vignette, recounted in the 87-year-old scholar's native British
accent, always garners laughs. Yet he tells it to underscore a serious
point. Most Islamic countries have failed miserably at modernizing their
societies, he contends, beckoning outsiders -- this time, Americans -- to
intervene.
Call it the Lewis Doctrine. Though never debated in Congress or sanctified
by presidential decree, Mr. Lewis's diagnosis of the Muslim world's
malaise, and his call for a U.S. military invasion to seed democracy in
the Mideast, have helped define the boldest shift in U.S. foreign policy
in 50 years. The occupation of Iraq is putting the doctrine to the test.
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For much of the second half of the last century, America viewed the
Mideast and the rest of the world through a prism shaped by George Kennan,
author of the doctrine of "containment." In a celebrated 1947 article in
Foreign Affairs focused on the Soviet Union, Mr. Kennan gave structure to
U.S. policy in the Cold War. It placed the need to contain Soviet
ambitions above all else.
Terrorism has replaced Moscow as the global foe. And now America, having
outlasted the Soviets to become the sole superpower, no longer seeks to
contain but to confront, defeat and transform. How successful it is at
remolding Iraq and the rest of the Mideast could have a huge impact on
what sort of superpower America will be for decades to come: bold and
assertive -- or inward, defensive and cut off.
As mentor and informal adviser to some top U.S. officials, Mr. Lewis has
helped coax the White House to shed decades of thinking about Arab regimes
and the use of military power. Gone is the notion that U.S. policy in the
oil-rich region should promote stability above all, even if it means
taking tyrants as friends. Also gone is the corollary notion that
fostering democratic values in these lands risks destabilizing them.
Instead, the Lewis Doctrine says fostering Mideast democracy is not only
wise but imperative.
After Sept. 11, 2001, as policy makers fretted urgently about how to
understand and deal with the new enemy, Mr. Lewis helped provide an
answer. If his prescription is right, the U.S. may be able to blunt
terrorism and stabilize a region that, as the chief exporter of oil,
powers the industrial world and underpins the U.S.-led economic order. If
it's wrong, as his critics contend, America risks provoking sharper
conflicts that spark more terrorism and undermine energy security.
After the terror attacks, White House staffers disagreed about how to
frame the enemy, says David Frum, who was a speechwriter for President
Bush. One group believed Muslim anger was all a misunderstanding -- that
Muslims misperceived America as decadent and godless. Their solution:
Launch a vast campaign to educate Muslims about America's true virtue.
Much of that effort, widely belittled in the press and overseas, was
quietly abandoned.
A faction led by political strategist Karl Rove believed soul-searching
over "why Muslims hate us" was misplaced, Mr. Frum says. Mr. Rove summoned
Mr. Lewis to address some White House staffers, military aides and staff
members of the National Security Council. The historian recited the modern
failures of Arab and Muslim societies and argued that anti-Americanism
stemmed from their own inadequacies, not America's. Mr. Lewis also met
privately with Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Mr.
Frum says he soon noticed Mr. Bush carrying a marked-up article by Mr.
Lewis among his briefing papers. A White House spokesman declined to
comment.
Says Mr. Frum: "Bernard comes with a very powerful explanation for why
9/11 happened. Once you understand it, the policy presents itself
afterward."
His exposition and the policies it helped set in motion heralded a
decisive break with the doctrine that prevailed during the Cold War.
Containment, Mr. Kennan said, had "nothing to do with outward histrionics:
with threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward 'toughness.'
" It rested on the somber calculation that even the most aggressive enemy
wouldn't risk its own demise by provoking war with a powerful U.S.
AMERICA ABROAD
Some ideas that have shaped U.S. foreign policy:
1900: Open Door Policy rejects efforts to carve up China or restrict its
ports
1901-09: Gunboat Diplomacy used by Theodore Roosevelt to exert U.S.
influence and deter Europeans from Americas
1917: Making the world safe for democracy is Woodrow Wilson's rationale
for entering World War I
1919-20: Isolationism rises as U.S. shuns League of Nations Wilson
championed
1930: Protectionism reflected in Smoot-Hawley tariff bill
1932-3: Good Neighbor Policy of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt
forswears armed intervention in Latin America
1941: FDR looks to a world with Four Freedoms: of speech, of worship, from
want and from fear--meaning deep arms reduction
1947: Containment of Soviet power by counterforce is urged by George F.
Kennan; later, notion of mutually assured destruction helps keep
U.S.-Soviet relations peaceful
1947: Truman Doctrine, focused on Turkey and Greece, says U.S. will back
free peoples resisting armed minorities or outside pressures
1948: Secretary of State George C. Marshall implements Marshall Plan that
sets out to lift Europe from postwar poverty
1957: Eisenhower Doctrine offers U.S. aid to any Mideast country
threatened by communism
1960s: Domino theory and vow by John Kennedy to "bear any burden, pay any
price" for freedom motivate U.S. to fight Vietnam war
1969-76: Realpolitik of Henry Kissinger leads to opening with China,
detente with Soviets
Late 1970s: Human rights guides foreign policy in Carter years
Mid-1980s: Reagan Doctrine aids insurgents fighting leftist governments in
Central America, Africa and Afghanistan
1990: New World Order of superpower cooperation declared by George H.W.
Bush after Iraq invades Kuwait
2001-2003: "Lewis Doctrine" calls for seeding democracy in failed Mideast
states to defang terrorism
The Lewis Doctrine posits no such rational foe. It envisions not a clash
of interests or even ideology, but of cultures. In the Mideast, the font
of the terrorism threat, America has but two choices, "both disagreeable,"
Mr. Lewis has written: "Get tough or get out." His celebration, rather
than shunning, of toughness is shared by several other influential U.S.
Mideast experts, including Fouad Ajami and Richard Perle.
A central Lewis theme is that Muslims have had a chip on their shoulders
since 1683, when the Ottomans failed for the second time to sack Christian
Vienna. "Islam has been on the defensive" ever since, Mr. Lewis wrote in a
1990 essay called "The Roots of Muslim Rage," where he described a "clash
of civilizations," a concept later popularized by Harvard political
scientist Samuel Huntington. For 300 years, Mr. Lewis says, Muslims have
watched in horror and humiliation as the Christian civilizations of Europe
and North America have overshadowed them militarily, economically and
culturally.
"The question people are asking is why they hate us. That's the wrong
question," said Mr. Lewis on C-SPAN shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.
"In a sense, they've been hating us for centuries, and it's very natural
that they should. You have this millennial rivalry between two world
religions, and now, from their point of view, the wrong one seems to be
winning."
He continued: "More generally ... you can't be rich, strong, successful
and loved, particularly by those who are not rich, not strong and not
successful. So the hatred is something almost axiomatic. The question
which we should be asking is why do they neither fear nor respect us?"
For Mr. Lewis and officials influenced by his thinking, instilling respect
or at least fear through force is essential for America's security. In
this formulation, the current era of American dominance, sometimes called
"Pax Americana," echoes elements of Pax Britannica, imposed by the British
Empire Mr. Lewis served as a young intelligence officer after graduate
school.
Eight days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with the Pentagon still smoldering,
Mr. Lewis addressed the U.S. Defense Policy Board. Mr. Lewis and a friend,
Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi -- now a member of the interim Iraqi
Governing Council -- argued for a military takeover of Iraq to avert
still-worse terrorism in the future, says Mr. Perle, who then headed the
policy board.
A few months later, in a private dinner with Dick Cheney at the vice
president's residence, Mr. Lewis explained why he was cautiously
optimistic the U.S. could gradually build democracy in Iraq, say others
who attended. Mr. Lewis also held forth on the dangers of appearing weak
in the Muslim world, a lesson Mr. Cheney apparently took to heart.
Speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press" just before the invasion of Iraq, Mr.
Cheney said: "I firmly believe, along with men like Bernard Lewis, who is
one of the great students of that part of the world, that strong, firm
U.S. response to terror and to threats to the United States would go a
long way, frankly, toward calming things in that part of the world."
The Lewis Doctrine, in effect, had become U.S. policy.
"Bernard Lewis has been the single most important intellectual influence
countering the conventional wisdom on managing the conflict between
radical Islam and the West," says Mr. Perle, who remains a close adviser
to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "The idea that a big part of the
problem is failed societies on the Arab side is very important. That is
not the point of view of the diplomatic establishment."
Mr. Lewis declined to discuss his official contacts in Washington. When
told his political influence was a focus of this article, he turned down
an interview request. "It's still too early," he said. "Let's see how
things turn out" in Iraq. In speeches and articles, Mr. Lewis continues to
advocate assertive U.S. actions in the Mideast, but his long-term
influence is likely to turn on whether his neoconservative acolytes retain
their power in Washington in years to come.
Born in London in 1916, Mr. Lewis was drawn to the study of history and
foreign languages by a deep curiosity about "what things looked like from
the other side," he said on C-SPAN in April. He earned undergraduate and
doctoral degrees in Mideast and Islamic history from the School of
Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, then spent five
years working on Mideast issues for British intelligence during World War
II.
Among other things, his wartime service taught him the dangers of
appeasement, he told a seminar at the University of Toronto last spring.
He said speeches by foes of war in Iraq reminded him of the arguments of
peace activists in the 1930s. "All I can say is thank God they didn't
prevail then," he said. "If they had, Hitler would have won the war and
the Nazis would be ruling the world."
In 1945, Mr. Lewis returned to the University of London as a professor,
where he earned renown in Ottoman and Turkish history. He was lured to
Princeton in 1974 and soon became a mentor to many of those now known as
neoconservatives.
Mr. Perle recalls hearing Mr. Lewis speak in the early 1970s and inviting
him to lunch with Mr. Perle's then-boss, the late Sen. Henry "Scoop"
Jackson of Washington. "Lewis became Jackson's guru, more or less," says
Mr. Perle. Mr. Lewis also was an adviser to another Democrat, the late
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, when Mr. Moynihan was ambassador to the United
Nations in the 1970s. He formed lasting ties with several young Jackson
and Moynihan aides who went on to apply his views to Iraq. Among them were
Paul Wolfowitz, now deputy defense secretary; Elliott Abrams, now National
Security Council Mideast chief; and Frank Gaffney Jr., a former Pentagon
official. Talking with Mr. Lewis, Mr. Perle says, was "like going to
Delphi to see the oracle."
Mr. Lewis retired from teaching in 1986 but has maintained ties with many
former students in high posts. One, Pentagon analyst Harold Rhode, has
played prominent roles as Mr. Wolfowitz's adviser on Islamic affairs, as a
planner of the Iraq occupation and as an aide to Pentagon strategist
Andrew Marshall. Mr. Lewis dedicated his latest book, "The Crisis of
Islam," to Mr. Rhode -- who says Mr. Lewis is "like a father to me."
Mr. Lewis is also close to government circles in Israel and Turkey --
non-Arab lands he describes as the only successful modern states in the
region. He warmly praises Kemal Attaturk, who made Turkey a secular
republic after World War I by suppressing Islam. (He has also said the
Ottoman Turks' killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 wasn't
genocide but the brutal byproduct of war. It was a stance for which a
French court convicted Mr. Lewis in 1995 under France's Holocaust-denial
statute, imposing a token penalty.) Israeli experts say Mr. Lewis's
contacts with Turkish generals and politicians helped cement
Israeli-Turkish military ties in the 1990s.
Mr. Lewis became politically involved with Israel by the mid-1970s, when
he wrote an article for the American Jewish Committee publication
Commentary. At a time when Israel was dead-set against a Palestinian
state, he recommended that Israel "test the willingness" of the Palestine
Liberation Organization to negotiate a two-state solution to the conflict.
But Mr. Lewis also wrote that Palestinian Arabs didn't have a historical
claim to a state, because Palestine hadn't existed as a country prior to
British rule in 1918. Israeli leaders jumped on that part of his thesis.
The late Prime Minister Golda Meir required her cabinet to read the
article, says Amnon Cohen of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who worked
for the West Bank military government. He says Mrs. Meir summoned Mr.
Lewis and "they spoke for hours. Her aides tried to end it, but Golda kept
going and Bernard didn't want to be rude. She was very much in favor of
his point" that Palestine as a nation had never existed.
Mr. Lewis began spending months at a time at the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv
University in the 1980s. He became the confidant of successive Israeli
prime ministers, including Ariel Sharon. Mr. Cohen organizes an annual
conference at Hebrew University in honor of Mr. Lewis's birthday.
Mr. Wolfowitz took part by videoconference in 2002. Signaling the
administration's acceptance of Mr. Lewis's prescription for Iraq, Mr.
Wolfowitz said: "Bernard has taught how to understand the complex and
important history of the Middle East, and use it to guide us where we will
go next to build a better world for generations to come."
Mr. Lewis's work has many critics. Some academics say Mr. Lewis's
descriptions of Arab and Muslim failures epitomize what the late Edward
Said of Columbia University dubbed "Orientalism" -- the shading of history
to justify Western conquest. Mideast historian Juan Cole of the University
of Michigan praises Mr. Lewis's scholarly works earlier in his career but
says his more-popular writings of recent years tend to caricature Muslims
as poor losers, helpless and enraged.
Mr. Cole is among those who say Mr. Lewis's call for military intervention
to transform failed Muslim states risks making the culture clash between
Islamic lands and the West worse. So far, they say, Iraq looks more like a
breeding ground for terrorism than a showcase of democracy -- not
surprising, they say, given that the U.S. invaded an old and proud
civilization.
"Lewis has lived so long, he's managed to live into an era when some
people in Washington are reviving empire thinking," says Mr. Cole. "He's
never understood the realities of political and social mobilization and
the ways they make empire untenable."
Ilan Pappe of Haifa University says Mr. Lewis's view that political
cultures can be remade through force contributed to Israel's decision to
invade Lebanon in 1982. "It took the Israelis 18 years, and 1,000 soldiers
killed, to abandon that strategy," Mr. Pappe says. "If the Americans
operate under the same assumptions in Iraq, they'll fail the way the
Israelis failed."
After Sept. 11, a book by Mr. Lewis called "What Went Wrong?" was a
best-seller that launched the historian, at age 85, as an unlikely
celebrity. Witty and a colorful storyteller, he hit the talk-show and
lecture circuits, arguing in favor of U.S. intervention in Iraq as a first
step toward democratic transformation in the Mideast. Historically,
tyranny was foreign to Islam, Mr. Lewis told audiences, while consensual
government, if not elections, has deep roots in the Mideast. He said Iraq,
with its oil wealth, prior British tutelage and long repression under
Saddam Hussein, was the right place to start moving the Mideast toward an
open political system.
Audiences lapped it up. At the Harvard Club in New York last spring,
guests crowded the main hall beneath a huge elephant head, sipping
cocktails and waiting for a word with the historian before his speech. On
a day when Baghdad was falling to U.S. forces, one woman wanted to know if
the American victory would make Arabs more violent. Mr. Lewis politely
deflected the question.
When the throng shifted, another interrogator pushed forward, this one
clearly intent on the possible next phase of America's remolding of the
Mideast. "Should we negotiate with Iran's ayatollahs?" asked Henry
Kissinger, drink in hand.
"Certainly not!" Mr. Lewis responded.
