Original articles on Israel and related issues written by Steven Plaut, a professor at an Israeli university.
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Monday, January 31, 2005
1. Suggestion for the quarter million anti-appeasement protesters in
Jerusalem last night to oppose the Sharon-Mitzna plan. Adopt the
following slogam!
"There are Substantial Penalties for Early Withdrawal!"
Should be accompanied by a large photo of a box of Viagra.
2. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16833
Taking to the Streets in Jerusalem
By Judy Lash Balint
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 31, 2005
Is Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharons unilateral plan to uproot dozens
of Jewish communities in Gush Katif and northern Samaria in trouble?
If Prime Minister Sharon were to listen to the people, the answer would be
yes. An estimated 150,000 gathered outside Israels parliament building on
Sunday evening for a mass demonstration that organizers dubbed the mother
of all Israeli demonstrations.
Under the theme of Let the People Decide, the huge crowd waved placards
and Israeli flags and listened to speeches from a long line of politicians
and rabbis, all of whom berated the once right-wing leader for his about
face on giving away Israeli land.
Several speakers were from Sharons Likud party. They warned the prime
minister that if the so-called disengagement plan is carried out,
irreparable harm would be done to the fabric of Israeli society.
Popular Likud Knesset member, Uzi Landau railed against Sharons tactic of
bringing the leftist Labor party into the government. They call this a
unity government? he asked. Its a lie. Sharon threw out the parties who
didnt agree with him. This government has no mandate for a one sided
withdrawal, Landau concluded.
David Levy, a veteran Likud Knesset member, told his fellow Likudniks to
wake up! As the crowd roared its approval, Levy asked how the Likudniks
could sleep at night knowing that the plan they narrowly approved is
pitting brother against brother.
Levy warned that the withdrawal would endanger the whole country, as
terrorists will be emboldened and have closer access to Israels population
centers.
Cheers went up from the crowd, as National Religious Party leader, Effie
Eitam declared: "We are telling you Ariel Sharon you have no mandate to
expel Jews. "We are telling you you have no right to divide this nation.
Israels media repeatedly claims that a majority of the public supports the
Sharon plan, but actual poll figures are hard to come by. For protestor
Hannah Baum of Netanya, the ninety-minute drive to Jerusalem was
worthwhile, just to show that not all those who are opposed to the
uprooting of Jewish communities are over the Green Line settlers.
Months before Ukrainian democracy supporters started sporting orange, the
Gush Katif campaign decided to use the color as a symbol of the sun and
sand that marks their region. At the Sunday demo, every speaker on the
dais was decked out in orange scarves, and most demonstrators wore at
least one piece of orange clothing. At one point, officials asked for the
crowd to raise their orange placards over their heads, so that an entire
sea of orange would cover the streets directly in front of the Knesset
building.
A centerpiece of the protest was a mass pledge to go to Gaza to prevent
the evacuation should it take place.
In a series of film clips, demonstrators viewed the before and after
Sharon. Before the last election, Sharon spoke out strongly against his
opponents ideas of dismantling Jewish communities.
Little more than a year after his election, the new Sharon announced his
eviction plan.
As the last clip drew to a close, the chant of Arik, Go Home, swelled
through the streets. Speaker after speaker called on Sharon to hold a
referendum or go to new elections. This is not about our homes only, said
Gush Katifs leading rabbi, Yigal Kaminetsky, Its about our national home.
Golan Regional Council head Eli Malka, who pledged the assistance of Golan
residents for the anti-disengagement campaign, reiterated the theme.
Tens of thousands of mostly religious teenagers were on the streets in a
show of commitment to the country. Their representative, 14 year old Neve
Dekalim resident Smadar Golan, addressed the gathering. I was born in the
first intifada, she noted. I dont know what it is to live without terror,
she continued in a steady voice. She told the crowd that her community in
Gush Katif is the security fence for the whole country.
Speaking to Prime Minister Sharon on behalf of the demonstrators, Golan
honed in on what appears to have been one of Sharons worst political
moves. You didnt even come to talk to us to explain what was going to
happen, she complained. We had to hear about it through the mediaand you
portrayed us as obstacles to peace.
3. For those who thought I was kidding you:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/533869.html
4. For those who think Americans do not know anything about Islam or
Arabs:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16816
5. Reason for optimism:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/533870.html
6. Anyone still sorry Kerry lost?
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=12724y
7. Ending the Liberal Myth about "Self-Esteem":
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=000CB565-F330-11BE-AD0683414B7F0000&pageNumber=1&catID=2
8. Know how the Euronerds claim the US is being "stingy" about Tsunami
relief? Well:
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=66782005
9. Let's see the asslib Tikkun Olam Pagans use this!
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0105/bush_tikkun_olam.php3
10. Someone who does not like radical feminizts:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0105/west013105.php3
Sunday, January 30, 2005
1. Fast Current Events Quiz!
Q: What is the difference between the new liberated Iraq under Allied
control, and Israel ruled by Ariel Sharon?
A: In one country, the citizens of the country decide in the ballot box
the direction of their country in free elections initiated by the
governing leaders of the state. The OTHER country is governed by Ariel
Sharon.
2. Remember when Ehud Olmert was a Zionist?
"Israel Can't Do Business With Terrorists
Violence against civilians must be forcibly stopped, not forgiven. "
BY EHUD OLMERT , Wall Street Journal
Monday, June 3, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110001793
3. Dartmouth and Totalitarian Leftism:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16811
4. Colorado Professor of Stupidity:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16812
5. Holocaust Denial:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1106796046706&p=1006953079865
6. Fighting back on campus:
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article4092.html
1. The German High Constitutional Court ruled over the weekend that the
local German neonazi party may be banned under law. The curious thing is
that the nazis, who call themselves the "National Democratic Party" of NDP
also insist that they are a liberal democratic party.
I mention this because these neonazis are not the only anti-Semitic
fascists around claiming to be liberal democrats. Actually, most
anti-Semitic fascists today claim they are liberal democrats. They are to
be found in many places, and even Israel has a movement of anti-Semitic
fascists calling themselves liberal democrats. Many of these have tenure
on Israeli university campuses.
2. George Orwell said that there are some ideas that are so stupid that
you can only learn about them from university professors and lecturers.
Israeli university's are crawling with flaky pseudo-scholars. Take the
Op-Ed column in today's Haaretz by one Eran Neuman, a lecturer in
architecure at Tel Aviv University
(http://www2.tau.ac.il/person/art/researcher.asp?id=adfmigdjl ) who
insists that all
of architecture should be conscripted on behalf of political opposition to
"occupation" of the Palestinians, but not of course to the genocidal mass
murder of Jews.
There are many anti-Israel architects running around Israel, and two
years ago, two of the loopiest, Ayal Weizmann and Rafi Segel organized an
exhibition on "Architecure against the Occupation".
Their point was that the very design of Israeli buildings in the "occupied
territories" shows how Israel is a brutal colonialist evil racist entity.
Trust them, they are architects so who better to offer insights on the
Arab-Israeli war!
After airing their "art" in Berlin, a place containing many people
with experience in liberating territories from Jewish occupation,
the Daffy and Bugs of Israeli architecture wanted the Israeli Architects
Association also to show their "exhibit" in the Association's building,
but they declined. They considered the exhibit blatant politics and
extremist politics at that, but not art nor design. Naturally, the Far
Left screamed censorship, since not allowing anti-Semites and
pro-terrorists to use your private property to promote their views is in
their opinion suppression of free speech.
Comrade Neumann in Haaretz Jan 30, 05 is all
upset because of this "censorship" and also over the fact that not all
architects have followed the example of Weizmann and Segel in promoting
the destruction of Israel through critical art and progressive
architecture. Comrade Neumann by the way teaches "Critical Theory"
(which means Marxist boilerplate) at Tel Aviv University. Why does Tel
Aviv University carry
courses in Marxism, after Marxism was thoroughly disproved 150 years ago
and discredited by the 100 million victims killed by communism in the
20th century? Maybe you
should ask the officials at Tel Aviv University
(http://www.tau.ac.il/administration-eng.html) or some of their donors!
Meanwhile, I am
sure these architects against occupation must have gone out and partied
all night long right after bin Laden filed his own protest against
buildings representing power and domination in New York and DC!
Ah, but Marxist architects for the destruction of Israel do not even
come CLOSE to this week's Israeli award winner for Dumbest Idea on Campus,
which must go to
Dr. Danny Kaplan, a sociologist at Hebrew University (you know, Baruch
Kimmerling's stomping grounds). He also teaches
"gender studies" at Bar-Ilan University and The Tel Aviv-Jaffa Community
College.
Kaplan is featured in Haaretz Jan 30, 04 in a long interview by Dalia
Shahori, who in recent months spent a lot of her quality time celebrating
Ilan Pappe and the "Post-Zionist" and "New Historian" faculty members for
the destruction of Israel.
Kaplan recently published an article in "Theory
and Criticism," which is a brain-dead Marxist piece of manure edited by
Tel Aviv Univerity Marxist sociologist Yehuda Shenhav. You may recall
this "journal" as the one in which an education faculty member at Haifa
University published an article arguing that his own university's
architecure was nothing more than a large phallic symbol representing
oppression of Arabs. Really!
In the hot new issue of "Theory and Criticism," Kaplan develops a
theory according to which any time Israel mourns
for any of its soldiers who have been murdered by the Palestinian savages,
this mouring is in fact a form of eroticism and that all Israelis mourning
the dead soldiers are possessed with an uncontrollable form of
homosexual necrophilia. Military solidarity among soldiers in Israel is
erotic by its nature, insists Kappy.
Really. I am not making this up.
Kappy insists friendship and mutual support among Israeli soldiers is
homosexual and erotic, and that Israel's mourning murdered soldiers is
collective necrophilia and also homoerotic.
My guess is he did his research on this point while stroking
himself in the Hebrew University men's room while looking at photos of
dead Israelis.
Kaplan can be reached at kapland@mscc.huji.ac.il
Meanwhile, for many more horror stories about Israeli academia, stories
you should bring to the attention of any prospective donors to any Israeli
universities, please go to www.israel-academia-monitor.com !
3. Euro-Barbarism
from the Daily Telegraph
THEY DIED AND NOW WE SNEAR
By Leo McKinsry
(Filed: 30/01/2005)
The wind moaned gently in the nearby forest of the Vosges mountain. A
thick blanket of snow lay on the ground and on the thousands of white
crosses that marked the graves of US servicemen who had fallen in France
during the Second World War.
With my wife and her aunt Nancy from Pittsburgh, we had come to the
American military cemetery at Epinal in eastern France, where 5,200 US
soldiers are buried. We were paying tribute to one of those brave men,
Private Bill Anderson from Pennsylvania, Nancy's brother, who went through
D-Day and then died at the age of just 19 in November 1944 while on a
dangerous reconnaissance mission.
As we stood by the headstone, Nancy read out a heart-rending letter to
Bill that she had written before leaving America. Full of poignant
memories of their young life together, the letter captured the spirit of
heroic optimism that had led Bill to give his life for the cause of
freedom in Europe. Though I was born almost 20 years after Bill died, I
was overwhelmed with gratitude for the sacrifice he had made, a feeling
reinforced as I lifted my eyes from his grave towards the arch that
overlooks the cemetery. On it were carved words of remembrance for those
"citizens of every calling bred in the principles of American democracy".
To European intellectuals, the term "American democracy" is probably an
oxymoron. Though such sophisticated cynicism is contradicted by events in
Iraq, where just like in France 60 years ago US soldiers have been
sacrificing their lives to liberate a people from tyranny,
anti-Americanism is now written into the European psyche, the last
acceptable prejudice in a culture that makes a fetish of racial equality.
Indeed, as I walked through the cemetery, my sense of gratitude at Bill's
service was accompanied by deep, almost visceral, anger at my fellow
Europeans for their constant sneering at America and their gloating over
the body count in Iraq, despite all that the USA has done to free Europe
in the past from totalitarian dictatorships, whether they be Nazi or
communist.
Last week, the world marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of
Auschwitz. Although it was achieved by the Russian army, it would never
have happened without US intervention in western Europe, which forced
Germany to fight on two fronts. America's action was purely altruistic.
Whereas Russia was engaged in a life-and-death struggle for survival, the
USA was not directly threatened by the Nazi domination of Europe.
What sickens me is that we in Europe are fed a constant diet of
anti-American propaganda because of the USA's supposed aggression, greed,
imperialism or insularity. Yet, at the very same time, we are urged,
through the remorseless process of European integration, to embrace
Germany, the country responsible for most of the ills of Europe for the
past 140 years. Perhaps even worse is the way the experience of Nazism has
been used to promote the ideology of multi-culturalism.
Any objection to mass immigration or the destruction of traditional
Judaeo-Christian moral values is deemed as racist, akin to support for
fascism. As a result, in the name of multi-cultural tolerance, we have
allowed the creation of the brutal, anti-democratic monster of Islamism in
our midst.
It is a bizarre paradox that the hysteria over Nazism has encouraged
Europe to be swamped by Islam, in which anti-Semitism appears to be an
integral part of the creed tellingly, the Muslim Council of Britain
refused to take part in the Holocaust commemorations. Instead of falling
under the sway of Islam and European federalism, it would be better if
Europe followed the values of America, a country that has always
understood the meaning of the word "freedom".
Friday, January 28, 2005
1. HA'ARETZ
January 28, 2005
Unilateral withdrawal is irresponsible
By Michael Rubin
The Baghdad restaurant grew silent, all eyes on the television. It was
January 29, 2004. Every Arabic news channel had its cameras trained on
a Beirut runway, where a German transport plane was due to land.
Israel had just released Sheikh Abdel Karim Obeid, once leader of
Hezbollah's southern Lebanon operations, after almost 15 years in an
Israeli prison. The group of largely pro-Western Iraqis had tears in
their eyes. "The first Arab victory over Israel was [the withdrawal
from Lebanon] in May 2000. This is the second," an Iraqi professor
explained.
Six weeks earlier, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had announced plans to
withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza Strip. A broad range of Israeli
politicians cautiously endorsed the move. While European diplomats
wrung their hands nervously, President George W. Bush called Sharon's
plan "historic and courageous."
Nothing could be more untrue. While Israelis might fear civil and
political strife if settlers are forced from their homes, Sharon's
plan will reinvigorate terrorism not only in Israel, but as an
international tactic of choice.
The power of television is tremendous across the Middle East. Arabic
satellite stations like the Qatar-based Al Jazeera, Hezbollah's
Al-Manar, and Iran's Al-Alam deluge their audiences with images of
American defeat: the 1983 U.S. withdrawal from Beirut, and the flight
from Mogadishu a decade later. Watching television on any Baghdad
evening, I would see American diplomats fleeing Vietnam. To the Iraqi
audience the message was clear: Bush may say America has staying
power, but it is weak. Al Jazeera mastered has information warfare. On
days without American casualties, the station simply rebroadcasts
images of the previous day's roadside bomb.
The Iranian government primes its audience with similar messages.
While critics rave about the latest Iranian art films, the normal fare
for ordinary Iranians is far different. Sitting among Iranian soldiers
packed into a Shiraz movie theater, I watched a Rambo-type film
pitting Hezbollah characters against hapless Israeli soldiers. I tried
to be inconspicuous as the crowd began to shout "kill the Jew" in
anticipation of events on screen. The message to the soldiers was
clear: Violence works.
Imagery can be equally powerful on Israeli television. More than 20
years later, older Israelis remember television pictures of residents
of Yamit battling soldiers during that settlement's 1982 evacuation.
But while such images will have a profound impact on the Israeli
electorate and their replication may cause some government ministers
to reconsider their support for Sharon's plan, far more damaging to
Israel and the United States would be the subsequent pictures. Images
of Hezbollah and Hamas flags flying over Jewish settlements like
Netzarim and Kfar Yam will torpedo hope not only of a comprehensive
Arab-Israeli peace, but also of an end to terrorism in Iraq, Turkey,
Kashmir and against the West in general.
Israelis and some in the Palestinian Authority may be sincere in a
desire for peace, but rejectionists abound, not only in Lebanese and
Syrian refugee camps, but also in Iraq's Sunni Triangle, Iran's
Revolutionary Guard bases and Pakistani seminaries. A Hamas flag over
Netzarim will justify 37 years of terrorism. The reasons for Israel's
withdrawal will be irrelevant on the streets of the Islamic world. If
terrorism can free Gaza, why not the West Bank, the Galilee, Indian
Kashmir or democratic Iraq? Why compromise if terrorism obviates the
need for concession? There is a limit to the West's stamina. Neither
Israelis nor Americans should assume their opponents would be
unwilling to pay the price of continued violence. As the Shi'ite
commemoration of `Ashura approaches, millions will commemorate the 680
martyrdom of Imam Husayn, ritually cursing Sunni leaders of the day,
as if Husayn's death was yesterday.
The price of continued terrorism and insurgency might be high, but
terror masters themselves often do not pay the price. Earlier this
month in Baghdad, I interviewed Iraqis fleeing violence in the
northern city of Mosul. Without exception, each said that the
insurgents who invaded the city were in their mid to late teens; they
complained that the insurgent leaders were using impressionable youth
as cannon fodder. But so long as oil-rich Arab states and Iran are
willing to subsidize incitement on television, in schools and in
mosques, there will be no shortage of recruits. Not only Israelis, but
also Iraqis, Indians, Turks, Americans and Europeans will pay the
price.
Seeking peace is honorable, but Sharon is gambling. Whether motivated
by a sincere desire for peace or for an egotistical need to rewrite
his place in history is irrelevant. Unilateral withdrawal is
irresponsible. Should Gaza be part of a comprehensive deal, pictures
of Hamas flags over Gaza will be immaterial, for they can be
counterbalanced with images of Israeli embassies hoisting flags in
Damascus, Riyadh and Tehran. But if Sharon goes ahead with Gaza
disengagement, generations both inside and outside Israel will be
sacrificed upon the alter of his legacy.
Michael Rubin, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute,
is editor of the Middle East Quarterly.
2. Ah the honor of being called "totalitarian" by America's chief
Stalinist, by the Khmer Rouge's favorite professor, and by the friend of
Holocaust Deniers everywhere:
From the UK Times Higher Education Supplement
http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/story.aspx?story_id=2019130
'We have our eye on you...so watch out'
Michael North
Published: 28 January 2005
Do websites such as Campus Watch seek balance or do they undermine
integrity? Michael North reports
Israeli academic Neve Gordon was not too bothered by the image of himself
transmuting into Hitler posted on Masada2000 - a website containing a
"hitlist" of 7,000 people it deems "enemies of the Israeli state". He
says: "I didn't take it seriously. It was totally pornographic."
More worrying, says Gordon, a professor of politics at Ben Gurion
University, is that such sites have the same audience as the less
sensational right-wing websites that target academics who express views
sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. They also share, he says, a myopia
about the nuances of the Middle East debate.
Campus Watch, in the US, and Israel Academic Monitor, in Israel, post
articles that attack academics' work, encourage donors to these academics'
institutions to withdraw funding and urge universities either to sack the
academics or to thwart their progress up the career ladder - all in the
name of free speech.
Gordon, who is on sabbatical at the University of California, Berkeley,
has been targeted by both websites. He says that the Israeli site, written
in English, is failing to have a big impact. "It is asking students to
become collaborators and to report professors, but it needs a broader
Hebrew audience." In contrast, Campus Watch, a slick site sponsored by the
Middle East Forum in the US, has, according to Gordon and other US
academics, strongly contributed to the post 9/11 campaigns to discredit
left-wing academics.