Up on the podium, Mr. Lewis lambasted the belief of some Mideast experts
at the State Department and elsewhere that Arabs weren't ready for
democracy -- that a "friendly tyrant" was the best the U.S. could hope for
in Iraq. "That policy," he quipped, "is called 'pro-Arab.' "
Others, like himself, believe Iraqis are heirs to a great civilization,
one fully capable, "with some guidance," of democratic rule, he said.
"That policy," he added with a rueful smile, "is called 'imperialism.' "
Write to Peter Waldman at peter.waldman@wsj.com8
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107576070484918411,00.html
Hyperlinks in this Article:
(1) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107568575133017655,00.html
(2) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107542341587316028,00.html
(3) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107533847490914729,00.html
(4) javascript:
window.open('http://online.wsj.com/documents/info-paxam04-frameset.html','paxam04','toolbar=no,scrollbars=no,location=no,width=400,height=500,left=70,top=30');
void('');
(5) http://online.wsj.com/documents/P1-AB131_DEMOCRACY.pdf
(6) http://wsj./com/iraq
(7) http://wsj.com/iraq
(8) mailto:peter.waldman@wsj.com
Updated February 3, 2004 2:33 p.m.
3. How to Protest Marriage from the Reform Synagogue:
A Citizen's Guide
To Protecting Marriage
By MITT ROMNEY
No matter how you feel about gay marriage, we should be able to agree that
the citizens and their elected representatives must not be excluded from a
decision as fundamental to society as the definition of marriage. There
are lessons from my state's experience that may help other states preserve
the rightful participation of their legislatures and citizens, and avoid
the confusion now facing Massachusetts.
In a decision handed down in November, a divided Supreme Judicial Court of
Massachusetts detected a previously unrecognized right in our 200-year-old
state constitution that permits same-sex couples to wed. I believe that
4-3 decision was wrongly decided and is deeply mistaken.
Contrary to the court's opinion, marriage is not "an evolving paradigm."
It is deeply rooted in the history, culture and tradition of civil
society. It predates our Constitution and our nation by millennia. The
institution of marriage was not created by government and it should not be
redefined by government.
Marriage is a fundamental and universal social institution. It encompasses
many obligations and benefits affecting husband and wife, father and
mother, son and daughter. It is the foundation of a harmonious family
life. It is the basic building block of society: The development,
productivity and happiness of new generations are bound inextricably to
the family unit. As a result, marriage bears a real relation to the
well-being, health and enduring strength of society.
Because of marriage's pivotal role, nations and states have chosen to
provide unique benefits and incentives to those who choose to be married.
These benefits are not given to single citizens, groups of friends, or
couples of the same sex. That benefits are given to married couples and
not to singles or gay couples has nothing to do with discrimination; it
has everything to do with building a stable new generation and nation.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DOW JONES REPRINTS
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It is important that the defense of marriage not become an attack on gays,
on singles or on nontraditional couples. We must recognize the right of
every citizen to live in the manner of his or her own choosing. In fact,
it makes sense to ensure that essential civil rights, protection from
violence and appropriate societal benefits are afforded to all citizens,
be they single or combined in nontraditional relationships.
So, what to do?
Act now to protect marriage in your state. Thirty-seven states -- 38 with
recent actions by Ohio -- have a Defense of Marriage Act. Twelve states,
including Massachusetts, do not. I urge my fellow governors and all state
legislators to review and, if necessary, strengthen the laws concerning
marriage. Look to carefully delineate in the acts themselves the
underlying, compelling state purposes. Explore, as well, amendments to the
state constitution. In Massachusetts, gay rights advocates in years past
successfully thwarted attempts to call a vote on a proposed constitutional
amendment banning gay marriage. This cannot happen again. It is imperative
that we proceed with the legitimate process of amending our state
constitution.
Beware of activist judges. The Legislature is our lawmaking body, and it
is the Legislature's job to pass laws. As governor, it is my job to carry
out the laws. The Supreme Judicial Court decides cases where there is a
dispute as to the meaning of the laws or the constitution. This is not
simply a separation of the branches of government, it is also a balance of
powers: One branch is not to do the work of the other. It is not the job
of judges to make laws, the job of legislators to command the National
Guard, or my job to resolve litigation between citizens. If the powers
were not separated this way, an official could make the laws, enforce
them, and stop court challenges to them. No one branch or person should
have that kind of power. It is inconsistent with a constitutional
democracy that guarantees to the people the ultimate power to control
their government.
With the Dred Scott case, decided four years before he took office,
President Lincoln faced a judicial decision that he believed was terribly
wrong and badly misinterpreted the U.S. Constitution. Here is what Lincoln
said: "If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the
whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,
the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in
personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers,
having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands
of that eminent tribunal." By its decision, the Supreme Judicial Court of
Massachusetts circumvented the Legislature and the executive, and assumed
to itself the power of legislating. That's wrong.
Act at the federal level. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Defense
of Marriage Act. While the law protects states from being forced to
recognize gay marriage, activist state courts could reach a different
conclusion, just as ours did. It would be disruptive and confusing to have
a patchwork of inconsistent marriage laws between states. Amending the
Constitution may be the best and most reliable way to prevent such
confusion and preserve the institution of marriage. Sometimes we forget
that the ultimate power in our democracy is not in the Supreme Court but
rather in the voice of the people. And the people have the exclusive right
to protect their nation and constitution from judicial overreaching.
People of differing views must remember that real lives and real people
are deeply affected by this issue: traditional couples, gay couples and
children. We should conduct our discourse with decency and respect for
those with different opinions. The definition of marriage is not a matter
of semantics; it will have lasting impact on society however it is
ultimately resolved. This issue was seized by a one-vote majority of the
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. We must now act to preserve the
voice of the people and the representatives they elect.
Mr. Romney is governor of Massachusetts.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107594365960321326,00.html
Updated February 5, 2004
4. Unrelated to other things, you will love this:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040204/ap_on_re_us/hooters_school_2
5. Zionist Provocation:
http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article.jhtml?articleID=724262
6. Anti-Semitism as a "Human Right":
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1075954582547&p=1006953079865
7. Yossi Beilin is the father of the Spanky-and-Alfalfa-Make-Peace Plan:
Here are some letters from the Jerusalem Post on him:
Railin' at Beilin
Sir, - One wonders, especially at this time, how a dreadful little man
like Yossi Beilin could still warrant a sentence, let alone an entire
column ("What happened to Yossi Beilin," January 30). The story of
littleness that seeks to be big is an old one on this bleeding planet.
More often than not it produces a vast field of corpses. Beilin's
particular story, revolting at the core, combines personal pathos with
national tragedy in a way that can only make decent people shudder.
LOUIS RENE BERES
West Lafayette, Indiana
Sir, - From your "Dilbert" cartoon (February 1): "The definition of
insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result."
HULA K. SMITH
Tel Aviv
Sir, - First I thought you were being sarcastic. Maybe the pre-Oslo Beilin
had some constructive ideas. But when Oslo proved him a fool, along with
Shimon Peres and others, Beilin became the Israeli Benedict Arnold.
ALBERT G. SILVERTON
Upland, California
Thursday, February 05, 2004
Subject: A Public Choice Analysis of the Middle East 'Road Map' - a Debate
in Public Choice
Subject: A "Heads Up" for a Long Posting
This short posting will be followed by a rather long one. If it does not
interest you or you think it will jam your mailbox, just delete and accept
my apology.
Public Choice is a subfield of economics, and it overlaps partly with
law and with political science and with conflict resolution. The leading
institution in the world in this field is George Mason University, sporting
two separate Nobel Prize winners who have worked on this subject
there. And the leading academic journal in this area is named "Public
Choice" and is published by the same people at George Mason.
In January 2004, the journal devoted much of its issue to a "Public
Choice" Debate over the Middle East Road Map, between one Tyler Cowan from
the University of Texas, who was gung ho in favor, and your humble
curmudgeon, who was gung ho not.
I believe you will find the debate very interesting, if a bit
long. If you are bored by Cowan's opening piece, skip to the in-depth
rebuttal and analysis of the "Road Map that follows it, by me. There is
relatively little economic jargon and no equations nor tables nor
statistics. Just an academic debate, which you may find
illuminating. From my point of view, the achievement is to have been able
to educate an entire large branch of academia about what the Middle East
conflict is about, in one of the leading academic journals.
Hope you find it of interest.
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
1. The Un-Greening of Tu-B'shvat
By Steven Plaut
University of Haifa
Almost everything that most people "know" about Tu-B'shvat is totally
wrong and completely false. Tu B'shvat, the 15th day of the month of
Shvat in the religious calendar, has been deconstructed in recent years
and converted into a holiday of ecology and environmentalist political
agitprop. It is waved about by the Tikkun Olam Pagans as political banner
to demand that all Jews support the Green political agenda. The wacko
pagan "Eco-Judaism" movement, including its Tikkun dervishes, has made it
their holiest of all holidays, a day to hug bushes and worship tree
spirits and nature. And Jewish assimilationist liberals)in the United
States use it as theological ammunition to disarm anyone criticizing
environmentalist fanatics.
Tu B'shvat is NOT a holiday of ecology, and has nothing to do with
environmentalism. It also is not a day in which Jews celebrate pristine
forests, national parks and wilderness areas. It is, if anything, the
very opposite. It is the celebration of agri-business and exploitation of
nature for human consumption.
Tu B'shvat is nominally the "New Year of the Trees" (called this in
the Talmud), but I doubt if one in 100 liberal politically active Jews can
correctly explain in what sense it is or what this means, and I doubt that
any follower of Arthur Waskow or reader of Tikkun magazine on the planet
could explain these things correctly.
Tu B'shvat is decidedly NOT the time when Jews celebrate the
blossoming of trees. It is the middle of winter when, even in Israel,
almost no trees are blossoming. (The almond tree is an exception.) The
custom of going out and planting trees on Tu-B'shvat is a modern
deconstruction of the meaning of the day, and is in fact rather silly.
Tu-B'Shvat is the WORST part of the year in which to try to plant trees
and get them to grow. I have no doubt that 80% of the famous saplings
planted on Tu B'Shvat by Israeli school children never really take root
and grow.
If anything, Tu B'Shvat is the "New Year of Trees" precisely because
it is when trees are NOT blossoming and when it is the very WORST time to
be planting saplings. Tu B'Shvat is the time when the agricultural year
for produce begins, for religious counting purposes. For example,
religious laws having to do with farm produce, such as the sabbatical of
the land every 7th year, or the tithes on annual produce donated to the
Levites or the Temple, or the counting of growth years to determine when
fruit becomes edible, require a chronological basis for counting. The
logical time to start counting is exactly when nothing in nature is
happening or growing, in exactly the same way that the time to start
counting a New Moon (for the New Month) is when it is not there at all.
It makes the division into annual cycles easier and more logical for
counting and taxation purposes.
Tu B'Shvat is a happy time simply because farmers are about to begin
a new agri-cycle. This is so in exactly the same sense as the "New Year
for Farm Animals", also discussed in the Talmud although completely
forgotten by almost all Jews, which starts on the first day of Ellul in
late summer. Tu Bshvat is a fiscal-tax New Year, more like April 15 in
the US (the day you pay your taxes) than a Save the Earth and the Whales
Day. Not only is it not a harvest day, it is a day when most trees are
bare, and where dry fruits are eaten because there are so few fresh fruits
in season, even in Israel. Never mind that in Israel these days, almost
all the dry Tu B'Shvat fruits come from Turkey.
Because it is a day in which the annual business cycle in
agri-business begins, there is not the slightest smidgen of an
environmentalist political agenda in the real meaning of the day. (In
fact, Tu B'Shvat is really no holiday at all in any sense and does not
have any liturgy or prayers of its own, other than the routine blessings
over foods one says every day.) Because it is a celebration of farming,
it certainly cannot be used as religious artillery ammunition by those who
demand that pristine rain forests and wilderness areas be preserved and
their conversion into farms be prevented. People who want to preserve
national parks and natural areas are free to lobby for these, but they
will find no theological support for their position in the real Tu
B'Shvat.
SO why do so many people think Tu B'Shvat has something to do with
preventing greenhouse gasses or promoting animal rights or preserving rain
forests? Because the Tikkun Olam Pagans, the assimilationist
Leftism-as-Judaism proponents of pseudo-Judaism in the Diaspora and in
Israel, have intentionally hijacked and distorted its meaning altogether.
Want to celebrate Tu B'Shvat in the real manner it was intended?
Chop down a tree for lumber, slaughter some farm animals for dinner, build
a farm in the forest, and fish to your heart's content.
2. Columbia U hires a Jihadnik:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12011
3. "Free Speech" for terrorism:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12016
4. Rewarding Terror:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12020
5. Could you send these good folks a yasher koach?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact: Bryan Pravda, Executive Director of Public Relations
(College Republicans at Texas) 512-663-8471
The College Republicans at Texas are encouraging students to wear shirts
that read, "If I were a Homicide Bomber you'd be dead right now. Do not
let terrorists deter democracy! Support America. Support Israel."
The T-shirts, which the College Republicans created and are selling on
their website, http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/cr, are in response to the
on-going
terrorist attacks around the world.
Bryan Pravda, Executive Director of Public Relations for the College
Republicans at Texas, said, "We are wearing these shirts in classrooms, on
buses, and in local coffee shops. The aim of the message is for people to
appreciate
the freedom in which they are living." Pravda continued, "Both America
and Israel want peace, but the war on terror is necessary so citizens do
not have
to live in fear."
Brian Bodine, Chairman of the College Republicans at Texas, asserted,
"Freedom and liberty should not have to be attributed to the Republican
Party or
the Democrat Party. However, President Bush is the only leader [out of
the
Presidential candidates] firmly defending these inalienable rights."
Pravda stated, "Gruesome and horrific murders targeted at the innocent
in Israel, America, Turkey, Iraq, and other allies of freedom, have called
us into action in creating these shirts. Some say that our shirts are
offensive, but I find silence in the face of terror a greater offense."
The shirts may be purchased on-line at http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/cr
using your credit card, or by mailing a check to The College Republicans
at
Texas; P.O. Box 7119; Austin, TX 78713. Please note that the prices are
for
delivery in the U.S. only. International shipment will cost more.
(Image of shirt attached)
Marc Levin
General Counsel
Young Conservatives of Texas
www.yct.org
Article Archive
2002-A Guadalupe St., #284
Austin, TX 78705
(512) 453-7989 phone
(512) 453-7990 fax
(713) 906-1833 portable
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
1. The Latest Research from Ben Gurion University:
Here is an important article by Neve Gordon, the political science
lecturer from Ben Gurion University in the Negev, who is suing me for
"libel" because I dared to criticize his
articles and his political behavior (entering Arafat's headquarters
illegally to show his solidarity with Arafat in the middle of Operation
Defensive Wall, when Arafat was hiding wanted murderers in his offices
including two who had assassinated an Israeli cabinet minister):
The article is at http://oznik.com/words/010923.html
You should read through the full text to find the parts where Gordon
proves that Israel is a terrorist state. Please also take note of the
photo and ad on this same page supporting imprisoned nuclear traitor and
spy Mordecai
Vanunu. And don't forget to try the link that connects you to the
movement for boycotting all Israeli art institutions.