Joseph Massad, assistant professor in modern Arab politics at Columbia
University, New York, is at the sharp end of the pro-Israeli groups' zero
tolerance approach. His bid for tenure is being opposed. He says: "The
Campus Watch website appears to be the first salvo in a much larger
campaign targeting US universities and especially academics doing work on
the Middle East who have critical views of the policies of the state of
Israel and of US Middle East policy. Since then, there have been more
protracted campaigns, the latest of which is one targeting me that is
spearheaded by a Boston-based Zionist group called the David Project and
the right-wing newspaper the New York Sun. The campaign has led a
congressman to ask Columbia to fire me."
Rachid Khalidi, professor of Arab studies at the Middle East Institute at
Columbia and an American of Palestinian origin, has also been targeted by
Campus Watch. He has a taped phone message that says: "Khalidi, Columbia,
alumni love Campus Watch because they keep an eye on thugs like you. We
have our eye on you. You'd better watch out."
Khalidi believes the aim of Campus Watch is to have a "chilling effect" on
free speech - a term echoed by two other academics targeted by the
website, Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia and Yvonne Haddad,
professor of the history of Islam at the Center for Muslim Christian
Understanding at Georgetown University. Foner says: "The purpose of these
sites is intimidation, not information. Encouraging students to report on
comments professors make that they deem unfair or unpatriotic could have a
chilling effect on education."
Khalidi adds: "There is a dearth of proper debate in the media and
politics about the Middle East. The only place where these views can be
found is in academia. They want to shut down this last window."
Khalidi claims Campus Watch is closely linked to a wider campaign of
actions against so-called pro-Palestinian academics. He cites the recent
attempt by some members of Congress to push through a law threatening
funding to universities whose faculties do not stick to the defence of US
government policies; changes in grant proposals demanded by rich
university funders, such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, to
affirm that beneficiaries do not support terrorism; and the back-door
(recess) nomination of Daniel Pipes, founder of Campus Watch, to the
government-funded United States Institute of Peace - an event, according
to Foner, that proved the US Administration "at least retains a sense of
irony".
Pipes, who is also director of the Middle East Forum, recently stood down
from the board of USIP, which makes key research grants to academics
working in Middle East studies, saying that "at times I felt frustrated".
Khalidi is delighted at the development and also pleased that key members
of the institute attacked Pipes publicly for objecting to the institute
hosting a conference with the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy
last year.
But Khalidi concedes that academics can do little against the power of
neoconservatives such as Pipes and the extensive and rich networks of
pro-Israeli groups, such as the new Israel on Campus Coalition.
Pipes, for his part, succinctly defends Campus Watch's mission to "alert
outsiders about the problems in Middle East studies and to challenge
Middle East studies specialists to think about their field". He says the
aim is "to improve and balance, not to cause anyone to lose a job". Asked
if he is fuelling an unhealthy bias in the US media, he says: "You must be
kidding", then refers to the website of the Committee for Accuracy in
Middle East Reporting in America, which gives examples of numerous
anti-Israeli reports.
The driving force behind the Israel Academic Monitor website is more
forthcoming in his defence of his group's work. Steven Plaut, professor of
economics at Haifa University, refers to his crusade against "the crazies"
using the classroom "to impose their extremism on their students" and as a
"bully pulpit for their political agendas". And he names US academic Noam
Chomsky as an example of such people "who passionately hate their
country".
To which Chomsky, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, replies: "He is borrowing from the lexicon of
totalitarianism: Soviet dissidents were accused of 'passionately hating
their country' because of their criticism of state policies. For the
totalitarian mind, the state is identified with the country, its culture
and its people."
Gordon is suing Plaut for libel for, he says, alleging that he is a
Holocaust denier. Plaut denies libel and his supporters accuse Gordon of
censoring free speech.
However, Gordon and other Israeli academics say that debate in Israel is
far healthier than in the US. Khalidi comments that many Israeli
journalists would not be published in American newspapers.
Anat Biletzki, chair of philosophy at Tel Aviv University, says that only
a handful of radicals are really targeted by the Right, but adds that
there is self-censorship. She gives an example of such "undercurrents of
McCarthyism". "I was called to the dean when two students complained about
me sneaking politics into my teaching. The university constitution says we
are perfectly within our rights to talk politics in class. Two weeks later
the rector called me up to say he had heard I talked politics in class. He
said 'in times such as these we have to think twice about everything we
say'. I said 'in times such as these there are things that have to be
said'."
For now, European academics critical of Israeli government policies work
in a less intimidating environment. Anoush Ehteshami, director of Durham
University's Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, says the
debate is more polarised in the US than anywhere else. "I have lots of
contacts with colleagues here and in Finland, Germany and France. None of
them has complained of intimidation."
Ehteshami says the "poisoned atmosphere" in the US since 9/11 is deterring
UK academics from applying for posts across the pond. He knows two, but
refuses to name them. "They don't want pressure to be 'patriotic'," he
says.
But he adds that resistance to the neocons is taking hold, a view
confirmed by Lynne Segal, professor of psychology at Birkbeck, London
University, and a member of the international group Faculty for
Israeli/Palestinian Peace as well as Jews for Justice for Palestinians in
Britain. Such groups campaign in the name of academics who find themselves
threatened, holding seminars and conferences and distributing their views
to a wide audience.
"I think intimidation is possible. These are very troubling developments
and we need to be watchful," Segal says.
Ehteshami says that, for now, inquiries by students about his political
views are just "inquiries, not a challenge". He adds: "This is a
witch-hunt that compromises academic integrity and freedom that,
ironically, in the past the US was very proud of. God forbid it happens in
the UK."
1. "Disengagement or Appeasement?"
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16813
2. Openly Anti-Semitic Garbage at "Commondreams":
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/headlines05/0127-07.htm
3. Eurocrap:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0105/euro_antisem.php3
4. Is there still room for this asshole on Robin Island?
http://www.mandela-palestine.org/
5. Still think the analogy with Munich is out of place?
http://israelnn.com/news.php3?id=76008
6. Shame that the Holocaust gave Anti-Semitism a bad name:
http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=4723
7. Let us snip his baton!
http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?strwebhead=Barenboim+speech+sparks+outrage&intcategoryid=5
Courtesy of the David Project
A still from the documentary, Columbia Unbecoming.
http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?strwebhead=Barenboim+speech+sparks+outrage&intcategoryid=5
Barenboim comments spark anger
as controversy at Columbia builds
By Rachel Pomerance
NEW YORK, Jan. 26 (JTA) ? Its not oftenn that someone compares the
anti-Semitic German composer Richard Wagner to Theodor Herzl, the father
of Zionism.
But at Columbia University on Monday ? the day the United NNations marked
the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz ? tthe
Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim reportedly did just that.
Barenboim, who sparked outrage several years ago by performing Richard
Wagners music in Israel, where it was taboo to play the work of Hitlers
favorite composer, excoriated the Jewish state at a memorial lecture for
his late friend Edward Said, the Columbia professor who was a member of
the Palestine National Council.
According to news reports and comments from audience members, Barenboim
compared Herzls ideas to Wagners; criticized Palestinian terrorist attacks
but also justified them; and said Israeli actions contributed to the rise
of international anti-Semitism.
The lecture is emblematic of an escalating crisis embroiling
Columbia, where faculty members in the Middle East and Asian Languages and
Cultures departments have been accused of intimidation by pro-Israel
students.
In October 2004, the David Project, a pro-Israel advocacy group, screened
a documentary called Columbia Unbecoming, airing claims that faculty
members harass students who dont share their anti-Israel views.
Two months later, Columbia University president Lee Bollinger announced
the formation of an investigative committee, which is due to issue a
report by the end of February.
Pro-Israel students had complained of faculty intimidation before. In
2003, Bollinger responded by appointing another committee to assess the
matter. That group found no evidence of bias.
This time around, some are taking issue with the five committee members
chosen. Among them are faculty members who signed petitions urging
Columbia to divest its holdings in companies that do business with Israel,
as well as the former adviser of one of the faculty members accused of
intimidation.
Meanwhile, Columbias campus newspaper reported Wednesday on the second
instance of anti-Semitic vandalism in recent months: A swastika and racial
slurs were scrawled in a mens bathroom at the student union Monday.
In light of the ongoing concern among Jewish students on campus, Daniel
Ayalon, Israels U.S. ambassador, canceled plans to attend a Columbia
conference on the Middle East peace process scheduled for Thursday,
according to Israels consul general in New York, Arye Mekel.
Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, who coordinated the conference, said he
would reschedule the event for September. In an e-mail to JTA, Mitchell
explained that several expected guests, including Palestinian Authority
Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei, had faced travel difficulties that made the
conference inconvenient.
Many Jewish students on campus say theyre distressed by the latest
developments.
Im feeling really worn out by the whole thing, sophomore Bari Weiss said.
At the same time, she said, the active Jewish students are committed to
being really unrelenting about this whole thing.
Weiss, who will represent herself and other students before the university
committee, is working with Columbians for Academic Freedom. According to
its Web site, the group is compiling student grievances to put a stop to
the abuse of professorial power in the pursuit of political ends.
Weiss just finished a course with Joseph Massad, one of the professors
accused of intimidation in Columbia Unbecoming.
Weiss said Massad had claimed that Zionism destroyed Jewish culture, said
Israeli schoolchildren killed in a terrorist attack were casualties of
crossfire, and made sarcastic comments about the ongoing investigation
into his conduct that silenced critical students. Massad could not be
reached as of press time.
I feel scared because I dont trust the committee, Weiss said ? but added,
We dont really have a choice at this point.
Bollinger, the university president, attended the Barenboim lecture,
applauded and failed to criticize his statements, according to several
audience members.
Bollinger asked Barenboim what alternative perspectives must be
entertained in order to bring about the resolution we all desperately want
toward Israeli-Palestinian peace, according to Susan Brown, a university
spokeswoman.
As a university it is our responsibility to discuss the most controversial
and intractable issues of our day, and Columbia must be resolute in its
tolerance for those who express unconventional, unpopular and sometimes
even offensive views, with which we dont necessarily agree, in the course
of public debate, Brown said.
Publicist Shira Dicker and her husband, Ari Goldman, dean of students at
Columbias School of Journalism, were outraged by the lecture.
I have never encountered such intellectual dishonesty, said Dicker, who
wrote a letter of protest to Bollinger after the lecture.
Anybody who tries to frame the debate as academic freedom is out of their
mind, she said. Its bullying.
Goldman said he was booed when he asked a critical question of Barenboim.
He left before Barenboim played the piano following his speech.
Barenboims comments were very disturbing, especially in the charged
atmosphere at Columbia now over Israel, Goldman said. I know hes a great
musician, but when he started to play, I left. I couldnt listen to music
from someone who had such scary things to say about Jews.
Thursday, January 27, 2005
1. Dissent is a Leftist Magazine:
The Transformation of the Left into a
Neo-Fascist Movement
By Andrei S. Markovits
Dissent Magazine | January 27, 2005
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16788
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall the European-along with the much weaker
American-left has been in a crisis that has challenged its very identity.
In fact, this profound crisis predated the events of 1989; it was in full
swing by the time the Wall tumbled in good part because of the ineptitude
and moral bankruptcy of at least part of this left. Still, with the events
of 1989 and 1990, a period that began in the late 1860s and early 1870s
and entered its political salience in the 1880s came to a close. A
political manifestation and social formation that defined the very idea of
progressivism in the advanced industrial societies for exactly one century
collapsed. Some would say that the radicalism of this period, its
revolutionary potential to transform capitalism, ended with the tragedy of
1914. After all, it was then that the left realized that its
internationalism and perceived universal class solidarity had lost its
primacy to the much more powerful sentiment of particularistic
nationalism. The left's innocence was most certainly lost by the early
fall of 1914. Others would date the crisis from the end of World War I,
the events of 1918, which already pointed toward the coming of Stalinism
in the Soviet Union and National Socialism in Germany.
Still others see the death of a progressive alternative in the internecine
battle between social democrats and communists that contributed to-though
it wasn't responsible for-fascism's triumph, particularly in Germany. The
Hitler-Stalin pact, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, a replay of
that in Czechoslovakia twelve years later, the Sino-Soviet altercations,
the war between China and Vietnam, the Cambodia fiasco with all its
implications- there were plenty of sobering experiences for the
progressive project in Europe. And yet, it was none of these political
events that initiated the fundamental transformation that was to be
completed in 1989. It was really a conjuncture of social, economic,
generational, and cultural shifts that changed the very identity of the
left over the last twenty-five years. At least in this instance, I will
argue for the primacy of economy and society over politics.
I argue that there have been four periods in the history of the left since
World War II that have affected the position of the left today. American
developments will be mentioned only when they were essential contributors
to the shaping of the left in all advanced industrial societies. Although
it is evident that "the left," as commonly understood, was predominantly a
European phenomenon throughout the late nineteenth century and all of the
twentieth century, the United States did contribute significantly to this
political formation precisely in the postwar period.
The Orthodox Period: 1945-1968
I have called the first era the orthodox period because it witnessed a
continuation, by and large, of the left's ideological and political
topography since the Bolshevik Revolution. Whereas 1945 represented a
major hiatus in the arrangement of global politics, it did not alter the
essential identity and topography of the left. Yes, communism seemed
ascendant vis-Â?-vis social democracy on account of the Soviet Union's
emergence as a global power. Communism was a serious contender for
governmental power in Italy, France, Greece, and Czechoslovakia before it
was defeated by American-sponsored opposition in the first three cases and
by Soviet tanks-twice-in the last.
But the political landscape of Western Europe, as delineated by Seymour
Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, still pertained. Two fault lines-both of
which had been "frozen" by 1920-defined the identity of "the left." The
first was the external line that separated it from the rest of the
political world, notably liberals, conservatives, fascists, clericalists,
and the representatives of "cleavages" other than the "owner-worker"
cleavage that defined the essence of the left as a whole.* And second was
the internal line that separated social democrats from communists. The
earlier relationship between these two was by and large resumed during the
postwar period. Where social democracy was the stronger of the two before
the war, it emerged so again afterward-and vice versa. The character of
left-wing politics, the culture of socialists and communists, was barely
changed by the war. The working-class-dominated milieus of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remained by and large what they
had been. Associations, colors, insignia, songs, tastes, and leisure
activities that had been institutionalized in the decades before the
Second World War- in many instances even before the Great War-continued in
a completely different world.
Whatever the actual reasons for the predominance of one leftist camp over
the other, there was an obvious North-South divide in Europe during this
period of orthodoxy. The countries north of the Alps (with Finland and
Norway being the useful exceptions proving the rule) exhibited a social
democratic identity, whereas their counterparts to the south embarked on a
communist path. These collective expressions of working-class identity
remained largely intact between 1918 and 1968. One of the most
characteristic manifestations of orthodoxy all over Europe was the
domination of the party over the unions. In the communist as well as the
social democratic version, the party was in charge of "big" politics; that
is, all matters pertaining to the state, society, economy, and culture,
whereas the unions' domain pertained almost exclusively to "small"
politics, the realm of industrial relations however defined. There is, of
course, the exception of the British Labour Party, whose identity and
policies were much more directly influenced by the party's constituent
unions than was the case for the continent's three social democratic
giants-Sweden, Austria, and Germany. To be sure, the big union
organizations were major players in these countries' social democracies,
but they took a back seat to "their" parties in politics.
No doubt, the party's primacy over the unions was much more pronounced in
the communist model than in the social democratic one. After all, Leninism
had designed the transmission-belt pattern of party-union relations
precisely in order to eliminate unions as autonomous actors-and thus
prevent syndicalist tendencies from developing as viable options for left
politics in advanced industrial societies (though they did develop in
semi-agrarian settings such as Spain, Italy, and southern France). But
even in the social democratic variant, where no concept equivalent to the
transmission belt existed, the party was hegemonic: it designed strategy,
took charge of the theoretical debates, and prevailed in shaping economic
policy. In short, it led, and the unions followed.
Of course, there were immense differences between social democrats and
communists in this orthodox period. The former had reached an
accommodation with capitalism, even if they had not quite accepted it yet;
whereas the latter still saw their raison d'Â?tre in fundamental opposition
to the dominant social system. As a consequence of this difference,
communists and social democrats also found themselves on opposite sides of
the cold war, then in a hot phase. All communists-without
exception-rejected the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, opposed the
United States, and favored the Soviet Union at least in some fashion,
whereas most social democrats were hostile to the Soviet Union, if
initially also guarded in their support for the West, NATO, and the United
States. This issue contributed to an open break within Italian social
democracy (between the Socialist Party [PSI] and the Social Democratic
Party [PSDI]), and similar fissures-without the ensuing break-opened in
German, British, Danish, and Norwegian social democracy as well. By the
mid-to-late 1950s, however, the "Westernizers" had carried the day. For
the ensuing thirty years, social democracy was unequivocally pro-Western.
John Maynard Keynes triumphed over Karl Marx, and the Godesberg platform
prevailed all over Western Europe-well beyond the immediate confines of
the German Social Democratic Party (SPD).
Still, the immense similarities between communism and social democracy
were more characteristic of the orthodox period than the obvious
differences. These in fact rendered them the unchallenged representatives
of a clear political formation that was known to itself and the rest of
the world as "the left." Here are some of these shared traits: both were
sociologically anchored in the male, industrial, mainly skilled working
class; ideologically, both were ardent advocates of growth at all costs;
politically, they were believers in collective arrangements countering the
inherent fragmentation of the market and liberal individualism;
strategically, both were hopeful about "mega" solutions-"mega" state,
"mega" bureaucracies, "mega" technologies, "mega" progress. This was a
time when the left, both social democratic and communist, placed its hopes
in the "clean" energy of nuclear power. The changes that came in the late
1960s were nothing short of revolutionary, though-in contrast to the two
subsequent periods-they still followed the major vectors of what it meant
to be "left."
The Heterodox Period: 1968-1979
It would not be an exaggeration to say that virtually all the tenets
defining the left during the "orthodox" period were substantially
challenged, if not superseded, by events during the legendary sixties.
Thus, it is not by chance that in Germany, France, Italy, and the United
States, the "'68ers" (achtundsechziger, soixantehuitards) have attained
near mythical status, and generated a considerable nostalgia, in the
postwar histories of these countries' left-wing politics. Be it the events
at Berkeley, Columbia, and the National Democratic Convention in Chicago
for the United States; "the events" in Paris; Italy's Hot Autumn; or the
politics of confrontation embodied by the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition
(APO) and the Student Socialist Organization (SDS) in the Federal
Republic, there developed a clear challenge to the existing lefts in each
of these societies.
For the first time in the history of the left, the essential impetus for
this development came not primarily from Europe but from the United
States. Concretely, these changes were anchored in two major struggles
that informed American politics at the time: the civil rights movement at
home and the Vietnam War abroad. Both of these developed into absolute
icons for all lefts in the world. Mainly carried by students and not by
the traditional subject of the left-that is, the industrial working
class-this massive transformation of the discourse of the left was deeply
anchored in the cultural climate of the United States, which the rest of
the world, particularly Europe's students and its young generally,
embraced with enthusiasm. One cannot understand the rise of the New Left
in Paris, Berlin, Milan, and London without understanding the massive
influence of American rock 'n' roll, folk music, protest songs and poetry,
and the civil rights movement's tactic of the "sit in." Posters of Bob
Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Jerry Garcia, Martin Luther
King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Allen Ginsberg adorned the homes of thousands of
European New Leftists alongside such other icons as Che Guevara and, of
course, Ho Chi Minh. On both sides of the Atlantic, this generation was
equally formed by the first seemingly democratic and impromptu rock
festival held in the muddy fields near Woodstock, New York, and by one of
Europe's foremost intellectual Â?migrÂ?s who, unlike others in his immediate
milieu, proudly remained in America while becoming one of this country's
most challenging critics. I am talking about Herbert Marcuse, whom many
have-quite rightly-called the New Left's most influential thinker. The
deep American roots of the New Left in Europe, both in form and substance,
are beyond debate.