2. Ariel Sharon has just announced his new master plan to make the Gaza Strip
judenrein, to conduct ethnic cleansing of Jews there as a reward for the
PLO, and as a way to turn all of the Gaza Strip over to the Hamas. No
doubt we will have much to say about this later. For now, only a few
words come to mind:
Make them into an acronym:
Auto-Annihilationist
Pusillanimous
Pathetic
Execrable
Asinine
Stupid
Encephalophobic
Milksop
Enraging
Nauseating
Timid
Put their initials together and you have Ariel Sharon's new peace policy.
3. Now that Ariel Sharon wants to play Chamberlain in the Gaza Strip, I
thought the time was ripe for reposting this old piece about doing reserve
duty in precisely the same place Sharon now wishes to turn over to the
Hamas: http://www.jewishmag.com/11MAG/OPINION/opinion.htm
4. Britain's Chief Rabbi Sacks is a long-time disgrace. He has been a
backer of Oslo leftism from the start. Now in the very days when the
entire world knows that the BBC is a biased pseudo-news service that not
only hates Jews but lied as part of its jihad against the Blair
government's participation in the denazification of Iraq, Rabbi Sacks
rushes to defend the BBC:
Britain's chief rabbi comes under fire for praising BBC
By Sharon Sadeh
LONDON - A senior British rabbi yesterday harshly criticized Britain's
chief rabbi, Dr. Jonathan Sacks, who, on Saturday praised the BBC for its
"integrity, honesty, fairness [and] balance."
Sacks devoted his latest "Thought for the Day" program to expressing his
admiration for the work of ousted BBC director-general Greg Dyke.
Dyke was forced to resign last weekend in the wake of the findings of a
royal commission of inquiry that determined, among other things, that the
corporation had broadcast unfounded reports against the British
government, criticizing its intentions to go to war in Iraq.
In his program, Sacks praised the BBC for viewing broadcasting "not as a
business, but as a service," adding that "news doesn't have to be sexy or
sensational. All is needs to do is to tell it the way it is - impartially,
objectively, without taking sides."
Rabbi Dr. Jeffrey Cohen, the rabbi of the Jewish community of Stanmore,
the largest of the United Synagogue communities (an organization headed by
Sacks), however, expressed rage and disgust with the chief rabbi's
statements.
"The chief rabbi's statement runs counter to the almost universal belief
within Anglo-Jewry that the BBC has shown almost unremitting bias in its
reporting of Israel's case," a response from Cohen said. "Such bias may
well have contributed significantly to the anti-Israel sentiment that is
growing apace around the world, and which has, in turn, fueled the naked
anti-Semitism that parades as mere opposition to the policies of the
government of Israel."
According to Cohen, "Not only was the chief rabbi's fulsome praise of the
BBC's `integrity, honesty, fairness, balance ... impartiality,
objectivity' misplaced, to say the least, but to suggest that, somehow, it
was fulfilling a sacred purpose, a `service' is quite preposterous."
Israel boycotted the BBC for five months in response to reports with
anti-Israel overtones, some of which included false particulars about the
activities of the Israel Defense Forces in the territories.
Others in Britain's Jewish community also expressed anger and wonderment
at Sacks's remarks, noting that the chief rabbi's statements were a mortal
blow to efforts to balance the BBC's "hostile and one-sided" coverage
policy.
A few weeks ago, one of the leaders of Britain's Jewish community, Stanley
Kalms, called for Sacks to be removed from his post, charging him of being
unworthy of the position of chief rabbi.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/389605.html
5. Indict the bastards:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1075730352523&p=1006953079865
6. News from the Jews for a Second Holocaust:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1075730352541&p=1006953079865
7. Californians on "Racism":
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=5809
Monday, February 02, 2004
Suject: An Open Letter to a Leader in Neturei Karta
As you know, I recently published an article entitled "I am Ashamed to be
an Israeli". The article seems to have had a very wide exposure and I
have received many responses.
Among those I received were a series of email letters from someone
associated with the wacko Neturei Karta movement, and - if I am not
mistaken he is actually the guy who runs their anti-Israel web sites. He
and I have carried on a correspondence of sorts all week. Below I have
collected the essence of the notes I sent him and compiled them into this
"Open Letter to a Leader of Neturei Karta".
But first, some background information. Neturei Karta is a small
sect of ultra-Orthodox "Jewish" religious extremists, best known for
marching arm in arm with Arafat, endorsing every anti-Israel terrorist and
anti-Semite on the planet. It wants Israel destroyed and does not care if
a Second Holocaust must take place in order to achieve this lofty goal,
because Israel must not be set up at all before the Messiah comes (in
their opinion) and - more generally - because many Israelis are
secularists and some eat pork. No one knows how many people the sect has;
they claim about 50,000 but I suspect the correct number is one zero less.
The Neturei Karta were originally set up as a splinter breakaway
movement in 1938, mainly by fanatical ultra-Orthodox Hungarian Jews,
splitting from the more mainstream Agudat Israel party and movement.
Agudat Israel has made its peace with Israel's existence and has
participated in the country's affairs, run for and been elected to the
parliament, and even held cabinet posts. Neturei Karta is Aramaic and
means "Guardians of the Gate". It is motivated by intense hatred not only
for secularist Jews but for all Orthodox and observant Jews who happen not
to share its ideas. It openly calls for Israel to be destroyed and it
openly supports the worst genocidal anti-Semites on the planet from
Arafat to Asad - in order to "punish" those evil Jews who refuse to accept
its religious notions.
Naturally, Neturei Karta has been adopted by all the Bash-Israel
organizations in the world and is celebrated by them as the only "true"
representatives of Judaism. Curiously, the people who hail Neturei Karta
are themselves often leftist secularists who would never consider backing
religious lunatics from other faiths. The Islamofascists of course also
love them. The Neturei Karta "Rabbis" are cult figures roughly like Jim
Jones from the Jonestown story. I guess Jewish Elmer Gantries might also
be an accurate description.
The most famous image of Neturei Karta may be
http://www.gravett.org/Israellycool/archives/010995.html
Here is my message to the member of the Neturei Karta with whom I
conducted the "dialogue" this week:
"Open Letter to a Leader of Neturei Karta".
Dear Sir:
In the Amida prayer, which Jews recite three times every day,
there is a section in which the "minim" are denounced. The "minim" refer
to small treasonous groups of Jews who collaborated with the Roman enemies
of the Jewish people, and the prayer explicitly mentions that these minim
were tattlers, snitches, people who served the anti-Semites of their day
as agents, and worked against Jewish existence and survival. Since then
of course the segment in the daily prayer is understood to be a curse in
general upon anti-Semites, and especially Jewish anti-Semites working
against their own people. Jewish anti-Semitism was not born with the
modern Israeli Oslo Left.
I mention all this because I can think of no more apt illustration of
a cult of Minim than the Neturei Karta. Your cult is nothing more than a
pseudo-Jewish pagan group working against Judaism and for the
enemies of the Jews.
You claim that you are simply opposed to Israel because it is full of
pork eaters and people who trample upon Jewish observance. Well, let me
tell you something. The most secularist pork eater on any kibbutz in
Israel is halakhically (by Rabbinic law) far more Jewish and far more pure
than all the
"Rabbis" in the Neturei Karta cult. And why do I say this? Because, as
you know, there is a clear halakhic rule that says that living in the Land
of Israel is itself "shakul" or equivalent to observing all 613 religious
commandments or mitzvot! All of them! Even the ones reserved for
priests and even the ones that may only be performed in the Temple and so
may not be performed today.
There is not a single "Rabbi" in Neturei Karta who performs these 613
mitzvot. Yet the worst pork eater in Israel is already deemed equivalent
to one who observes them all, even before he gets started. If he was
circumcised at 8 days, that already puts him even one more
mitzvah/commandment ahead of you and your "Rabbis". No, I am not
suggesting that living in Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, should be
regarded as a legitimate blanket exemption from all other religious
precepts. I am simply saying that even someone who observes nothing at
all in Judaism but lives in Israel is more Jewish and more religiously
pure than the "Rabbis" of your minim cult.