In notable contrast to the subsequent time period, which entailed a
paradigm shift, the New Left challenge developed within the Marxist
paradigm-though it was profoundly threatening to the existing world of
socialist politics. If the subsequent era was to transcend socialism and
develop some sort of post-socialist politics, New Leftists in the period I
have labeled "heterodox" wanted a "true" socialism, freed from what they
viewed as related perversions: social democracy in the West and
Leninism/Stalinism in the East (though some New Leftists were mesmerized
by Leninism in its Maoist version).
The authority that parties of the established left enjoyed during the
orthodox period eroded in this decade of heterodoxy. On the intellectual
level, the New Left offered a radical critique of the politics of the
hegemonic parties. On the institutional level, there emerged small, but
intellectually influential parties to the left of the traditional social
democratic and communist parties in terms of their programs as well as
their strategic approaches. Though small in actual numbers, these parties
represented the legacy of the "68-ers" in the left's "party space"-a
standing challenge to the orthodox left. The Parti Socialiste UnifiÂ? in
France might perhaps be the best example of this genre: small in number of
voters, members, and officeholders, but important in intellectual
influence.
On the other hand, the relationship between parties and unions changed
substantially. Several points are worthy of mention in this context:
1. Everywhere in Europe there occurred at this time a clear politicization
of the unions. They expanded their horizons from the confined world of
industrial relations and shop-floor affairs to include issues of "grand
politics" hitherto left to the respective "sister" (or "mother") party.
Unions catapulted themselves into a position of quasi-equality with
"their" parties. On the one hand, they entered into various macropolitical
arrangements with employers and the state that gave labor an active role
in economic management. Even though often defensive in nature (and also
demobilizing), these neocorporatist arrangements signaled a new union
strength. In addition to this activism "from above," the unions also
engaged in an activism "from below." Largely propelled by a restive rank
and file that wanted to cash in on its superb position in a tight labor
market, the unions bargained for the most impressive "quantitative" and
"qualitative" gains attained by labor at any time in the fifty-plus years
of the postwar period. Even though these two activisms clashed with each
other, they emanated from the same optimism, power, and self-confidence
that redefined the role of unions inside the European left during this
period.
2. This, of course, led the unions to distance themselves from their
respective parties. Nowhere was this more obvious than in Italy, where the
three union confederations (allied with different parties) discovered that
as many things united as divided them. Similar, though not as effective,
distancing maneuvers on the part of unions also occurred in Germany,
Britain, Sweden, and Austria. Only in France did the old transition-belt
model between the Communist Party (PCF) and the communist-dominated trade
union federation (CGT) remain largely intact. There too, however,
independent union power figured significantly in the discourse of the
left, particularly because the former Catholic union, sporting the new
acronym CFDT, shed its former clericalism and became one of the most vocal
advocates of the New Left.
3. Central to this activism was the role of hitherto marginal elements
within the labor movement. Although labor's core-that is, male, skilled,
industrial workers-also participated in the general mobilization, it was
often its lesser skilled, female, and foreign colleagues who were the
political vanguard at the grass roots and on the shop floor. Add to this
group a substantial presence of tertiary-sector "intellectual" workers,
and the new working class had become a politically meaningful reality.
4. There was also a noticeable "intellectualization" of the labor
movement. Through the influx of a large number of academic researchers,
many of whom were veteran "68-ers," the unions developed a more
sophisticated theoretical approach to problems that until then remained
largely beyond their purview. Union leaders always had a very ambivalent
relationship to left-wing intellectuals, but now a "march through the
institutions" on the part of New Left activists changed organized labor's
mentality to a noticeable degree.
But something wholly new also happened at this time: the rise of left
politics outside of any established institutions, parties, or unions. It
was in this milieu that the new meaning of "leftism" in Europe and the
United States was forged. It was at this critical juncture-the decade
between 1968 and 1978-that tendencies developed whose influence persists
to this day, in Germany especially, but also in Europe generally. In my
article "The Minister and the Terrorist" (Foreign Affairs,
November-December, 2001), I described four groupings that emerged at this
juncture within the New Left.
I call the first group the "Westerners." Germany's current foreign
minister, Joschka Fischer, is exhibit A. This group, though vehemently
against the war in Vietnam, totally supportive of third world liberation
movements, and bitterly opposed to Western-as well as West
German-capitalism, began to reorder the hierarchy of its negative
preferences. Crucial in this reordering was that tyranny rather than
capitalism was put at the top of the list. Put positively, at the top now
was not the emancipation of the working class or even the liberation of
third world peoples from imperialism, but rather democracy, due process,
constitutionalism, and human rights. For reasons that probably have more
to do with the personal psychologies and histories of the relevant
individuals than with macro-sociological factors such as class background,
education, religion, geographic origin, and gender, the Westerners
successfully differentiated between American culture (which they loved, as
is evident from Fischer's well-known admission that Bob Dylan had a
greater influence on his life than Karl Marx) and American politics in the
world (which they disliked). Above all, they did not develop a visceral
hatred of all things American. And they also began to look at the
Holocaust as a development sui generis and not merely as an epiphenomenon
of what the rest of the German left then still called-and continues to
call-"fascism" rather than National Socialism. As a consequence, the
Westerners committed a major blasphemy in the eyes of the rest of the
left. They argued that the United States and the Federal Republic of
Germany could-and did-on occasion produce good things, such as a stable
and democratic order in Germany and Europe; and that liberal democracy,
though capitalist, was indeed preferable to tyranny, even of the people's
republic kind. They saw the West also as an occasional force of liberation
and emancipation, not only as one of repression and exploitation. Lastly,
members of this group upheld the value of universalism-already at this
time a ready target for various relativizing particularisms that came to
define other groups on the left, to which I now turn.
The second group I call the "Third Worldists." They considered imperialism
the most important political issue of the day and rejected everything that
the developed world stood for, including Western values and industrial
modernization. The Third Worldists would later constitute the bulk of the
"Fundamentalist" (or "Fundi") wing of the German Green Party and fight a
bitter rearguard action against what they believed to be the sellouts by
Fischer and his "Realos." During the 1970s, the Third Worldists believed
that the Federal Republic was second only to the United States in its
objectionable character. They detested its parliamentary institutions,
disdained its market-based economy, hated its role as a driving force in
modernization's inevitable destruction of the environment, and feared any
manifestation of nationalism, which they saw as a harbinger of the
ever-looming "fascistization" of German politics and society. They were
vehemently anti-Zionist (although not necessarily anti-Semitic) and found
in the Palestinians an emblem of noble suffering and anticolonial
resistance.
The third group were the "orthodox Marxists," who located the source of
the Federal Republic's ills not in industrial modernization but in
capitalism. In contrast to all other New Leftists, members of this group
considered the industrial working class not only a worthy ally but as an
"objectively necessary" part of any major social transformation. Adherents
of this tendency reached deep into the SPD and some German trade unions,
notably the metal workers', printers', journalists', writers', and bank
employees' unions. They also developed cozy relations with East Germany,
whose Marxist-Leninist system they regarded with tolerant admiration if
not outright enthusiasm. This group's strength explains why serious
criticism of "actually existing socialism" in the Soviet bloc was
unpopular in parts of the German left well into the 1980s-so much so that
the Polish Solidarity movement was often denounced by German unionists and
social democrats as retrograde and reactionary. (During his JUSO [youth
organization of the SPD] days, the current chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder,
was closest to this wing of the New Left.)
I call the fourth and last remaining group the "neo-Nationalists." The New
Left focused mainly on opposing the war in Vietnam, demonstrating
solidarity with developing-world liberation movements, and transforming
bourgeois society. But in Germany it also had a nationalist component
provoked by the country's division and limited sovereignty. Left-wing
nationalism has a long history in Germany (National Bolshevism and the
Strasser wing of the National Socialists are two cases in point), and it
is hardly surprising that such feelings were represented among the '68ers
as well. Nationalist sentiment grew over the controversy surrounding the
1983 deployment of American intermediate-range nuclear missiles on German
soil and was later intensified by German unification. By the mid-1990s, in
fact, a substantial number of '68ers had completed a journey from extreme
left to extreme right, with the constant factor being their hatred of the
West. Today, this antimodernist, anti-Western sentiment is alive and well
throughout Europe among those on the extreme right and left who invoke
nationalism in their opposition to globalization. The two most prominent
German radicals to undergo such a shift are Horst Mahler and Bernd Rabehl.
Along with two other prominent ex-leftists, Mahler-now the far right
National Democratic Party's official legal counsel-recently declared that
the '68er movement had been "neither for communism nor for capitalism,
neither for a Third-Worldist nor for an Eastern or a Western community of
values." Instead, it had been "about the right of every Volk to assert its
national-revolutionary and social-revolutionary liberation." In this view,
the Germans were no exception. Already then, the main root of Germany's
trouble lay in its solid anchoring in the West-controlled by that
double-headed evil, the United States and world Jewry. In marked contrast
to the Third Worldists, adherents to this path developed an anti-Zionism
that could barely, if ever, be differentiated from anti-Semitism.
This is also the period when the left's enmity against Israel, begun in
the wake of the Six Day War of June 1967, became a salient issue for its
politics, its identity, and also its internal divisions. Indeed, I would
argue that perhaps the most defining gauge of where somebody stood
politically, how she/he saw the world, was that ubiquitous triangle of
Israel, the Jews, and the United States. Roughly speaking, to the
Westerners, the plight of the Jews was a serious issue, which meant that
they developed a much more favorable view of Israel than did the other
three groups. To the Third Worldists and the orthodox Marxists, the plight
of the Jews-though real-remained unimportant, massively subordinate to the
plight of third world peoples (to the Third Worldists) and of workers (to
the orthodox Marxists). In the nationalist camp, by contrast, the plight
of the Jews was either never acknowledged or even viewed with outright
contempt. It is here that the nexus between the vÂ?lkisch left and the
vÂ?lkisch right, which manifested itself so vigorously in the streets of
many German and European cities in the spring of 2002 and again in 2003,
was forged.
Paradigm Shift: 1980-1989
In this era most fundamental assumptions of the socialist project
underwent major challenges. Above all, the 1980s witnessed the weakening
-perhaps even severing-of an alliance that once had defined the left, with
the working class as subject of history and driving force of progressive
politics. From circa 1880 until 1980, the most fundamental dogma of social
democrats and communists alike was that the working class would be the
decisive carrier of social transformation beyond capitalism. Both
theoretically and empirically, there was a tight logical connection
between the working class and the left: not all workers had to be left,
but there could be no left without workers. All other movements, social
groups, and individuals were in principle subordinated to the working
class in the endeavor of attaining socialism. This changed drastically in
the course of the 1980s. Briefly put, the working class lost its position
not only as a theoretically compelling feature of all socialist
orientations but also as an empirical necessity of quotidian politics.
This radical change has three salient features.
1. The appearance of the new social movements and their political
offspring, the Green parties. In the course of the 1970s and increasingly
in the 1980s, progress began to mean almost the opposite of what it did
before. The term had always been associated with some sort of growth, but
now the desirability of growth was questioned, if not entirely rejected.
If being left and progressive meant building dams and steel mills during
the previous two eras, it now implied saving little fish and rare birds
from the destruction wrought by those very dams and mills. The
universalism of class as a primary political identity was superseded by
the particularism of groups. Faith previously placed in technology,
centralization, and the state was now conferred upon localism,
decentralization, and community power. The left moved from growth, state,
class, economy, and politics to identity, gender, empowerment, and
deconstruction. Tellingly, much of critical social science, formerly
engaged on behalf of a progressive agenda, was now superseded by an
increasingly philosophized Marxism, which in turn drifted toward literary
criticism and various other poststructural and postmodern intellectual
endeavors.
It had become clear by the mid-1980s that green was the left's
trendsetting color instead of the century-old red. Increasingly, also, the
color purple denoted the arrival and staying power of politically
meaningful women's movements in the public arena of all advanced
industrial democracies. Possibly no other change wrought by the New Left
had such a tangible impact on virtually all aspects of private and public
life as did the rise and establishment of the women's movements. In brief,
protecting the life-world, reclaiming lost intimacy, defending vulnerable
groups, extolling smallness-all this replaced the previous faith in the
liberating aspects of technology and the obsession with "mega" projects
that had dominated the European and American left's discourse for exactly
one hundred years.
2. The weakening of union power. If the 1970s was the decade of the
unions, the 1980s could be called the decade of union setbacks. Absolutely
crucial in these were the massive offensives led by hard-right governments
such as Ronald Reagan's administration in the United States and Margaret
Thatcher's in Great Britain. On every conceivable front and in every
country, organized labor suffered one defeat after another, leading to a
substantial weakening of its position in the political arena and the labor
market. The losses covered many areas: receding or stagnating membership;
failure to attain even the most meager compromises in collective
bargaining; seeing the arena and timing of conflict determined by
management; being unable to strike; facing serious problems with one's
"own" parties, be they communist or social democratic; confronting harsher
conditions of production; dealing with a hostile state preoccupied with
creating favorable economic conditions for an increasingly difficult
global economy.
Interestingly, the losses were particularly severe in those countries
where labor had been the least "compromised" by corporatist arrangements
during the previous two decades. In other words, where labor's conflict
with capital remained the "purest" in the sense that it preserved the
market as the main arena and adjudics mattered, more important still were
the deeper social structures. Thus, for example, even though Helmut Kohl's
government in Germany was by most measures as conservative as Reagan's in
the United States and Thatcher's in Britain, it simply could never roll
back labor in Germany to the same degree. Wherever labor's struggle with
capital was mediated by various public or para-public institutions and
neocorporatist arrangements, the losses were less drastic.
3. Labor's inability to pursue a genuine policy of international
solidarity. Marx got it right: capitalism, an inherently depersonalized
and rootless form of productive relations, was indeed international in its
structure, and this international system of production exploited labor on
an international scale. But just as Marx the social analyst was more often
right than wrong, the opposite is true for Marx the normative thinker, the
revolutionary, the activist, the political man. He believed that because
capitalism exploited the working class internationally, the working class
would sooner or later realize the international dimensions of its
predicament and confront capitalism with its own internationalist
solidarity. Alas, we know from too many tragic events how erroneous this
wishful thinking was. If anything, labor has emerged as the most
nationalistic among all major social groups in advanced capitalist
countries. In the United States, Canada, Britain, France, and even in
supposedly "open" and export-oriented countries such as Germany, the trade
unions have consistently been active supporters of some sort of
protectionist measurject only to the laws of unbridled capitalism. This is
a very serious problem for organized labor and its progressive allies in
advanced capitalist societies because it fosters an especially problematic
particularism.
Fragmentation and Polarization
1989/1990-Present
With the collapse of Soviet communism and the green and purple challenge
to Western social democracy, the European left has lost the overall
coherence of modernist universalism that defined it for more than a
hundred years. On the one hand, one should rejoice in this development,
because Truth and Progress (with capital letters) were too arrogantly
defended by much of the left throughout the twentieth century. We will
most likely be spared any repetition of the horrors of the GULAG or the
genocidal mania of the Khmer Rouge-whose protagonists claimed to be acting
in the name of justice, equality, and progress. But there exists a more
fundamental problem. Although one can still identify many worthy causes
that qualify as progressive, one would be hard-put to identify a subject
of hof the death penalty, equality in marital arrangements and official
recognition of gay and lesbian couples by the state; progressive income
tax; economic and social justice; support for third world claims against
the rich first world; multilateralism as opposed to unilateralism;
legalization of marijuana; and on and on-opposition to Israel and America
figure at the very top. If one is not at least a serious doubter of the
legitimacy of the state of Israel (never mind the policies of its
government) and if one does not dismiss everything American as a priori
vile and reactionary, one runs the risk of being excluded from the entity
called "the left." There has not been a common issue since the Spanish
Civil War that has united the left so clearly as has anti-Zionism and its
twin, anti-Americanism. The left divided, and divides, over Serbia, over
Chechnya, over Darfur, even over the war in Iraq. There are virtually no
divisions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and over the essence of
the United States. If one has anything positive-or even non-derogatory-to
say about the United States or Israel, one always needs to qualify it with
a resounding "but."
I remember calling myself a Labor Zionist in the late 1960s and early
1970s. This was still possible in important circles of the German and the
American left. Being a Dissenter was still acceptable in the large tent of
the left. This has changed. To be sure, there are some small pockets among
the German Greens-though much less in the SPD's milieu-where Israel,
Zionism, and America have not become automatic terms of derision and
hatred. Few people will admit this, but the tone that makes the music is
pretty clear. The hegemonic discourse of the left on both sides of the
Atlantic features America and Israel as identity-defining issues that are
largely nonnegotiable.
Finally, it remains an open question whether what is today called
"globalization" is truly unprecedented in its altering of social relations
and human life-as so many claim-or whether it is merely another of the
constantly changing and highly disruptive stages in the longue durÂ?e of
capitalism. This question lies beyond my scope here. I only want to
suggest that on virtually all the indicators dear to economists, the
restructuring that occurred at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning
of the twentieth centuries created dislocations far more massive than
those produced by capitalism today. The dislocations of those years
shattered the left's internationalism, led it to embrace centrifugal
particularisms, and then to watch its emancipatory dreams die on the
battlefields of Europe. History, of course, never repeats itself. But to
paraphrase a well-known political economist of the nineteenth century: it
appears first as tragedy, the next time as farce.
*Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, "Cleavage Structures, Party
Systems and Voter Alignments: An Introduction" in Seymour Martin Lipset
and Stein Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National
Perspectives (New York: The Free Press, 1967), pp. 1-64.
2. Islamofascist Holocaust Denial:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16793
3. Thanks God for not Making all the Meshuganas Jewish:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16769
4. Hiring a terrorist as professor (no, NOT at Ben Gurion University):
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16774
1. Israel's Attorney General, Menachem "Manny" Mazuz, is a far leftist
and a compatriot of Yossi Beilin, godmother of Olso. So naturally, when
Ariel Sharon needed an Attorney General, Mazuz was the guy he picked.
The Likud's main goal at the yop of its agenda is to install leftist
officials and implement the Left's agenda.
Yesterday Mazuz declared war on the Jewish National Fund. The Jewish
National Fund is a NGO (non-governmental organization) whose origins go
back to the early days of Zionism. It would collect kopeks and pennies
from Jews all over the world in little "pishka" tin cans and use the money
to buy lands that would then be leased out for Jewish enterprises and
farms. The lands being purchased were intended for the benefit of Jews
and the use by Jews in nation-building. JNF land is alloted for things
like settling new immigrants to Israel.
Yesterday Mazuz declared that the JNF, even though it is not a
state-agency but a NGO, cannot favor Jewish users and uses in allocation
of its lands and has to give equal priority to Arab uses and users. That
means that he wants to deny the right of all those little Jewish
contributors putting their kopeks in the pishka to earmark their donations
for other Jews. See http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/532493.html
Now just to put this into perspective, there is another NGO whose lands
allocation Mazuz is NOT going to direct or interfere in. That is the
Moslem WAKF, a NGO that holds lands for Moslem religious purposes and
explicitly discrminates against Jews and Jewish users.
In other words, the JNF is "racist" in Mazuz' view when it uses its
land for the benefit of Jews, but not the WAKF. There are other
state-owned lands in Israel owned by the Israel Lands Authority, but that
has long followed a policy of alloting these for general public uses
(Jewish and Arab). It should be noted that much of the land in Israel is
nationalized, something I as an economist oppose, but out of the
privately-owned land Arabs own a far greater proportion than their
percent in the population! For 1300 Jews were discrimated against by
Arabs in the Middle East and prevented from owning land. Hence one might
legitmately regard the JNF's previous policy of favoring Jewish users as
affirmative action.
Mazuz' latest is a symptom of the "Post-Zionist" syndrome and its
increasing control over the Likud itself.
2. Who is to blame for the rise in Anti-Semitism? The British Media!:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200501/s1288718.htm
and also http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1397726,00.html
and also
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=604299
(Of course, they forgot to mention the Israeli media)
3. How to make the stock market go up - catch terrorists!
http://nationalreview.com/kudlow/kudlow200501261120.asp
4. Interesting piece:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050126.wxaush0126/BNStory/I
5. Making the punishment fit the crime:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=531846&contrassID=1&subContrassID=7&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
(Was the porno material - Haaretz?)
6. You know how the whiney Left has been screaming every time Israel
bulldozes an illegally built Arab house? Well:
http://www.israelnn.com/news.php3?id=75852
Will th eFar Lefties be calling for a new international boycott of the
Caterpiller bulldozer company?
7. Israeli Feminazis for Terror:
http://israelnn.com/news.php3?id=75826
8.
Harvard Prez better not cite this:
http://www.news.com.au/story/0%2C10117%2C12033956-13762%2C00.html
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
1. Oh how embarrassing. The anti-Israel crowd, the Jew baiters, and the
tenured traitors were having a field day this morning. A 3 year old
Palestinian girl had been killed this morning in the Gaza Strip and it
looked like she was killed when Israeli troops returned fire at
Palestinian terrorists firing at THEM. Now that, you might say, would
mean the Palestinians are responsible for the girl's death, since they
opened fire, and they must be held accountable for any collateral damage
from Israel returning fire.
AH, but we know the real world does not work that way and the Jews are
always to blame when they shoot back.
So here we were witnessing the anti-Semites of the world having a
celebration without precedent of Israel being blamed for the 3 year old
girl's death - when the truth comes out. It was even more embarrassing
than when the truth came out that the PLO had killed the little boy
Mohammed al-Dura and not Israeli troops!
It was revealed this afternoon that the girl was NOT killed by Israeli
return fire. She was killed by a Kassam rocket. The Kassam rockets are
PLO weapons fired into Jewish civilian areas, and the PLO has been
continuing to fire tham at the Jews even during the current make-pretend
ceasefire. Except that the one fired this morning had a structural
default, and landed short, inside the Palestinian area of the Gaza Strip.
It blew the girl to smithereens.
2. Regarding that film by an Israeli "producer" glorifyiong suicide
bombers, which we discussed in yesterday's post, the evil Israeli in the
film is played by a .... Palestinian actor.
How Come? The Israeli producer Harel uses a "Palestinian" actor when he
wants to portray an "edgy...Israeli" who looks like a thug. Is that
racist typecasting - or what? Also, notice that this film was shown "in
association with the Consulate General of Israel (SF)?" Is this sick, or
what? An official sponsorship of this movie by the diplomatic services of
Israel?
"Palestinian actor Salim Daw is striking as the edgy, underground Israeli
businessman. The Holy Land they inhabit is less the dream of milk and
honey than a reality of abuse and misfortune.
3. For the past few days, the Loony Left here has been whining about the
arrest of a Danish citizen suspected of espionage. No doubt one of those
"peace solidarity" people, Rachel Corrie wannabes. Well, now the details
have come out:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1106710064981
Dane under arrest is Hizbullah spy
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yaakov Katz and Margot Dudkevitch, THE JERUSALEM POST Jan. 26, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Danish citizen of Lebanese origin currently the focus of a joint
Police-Shin Bet investigation was identified Wednesday as a Hizbullah
recruited agent by the name of Iyad al Ashwah, 39, after a gag order on
the investigation was lifted.
Al Ashwah, originally born in Lebanon moved to Denmark in 1986 and
received Danish citizenship six years later.
Al Ashwah was arrested on January 6 while he was on a train from Nahariya
to Haifa after he raised a security officer's suspicions by videotaping
the passing scenery through the train window.
He was arrested by police and confessed that in July 2004 he had been
recruited into Hizbullah by relatives living in Lebanon. In his
interrogation, al Ashwah told police that he was ordered to travel to
Israel disguised as a tourist to collect security information and most
importantly to recruit Israeli-Arabs into the terror organization.
Two Israeli-Arabs have also been arrested.
In exchange for his work, al Ashwah was paid $2,000 by his Hizbullah
operators.
On December 29, al Ashwah arrived in Israel on a Turkish Airlines flight.
He entered Israel with a brand new passport which had been issued right
before his trip. During the six days leading up to his arrest, al Ashwah
succeeded in recruiting two Israel-Arab suspects. He told police that he
planned on renting a car and driving up north to locate security
installations. He said he understood his mission to be a "test" which
would be followed by a larger "more significant" mission.
The suspect further told police that he maintained close contacts with
relatives living in the Middle East and would visit Syria and Lebanon on
an annual basis. Over the past two years, al Ashwah was unemployed and
lived off
of a government stipend. He said that in Denmark he gave most of his money
to the Al Bureij Islamic charity association that maintains close ties
with the refugee camp of the same name in Lebanon.
"This suspect is just another example of the Hizbullah's growing interest
in acting against Israel," the police said. "This time, the Hizbullah used
an Arab with a Western passport to fool the Israeli security service."
Foreigners recruited by Hizbullah
This is not the first foreign national to be arrested by the Shin Bet
(Israel Security Agency) on suspicion of violating state security.
In October 2002, Fawzi Ayoub, 38, a senior Hizbullah official who entered
Israel on a forged US passport to carry out attacks in Israel and assist
terrorist organizations in the territories was arrested by the Shin Bet.
Ayoub, of Lebanese Shi'ite descent, participated in numerous attacks in
and outside Lebanon and operated in a special unit headed by Hizbullah
leader Hassan Nasrallah's deputy on military affairs, Amed Muaneh.
After undergoing training, Ayoub was sent to Canada, where he lived for a
number of years. He maintained contact with officials in Lebanon and
carried out a number of missions on their behalf. On returning to Lebanon,
Hizbullah recruited him to carry out a dangerous covert operation in
Israel. He underwent intensive military preparation and was then
dispatched to Europe where he received a forged US passport which he used
to enter Israel.
In January 2001 security officials arrested Hizbullah agent Jihad Shuman
who bore a British passport with the name Gerard Shuman, who had entered
the country in December 2000.
Shuman, who studied computers at the Beirut University, is a Lebanese
Shi'ite by descent and was ordered by his operators to travel to London
and leave his Lebanese passport in the country, where he was instructed to
purchase a cellular phone and fictitiously rent a mailbox and apartment,
which he was to give out as his address once he arrived in Israel. He was
told to locate a spot in Wadi Joz where certain items had been hidden for
him, and was arrested six days after arriving in Israel. When arrested by
security forces in his hotel room, Shuman had in his possession a kippah,
timers, large sums of money, and three cellular phones.
In November 1997, German citizen Stefan Josef Smyrek was arrested by the
Shin Bet on his arrival at Ben Gurion airport. Smyrek, a convert to Islam,
was recruited by the Hizbullah and sent to Israel to perpetrate a suicide
bomb attack.
Tried and convicted in Israel, he was in the middle of serving a ten-year
jail sentence when he was released last year in a swap for the return of
the bodies of the three soldiers abducted and killed in Har Dov in 2000
and the release of Israeli businessmen Elhanan Tenenbaum.
In 1996, Hassin Makdad, who entered Israel on a British passport in April
of the same year, was wounded when a bomb he was preparing exploded
prematurely in his room at the Lawrence Hotel in east Jerusalem.
4. Down goes yet another "ceasefire" - until the next one:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1106623165328&p=1078397702269
5. The British Spectator Merges with Der Sturmer:
http://web.israelinsider.com/views/4875.htm
6. For Hebrew readers: nice piece on Jewish anti-Semitism:
http://www.norskisraelsenter.no/hebr/2004-bukai-jewish-self-hatred.htm
7. Outting the Terrorhoids:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16776
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Subject: Coming to a Cinema Near You!
You will no doubt think I am pulling your leg and posting yet another dumb spoof when I report to you that an Israeli movie producer is producing a film direct by a Palestinian that celebrates and romanticizes Palestinian suicide bombers. Yes, Amir Harel has decided that movie viewers need to ?understand? and identify with the just cause of Palestinian suicide bombers who mass murder Israeli children. The Jews for a Second Holocaust will be getting a movie in which they can at last feel comfortable. The tenured traitors can show it on campus and the Tikkun editors can give it a rave review. You just know it will be featured at the Berkeley Jewish Film Festival.
Amir Harel was until a few years ago a ?journalist? for Haaretz, the anti-Israel Palestinian newspaper published in Hebrew. While maintaining his day job at the ?newspaper?, which is in fact no newspaper at all but rather a propaganda organ, Harel started producing a few highly forgettable B movies. (Ok, make those F movies.) Evidently Harel was able to do so on the basis of subsidies he got from an Israeli government film-producing fund (http://www.nfct.org.il/nfct/international1.htm and http://www.filmfund.org.il/ ), one of countless Israeli government agencies that should have been shut down and locked up decades ago. Before making anti-Israel films with Israeli taxpayer money, Harel?s greatest artistic achievement was making a web site about Seinfeld (http://www.geocities.com/a_harel/ ). Really.
One of the Harel films was about how an African guest worker suffers at the hands of the horrid insensitive racist Israelis (http://www.sffs.org/fest04/titleDetail.asp?title_id=22 ), who mistreat such workers. The mistreatment is so awful that today Africans by the tribe-load are knocking down the Israeli Embassy guards all over the continent to try to get temp jobs in Israel. The other Harel films were even worse and even stupider, which is why at least one got a prize from the Israeli Academy of Cinema, which is what Hollywood would look like if it were located on Saturn. One of these is about a German police agent named ?Axel? (Eddie Murphy ? sue his ass!!) and it celebrates sodomy and homosexuality in Berlin, along with its junior high school ?action? plot (http://www.eilatfilmfest.com/movieshebrew.htm ). That piece of garbage cost the Israeli taxpayer about 32000 Euros.
The new movie celebrating mass murderers of Jewish children was produced by the same Amir Harel, directed and co-written by a Palestinian pro-terrorist living in the Netherlands named Hany Abu-Assad (who previously made "Rana's Wedding" and ?Fort Transit?). The new Terror-is-Nice film is financed by a consortium of German, French and Dutch anti-Semites, and - incredible as it sounds - it was NOT funded by the Israeli government, which ordinarily can be counted on to finance the ?Jews as Nazis and Palestinians as their Victims? genre of cinema.
The new celebration of mass murder of Jewish children is getting rave reviews from the Beirut press (http://dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=4&article_id=11285 ). The official PLO web site also endorses the film as a great work of art:
http://www.palestinereport.org/article.php?article=386 . It is expected to the darling of the Berlin Film Festival next month, where there are many movie goers who know a lot about the art of murdering Jewish children.
My guess is that the ?New Likud? will grant the producer next year?s Israel Prize on Independence Day for the film.
Subject: Our World: Today's Jewish anti-Semites .... by Caroline Glick
Our World: Today's Jewish anti-Semites
_http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=
1106537800595&p=1006953079897_
(http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1106537800595&p=1006953079897)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST Jan. 25, 2005
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
In a recent poll, 62 percent of Germans said they were "sick of all the
harping on about German crimes against the Jews." Two thirds of Germans said
they believe Israel is waging "a war of extermination" against the Palestinians.
Jews often focus their attention on Holocaust sentiment among non-Jews to
gauge anti-Semitic feelings. But while feelings about the Holocaust serve as
an indicator of general sentiment about Jews, there are other indicators no
less important or revealing.
Sensitivity about the Holocaust may tell us what a person feels about Jews,
but it may also simply tell us what that person feels about dead Jews.
But let's say that most Germans did believe the Holocaust was a terrible
crime. Would the German rejection of the Holocaust mean that the majority
that believes Israel is today's Nazi Germany is less anti-Semitic? No, it
would not.
Yesterday the UN General Assembly for the first time held a special session
to commemorate the liberation of the Nazi death camps and the Holocaust.
Does this mean that the UN, which devotes some one-third of its resolutions
to condemning Israel, is no longer hostile to the Jewish people? No, it does
not.
SINCE THE Holocaust, the rallying cry of Jews has been "Never Again!" But
the enormity of the Holocaust must not blind us to its present-day mutation.
Today the vast majority of anti-Semites are not calling for Jews to be
deported to death camps. They are calling for the destruction of the Jewish
state and, as was the case in previous generations, they are seeking out and
finding Jews like Karl Marx who share their hatred for the Jewish people and
willingly advance their evil agenda.
This agenda is to again reduce Jews to a state of powerlessness where we
will be at the mercy of the same world that either participated in or did
nothing in the face of the extermination of European Jewry.
Today this is done by striking out at the main safeguard against such
powerlessness â?? the State of Israel â?? criminalizing it as the modern-day
incarnation of Nazi Germany. The role of Jewish anti-Semites in this
campaign is to decouple the dead Jews murdered by the Nazis from the live
Jews who live in, or support, the Jewish state.
Such a Jew was found by the British conservative magazine The Spectator in
one Anthony Lippman. Lippman is actually an Anglican, not a Jew, but as the
child of Jewish Holocaust survivors, he will do.
In a recent article, Lippman writes hypnotically about his mother's
sufferings in Auschwitz only to explain that the job of Holocaust survivors
and their children is to speak out against... Israel.
In his words, survivors have "a terrible responsibility â?? to live well in
the name of those who did not live and to discourage the building of walls
and bulldozing of villages. Even more than this, they â?? and all Jews â?? need
to be the voice of conscience that will prevent Israel from adopting the
mantle of oppressor, and to reject the label 'anti-Semite' for those who
speak out against Israel's policies in the occupied territories."
ANOTHER such Jew is Tony Judt. Since the start of the Palestinian terror
war, Judt, a historian at New York University, has been outspoken in his
rejection of Israel's right to exist.
In a series of articles in The New York Review of Books, The Nation and The
New Republic, Judt has led the charge in claiming that "the depressing truth
is that Israel today is bad for the Jews," and that for Jews to feel good
about themselves again Israel must cease to be a Jewish state â?? that is,
Israel must cease to exist.
This perverse line of reasoning, whereby the only way for Jews to be happy
is for us to again be powerless, has brought Judt under attack by prominent
Jews who have exposed the anti-Semitism inherent in his argumentation.
In a new article in The Nation magazine, Judt takes a stab at responding to
his many critics. The article is a ponderous attempt to argue that there is
no relation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
On the one hand, he says that it is anti-Semitic to say that Jews control
the US. But on the other hand, Judt allows that "contemporary US foreign
policy is in certain respects mortgaged to Israel," adding, "To say that
Israel and its lobbyists have an excessive and disastrous influence on the
policies of the world's superpower is a statement of fact."
Judt allows that there has been a rise in anti-Semitism in Europe in recent
years, but he blames this on "the policies of Israeli government." Echoing
Anglican Lippman, Judt writes that for anti-Semitism to be dealt with in
Europe, "Jews and others must learn to shed inhibitions and criticize
Israel's policies and actions."
In Judt's view, "once Germans, French and others can comfortably condemn
Israel without an uneasy conscience, and can look their Muslim fellow
citizens in the face, it will be possible to deal with the real problem
[i.e., anti-Semitism]."
Since the September 11 attacks Muslims have been called upon to decry the
preaching of hatred in their community. It is argued that until Muslims
themselves delegitimize the voices of hatred in their communities the
poisonous message of jihad will continue to attract thousands to its
genocidal cause.
The 60th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation is a good time to call for a
similar Jewish condemnation of hate-filled Jews and those that use them to
advance their anti-Semitic agenda.
These are not legitimate voices. These are not legitimate views. They are
the views of deranged Jew-haters which, if listened to, will do nothing
other than pave the way to the next calamity.
caroline@jpost.com
1. A Fascinating New Piece by Dan Pipes:
Orthodoxy - the Future of Judaism?
By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 25, 2005
(It should be emphasized that Dan is not himself religiously observant)
Until the eighteenth century, there was basically only one kind of
Judaism, that which is now called Orthodox. It meant living by the
religions 613 laws, and doing so suffused Jews lives with their faith.
Then, starting with the thinker Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) and moving
briskly during the Haskala (enlightenment) from the late eighteenth
century, Jews developed a wide variety of alternate interpretations of
their religion, most of which diminished the role of faith in their lives
and led to a concomitant reduction in Jewish affiliation.
These alternatives and other developments, in particular the Holocaust,
caused the ranks of the Orthodox to be reduced to a small minority. Their
percentage of the world Jewish population reached a nadir in the
post-World War II era, when it declined to about 5 percent.
The subsequent sixty years, however, witnessed a resurgence of the
Orthodox element. This was, again, due to many factors, especially a
tendency among the non-Orthodox to marry non-Jews and then to have fewer
children. Recent figures for the United States published by the National
Jewish Population Survey point in this direction. The Orthodox proportion
of American synagogue members, for example, went from 11 percent in 1971
to 16 percent in 1990 to 21 percent in 2000-01. (In absolute numbers, it
bears noting, the American Jewish population went steadily down during
these decades.)
Should this trend continue, it is conceivable that the ratio will return
to somewhat where it was two centuries ago, with the Orthodox again
constituting the great majority of Jews. Were that to happen, the
non-Orthodox phenomenon could seem in retrospect but an episode, an
interesting, eventful, consequential, and yet doomed search for
alternatives, suggesting that living by the law may be essential for
maintaining a Jewish identity over the long term.
These demographic thoughts come to mind on reading a recent article in the
Jerusalem Post, US haredi leader urges activism, by Uriel Heilman, in
which he reports on a landmark address in late November 2004 by Rabbi
Shmuel Bloom, executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America.
Agudath, an Orthodox organization with a stated mission to mobilize
Torah-loyal Jews for the perpetuation of authentic Judaism, has a
membership ranging from clean-shaven men to black-hatted ones (the
haredi), from Jews educated in secular universities to full-time,
Yiddish-speaking students of the Talmud.
Rabbi Bloom told an Agudath audience that Jewish demographic trends imply
that American Orthodox can no longer, as in the past, bury themselves in
their parochial interests and expect non-Orthodox Jewish institutions to
shoulder the major burden of communal responsibilities. Rather, the
Orthodox must now join in, or even take over from their non-Orthodox
co-religionists such tasks as fighting antisemitism, sending funds to
Israel, and lobbying the U.S. government. The things we rely on secular
Jews for, he asked, whos going to do that if the secular community
whittles down? We have to broaden our agenda to include things that up
until now weve relied upon secular Jews to do.
He exaggerates, in that some Orthodox Jews in the United States have been
prominently involved in both national (think of Senator Joseph Lieberman)
and communal affairs (Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America
comes to mind). But he is accurate in so far as Orthodox institutions have
generally stayed out of the American fray except to pursue their narrow
agenda.
Others in Agudath agree with the need for the Orthodox to broaden their
ambitions. David Zwiebel, the organizations executive vice president for
government and public affairs, notes that, With our growing numbers and
the maturing of the community and the greater self-confidence that comes
with that maturity and those numbers, theres no question that we need to
at least recognize that there may be certain responsibilities that now
have to shift to our shoulders.
Heilman understands this intent to assume a greater role in national and
Jewish life as a sign both of the success of the American haredi community
in sustaining its numbers and its failure to translate that success into
greater influence in the community at large.
It also could portend a much deeper shift in Jewish life in the United
States and beyond, being a leading indicator of Orthodoxys political
coming of age and perhaps even its eventual replacement of non-Orthodox
Judaism.
Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum
and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16754
2. Berkeley Hires a Feminist from Israel:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16737idqyy
3. Sharansky: PA promotes genocide
Jerusalem Post | Breaking News from Israel, the Middle East and the
Jewish World
Hilary Leila Krieger, THE JERUSALEM POST Jan. 25, 2005
At a press conference timed to coincide with events marking the 60th
anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Diaspora Affairs Minister
Natan Sharansky will on Tuesday assert that the Palestinian Authority,
even under new chairman Mahmoud Abbas, is engaged in the "promotion of
genocide" against the Jewish people.
The "Kill a Jew Go to Heaven" presentation, compiled by Palestinian
Media Watch, an Israel-based organization that monitors incitement in
Palestinian society, and distributed under Sharansky's auspices,
accuses the Palestinian media of dehumanizing Jews similar to ways the
Nazis did.
A fundamental message broadcast in sermons, academic discourse and
even children's shows, according to report co-author Itamar Marcus, is
that "the Jews are an evil force, and it's inherent to the Jews, and
therefore they have to be killed."
In the run-up to the PA election on January 9, Abbas met with the head
of the Palestinian Broadcasting Authority and asked him to check all
programs aired on PA television to prevent the broadcast of inciting
material. Since then, Marcus said that nationalistic programming
calling for violence against Israel has decreased somewhat, but that
anti-Semitic rhetoric has remained unabated.
He pointed to January 14, when he said an imam gave a sermon
declaring, "The days of the pilgrimage to Mecca remind the Muslim of
the connection to his history and remind him of his past glory and the
lowliness of the Jews, who today rule the world; how Muhammad expelled
them from Medina in retribution for their actions and their hostility
and their corruption, and not on false charges, not unjustly. No, it
was retribution for their hostility toward Islam."
4. The Jews for a Second Holocaust now have their own official web site:
http://www.kibush.co.il/index.asp?lang=1
5. Montreal Anti-Jewish Terror:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050119.wbomber19/BNStory/National/
6. Boojoos:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=12512
7. Cute Piece:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=12537
8. Nuremberg Rally in U of Toronto:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=12577
and
http://www.israpundit.com/archives/2005/01/ccd_press_relea.php#more
9. Jihad at Princeton:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16722
10. Well put:
http://ngng.co.il/archives/000196.html
11. Canada becoming Waskovian?
http://www.canada.com/fortstjohn/story.html?id=2a5ad089-4d2a-4b1b-8061-48f0e6390253
12. Forget Prince Harry - Go after the REAL Nazis!
http://jewishworldreview.com/0105/tobin_2005_01_21.php3
13. Debunking Environmentalist claptrap:
http://www.examiner.ie/pport/web/world/Full_Story/did-sgsAtWaxCKF0EsgTbBP-2fa91M.asp
14. Harvard Bans Truth Telling
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16756
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Subject: Hebrew University cans Feminist Prof under Suspicious Circumstances,
who Escapes to Academic Refuge in Berkeley
Hebrew University cans Feminist Prof under Suspicious Circumstances, who Escapes to Academic Refuge in Berkeley
Over the past few days, the media in Israel have broken a scoop about a major scandal at the Hebrew University involving a radical feminist professor who was canned for gross fabrication and distortion of research results. As usual, the Israeli media are playing ?peek-a-boo? and only revealing part of the story. But the parts that have been revealed are sufficiently outrageous.
The story involves the firing of Prof. Meira Weiss on grounds of gross falsification of results in her ?research?. Weiss was Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Hebrew University. She evidently also gave courses in the medical school, and some of her research concerns medical related issues, including psychiatry. She is a far leftist and radical feminist.
According to Maariv Jan 21, 2005, which relied in part on some local weeklies in Israel for the story, the saga began when some ?anonymous source? (sounds like a rival professor) had leaked the information to campus authorities that Weiss had falsified results in her research over a long period. The newspapers are being very vague about what exactly she did, but, from the uncharacteristic reaction by the University, I suspect it had to do with some of her projects purportedly related to ?discovering? medical phenomena and responses. Ordinarily, why would anyone care if an anthropologist lied, but if the lying had to do with misleading people about medical matters, that is serious stuff.
It is not clear whether she just made up data and results or perhaps plagiarized them from students or other researchers. (The press is not saying the latter, but some choices of phrases seem to hinting at this.)
The Hebrew University set up a disciplinary committee at the initiative of the Dean of Social Sciences to investigate the allegations. Weiss was invited to submit her side of the story in full in writing and she did so. She also retained a lawyer. The university committee evidently examined her academic record and work, going all the way back to her PhD dissertation. The committee examined all the evidence, concluded that she had grossly falsified her research results, and recommended that she be indicted under internal university disciplinary procedures (which might have resulted in her being dismissed, even though she has tenure). The exact allegations must have been extraordinarily scandalous; ordinarily, once someone is tenured, even crashing a plane into a skyscraper might not be enough to get the tenure revoked.
At that point Weiss decided to resign in the middle of the academic year, rather than face ?prosecution? or dismissal. She is now a visiting prof at the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.
Weiss has a long history of writing flaky things. She seems to be a real goofball ? as can be seen in the following two web sites about what looks like her defining ?research? book:
http://sociology.huji.ac.il/the%20chosen%20body.html
and
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/anthropological_quarterly/v075/75.1weiss.html
She has some wacky theories about the ?Jewish body? and these seem to be comparable to certain discredited ideas about the ?German body?.
Among her flaky claims, she has written that early Zionist leaders endorsed or practiced mass eugenics. Here is a short passage from a review article on her book on ?The Jewish Body?:
"Prof. Meira Weiss, an anthropologist of medicine at Hebrew University, describes in her book "The Chosen Body" how the settlement of the land and work on the land were perceived by these Zionist thinkers as the "cure" that would restore the health of the Jewish body that had degenerated in the Diaspora. In Nordau's terms, a "Judaism of muscle" would replace "the Jew of the coffee house: the pale, skinny, Diaspora Jew. " At a time when many Europeans are calling for a policy of eugenics, the Jews have never taken part in the `cleansing' of their race but rather allowed every child, be it the sickest, to grow up and marry and have children like himself. Even the mentally retarded, the blind and the deaf were allowed to marry," wrote Ruppin in his book "The Sociology of the Jews." "In order to preserve the purity of our race, such Jews [with signs of degeneracy] must refrain from having children."
This racialist nonsense, it goes without saying, has already been picked up by anti-Semitic and neonazi web sites as ?evidence? of the depravity and racism of Jews.
( taken from http://www.usenetarchive.org/Dir16/File14.html )
Among her wackier writings, she has endorsed Chamish-like conspiracist lunacy regarding the now thoroughly-discredited myths of ?kidnapped Yemenite children?:
For example, in http://www.medanthro.net/maq/v15/15no2.html,
?The Children of Yemen: Bodies, Medicalization, and Nation-Building,?
Meira Weiss writes :
?Yemenite Jews were among the many immigrants from Arab countries who were
flown to Israel after its establishment in 1948. Following many complaints
regarding the disappearance of Yemenite children from hospitals and
schools in the transit camps where the new immigrants were kept in the
1950s, a governmental investigation committee was established in 1995.
(It concluded that there were no kidnappings, which she neglects to mention ? SP)
?This article provides a preliminary description, from an anthropological
perspective, of what is called in Israel "the Yemenite children affair."
My analysis focuses on interviews with Yemenite Jews, describing how the
bodies of new immigrants were medicalized and commodified and how
immigrants and their families have come to resist these processes. I then
focus on the role of the Israeli medical profession in promoting national
goals and maintaining collective identity. [Israel, Yemenite children,
medicine, nationalism, body, commodification, medicalization]?
Her full web page at Hebrew U is http://sociology.huji.ac.il/weiss.html Note the de rigueur ?postmodernist? Newspeak and gibberish. Note her obsession with the Yemenite children conspiracist nonsense.
While she evidently wrote a few serious articles related to health, much of her other work is feminist flakiness, and ? like most radical feminists - she is pro-Palestinian. (Ok, I admit that I regard most of anthropology as flaky, and I really think that ?anthropological research? is generally an oxymoron.)
But there is clearly more to the story than simply flakiness or academic unfitness. After all, the Hebrew University is crawling with flaky professors. Feminists doing low-quality work are not ordinarily canned at the Hebrew University. A few years back, a radical feminist lecturer of law was fired for doing insufficiently serious research. She organized the feminist lobby as artillery and the law school was forced to capitulate and re-hire her back.
For the Hebrew University to fire Weiss, she must have either been caught with her fingers in a very serious cookie jar, perhaps plagiarizing over a long period of time, or simply lying and fabricating results, as the Hebrew University answer to NY Times reporter Jayson Blair, who was caught for fabricating stories.
I repeat that the press here is being coy and has not revealed the details of what Weiss? misdeeds really were. Meanwhile, some radical feminists are trying to pressure Hebrew University to back down in this, although this time ? uncharacteristically ? the Hebrew University is digging in its heels and its PR people are returning fire. Weiss? attorney struck the deal with the university, by which Weiss retires early (at age 58) in exchange for not being prosecuted or dismissed in disgrace.
Meanwhile, the next question is why Berkeley wants to hire her, given this dubious track record. Below is the description of the course at Berkeley that Weiss is currently inflicting upon her students. You can judge it for yourself. (I have corrected some of her embarrassing spelling errors in the description, but have left most of the Newspeak.) You catch the references to Israeli Arab women as ?Palestinian women in Israel?? You catch the use of gay Marxist ?philosopher? Foulcault, a cretin suspected of having intentionally infected and murdered gay men in San Francisco after he knew he had AIDS, as a text?
Here is a course description of the garbage she teaches at Berkeley:
ANTHROPOLOGY 119: (SPECIAL TOPIC): THE STATE, MEDICINE, and THE
MIDDLE-EASTERN BODY
M. Weiss, TuTh 3:30-5, 105 Dwinelle
This seminar/course examines some major theoretical approaches and debates
that have shaped and informed anthropological research, fieldwork
practices, analysis and writing concerning medicine and the body in the
Middle-East from the mid 20th century to the present. . It is open to
upper division undergraduates and to graduate students. Graduate students
will be expected to write a major research paper only.
The seminar is divided into two parts. We begin by problematizing the
question of the body as a biosocial locus where truths and contradictions
are expressed, as well as the site of resistance, creativity, and
struggle. This part discusses theoretical issues such as the
racial\ethnic\national body, the disabled body, Middle Eastern and Western
systems of medicine, the politics of medicalization, and the politics of
reproduction and infertility in the context of nation-building.
The second part focuses on the Middle East. Is there a "Middle-Eastern
body" in a similar manner to the "German body" (Linke) or the "Jewish
Body" (Gilman)? And, conversely, are there Israeli, Lebanese, Palestinian,
and Egyptian bodies? These questions will be explored by discussing cases
of reproductive technologies, organ transplantation, genetic testing,
identification, forensics, etc. in Middle-Eastern contexts.
Requirements:
This seminar is limited to 15 participants. Active, thoughtful
participation in seminar discussions based on a careful and critical
reading of the assigned readings is mandatory. Participants are expected
to divide themselves into reading groups. Each week one of the reading
groups is responsible for co-leading the discussion and presenting
relevant background context for the readings. The reading group will meet
independently to decide on the themes they would like to discuss and
present. Each student is responsible to sign up to write 2 short critical
reaction papers ( 2-3 pages each) in response to the assigned readings for
each of two pre-selected seminar meetings. A sign up sheet will be
distributed during the first meeting. Students will be required to keep a
media journal describing and interpreting at least one relevant news
story. Finally, each member of the seminar will write a final paper of 20
pages plus bibliography on a topic to be approved in consultation with the
professor. An abstract of the proposed paper and bibliography is due on
week 8. The final paper is due at the last seminar meeting. Due to the
instructors summer research travel , no late papers will be accepted.
Tentative reading list:
Asad, Talal 1998 [1973]. Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter. Atlantic
Highlands, N.J: Humanity Books.
Gilman, Sander (1991). The Jew's Body. London: Routledge
Ellen Gruenbaum (2001). The Female Circumcision Controversy. Univ. of
Penn. Press.
Hogle, Linda ( 1999) Recovering the Nation's Body. Cultural Memory ,
Medicine and the Politics of Redemption. Rutgers University Press.
Inhorn, Marcia (2003). Local Babies, Global Science: Gender, Religion and
In Vitro Fertilization in Egypt. NY: Routledge
Kanaaneh, Rhoda Ann. (2002). Birthing the Nation: Strategies of
Palestinian Women in Israel. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of
California Press
Kahn, Susan (2000). Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted
Conception in Israel. Durham: Duke University Pres.
Rabinow, Paul (1984). The Foucault Reader. New York : Pantheon Books.
Weiss, Meira (2002). The Chosen Body: The Politics of the Body in Israeli
Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
From
http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/courses.html
(PS If any reader has more information on this story, please send it and
I will post it.)
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
1.
You know how the media are full of all these pseudo-statistics about how
Israel has killed or wounded such-and-such thousands of Palestinians since
the start of the "intifada"? Never mind that the number of
innocent Palestinian civilians intentionally killed or injured by Israeli
troops, despite their not being involved or standing alongside terrorists
involved in terrorism, is exactly ZERO!
Well we thought we would mention 14 more Palestinians the Left will
now add to Israel's long list of victims of crimes against innocent
Palestinian civilians by Israel.
Seems that 14 Palestinians were driving around the Negev after
having entered Israel illegally in a vehicle that had been ordered off the
road by Israeli traffic cops two months ago, because it was in such bad
shape that it was unsafe to drive. The 14 were cruising the Negev anyway,
without permission to be in Israel at all, when the vehicle flipped over
off the road, near Dimona. All 14 were hurt and treated in Israeli
medical facilities.
Will Israel's unforgivable crimes against humanity never stop?
2. Rallying for Terror in Berkeley:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16689
3.
Why Israel should build MORE settlements in the Gaza Strip:
http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=4683
4. Some asked me for a primary source on that story
about Mohammed Goebbels Bakri admitting "Jenin Jenin" is a tissue of lies.
See http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16704
Here is a Hebrew primary source:
http://www.nfc.co.il/archive/001-D-59189-00.html?tag=3D22-22-32
5. Bring a baseball bat please:
http://www.rightmarch.com/parade.htm
6. Journalists on the PLO dole:
http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/Palestinian_Insiders.asp
7. Feminists Attack Harvard Prez:
http://www.feminist.org/news/newsbyte/uswirestory.asp?id=8842
Heterophobe Militants assault Jerusalem Mayor:
http://www.365gay.com/newscon05/01/011805israel.htm
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
1. There is no better treatment for doldrums than uncontrollable
laughter. Just when things are looking totally bleak in Israel, God
decides to cheer us all up by giving us the most comic incident of the
year, possibly of the century. It is the defeat of Amram Mitzna by Raleb
Majadele.
Now if you have never heard of Raleb Majadele, you are hardly alone. I
am not sure that even his own grandchildren have heard of him. He is a
brand new Knesset backbencher from the Labor Party's Meimad faction, a
faction supposedly made up of lefty Orthodox Jews that try to get for the
Labor Party a handful of votes from people wearing yarmulkes. But
Majadele is of course an Israeli Arab. He took over a warm parliamentary
seat eight months ago when it was abandoned by the rear end of MK Avraham
Burg, who decided to devote himself to the greater goal of Palestinian
liberation of Tel Aviv and Haifa. Majadele's bio is at
http://knesset.gov.il/mk/eng/mk_eng.asp?mk_individual_id_t=758,
You will notice that his main achievement in life seems to be that he
finished high school.
But as things worked out, Majadele is now an Israeli national hero, a
jolly good fellow, toast of Broadway, and legend in his own time. He
whooped the derrier of Amram Mitzna! Really!
Amram Mitzna, you recall, was the candidate of the Labor Party for
Prime Minister of Israel in the last national election, and before that he
was the corrupt Indonesia-style mayor of Haifa, running Haifa for the
benefit of his construction contractor oligarch cronies. After being
thrashed by Sharon, Mitzna's machine also lost control of Haifa to a
reformist party. Mitzna himself has morphed into little more than a
national joke, a crooked version of Howard Dean.
This week Mitzna, a lowly backbencher in the Labor Party parliament
faction, wanted to get himself elected chairman of the nickel-and-dime
Knesset parliamentary committee on internal affairs and the environment.
It is a committee that debates such matters of national urgency as the
rules governing the fattening up of farm geese. Mitzna was challenged for
the honor by MK Majadele.
Yesterday, the unknown Majadele beat Mitzna by the landslide committee
vote of 10 to 7. He can sign up as a college student in MY courses any
darned time he pleases!
You appreciate the cosmic humor in this? The man who would have been
Israel's Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister wannabe, gets beaten for
a dinky committee chair slot by an unknown Arab high school grad!
Mitzna has been so discredited that he could not get himself a job as
promoter of the Barbershop Quartet of River City. I doubt even American
Express would hire him for one of its "You probably do not know who I am
but" commercials. Alongside him, Mike Dukakis is Time's Man of the Year.
I have been laughing so hard that - you will excuse me - I gotta run
to the Little Inciters' Room now!
(The last laugh of course is Mitznas. Discredited he may be, but Ariel
Sharon is implementing Mitznas discredited Gaza capitulation plan, after
it was rejected overwhelmingly by voters.)
2. The Jihad at San Fran State against Republicans:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16662
3. Fox capitulates to terror:
http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2005-01/16/article01.shtml
4. Protesting for Terror in Berkeley:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1322199/posts?page=21
5. In the year 2004, the Lord came unto Noah, who was now living in the
United States, and said, "Once again, the earth has become wicked and
over-populated and I see the end of all flesh before me.
Build another Ark and save two of every living thing along with a few good
humans."
He gave Noah the blueprints, saying, "You have six months to build the Ark
before I will start the unending rain for 40 days and 40 nights."
Six months later, the Lord looked down and saw Noah weeping in his yard
.... but no ark.
"Noah," He roared, "I'm about to start the rain! Where is the Ark?"
"Forgive me, Lord," begged Noah. "But things have changed. I needed a
building permit. I've been arguing with the inspector about the need for
a sprinkler system. My neighbors claim that I've violated the
neighborhood zoning laws by building the Ark in my yard and exceeding the
height limitations. We had to go to the Development Appeal Board for a
decision. Then the Department of Transportation demanded a bond be posted
for the future costs of moving power lines and other overhead
obstructions, to clear the passage for the Ark's move to the sea. I
argued that the sea would be coming to us, but they would hear nothing of
it.
Getting the wood was another problem. There's a ban on cutting local
trees in order to save the spotted owl. I tried to convince the
environmentalists that I needed the wood to save the owls. But no go!
When I started gathering the animals, I got sued by an animal rights
group. They insisted that I was confining wild animals against their will.
As well, they argued the accommodation was too restrictive and it was
cruel and inhumane to put so many animals in a confined space.
Then the EPA ruled that I couldn't build the Ark until they'd conducted an
environmental impact study on your proposed flood.
I'm still trying to resolve a complaint with the Human Rights Commission
on how many minorities I'm supposed to hire for my building crew.
Also, the trades unions say I can't use my sons. They insist I have to
hire only Union workers with Ark building experience.
To make matters worse, the IRS seized all my assets, claiming I'm trying
to leave the country illegally with endangered species.
So, forgive me, Lord, but it would take at least ten years for me to
finish this Ark."
Suddenly the skies cleared, the sun began to shine, and a rainbow
stretched across the sky.
Noah looked up in wonder and asked, "You mean, You're not going to destroy
the world?"
"No," said the Lord. "The government beat me to it."