When you march in anti-Israel demonstrations alongside anti-Semites
(the Durban conference comes to mind), when you endorse Arafat and his
stormtroopers and serve as their public relations agents, when you support
terrorists and excuse mass murders of Jews, you are acting as followers of
the Evil Bil'am, not as sons of Jacob.
You say you want Israel destroyed because it was not set up properly,
because the Messiah has not yet come? Do you really think that Israel can
be destroyed without there also occurring a Second Holocaust? Don't you
realize this is the unavoidable consequence of what you are proposing, and
what the people you are supporting seek?
Let me tell you something. A ketuba marriage contract signed on the
Sabbath is still a valid one and must be respected, even though signing it
on the Sabbath is a prohibited violation of the day. A Cohen or priest
who marries a divorcee has sinned because such a marriage is prohibited by
the Torah, but the marriage must be acknowledged and even accepted and
honored. It stands. Whether or not Israel was created properly or at the
correct time, the fact that it exists changes how Jews must behave and
requires a certain amount of responsibility and "arevut ze l'ze" or mutual
support and defense, even from the most smug, self-righteous pretenders at
religiosity.
Whatever you think about the erection of Israel, you have no right to
endorse those seeking to destroy it and its population through violence,
people seeking genocide of Jews. And if you DO endorse such people and
march with them, you are nothing more than a disciple of the Evil Bil'am.
You are a collaborator with Haman. You are worse than Dotan and Aviram.
Had you lived in Shushan in Persia in the days of Queen Esther and her
Uncle Mordecai, you would have been marching arm in arm with Haman. After
all, those Persian Jews also included many who no doubt violated the
Sabbath and other religious principles. The Neturei Karta would have
supported Haman as a way to "punish" them. How many Rabbis of Rabbi
Akiva's generation served as PR agents for the Romans, to justify their
murdering Jews? How many said the murders were justified because - after
all - so many Jews were not properly observing mitzvot? In Elijah's
generation all except a few thousand Jews were acting as pagans. Strange,
but I do not recall Elijah justifying anti-Semites murdering them.
Indeed, Elijah endorsed the very worst pagan of all, King Ahab, when the
King went on the war path to kill anti-Semites. Of course, if Neturei
Karta Minim had been around in those days, they would all be in Syria
helping the evil Ben-Haddad murder the Jews.
The Neturei Karta "Rabbis" are not recognized as Torah Authorities
by any Torah Authority outside the cult. No Sephardic Rabbis, no
Ashkenazim, no Misnagdim, no Chassidim. No one recognizes Neturei Karta
as a legitimate movement of Judaism. In essence, these Rabbis - like
me - see Neturei Karta as a pathetic minim cult. Can you name a single Rabbi
outside Neturei Karta who endorses the view of your own "Rabbis"? Of
course you cannot.
So you think collaborating with the worst anti-Semites on the planet
who openly endorse genocide of Jews is better than collaborating with
misguided radical secularists who need to be pulled back to the traditions
of Israel? You believe that when a Jew sins he ceases to be a Jew. I
wonder which books you are reading as replacements for the Torah. This
is the level of the "logical reasoning" they are teaching these days in
Neturei Karta ashrams? (I hesitate to call them yeshivos).
You insist the Zionists are the Devil, not the Palestinians. And of
course, if the Palestinians are not the Devil, why should anyone think the
Germans were? Since you defend the Palestinian right to murder my family,
and as it happens we do not eat pork, then what is wrong with the Germans
murdering lots of Jews? Why don't you guys march around in your pro-PLO
parades with swastikas and put one on your web site? And if someone
happens NOT to keep the religious precepts of Judaism, what gives you the
right to act as Public Relations man for the people who seeking to murder
such sinners?
The Neturei Karta cultists are inverted Bil'amim. The Evil Bil'am was
ordered to curse Israel, yet ended up blessing the Tents of Jacob. You
are the reverse. You are ordered by the Torah to bless Israel but you
curse the Jewish people. You have no concept of Jewish solidarity because
you are not Jews, you are a pseudo-Jewish minim cult.
I really think you need to grow up or see a good shrink. So should
your "Rabbis".
******
For more information, see:
http://www.nkusa.org/ (Note the translator link into Arabic)
http://www.netureikartauk.org/
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Judaism/nk.html
1. This is worth reading in full:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11998
Israel's Self-Hating Newspaper
By P. David Hornik
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 2, 2004
During the Israeli workweek of Sunday, January 18 to Friday, January 23, I
kept track of the opinion pieces published on the English website of
Israels left-wing daily Haaretz. The paper, which goes back to
pre-statehood days, is actually considered to have moved toward the Center
during the intensified terror war launched in 2000. But as the quotations
below will show, it is at best a minor change.
Indeed, during the week I surveyed, the picture was not all black.
Haaretzs token right-wing columnist, the insightful Israel Harel, wrote a
piece supportive of Israel in the context of the incident at the Stockholm
museum, in which Ambassador Zvi Mazel damaged a display of a snow-white
suicide bomber floating over a pool of Israeli blood. The thoughtful
left-of-center columnist Amnon Rubinstein also came out, more cautiously,
in favor of Israels official position that the display was an outrage, as
did a Swedish Jewish activist in a guest column. And former minister Moshe
Arens, an occasional contributor, provided a splendid column on the folly
of kowtowing to Syria.
But with these exceptions, the paper was in typical form. The main theme
of the left-wing columnists was, as always, that peace with the
Palestinians and the Arabs is there for the taking and it is only Israels
pig-headedness that keeps the conflict going. Special targets of these
pundits spleen were the separation fence, Ariel Sharon, and Israeli
society itself. One would not guess from their writings what is understood
by more and more people of goodwill: that, however foolishly and
recklessly, Israel offered the Palestinians a state in 2000 and has kept
offering them one ever since, and the Palestinian reaction has been
constant terror and incitement.
Even though being an Israeli means being someone whose children have been
targeted for murder by Yasser Arafat and the entity over which he
presides, the large majority of whose members favor, if not celebrate, the
slaughter of Israeli civilians of all descriptions, this changes nothing
for the Haaretz columnists and the leftist fringe of the population that
they represent. Their instinct remains to exonerate and perceive virtue
and moderation in the Palestinians and the Arabs, and to accuse and vilify
Israel.
Thus Zvi Barel (January 18) detects soft breezes of peace blowing in the
Arab world: Last week, the editor of the Lebanese daily Al Nahar . . .
proposed to the Israelis and Palestinians, and to the Arabs in general, .
. . Let us look toward a political society like the European Union, in
which we will renew our aspirations together before we all drown together.
. . . Even in Egypt the weekly Al Ahram al Arabi can publish . . .
articles about the . . . dictatorship under which the Arab states exist,
while in Saudi Arabia the public discourse against Islamic terrorism is
being cultivated.
But unlike Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, those bastions of
enlightenment and pacifism, Barel finds Israel lacking in the right stuff:
The shockwaves of the conceptual jolt havent yet reached Israel, though.
No barricade has yet been positioned against the dictatorship of the old
conceptions: The only thing the Arabs understand is force, There is no
partner for negotiations, . . . First the cessation of terrorism, and then
negotiations. . . . The belief in the truth of these conceptions is so
fanatic that any challenge to them is tantamount to the desecration of all
thats holy. Considering the real facts of historythe Camp David Accords
with Egypt and the retreat from the entire Sinai, the Oslo process with
the Palestiniansone can only marvel at these words written by a
professional Israeli commentator.