6. Should this be called plugging the dike?
http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/01/1715050.php
Monday, January 17, 2005
You may remember the ruckus over the Goebbels-like propaganda film "Jenin
Jenin", produced by Israeli Arab film producer Mohammed Bakri, whose
cousins carried out a terrorist atrocity on an Israeli civilian bus,
cheered on by Mohammed Bakri. The Jenin Jenin film was
such a tissue of libelous lies, including against Israeli soldiers who had
died in the battle, that their families petitioned the court to order the
film not to be screened. The court at first complied, during which the
Israeli Jews for a Second Holocaust from the Far Left made a point of
screening it illegally, on campuses and in some Cinemateks. Later the
court reversed itself, and it is now legal to screen the filthy
anti-Semitic propaganda film in Israel as protected free expression,
unlike Tee-shirts that read "Where there are no Arabs there is no Terror",
which will get you arrested and jailed.
Anyways, while we have all known for a long time that the film is a tissue
of lies, the news now is that the producer ADMITS it is a tissue of lies.
No doubt this will not stop those Far Leftists and Tenured Traitors who
insist that telling lies should not matter when it comes to promoting the
"Palestinian narrative".
Here is the latest:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42404
Palestinian producer: False film funded by PA
Documentary claims Israeli army committed war crimes
January 17, 2005
A Palestinian filmmaker who produced a documentary alleging Israeli troops
committed war crimes in a refugee camp admitted in a deposition last week
to falsifying scenes, using inaccurate information and obtaining financing
for the project from the Palestinian Authority, WorldNetDaily has learned.
Muhammad Bakri, producer of "Jenin, Jenin," a documentary that claims
Israel committed genocide in the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002,
admitted in a deposition to inaccuracies throughout his film. The
filmmaker is being sued by five Israeli soldiers visible in still footage
in the film, which alleges IDF troops killed a "large number" of
civilians, mutilated Palestinian bodies, randomly executed and bombed
women, children and the mentally and physically impaired, and leveled the
entire refugee camp, including a wing of the local hospital.
The documentary doesn't show footage of the alleged atrocities, but in
some scenes, faces of the soldiers now suing Bakri were superimposed over
"eyewitness testimony," and it was indicated they had committed "war
crimes."
But Bakri, in a deposition obtained by WND, admitted he "believed"
selected witnesses but didn't check the information they provided.
"I believed the things that I've been told. What I did not believe was not
included in the film," said Bakri.
When asked about a scene in which it is implied Israeli troops ran over
civilians, Bakri admitted to constructing the footage himself as an
"artistic choice." He also answered "no" when asked if he believed "that
during the operation in Jenin, the Israeli soldiers killed people
indiscriminately."
In perhaps the most explosive element of the deposition, Bakri admitted
his documentary, which was screened in theaters around the world, was
financed in part by the Palestinian Authority. He said Yasser Abed Rabu,
Palestinian minister of culture and information and a member of former PLO
leader Yasser Arafat's executive committee, "covered a part of the film
expenses."
Israel entered Jenin, which was considered a center for terrorist
recruitment and operations, as part of its Operation Defensive Shield to
crack down on increased suicide bombings by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al
Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Israel sent infantry units to fight house-to-house
and lost nearly two dozen soldiers to ambushes, Palestinian snipers and
booby-trapped houses.
Claims of a massacre were immediately made following the operation by the
Palestinian leadership, which spoke of upwards of 500 civilians killed and
thousands wounded, but it was later determined 56 Palestinians, mostly
gunmen, were killed, and 23 Israeli soldiers died in the battle.
Media accounts, documentary evidence and investigations by several
international humanitarian organizations quickly proved there was no
massacre.
Bakri's film features several "witnesses" describing "brutality" by the
IDF, claiming Israel attacked and killed "many, many" Palestinians with
tanks, planes and snipers, although Bakri never lists the exact number of
Palestinians killed.
But a film by Pierre Rehov, "The Road To Jenin," seems to disprove many of
Bakri's claims, and has been cited in the lawsuit against the Palestinian
filmmaker.
One charge by Bakri is that Israel fired 11 missiles at a Jenin hospital,
leveling the facility while patients were inside, and later wouldn't allow
emergency personnel to access the area. Hospital manager Dr. Mustafa Abo
Gali tells Bakri's audience, "The whole of the west wing was destroyed.
Fighter planes launched their missiles every three minutes."
But in "The Road to Jenin," Rehov also interviews Gali, who shows the
filmmaker the extent of the damage a small hole on the outside of a
building, with the entire west wing intact. Rehov also provides aerial
images of the hospital on the last day of the Jenin incursion showing all
sections of the hospital standing normally.
With regard to Bakri's claim that ambulances weren't able to reach the
area, Dr. David Zangen, the IDF chief medical officer in Jenin during the
incursion, describes to Rehov how Israeli soldiers treated many wounded
Palestinian fighters, including members of Hamas. Rehov even cuts to a
scene of an Israeli soldier authorizing Gali in person to receive any
medical supplies he needs for the Jenin hospital.
Writes Tamar Sternthal of the Committee for Accuracy in Reporting in the
Middle East, "Even casual observers will notice apparent inconsistencies
in the 'witness testimony' on which Bakri relies. For example, an older
interviewee charges that the Israelis made Palestinian prisoners fully
undress: 'Some people were completely undressed in front of their
brothers, sisters and children, who were used as human shields.' Yet, the
accompanying image does not support this claim; it shows a group of
Palestinians, some of them without shirts. All wore pants."
Bakri also claims the IDF shot in the hands an unarmed Palestinian
villager, Ali Youssef, and when he couldn't stand up, they shot his feet.
But Rehov found Youssef for his documentary and reveals Youssef was
standing in a housing complex with Hamas gunmen when he was shot once in
the hand. Israeli medics treated Youssef's wound, found a congenital heart
problem, no foot injury and brought him to Israel for treatment at a
hospital in Afula. Hospital papers disclose Youssef was not shot in the
leg at all.
Zangen says Bakri uses deceptive filmography techniques to create the myth
of a massacre, a charge now supported by Bakri's deposition. Zangen cites
one scene of a tank heading toward a crowd. The scene then blacks out,
falsely suggesting the people were all killed, says Zangen. Also, Bakri,
who Zangen says was not on scene at any time during the battle to get
footage, deceptively juxtaposes images of Israeli tanks and snipers taking
aim with pictures of Palestinian children, another charge Bakri has
admitted to.
Some of the juxtaposed soldiers include the five who filed suit against
Bakri in Tel Aviv court seeking more than $500,000 in damages. The
lawsuit, filed in Hebrew and obtained by WorldNetDaily, charges Bakri
falsely claims the soldiers committed war crimes.
The five plaintiffs are current reserve soldiers and say their
professional lives require constant contact with Palestinians who may
recognize their faces from Bakri's documentary and seek to attack them.
"Bakri's blatant use of lies and deception to build his one-sided case
about Palestinians suffering at the hands of brutal Israel disqualifies it
from having contributed to any 'big truth.' Rather, 'Jenin, Jenin' amounts
to incitement fueling vicious propaganda that claims Jews 'are not even
human.'" writes Sternthal. She credits Rehov with exposing the
"inflammatory and defamatory falsehoods spread by works like 'Jenin,
Jenin.'"
1. The Reform synagogue movement and some of its sputnik friends from
other synagogue movements seem to be moving deeper and deeper into
insanity. I think we need to start a new corner of commentary to be
called the "Reform Lunacy of the Month". Here is the January entry:
http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?strwebhead=Day+school+institutes+eco%2Dk
shrut&intcategoryid=5&SearchOptimize=Jewish+News
HOLIDAY FEATURE
Eco-conscious day schools
offer students new takes on kashrut
By Loolwa Khazzoom
(on Bay Area Eco paganism being sold as Judaism)
The article includes the following passages:
"At a school assembly when the new lunch program began, students learned
about the importance of eating healthy food and of recycling. The lunch
program, students were told, would have a no-waste policy: Everything
from plates to cups to utensils would be 100 percent biodegradable.
"There would be no need for trash cans in the lunch room, which instead
would be furnished with bins for recycling and compost.
"â^À^ÜUtilizing the composting facility properly is not hard, but it does
raise consciousness,â^À^Ý he said. â^À^ÜA week ago a student asked if we
could think about using recycled paper, recycled paper towels. Students
and I are now doing research on the cost effectiveness, and presenting
our findings to the director of finance and operations.â^À^Ý
"â^À^ÜEach student, each school, each class makes a commitment to make
changes in their personal lives or in their school â^À^Ô to turn off
lights when they leave a room, to turn off water when they brush their
teeth, to bike instead of drive,â^À^Ý Dolgin said. â^À^ÜThey sit down
with us and figure out what they can do to make their school a greener
place â^À^Ô composting projects, getting rid of Styrofoam, using washable
mugs instead of disposable cups, recycling paper, planting gardens.â^À^Ý
"According to Jesse Alper, director of food services at JCHS, diet is a
key element of an environmental ethic.
"â^À^ÜThroughout the course of human history, all food was grown
organically, regardless of culture or locale,â^À^Ý he says. â^À^ÜIt
wasnâ^À^Ùt until the rise of the chemical industry in the 1950s that the
introduction of synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides changed
agriculture as we know it. Whatâ^À^Ùs even worse than that is the
corporate takeover of our food system. What that means is that we have
highly processed, chemically produced food of little or negative
nutritional value.â^À^Ý"
** Now I have always found the trash fetish to be one of the most
amusing forms of insanity of the political correctness stormtroopers. The
insistence that the highest calling for humans is to spend their days
massaging and caring for their trash. These include those little PC
creches, filled with the recycled bottles and newspapers, that pious PC
pagans erect in front of their houses on the lawns.
Now anyone who has cared to know, has known for decades that recycling
paper and bottles WASTES resources, it does not save resources. The
recycling uses far more resources that are being "saved". The recycling
is energy intensive (driving the trash around) and even more so
labor-intensive, and labor resources are part of nature's unrenewable
resources (once an hour is wasted, it is gone forever).
Here are just a few of the studies that prove that recycling wastes
resources and does not save resources:
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=14557
http://www.mrcranky.com/movies/clockstoppers/108.html
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/160258_recycle12.html
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-202.html
http://www.cato.org/dailys/8-27-97.html
There are far more you can find if you google.
Of all the real human problems on earth, one might think the Reformies
could find something more productive to do with their time than play with
their trash to make themselves feel righteous.
As for that "corporate takeover" of the food production the crackpots
cited above were talking about, that is what has saved billions of humans
from starvation, not vegan diets nor trash recycling.
2. The Economics of Panhandling
by Steven Plaut
In direct contrast with the popular view that panhandling on the streets
of the United States and some other Western countries is a symptom of the
failures of capitalism, it is IN FACT a clear illustration of the vitality
of free enterprise and market capitalism.
Under capitalism, enterprise,
innovation and entrepreneurship are rewarded, as is bold initiative and
hard work. Now economics would argue that panhandling, like almost
everything else in life, should be viewed as a market phenomenon. In this
market are producers of panhandling services and their consumers, those
who purchase the panhandling and homelessness services from panhandling
entrepreneurs. These consumers are clearly willing to pay for consumption
of these services, and so donate their "spare change" to the
entrepreneurs.
Now at first glance the reader might find it upsetting that
panhandling should be represented here as entrepreneurial activity, rather
than simply an urban nuisance, like Scientology. But anyone observing the
behavior of consumers of these services on the streets of New York or San
Francisco would have to acknowledge that a sizeable portion of the
American public is interested in consuming "homelessness services" from
the American domestic panhandling industry. And by Say's Law, demand
creates its own supply.
Panhandling is clearly a contestable market in the
Baumol sense, with low barriers to entry. Indeed homeless rights
advertising agencies confirm this for us all the time when they tell us
that ANYONE could become homeless. Under these free-entry circumstances,
economic theory teaches us that the size of the market must be DEMAND
determined and not supply determined, meaning that it is the desire of
consumers of panhandling services who determine the size of the market.
As in all other forms of consumption, it is impossible to really know
"why"
the service is itself being demanded by consumers. It may be that American
consumers simply enjoy the charitable posturing involved in purchasing
panhandling services. In other cases the panhandling industry provides
consumers with a cheap outlet for recreational compassion. That the
American consumer public derives consumer utility from the domestic
panhandling industry should be obvious. Why else would they insist on
forcing so many nice people out of their nice mental health institutions
and on to the streets where they sell panhandling services?
Apparently many American consumers like to see misfortune first-hand up
close, to
wring their hands over it, smell it, and feel they are exhibiting
"caring". And they are willing to pay for this recreation. Yes, for a
while they hoped they could purchase such recreation by importing
impoverished immigrants from underdeveloped countries to America, who they
hoped would provide them with caring opportunities. But these immigrants
have an annoying tendency to actually go out and get jobs, and so it was
necessary to develop a wholely domestic native panhandling industry.
Now contrary to the opinion of some European cynics, Americans really are
quite a savvy
people. They clearly do understand that when a panhandler asks them for
money in order to buy food, the money will not be spent on food. After
all, if buyers of panhandling services cared the least whether the
panhandler were eating, then instead of giving out "spare change", they
would buy the panhandler a pastrami sandwich or a chicken fajita. Or
perhaps they would make a donation to one of the countless soup kitchens
that feeds the homeless. But that is NOT what they do. They give out cash,
since there is no secondary market to speak of for converting sandwiches
donated into drugs and booze. (One might say that there is illiquidity in
the liquidity exchange market.) This is why most panhandlers only deal on
a cash basis, although some take major credit cards.
Americans are also
wise enough to realize that a panhandler holding up a sign that asks for
either a handout or "to work for food" does not want you to offer him work
for food or a job. This is why panhandler customers refrain from pointing
out the "dishwasher help wanted" sign just above the panhandler's station
or from buying for the panhandler the classified want-ad section of the
local paper.
Now it is always dangerous to tamper with a successful growth
industry. But nevertheless I would like to make a proposal for improving
the operations of this valuable economic sector. This important industry
should be reorganized by launching a national campaign called
Pushups-for-Panhandlers, or PFP for short.
Its operations would be quite
simple. Any panhandler asking for spare change would be instructed to drop
down on all fours and do pushups, to be compensated by the customer of
said at the reasonable rate of - say - three cents per pushup. No pushups,
no spare change. Those over 60 or pregnant would be permitted to perform
them from the knees.
Such a national campaign would do wonders for
America!! First, it would work for the benefit of the panhandling
entrepreneurs themselves. Many of these might actually choose to invest
some of their business revenues in nutrition rather than drugs and drink,
in order to improve future revenue-generating capacities. These would have
financial incentives to avoid unwholesome substances altogether in order
to preserve their pushup capacity. Second, panhandlers would have the
satisfaction of engaging in physisal production and contributing to the
Gross National Product. Third, American cities would be so much more
pleasant, as a panhandler nearby doing pushups is really no more annoying
than a street musician. I mean, a fit panhandler could earn more than the
minimum wage doing pushups. It would be the greatest fitness campaign
since President Kennedy did those 50 mile treks.
Pushup panhandling might
even prove more profitable than prostitution, and in any case does not
represent a public health threat when it is performed without a condom.
Most importantly, pushup panhandling would at long last remove the stigma
of getting something for nothing from this valuable industry. Citizens
concerned with homelessness should put on their Red, White and Blue PFP
buttons (Get Fit Now, Ask Me How) and answer every request for spare
change by inviting the entrepreneur to drop to all fours and gimme 50.
3. There is hope:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006149
4. Enjoy:
http://users.chartertn.net/tonytemplin/FBI_eyes/
5. New peace partners with which Sharon can negotiate?
http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/38704.htm
Saturday, January 15, 2005
1. The "We Can Appease Our Way to Peace" Syndrome:
http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=4666
2. Convicted Palestinian mass murderers get conjugal visits, BUT:
http://web.israelinsider.com/Articles/Culture/4805.htm
3. Interesting piece:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16620
4. Dear Mr. R:
Thank you for your email inquiry concerning the appointment of Prof.
Stanley Fischer as Governor of the Bank of Israel. You ask why I think he
agreed to accept the job, what "forced" him to do so, and whether he might
actually be working for someone else at the same time that he takes this
job.
I was initially going to respond to you that perhaps Prof. Fischer
accepted the job because he wanted the job. But upon reflection, it has
dawned on me that a far more plausible answer for you concerning his
decision is that Prof. Fischer must be part of a global nefarious
conspiracy sent into Israel by
his UFO masters to undermine the Israeli economy to serve the agenda of
the Sabbataens and Illuminati at the Council on Foreign Relations anxious
to cover up their involvement in creating the tsunami, in
assassinating Yitzhak Rabin, in the kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, and
in the shooting of JR Ewing.
So I must ask you to forgive me for my earlier naive delusion.
1. Affirmative Action Harms its "Beneficiaries" says UCLA law prof!
Race-based affirmative action admissions
An upcoming law review article rekindles a controversial issue
Vikram David Amar,
FindLaw Columnist
Special to CNN.com
(FindLaw) -- A forthcoming law review article by UCLA professor Rick
Sander is causing a big stir in the legal academic community. Sander's
piece in the Stanford Law Review argues that race-based affirmative action
as practiced by American law schools during the past 30 years actually
ends up hurting the group -- African American law students -- it is most
intended to help.
In this column, I shall sketch out some of the basic points Sander tries
to make. In Part Two, I will describe some of the critiques and criticisms
of Sander's piece that other academics are making, and share some of my
own reactions as well.
A liberal's attack takes a different tack
Before unpacking Sander's project -- which he styles as a "Systematic
Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools" -- I want to
briefly mention a couple of the reasons why his article in particular is
generating a lot of buzz. First, Sander is someone whose credentials, past
work, and personal life would seem to place him firmly in the so-called
progressive camp when it comes to racial issues.
As a graduate student (he is a social scientist as well as a lawyer), he
devoted much of his time to helping eradicate housing segregation. More
recently, he co-founded a civil rights group that has been instrumental in
enforcing fair housing rights in California. His son is biracial -- part
white and part black -- so that, in Sander's words, "the question of how
nonwhites are treated and how they fare in higher education gives rise [in
him] to all the doubts and worries of a parent."
Because he is critiquing a liberal policy from the perspective of someone
personally committed to liberal causes, Sander has a certain credibility
that right-wing critics might lack.
Second, the "costs" of affirmative action to blacks that Sander emphasizes
are not the "costs" to blacks that others have raised repeatedly against
race-based affirmative action. Most opponents of affirmative action who
argue that it hurts blacks focus on the dignitary or stigmatic harms to
the intended beneficiaries; these opponents assert that because some
blacks are admitted to institutions by virtue of affirmative action, the
outside world may assume that most or all blacks are not capable of making
it "on their merits."
By contrast, Sander focuses on the material or tangible harm to black law
students. If, as Sander argues, affirmative action actually hurts blacks
in terms of their career paths and not just in terms of their psyches,
then much of the support for affirmative action programs today would need
to be reconsidered, if not abandoned.
The weight placed on weight in admissions
Professor Sander lays the foundation for his critique by describing the
kind of race-based affirmative action that law schools use today.
Under the Bakke and Grutter Supreme Court precedents, public (as well as
private) law schools are prohibited from making use of quotas, two-track
admissions schemes, or fixed points added to the numerical indices of
minorities.
Indeed, such a "numerically fixed point method" was precisely the kind of
program used by the University of Michigan undergraduate school struck
down in 2003 by the Supreme Court in Gratz, the same day as it upheld the
Michigan law school's approach in Grutter. The Michigan law school's plan
was constitutionally preferable and permissible, said the Grutter Court,
because it used race in a more individual-specific, nuanced and flexible
way; race was just one factor among many diversity factors that might have
enhanced an applicant's chances.
Professor Sander argues that, in fact, the Michigan law school program,
despite its seeming flexibility and inscrutability, employs race in just
as ambitious (critics would say aggressive) a way as did the Michigan
undergraduate plan.
Using sophisticated statistical techniques, Sander concludes that the "law
school operated an admissions system that gave greater weight to race. . .
than the college's. ... [I]t is difficult to see how Justice O'Connor
could have thought the Law School system passed constitutional muster, or
that blacks and whites were in any sense on the same 'playing field' in
admissions. ... Race is obviously given far more weight than all of the
other 'diversity' factors together. ... It may be that Justice O'Connor
did not understand that the Law School and College admissions policies
were functionally identical in their treatment of race. . . [o]r it may be
that Justice O'Connor cared only about form, not substance."
Moreover, and more important, Sander argues, the way race is used at the
Michigan law school is the same way race is used in many if not most law
school affirmative action programs. Indeed, Sander says that he has "been
unable to find a single law school in the United States whose admissions
operate the way Justice O'Connor describes in Grutter" -- that is, where
race is used as a flexible plus factor that does not effectively dominate
over all other diversity criteria.
The system of aggressive racial preferences is not, Sander says, confined
to the "elite" law schools. Rather, "it is a characteristic of legal
education as a whole."
According to Sander, law school affirmative action across law schools is
characterized by a "cascade" effect. As the elite schools "snap up" the
blacks who otherwise would have been admitted to and have attended the
next tier of schools, that next tier of schools snaps up the blacks who
would have otherwise attended the tier below. And so forth.
The mismatch effect
This systematic cascade phenomenon is important, because when race is
being used so weightily in schools all the way down the ladder, the result
is that the African Americans who are admitted to each school under an
affirmative action program are significantly less numerically qualified
than are their white competitor students at that school, who were admitted
outside the affirmative action plan.
Sander calls this phenomenon the "mismatch" effect -- black beneficiaries
of affirmative action are "mismatched" at schools whose non-affirmative
action students possess better credentials and skills.
Because of the pronounced mismatch effect that extends down the law school
hierarchy, blacks tend to suffer poor grades in law school. According to
the data Sanders adduces, the median black law student's GPA at the end of
the first year of law school places him at the 7th or 8th percentile of
his class. Put another way, more than 50% of black law students are in the
bottom one-tenth of their law school class (in terms of grades) at the end
of the first year.
The long-term costs of the mismatch effect
This poor academic performance in law school, in turn, creates two
distinct costs for African Americans. First, Sanders argues, the poor
grades lead to a very poor bar passage rate. As he points out, "only 45%
of black law students in the 1991 cohort completed law school and passed
the bar on their first attempt." That number is far worse than the
comparable number for whites.
Sanders goes on to argue that many of these blacks with poor grades would
have had better grades - and have ended up with a higher chance of passing
the bar - if they had been at law schools more commensurate with their
academic skills. Sander's data suggests to him that black students at any
law school who have the same law school grades as white students at that
school pass the bar in the same percentages. In other words, blacks with
good law school grades don't fail the bar any more than whites with the
same grades.
The problem, Sanders suggests, is that law schools have "mismatched"
blacks in schools where they are unlikely to get good grades. By placing
black students in environments where their grades will be higher -- less
competitive law schools -- the system could improve their overall bar pass
rate.
(Sander doesn't delve into why a particular black student with poor grades
at a more competitive school would pass the bar more easily had he himself
attended a less competitive school -- where his grades might have been
better. But the explanation might turn on how receiving poor grades is
demoralizing for even able and smart students, and/or how students who get
high grades also get the lion's share of professorial advice and
mentoring, and/or how less competitive schools might focus more on the
basic skills needed to pass the bar than do more highly-rated schools.)
From all this, Sander argues that if race-based law school affirmative
action were eliminated or reduced, the black bar passage rate would
actually go up. According to his calculations, in the absence of
preferential admissions, this rate would rise to 74 percent from the 45
percent he observed.
But what about all the blacks who would not be in any law school at all
but for affirmative action? Sander argues that there are not as many of
those as you might think. If affirmative action were eliminated, most
black law students wouldn't be ousted from law school entirely -- they
would simply attend law schools that "match" their numerical credentials
more tightly. In other words, elimination of affirmative action would
simply eliminate the mismatch effect -- blacks would simply be attending
less competitive and less prestigious schools than they are currently
attending.
And of those blacks who would be displaced from the bottom of the legal
academic system altogether (i.e., those who need affirmative action simply
to get into the least competitive schools), many of them today do not end
up passing the bar and entering the legal profession in any event.
Indeed, Sander argues, counterintuitively enough, that because so few
black law students who are currently passing the bar would be eliminated
from the legal academy altogether were affirmative action ended, and
because many blacks at more highly-ranked schools who currently fail the
bar would pass the bar if they attended the lower-ranked schools they
would have attended absent affirmative action, the elimination of
affirmative action might actually increase the absolute number of blacks
who pass the bar and enter the ranks of the profession.
Second, and related, Sander says that blacks at better schools, but with
poor grades, get worse jobs than they would if they were at lesser schools
and had better grades. In other words, Sander argues, at all but the most
elite schools, grades matter more than the school from which one graduates
for black law job applicants.
The upside of attending a better school is more than outweighed - in terms
of employment options - by the downside of getting weak grades at that
school, compared to the better grades that could have been obtained at a
less competitive school.
This nonobvious conclusion might make some sense. Legal employers do like
to hire from the top, or at least the top half, of almost any law school
class. A high-performing student at a second-tier school may look more
attractive than a student with a mediocre record from a top school. And
virtually no one is eager to hire C and D students, from even the very
best school.
So whether one focuses on passing the bar, or getting a good job, Sander
says, there is a case that race-based affirmative action hurts, rather
than helps, black law students.
Vikram David Amar, a FindLaw columnist, is a professor of law at the
University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. He
is a 1988 graduate of the Yale Law School, and a former clerk to Justice
Harry Blackmun. Before teaching, professor Amar practiced at the firm of
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
2. Referendum:
http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=4658
3. More on the PETA Fruitcakes - Suing over the Happy Cow ads:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/01/12/BUG0TAOPRK1.DTL
4. France's Rathergate:
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewSpecialReports.asp?Page=%3e%3e%3eSpecialReports%3e%3e%3earchive%3e%3e%3e200501%3e%3e%3eSPE20050113a.html
5. Seems that conspiracy inventor Barry Chamish has uncovered yet another
"conspiracy", of the sort he "discovers" every time his medicine wears
off. Some people really should stop trying to get away from
their keepers long enough to find a keyboard.
This time it is some grand UFO-teletubby-CFR conspiracy
involving the appointment of the new Governor of the Bank of Israel, Prof.
Stanley Fischer, an American economist who is moving to Israel to take the
gig (http://web.israelinsider.com/views/4802.htm).
Chamish sees conspiracies crawling out from under the bed every time
someone sneezes three times in a row. He has never come up with a single
shred of real evidence for any of his conspiracy "theories", all of which
involve the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a foreign policy debating
society in the US whose main crime is that it publishes Foreign Affairs
magazine. Chamish insists that the CFR and not bin Laden knocked down the
World Trade Center. Chamish also insists Shimon Peres murdered JFK Jr.,
besides killing Yitzhak Rabin. And he insists Bibi Netanyahu is another
CFR agent planted to destroy Israel.
Chamish, along with the neonazi organizations with whom he seems to be
on such intimate terms (they were going to pay for his trip to address a
conference of nazi Holocaust Deniers in Sacramento last summer and
routinely publish his "scoops"), thinks
the CFR is a global puppet master controlling everything on earth.
Rush Limbaugh dismisses people who believe in a CFR "conspiracy" as kooks.
Many mentally unstable people attribute to global conspiracies
responsibilty for their own personal failures in life.
Anyway, Chamish's latest is that Fischer, who is a world class
economist who taught at MIT and was a VP at the World Bank, is some sort
of nefarious agent for the CFR-UFO conspiracy to run the world. (Most of
Chamish's 'career' was spent 'documenting' UFO's. Really. If not
convinced, google "Chamish and UFO".)
His evidence? Well, it is because Fischer is an
American economist making aliya to Israel to take the gig as Governor at
the Bank of Israel. But I am also an American economist who made aliya,
so does Chamish think that makes me a space alien or agent of some
conspiracy as well? And if so, how come I have not gotten paid by the
puppet masters for my nefarious role?
Fischer is not even the first Governor of the Bank of Israel to make
aliya to get the job. Jacob Frankel, while born in Israel, had lived in
Chicago for decades before making aliya when offered the same job.
Fischer has been professionally interested and involved in Israeli
economics for decades. True, he is a Peace Now sort ideologically, as was
Frankel, but so are most academics. In any case, no one is going to be
asking Fischer what his proposals are for dealing with the PLO. He will
be making monetary policy. And he is darned good at that. He was
appointed because the politicians were squabbling over who should be the
next Governor. Since the mid 80s, in most cases the Governor has been a
leading academic. Before that, it was always some political hack.
Failure to find a candidate of consensus now might mean the politicians
would bring back some political hack to run the Bank, or - even worse -
a general. Fischer is universally admired among Israel academic
economists of all political stripes.
Chamish and his ward co-patients have long been spreading a "scoop" about
Daniel Pipes supposedly backing a plan to injure Gaza settlers. Here is
Pipes' own response to the nonsense. Chamish has taken a special interest
in attacking Pipes because Pipes wrote a book debunking the infantile
conspiracy theories that plague the Middle East and the world, precisely
the sort that Chamish has made his "career" inventing. See
http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/287
Par for Chamish's course, he got the Pipes citation twisted.
Before that, Chamish was spending his days pooh-poohing what he calls
the "Killer Wave Theory" about how Rafael Eitan, an Israeli politician,
drowned a few weeks back. Chamish, unlike any of Eitan's family members
and unlike the thousand REAL journalists who were at the scene of the
drowning, thinks Raful's death suspicious and the proof that Raful was
really murdered is that Chamish thinks the death was suspicious. Of
course, Chamish thinks that absolutely EVERYTHING in the universe is
suspicious. As for pooh-poohing the idea that a "killer wave" could kill
someone, well doesn't he look silly now?
1. So let us see if we have this straight. Anti-Semitism and Holocaust
Denial are crimes in many democracies and they are not protected speech.
This week a court in Berlin convicted and jailed a German lawyer for 9
months for writing that hatred of Jews is solidly mentally healthy.
Really. Meanwhile Le Pen, the head of the French neonazi party, is about
to be indicted for his comments that the Holocaust was little more than a
frat prank, or words to that moral effect.
There is of course one country where open hatred of Jews, support for
Holocaust Deniers, and endorsement of genocide of Jews are all protected
free speech and no one is ever indicted for those things - that country is
Israel. Israeli leftists are increasingly candid about their endorsement
of mass murder of Jews, and openly call for Israel to be annihilated. At
least one academic, lecturer Neve Gordon from Ben Gurion University,
openly endorses Holocaust-Denier Norman Finkelstein and even compares him
ethically to the Prophets of the Bible. Crackpot leftists like Israel
Shamir openly proliferate anti-Jewish blood libels and endorse nazism.
Arab politicians openly endorse terrorist atrocities against Jews. Far
leftist professors promote mutiny and insurrection by leftist soldiers,
engage in law breaking and sometimes participate in violence against
Israeli police and soldiers. Tali Fahima is proclaimed the Mother Teresa
of the Israeli Left for her collaboration with terrorists in planning
atrocities against Jews.
And all THIS is protected speech.
What is NOT protected speech in Israel? Expressing any political
opinion with which Yossi Beilin might disagree.
2. The Nazi Roots of "Palestinianism":
http://www.jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=4592
Nazi Roots of Palestinian Nationalism
Posted 1/12/2005
By David Storobin
Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to
eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler
for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a
manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the
scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The
answer I got was: The Jews are yours.
Former Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini in his post-World War II
memoirs.
The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of
European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and
Himmler in the execution of this plan... He was one of Eichmanns best
friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination
measures.
Adolf Eichmann`s deputy Dieter Wisliceny in his Nuremberg Trials
testimony.
Within weeks of Adolf Hitler`s ascendance to power, Mufti of Jerusalem Haj
Amin al-Husseini contacted the German counsel-general in Palestine. With
the exception of funding some anti-Semitic riots, Germans rejected the
Arab`s overtures until 1937, when Adolf Eichmann and Herbert Hagen were
sent to Palestine to establish a framework to provide Husseini with
military and financial aid by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
By then, the Mufti had already proven his anti-Jewish credentials to the
Germans by organizing a three-year-long series of riots and massacres.
On April 19, 1936, a crowd of Arabs stumbled upon Jews in the town of
Jaffa. Having been incited by Mufti-spread rumors that Zionists were
killing Muslims, the crowd decided to kill three of the Jews they met. Six
days later, the Arab Higher Committee was created, with al-Husseini
presiding over the new body. The committee openly endorsed past violence
and began organizing future terror.
On May 5, the British colonial authorities warned al-Husseini against
committing illegal acts but did not appear particularly decisive, leading
the Arab to conclude that he could organize mass violence with impunity.
By October 1936, nearly 300 people were killed and another 1,100 wounded.
Colonial forces arrested a few pawns and one major leader, but took no
action against the Mufti. The New York Times reported on June 14, 1936
that al-Husseini had succeeded in convincing experienced high British
civil servants that he is working for the government`s interests [and
that] it was in the interest of the government that he should also be
president of the new Arab High Committee, so that Haj Amin el-Husseini
enjoys the government`s complete confidence as its unofficial adviser on
the Arab side of the situation....The government believes that he and only
he is in a position to appease the Moslem masses; therefore it gives him
every support while at the same time playing into his hands.
Continuing its policy of siding with the Mufti, in June the Brits arrested
scores of members of the Defense Party sponsored by the rival Nashashibi
clan, despite lack of any evidence that the Nashashibis were involved in
the massacres. Ninety percent of Arabs in the Sinai concentration camp
belonged to the Defense Party, with another 10 percent coming from smaller
political movements. Noe of the Husseini-backed people were sent to the
camp.
The UK was not the only power helping the Mufti in 1936. The
USSR-sponsored Communist Party of Palestine also did its part. After the
1929 massacres (including the slaughter of 68 Jews in Hebron), the
Communist Party issued a statement that revolutionary movement without
pogroms [anti-Semitic riots] is impossible. The Communists even considered
the Mufti too moderatein his fight against Jews.
In the run-up to the 1936-39 riots, the Palestinian leader began
coordinating the organization of anti-Jewish violence. In November 1935,
Communists declared that Zionists were killing Arabs, helping the Mufti`s
propaganda campaign to spark Arab rage against the Jews. On the eve of the
first riots, Communists met al-Husseini to work out the final terms of
their roles in the upcoming violence. Communist Party member Nimr Uda
became the intelligence chief for the Mufti`s military units. Another
Communist representative, Fuad Nasir, was named deputy to Abdul Qadir
Husseini, commander of Arab fighters in the southern West Bank.
By 1937, Britain realized the Mufti was sponsoring the violence not just
against Jews, but against the English as well. Al-Husseini fled Jerusalem
and settled in Lebanon. So glad were the British to see the Mufti leave
that they did not even bother to ask the French powers governing Lebanon
to extradite him.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to please the Arabs, the UK`s Peel Commission
violated the League of Nations Mandate by offering a proposal to divide
the land designated as the Jewish National Home by the League of Nations
Mandate of 1922. Instead, under the Peel Commission proposal of 1937, only
a small part of the land would become the Jewish state.
A year later, the Peel Commission issued another proposal, with even less
land offered to Jews. Some time after that, the British issued the White
Paper of 1939 rejecting the idea of a Jewish National Home and severely
restricting Jewish immigration. It was hoped for in London that such
concessions to Arab nationalists would appease al-Husseini and his
supporters. Yet, only two years after the White Paper, the Mufti would
come back to strike the British again.
* * *
In 1940 it looked as if Hitlers armada was unstoppable. Having already
conquered France, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark,
Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, Hitler and his friends in Italy, Spain
and the occupied countries were clearly the rulers of continental Europe.
Hitler had also allied himself with the USSR under the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact of 1939 which divided Eastern Europe by giving the Baltic states and
parts of Poland and Romania to the USSR, while letting the Germans take
over western Poland, Romania and other European nations.
Meanwhile, the Japanese were the dominant force of Asia, seemingly set to
impose their control on that continent. Britain`s Winston Churchill stood
virtually alone against the Fascist onslaught, with the United States
mired in radical isolationism, refusing to take part in what many
Americans saw as a European war.
The one region where the British still had significant influence was the
Middle East. Hitler set out to change that. Al-Husseini wanted to get rid
of the Hashemite-clan rulers in Iraq and Transjordan. Both men wanted to
get rid of the Jews and the Brits. It was a marriage made in heaven.
Despite boasting a powerful navy, the United Kingdom had an army that was
modest in size and spread too thin. The Middle East, especially Iraq,
seemed likely to be the next pawn to fall to the Third Reich.
In 1940, King Ghazi (son of King Faisal I) died, leaving only his
four-year-old son to govern. Emir Abdul-Illah, the regent for the young
Iraqi king, felt the need to bring Rashid Ali al-Kaylani into the
government as the prime minister, despite the latter`s support for Nazi
Germany and links with al-Husseini. The new head of state immediately
shifted the policies of Iraq in favor of Nazi Germany, guaranteeing suply
of natural resources to Hitler and refusing to cut ties with Italy. The
former Mufti of Jerusalem and his surrogates frequently acted as the
government`s representatives with foreigners. Kaylani also asked from
Hitler the right to deal with Jews in Arab states a request that was
granted.
Britain responded with severe economic sanctions which, coupled with the
UK`s initial defeat of German forces in North Africa and pressure from the
Iraqi royal family, brought down the pro-German government on January 31,
1941. Kaylani and other pro-Axis Iraqis, under the influence of
al-Husseini, conspired, unsuccessfully, to murder Abdul-Illah. But thanks
to widespread support for Kaylani among government officials, he was back
in power two months later.
As one of its first acts, the restored pro-German administration sent its
artillery to attack the British air base at Habbaniya, causing the Brits
to respond by invading Basra. The hoped-for support from Nazi Germany
never came and Kaylani eventually fled to Saudi Arabia.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, who issued a fatwa (Islamic religious ruling)
calling on all Muslims to help the pro-Axis government in Iraq, became one
of England`s most wanted men. In May 1941, a group of Jewish fighters,
including David Raziel, leader of the right-wing Irgun, set out for Iraq
to assassinate the former Mufti on a mission sponsored by the Churchill
government. The mission ended prematurely when Raziel was killed by a bomb
dropped from a German plane. Aware that his life was in danger,
al-Husseini fled to Europe dressed as a woman.
* * *
On November 28, 1941 the former Mufti was officially received by Hitler,
who agreed to establish a bureau for al-Husseini which was used to spread
propaganda on behalf of Nazi Germany, organize spy rings in Europe and the
Middle East, and, most importantly, establish Muslim Nazi SS divisions and
Wehrmacht units in Bosnia, the Balkans, North Africa and Nazi-occupied
parts of the Soviet Union. After the meeting, the Mufti was also named SS
gruppenfuehrer by Heinrich Himmler and referred to as the Fuhrer of the
Arab World by Hitler himself.
The largest Muslim Nazi SS unit was the 13th division, known as Hanjar.
Husseini also encouraged the creation of smaller, less efficient units,
including the Waffen SS divisions known as Skanderbeg (made up
predominantly of Albanians) and Kama (made up mostly of Yugoslavian
Muslims). Thus, Hitler`s Mufti organized or encouraged three out of 27
Waffen SS divisions formed before 1945 (eleven other SS divisions were
formed in 1945, but most of these were of questionable caliber and
accepted soldiers of questionable skill).