Aluf Benn (January 22) quotes the U.S. vice-president expressing a
reasonable view that takes account of the facts on the ground: Richard
Cheney . . . explained last week: As long as Yasser Arafat is the
interlocutor on behalf of the Palestinians . . . we think any serious
progress is virtually impossible. The Israelis are never going to sign up,
nor should they sign up to a peace, unless . . . theyve got confidence
that there is someone there on the Palestinian side prepared to keep those
commitments.^
Whats that? A top U.S. leader implying that the conflict isnt Israels
fault? Benn isnt going to take that lying down: Without intending to do
so, Cheney guaranteed that Arafat will remain in his Muqata headquarters.
The Likud government will not take a chance on removing him if leaving him
in place frees it from negotiations. The words are somehow twisted to put
the onusnot on Arafat, but on Israel. Just for the record, Likud
governments, for better or worse, have shown a distinct readiness to
negotiate as in the Camp David Accords, the Madrid Conference, the Hebron
Agreement, the Wye Agreement, and the present Likud governments
oft-reiterated commitment to the road map. But Benn adds for good measure:
Washington . . . continues to keep close tabs on Sharon, for fear that he
will go wild and ignite the region.
Gideon Levy (January 18) has his own twist on the theme of Israels
culpability for the conflict. For him, it all starts at a very specific
place: All of the Israel Defense Forces checkpoints in the occupied
territories are immoral and illegitimate. Therefore, they must be removed
unconditionally. There is no place to discuss their security value. Even
if someone were to succeed in proving that a connection exists between
locking residents in their villages and preventing terrorist attacks in
Israelwhich is highly doubtfulthat would make no difference one way or the
other. A law-abiding state does not adopt immoral and illegitimate
measures, whatever their value. . . . The only question is why checkpoints
exist deep in occupied territory? By what right? Only to satisfy the
settlers and abuse the Palestinians? . . . the checkpoints are the great
hothouse of terrorism. It is there that the hatred and the despair are
fomented.
Thus, Israel places checkpoints in the territories out of some arbitrary
sadism, solely to be able to send its sons to do difficult, dangerous duty
there and harass the local population. The hothouse of terrorism is not a
century of anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic incitement in the Arab world, but
the checkpointsnot a single one of which, in actuality, would exist if the
Palestinians, after Israel evacuated the urban areas of Judea and Samaria
in the mid-1990s, had set about the task of building their future state
rather than inculcating a thirst for martyrdom and blood in an entire
generation.
Zeev Sternhell (January 23) chips in that Israels traditional
liberal-conservative right . . . died a long time ago; . . . its place has
been taken . . . with respect to the Arab world, by an aggressive and
battle-hungry attitude. Yoel Marcus (January 20) grouses that Military
Intelligence reports about Assads seriousness do not dovetail with Sharons
political interests at the moment. . . . That Sharon, despite the godly
edict from Military Intelligence, might genuinely doubt Assads sincerity
and be loath to give up the Golan for solid strategic reasons, is
something Marcus would not allow because it might make Israel look better
than Syria.
Soon the separation fence is supposed to go on trial at The Hague.
Supporters of Israel understand that it is being built as a defensive
measure against the worst sustained campaign of terrorism any country has
ever known. Haaretz pundits, though, have a different take. Member of
Knesset Yossi Sarid (January 21): . . . this fence may begin with
protection but ends with a brutal attack on Palestinians who have
committed no sin. . . . even in my worst nightmares, I never imagined that
Ariel Sharon would go as far as he has in his fencing efforts. . . .
Without a doubt, . . . Sharons fence is a crime against humanity. . . .
Good thing Sarid wont be serving on the International Court of Justice.
Gideon Samet (January 21): The separation fence folly is turning into one
of the worst scandals in which an Israeli government has become entangled.
. . . The fence is designed to serve as a makeshift interim solution that
shoves aside diplomatic resolutions that the prime minister has done his
utmost to derail. . . . the fence has been his way of showing there is no
way to get around the impasse in talks with the Palestiniansan impasse for
which he bears most of the responsibility. Again, Samet not only trashes
the fence but sounds the beloved mantra that peacewith the Palestinian
Authority, home to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade,
collaborator with Hizbullah, importer of weapons from Iran, etc.is shining
like an apple on a tree, and it is only Israel that spoils it.
These leftists animus against Sharon himself is prima facie and cultic,
and hardly comes up short of Bush-hatred among the American Left. In a
different column (January 23), Marcus says: Since he became prime
minister, close to 1,000 Israelis have been killed. No peace, no security,
lots of hot air . . . Yet if Sharon had at any point ordered the IDF to
decisively defeat the terror, there is absolutely no doubt that Marcus
would have sung a different tune about him as a brutal warmonger. Doron
Rosenblum (January 23) informs us: . . . [Sharon] was elected twice by a
landslide not because of his . . . successful policies, but because of his
trampling, bulldozer-like personality. . . . Only Sharon is capable of
grabbing the microphone at a Likud convention and asking, Who is in favor
of eliminating terror?ias if his very personality were synonymous with
eliminating terror, and not some ugly, raging, egocentric thing.
For Yossi Sarid in the already-quoted column, its even worse: And as I
know him, his character and his plans, I presumed that [the] fence would
come out crooked. If Sharon is able to take something straight and twist
it out of shape, he will unquestionably do so. . . . Sharon is larger than
our nightmares . . . a brute without inhibition or tether, one suited to
serve as prime minister of South Africa in the blackest days of the
apartheid. . . .
Presumably, a society that would elect this brute twice in landslides is
nothing to brag about itself. The Haaretz sages confirm that inference.
Novelist-poet Yitzhak Laor (January 19), in a piece on Ambassador Mazels
act of protest in the Swedish museum, suggests that Mazel succeeded in
explaining to the Swedes how far wenot the region, not the conflict, but
weare from notions of the freedom of artistic expression. . . . readers of
newspapers on the Internet could learn about what had happened in
Stockholm without slanting the incident in the direction of Gewald, theyre
murdering us. . . . We have learned to live not only in fear, but also in
the demonization of the other side [and] the total rejection of any
rational debate. . . .
The leering cynicism of that Gewald, theyre murdering us is hard to fathom
from an Israeli who has been living in Israel these last few years.
The same derisive caricature of Israel as a boorish society hemmed in by
fears of the past is offered by Samet in his column: he calls Israel a
state in which a tyrant [Sharon] is taking root, in which it is so easy to
appeal to anti-Semitism, national anxieties and all the other old ghosts .
. . Ari Shavit (January 22) refers to the moral rot greedily eating away
at the state, and here, again, is Doron Rosenblum: Sharon has plunged us
into a kind of national chaos of identity that he himself symbolizes. More
than being the prime minister of a rational, law-abiding country, he
operated like a Diaspora leader in a self-imposed ghetto. . . . Nixon, in
the democratic United States, defended himself by saying: I am not a
crook. Sharon, in the Israeli Jewish community, can say: And even if I
amso what?^
Its all there in the words of these columniststhe self-loathing, the
softness toward enemies, the demonization of the prime minister, the crude
defamation of a society subjected to severe traumas.
Not a struggling democracy but a brutal, lawless, benighted,
peace-obstructing country with a mad-dog leader. Even those with a dovish
perspective must ask themselves if the intellectual level represented by
these columnists is something to be proud of.
And Haaretz makes this bilge available to the world on its English
website, every day of the week.
P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Jerusalem
whose work has appeared in many Israeli, Jewish, and political
publications. Reach him at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.
2. Nice idea, except in Israel, the leftists would respond by filing
frivolous SLAPP "libel" suits:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12004
3. Afterthought from yesterday. Scandinavian countries have made kosher
slaughtering illegal because it is "inhumane" (Moslem slaughter ok), but
Sweden has laws that make it legal to rape cats and goats (see yesterday's
posting of news piece on this).
4. Do I owe Mel an apology?
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36829
5. More on Kerry:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12012
6. Funding Columbia U:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12010
7. Fences: http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=5798
8. Google in Yiddish:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1075609219164
9. Semantics for Semitics:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1075349809318&p=1006953079865
10. For PC Jews who try to turn Tu B'shvat into the day where all of
Judaism is reduced to environmental radicalism:
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article3082.html
Sunday, February 01, 2004
1. Sharon's prisoner capitulation is already having its impact. The
Hamas is openly threatening now to start snatching Israeli civilians in
order to extort Israel, now that the the Hizbollah showed how effective a
tactic it is. The HizbAllah (that is its correct spelling) promises to
kidnap some new Israeli hostages soon. And Israel threatens that if it
does, Israel will retaliate Really Really Hard. Yep, it is the return on
the RRH doctrine.
All of which proves that Israel is planning to defeat the HizbAllah by
causing its leaders to laugh themselves to death.
2. No sooner does Haaretz, the newspaper of the thinking Israeli, run Uri
Avnery's screed about how Ariel Sharon is the cause of the kidnapping of
the three murdered POWS because he did not agree voluntarily to release
all the imprisoned Palestinian terrorists on his own initiative before
the kidnappings, when the editor of Haaretz publishes an editorial today
in which he repeats the same charge. By refusing to pursue peace by
releasing all the jailed Palestinian murderers and terrorists wholesale,
it is Ariel Sharon's fault that the Hizbollah kidnapped and extorted.
3. You know how everyone whines when Israel blows up the house of a
suicide
bomber, claiming it is inhumane, unlike the blowing up of civilian buses
which is a legitimate form of protest against occupation? well, just
guess who ELSE is blowing up terrorist homes without a squawk from
the media or the Eurotrash:
DEMOLISHING TERRORISTS' HOUSES, PAKISTAN-STYLE
They get the locals to do the dynamiting and bulldozing:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/international/asia/31STAN.html?ex=1076130000&en=4b0182917e4868b4&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
SLAMABAD, Pakistan, Jan. 30 At the start of the month, Pakistan massed
several thousand troops in and around the town of Wana, near the country's
mountainous border with Afghanistan. Using a harsh century-old British
method, officials handed local tribal elders a list and issued an
ultimatum.
If 72 men wanted for sheltering Al Qaeda were not produced, they said, the
Pakistani Army would punish the tribe as a group, demolishing houses,
withdrawing funds and even detaining tribe members.
Several days later, several thousand tribal elders held a jirga, or
council, and agreed to raise a force of their own to find the wanted men.
In the last two weeks, the tribes have handed over 42 of them. Tribal
members, meanwhile, have bulldozed and dynamited the homes of eight men
who refused to surrender.
Pakistani officials said they would wait to see how many of the wanted men
were handed over, particularly foreigners. Depending on the results, they
will shower the area with money, or soldiers.
4. Yes, Mel Gibson IS an anti-Semite:
http://www.nypost.com/gossip/liz.htm
January 30, 2004 -- 'YOU'RE GOING to have to go on record. The Holocaust
happened, right?" Peggy Noonan asks of Mel Gibson in the Reader's Digest
for March.
Gibson: "I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their
arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in
a concentration camp in France. Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War
is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some
of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In
the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933.
During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union."
Gibson sat down with conservative Catholic writer Noonan to speak of his
controversial film, "The Passion of the Christ," to explain his faith -
which he says became a strong force in his life after years of being "a
monster," having become "spiritually bankrupt" in the thrall of success.
And Gibson admits his spiritual life is "nowhere complete yet. I'm still
so full of flaws." Noonan pushed him about the Holocaust because of
accusations that the actor's father questions the attempted extermination
of all Jews by Hitler. Of his dad, Gibson says, "My dad taught me my
faith, and I believe what he taught me. The man never lied to me in his
life."
===
HUTTON GIBSON ON THE HOLOCAUST:
http://www.rickross.com/reference/general/general534.html
He moved on to the Holocaust, dismissing historical accounts that six
million Jews were exterminated. ''Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who
operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body,'' he
said. ''It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now, six million?''
Across the table, Joye suddenly looked up from her plate. She was dressed
in a stylish outfit for church, wearing a leather patchwork blazer and a
felt beret in place of the traditional headdress. She had kept quiet most
of the day, so it was a surprise when she cheerfully piped in. ''There
weren't even that many Jews in all of Europe,'' she said.
''Anyway, there were more after the war than before,'' Hutton added.
The entire catastrophe was manufactured, said Hutton, as part of an
arrangement between Hitler and ''financiers'' to move Jews out of Germany.
Hitler ''had this deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so
they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people
there to fight the Arabs,'' he said.
Whether any of this has rubbed off on Hutton's son Mel is an open
question. A church elder at Holy Family says that while the two share the
same foundation of faith, Mel Gibson parts company with his father on many
points. ''He doesn't go along with a lot of what his dad says,'' he says.
And beyond claiming to have seen the plans for Holy Family and attended
services with the congregation, Hutton Gibson has no apparent connection
to his son's church in California.
===
"Whether any of this has rubbed off on Hutton's son Mel is an open
question."
NOT ANY MORE, IT ISN'T.
5. Well at least now we know why certain ex-Israeli pro-terror "artists"
moved to Sweden:
INCREASING PROBLEM:
Swedes have more and more animal sex
Av ?yvind Ludt og Carin Pettersson 26.01.04 12:24
Animal sex is not illegal in Sweden, and every year between 200 and 300
pets are injured because of sexual assaults.
The estimate was presented by Svenska Veterin?rforbundet, the Swedish
veterinary organization, and it is now trying to make the authorities and
the public more aware of animals suffering. The organization claim the
problem has increased during the last couple of years, even if most people
are unaware of it.
We have seen an increase since 1999 when child pornography became illegal,
said Johan Beck-Friis. It appears, in other words, as there are some
people who have replaced children with animals. In both circumstances, it
is sex with defenceless individuals.
The injuries inflicted on animals after sexual assaults are of the same
character of those children get. Beck-Friis said that the most common
injuries are wounds on the sex organs and blisters.
Animal porn
The fact that animal sex is becoming an increasing problem can be
indicated by the mere fact that there is an increasing selection of animal
porn at video rentals and there an increasingly number of websites with
animal pornography is surfacing.
No one knows for sure how many animals that are abused, but a British
study from 2001 indicates that every 20th dog or cat that receives
treatment at veterinaries, the injuries are not a result of a direct
accident, but the animal has been inflicted the injury as a result of a
sexual assault.
According to the Swedish paper Expressen, if the same estimate can be used
in Sweden that will indicate that 200 to 300 dogs and cats every year are
injured as a result of sexual assaults.
Not illegal
In contrast with most other countries, animal sex is not illegal in
Sweden. It was decriminalized in 1944 in connection with the
decriminalization of homosexual sex.
http://pub.tv2.no/nettavisen/english/article177749.ece
6. Speaking of Scandinavia, the land that gave us "Oslo" is now in the
news once again. It seems there was some horrid Zionist provocation there
that the Norwegians suppressed.
Haaretz reports that a Jewish teacher in Norway wore a small Jewish
star around his neck to school. A Palestinian school girl objected,
complained, and in the spitit of democracy and pluralism ordered the
teacher to remove th einflammatory symbol of racism. The teacher refused
to take it off but offered to wear it hidden under his shirt. No deal,
the school filed formal charges against him. No report in th epaper on
whether or not the Palestinian girl was herself wearing a small gold
dagger medallion with "Allah Akbar" on it, which is quite popular among
certain Islamists.