According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, al-Husseini organized in
record time Croatian units that went on to massacre hundreds of thousands
of Serbian Orthodox Christians. Jacenovac, the third largest death camp,
where more than 200,000 people met their death, was run by Croatian Ante
Pavelic with the aid of al-Husseini. In all, at least 800,000 Yugoslavian
civilians were murdered by Pavelics pro-Axis Ustaschi regime.
Despite the relative inefficiency of the Hanjar division and the total
incompetence of the other two divisions, it can still be said that the
units established and encouraged by the Fuhrer of the Arab World played a
significant role in the genocide. Tens of thousands of Jews outside
Yugoslavia also perished when the Mufti argued against trading them for
German POWs held by the Allies.
Al-Husseini opened a North African Bureau in Germany with the goal of
recruiting 500,000 Arab soldiers from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. The
plan failed when German forces were forced to withdraw from much of North
Africa after a successful British operation.
But an Arab Legion was founded, and it fought under the German flag. Arab
soldiers had hoped to fight in the Middle East but were instead sent to
the Russian front, where they were completely wiped out while fighting in
the Caucasus region. Some time later, in responseto the British decision
to create a Jewish Brigade made up of some of the 26,000 Palestinian Jews
who had fought under the United Kingdoms flag, the Mufti convinced the
Germans to create an Arab Brigade. The unit, however, either did not fight
or was not very efficient because very little is known about it.
The Mufti also made a particularly strong effort to recruit Soviet
Muslims. It was largely due to Haj Amins propaganda that on the arrival of
German armies in the northern Caucasus in 1942, five indigene tribes the
Chechens, the Ingushes, the Balkars, the Karachais, and the Kabardines
welcomed them with bread and salt, wrote Joseph Schechtman in The Mufti
and the Fuhrer. Stalins response was deadly. Caucasian Muslims, including
nearly all Chechens and Ingush, were exiled from their land, with up to a
third dying as a result of inhumane treatment by Soviet authorities.
The Mufti was similarly instrumental in the recruitment of the Azerbaijani
battalion, which proved their valor, were included in German Storm Troops
and decorated by the German Army, according to a November 1943 broadcast
by DNB, the German News Agency. The Mufti`s representatives in Central
Asia recruited some Muslim fighters for Nazi Germany there as well,
despite widespread sympathy among the majority of Central Asian Muslims
for the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust.
The Mufti`s hatred of the West was matched only by his hatred of the Jews.
It is not a coincidence that Germany suddenly abandoned the policy of
expelling Jews and adopted far harsher methods a short time after the
Mufti arrived in Germany. When Haj Amin came to Germany again, the Nazis
decided to execute the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.
The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of
European Jewry, reported Eichmann`s deputy, Dieter Wisliceny. [He had]
played a role in the decision to exterminate the European Jews. The
importance of this role must not be disregarded.... The Mufti was one of
the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry.
We do not know if al-Husseini played a major role in shaping the Final
Solution. There is, however, wrote Joseph Schechtman, abundant first-hand
evidence of the part the Mufti played in making foolproof the ban on
emigration (of Jews out of Germany).
When the war ended, al-Husseini returned to the Middle East as a hero. On
October 1, 1948, he was proclaimed the president of the government of
All-Palestine. The government was fictional, however, because it did not
control any land and was recognized by only a handful of Arab nations. In
1959 it was dispersed by its sponsor, Egypt.
By that time, however, another member of the al-Husseini clan was planning
terror. Around the same time that the All-Palestine government was
disbanded, a man by the name of Muhammad Abd al-Rahman ar-Rauf al-Qudwah
al-Husaini better known as Yasir Arafat was busy organizing Fatah, which
would go on to become the main faction of the PLO.
David Storobin, Esq., is a New York attorney who is currently writing a
book titled The Root Cause: The Rise of Fundamentalist Islam and its
Threat to the World. He is also editor-in-chief of the Global Politician
(GlobalPolitician.com), an online journal of politics, economics and world
affairs.
3. New Banner of Israel's Treasonous Leftists:
http://list.haifa.ac.il/pipermail/alef/attachments/20050112/2ed81b2b/attachment-0002.jpg
1. Just when you think that everything has been said about Kerry and the
elections. I strongly recommend the following piece, which I think is an
excellent and original set of insights on the election:
http://commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11901023_1
I especially liked this paragraph:
"The New York Times, for example, has regularly questioned the presence of
a mandate in recent electionsbut only when the winner has been a
Republican. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan bested incumbent President Jimmy
Carter by 10 percentage points, the papers editors observed that his
'mandate', a word they themselves put in suspicion-arousing quotation
marks,
had little policy content, a position they reiterated four years later
when Reagan won reelection over Walter Mondale by a whopping 18 percentage
points ('a lonely landslide and a personal victory with little precise
policy mandate'). Nor could the 8-point victory by Bush's father over
Michael Dukakis fairly be called a mandate, asserted the paper in 1988.
"Whenever a Democrat has won, by contrast, the Times has perceived things
differently. After Bill Clinton's first victory (by 6 percentage points)
in
1992, the editors commented: 'The test now will be how quickly
President-elect Clinton can convert his mandate into momentum.' When he
won
reelection (by 8 points) in 1996, it repeated the thought - "There can be
no question about his mandate!" - and added a little civics lesson: "The
American people express their clearest opinion about what they want
government to do through their choice of chief executive."
2. 10 January 2005
Wall Street Journal: "The Unhelpful Hand:
Time to free the Palestinians from NGOs"
(Gerald Steinberg)
SUMMARY: Yesterdays elections in the Palestinian territories closed the
book on the Arafat era.
Even with the best of intentions, however, a much wider effort will be
needed to reverse decades of hatred and terrorism.
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) active in human rights and
humanitarian issues can help, but in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the
track record of NGOs, such as HRW, Christian Aid, Oxfam, Amnesty, etc. has
been abysmal.
Like the United Nations, they are part of the problem, not the solution.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gerald M. Steinberg
Wall Street Journal - Europe
JERUSALEM -- Yesterdays elections in the Palestinian territories closed
the book on the Arafat era. The end of four decades of terror and
corruption rightly generates great optimism about the Israeli-Palestinian
relationship. Mahmoud Abbas, the new leader, can now move to end the chaos
in Palestinian society and channel the massive aid flows away from
off-shore bank accounts and illegal arms to economic development.
Even with the best of intentions, however, a much wider effort will be
needed to reverse decades of hatred and terrorism. Third parties can help
in this immense task--in particular the wide network of non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) active in human rights and humanitarian issues. Yet,
in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the track record of these NGOs has
been abysmal. Like the United Nations, today theyre part of the problem,
not the solution.
With their multi-million-dollar (and euro) budgets, superpowers such as
Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International, Christian Aid, Oxfam, and
dozens of smaller allied groups in the region have contributed to
incitement to terrorism--when they should support reconciliation.
Their activities amplify Palestinian rhetoric that labels Israel as an
"apartheid regime", and Jews as "imperialists" and "colonialists", while
whitewashing terror and condemning the Israel defensive actions.
In contrast to their PR images as peace-makers, the one-sided approach
boosts the most radical Palestinians and undermines moderate voices. The
double standards by which HRW and Amnesty excuse non-state terrorism as
being outside the framework of international law, while using terms such
as "war crimes" to condemn Israeli defensive actions, help to fuel
violence.
When human rights groups repeat the language used by the rejectionists
from Hamas, Fatah's al Aksa brigades, and elsewhere, Palestinian opposed
to terrorism are silenced. And by ignoring the vast corruption of the
Palestinian leadership, the international NGOs have helped to keep this
elite in power, and blunted support for reform.
Some groups, such as Denmarks Rebellion, have gone further by directly
supporting terror organizations such as the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine--which sent the 16 year old suicide bomber who
killed three Israelis in Tel Aviv last October. In the Arab-Israeli
conflict, the NGO community has lost direction, making a mockery of the
human right ideals that it claims to uphold.
The contribution of NGOs to incitement in the Palestinian territories was
highlighted in September 2001 at the UN-sponsored Durban conference
against "racism and xenophobia".
The conference equated Zionism with racism, justified terror as
"resistance against occupation", and denounced Israeli defense as a
"violation of international law". Later, groups such as Christian Aid,
Oxfam, War on Want , etc. promoted the extremist Palestinian position in
condemning Israel's separation barrier as an "apartheid wall", while
referring to the anti-terror actions in Jenin and elsewhere as "war
crimes".
Some of these NGOs are also active in promoting the proposed economic
boycott on Israel in order to further delegitimize defensive actions
against terrorism.
The NGO political agenda also resulted in the relative neglect of mass
killings in areas such as Central Africa or Sudan, where there is less
media coverage and political mileage.
Since 2000, attacks by HRW and Amnesty on the actions of democratic Israel
amounted to less than half of those devoted to murderous regime in Sudan.
HRW only put Sudan on the top of their agenda after media and U.S.
government reports of the mass brutality. Before then, the human rights
NGOs were asleep at the wheel.
But despite these failures, the "halo effect" protects the NGOs them from
the same type of accountability that they demand from others. When Kenneth
Roth, the head of New York-based HRW, alleges Israeli abuses, or Irene
Khan of Amnesty repeats Palestinian myths in Jenin, few question their
motives or credibility.
Mr. Roth recently used part of his $22 million annual budget to hold a
press conference at Jerusalem's American Colony Hotel (the main
Palestinian public relations hub) to publicize a glossy 135-page report
purporting to document Israeli military excesses in Gaza, based on
unverified claims of Palestinian "eyewitnesses".
A few days later, Christian Aid (a major London-based "charitable
organization"), issued its own report ("Facts on the Ground") alleging
that Israeli "land grab policy" is making peace impossible. As in previous
activities by this group (such as the film, "Peace under Siege"),
Palestinian corruption and incitement were essentially ignored. These
conflict-enhancing activities are facilitated by allocations from European
governments, powerful philanthropies such as the Ford Foundation, and
church groups all claiming to promote peace.
Recently, however, these excesses have begun to erode the "halo effect":
the NGOs and their funding agencies have become the subjects of reports by
monitoring groups.
The NGO role in the Durban conference led to strong protests from the U.S.
government, critical press reports, and hearings by a Congressional
committee on the role of powerful charitable organizations, such as the
Ford Foundation, in this activity.
In response, Susan Berresford, president of the Ford Foundation, declared
a ban on funding for groups that advocate "bigotry or violence" or denial
of "very existence of legitimate, sovereign states like Israel."
But implementation is spotty. While advocating transparency for others,
Ford fails to provide updates on the groups it still supports. Some
individual donors have gone further, attempting to press HRW and other
groups to shift the counter-productive emphasis on Israel.
If these initial efforts gather steam, the NGO community might be able to
provide a positive contribution to ending the violence and promoting
understanding. In the post-Arafat era, they can also help to reverse
decades of incitement and promote reform within Palestinian society,
thereby also restoring some credibility among Israelis.
Mr. Steinberg is the editor of www.ngo-monitor.org, and directs the
program on conflict management at Bar Ilan University in Israel.
3. Demand an Investigation!
DEMOCRATS PONDER WHY KERRY DID SO WELL
WASHINGTON -- Almost two months after election day, Democrat strategists
continue to debate John Kerry's loss to George Bush, wondering how Mr.
Kerry failed to lose by a landslide.
"It's baffling," said Democrat National Committee (DNC) Chairman Terry
McAuliffe, "He had all the earmarks of a devastating, 10-million-vote,
49-state defeat. And yet he only lost by a few million in the popular vote
and cut it pretty close in the Electoral College."
The debate over how Mr. Kerry managed a mediocre performance rather than a
crushing embarrassment threatens to tear the fabric of Democrat party
unity.
On the one side, many strategists think President Bush should have beaten
Mr. Kerry "like a steel drum" due to the latter's lack of guiding
principles, reasonable ideas, tolerable personality or track record of
accomplishment.
On the other side, a raft of consultants continues to pore over precinct
spreadsheets trying to calculate why more people don't hate George Bush.
"If we can solve this riddle," said Mr. McAuliffe, "Our 2008 candidate
will be able to return us to the halcyon days of Mondale and Dukakis."
Meanwhile, he said, pundits and pols ponder the central question: "How can
a man who stands for so little still get the support of about 50 million
voters?"
Mr. Kerry, who is also a U.S. Senator, still attributes his "virtual
victory" showing to curiosity.
"I think many Americans were curious to see my plan," he said. "My whole
strategy was to tease them with it during the campaign, so they would be
burning to get a glimpse of it by November. It worked. Without that plan,
sculptors would be chiseling my face on the Democrat Mount Rushmore, right
next to Walter and Michael."
-- Scott Ott, courtesy Scrappleface, Copyright 2004 Scrappleface. All
rights reserved.
4. More Spoof News:
ISLAMIC SCHOLARS EXPLAIN : IT'S FREUD'S FAULT
-- Multicultural Scholarship In Action!
December 17, 2004: In another advance in Islamic scholarship, we learn
that Freud is the archetypal evil Jew whose ideas have corrupted the
infidels:
"...The theory of social liberty was created in the 19th century. A number
of writers and philosophers support it, and we won't mention them by name
from this pulpit. Whoever studies science and visits libraries knows who
they are. This theory evolved until the writers of existentialism in the
20th century. Various schools of thought stemmed form it, such as
permissiveness and existentialism. Even economic schools of thought
adopted social liberty. Socialism was also a school of social liberty.
They put their trust in Man's downfall. They didn't say 'downfall,' but
they said that society limits people. Especially in the case of sex.
"The first theoretician we mention on this pulpit is Freud. He is the one
who claimed that all of man's urges revolve around the sexual urge. He
even claimed that babies have sex when they breastfeed from their mothers,
meaning they don't breastfeed out of hunger or thirst - no, they
breastfeed due to a sexual urge. This is extremism. They claimed that the
restrictions on this urge have created repression.
"Brothers, I got the following numbers from American sources: There are
currently 1,000 Jewish soldiers in Fallujah. This is according to American
sources. Among them are 37 rabbis. The rabbis raise the morale among the
Jewish soldiers fighting in Fallujah. So America is fighting for Israel.
It is not fighting for Iraq's oil, since it has been drilling it for some
time.
"...The Jews are fighting now. Even before we read the information about
Jewish presence in Fallujah we thought that storming houses with boots
from one house and moving from one house to another by explosions are
actions we have already seen in Balata, Jenin, and Rafah. The Jews came to
conduct urban warfare on behalf of America, and America is supporting them
in exchange..."
See the rest here.
Stephen Rittenberg, Co-Publisher, Horsefeathers
1. If Israel is ever destroyed, in part it will be because of Israel's
insistence that rhetoric and words do not matter, and its obstinate
refusal to challenge semantic distortion and New-speak. The position of
the Israeli political elite has always been that it does not make sense to
quibble over words.
Including the word "elections".
Starting in the late 1960s, Israeli leftists adopted the ruse of
calling Arabs living on the West Bank and Gaza Strip "Palestinians", and
over time the rest of the chattering classes and the political elite caved
in. The origin of the claims for a right to self-definition for a
make-pretend Palestinian "people" can be traced directly to that
capitulation. In
retrospect, Israel should have stated over and over, a dozen times every
day, that Arabs living under Israeli rule are no more a "nation" (other
than being part of the Arab nation which owns 22 states already) and no
more entitled to self-determination than are the Arabs of Detroit or
Paris. The willingness to resist the Newspeak ended when Begin left
office.
Alongside this capitulation to anti-Israel Newspeak came the
growing insistence that Arab rhetoric is meaningless, simply Levantine
bravado. Hence when Arafat was calling for terror and jihad even before
the ink was dry on the Oslo "Accord", when Arafat was singing the praises
of "The Engineer" and suicide bombers, when Arafat was declaring that the
PLO would never give up the "Right of Return" as its formula for
destorying Israel, this was ignored by Israeli politicians as empty
rhetoric by primitives from the Third World. The same dismissals are
being heard this week in the Israeli leftist press concerning the
make-pretend Palestinian
"election", where the winner has already declared that Jews are the
Zionist enemy, where he has endorsed terror openly, and where he has
repeated that the "Right of Return" to destroying Israel is the only
formula he will accept.
Then there is the newest manifestation of leftist Newspeak in Israel,
where the treasonous Left has renamed Israeli Arabs as "Israeli
Palestinians" - simply the next step in the semantic war against Israeli
existence and the rhetorical delegitization of the Jews.
The conducting of the Potemkin Palestinian election belongs in this
genre. Like when the Wizard of Oz gave the Scarecrow a diploma because he
could not provide a brain, Israel's proponents of appeasement and the
rest of the world have
provided the Palestinians with an "election" because no one thinks
Palestinians can possibly have any democracy. It is a Reichstag-style
"election". Remember how Hitler and Mussolini came to power.
Jimmy Goobers Carter is there to legitimize the "election", the same
peanut brain, Billy's dumber brother, just back from "koshering" the
corrupt pseudo-election stolen in Venezuela, no doubt ready to declare
the communist poisoner in the Ukraine the winner last month.
Here is the Peanut Brain:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/050108/481/xaz10301081120
2. How to Interrogate Terrorists:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_1_terrorists.html
Friday, January 14, 2005
1. Nice web site:
http://jonjayray.blogspot.com/
2. Liberals Quoting Scripture: Beware The Politically-Correct Bible
Thumpers
Steven Plaut
When I was a lad we used to suffer from the frequent visits of
missionaries who often canvassed our neighborhood, presumably because of
the large number of Jewish families whose souls could be saved there.
Occasionally I would chat up these people, and at one point I asked about
the training and preparation they undergo before taking to the streets to
save our doomed souls. The missionary confided to me that she had learned
15 or 20 selected biblical quotations in a special seminar - including
many especially chosen because the quotes were thought to hold persuasive power
for Jewish listeners - and she simply pulled these out during missionary
visits.
Doubtless some of the missionaries knew their Bible backward and forward,
but the ones with whom I came into contact were apparently all one-day
crash-course Bible thumpers. (I learned that all I needed to do to drive
these neighborhood missionaries into a state of confused silence was to
produce an alternative biblical quote not on their list of 15 or 20, or
show them how their quotes of choice had been wrenched out of their
overall context.)
This comes to mind because it is strongly reminiscent of a fad quite
common these days among Jewish assimilated liberals and leftists in the
United States. These people constitute the School of Jewish
Politically-Correct Bible Thumpers. They advocate the PC fads and programs
of the American Left, while coating them with a thin veneer of supposedly
biblical ethics.
Like the missionaries of my youth, they learn a dozen or so select
biblical phrases, taken out of context, and argue that the Bible and
traditional Judaism unambiguously require that one accept and support a
left-wing political agenda. I assume that most readers
are familiar with these folks.
Examples of Jewish politically-correct Bible thumping abound, the most
outrageous, of course, are the Cheech-and-Chong ethics and the political
platform of the editors of Tikkun magazine, featuring the Politics of
Meaning psychobabble promoted by "Rabbi" Michael Lerner.
But many mainstream liberal leaders of the Jewish community also engage in
Biblical posturing in order to conscript scripture for support of liberal
fads. Generally such Bible-based PC preaching operates through conjuring
up the ethics of the Prophets as scriptural underpinning for the Left's
political agenda.
The term "Prophetic Ethics" is used to justify support for everything from
affirmative action to abortion on demand, animal rights to homosexual
rights, ecological activism to various and sundry redistributionist social
programs.
The Oslo peace accord, it should go without saying, was accorded a
particularly hallowed place in the doxology of the Jewish
politically-correct Bible thumpers.
What is one to make of all this? Let us begin by noting that the attempt
by Jewish leftists to conjure up Scriptural support for their political
agenda might be somewhat more persuasive if these same people were
practitioners of traditional Judaism. (Orthodox politically-correct Bible
thumping is extremely rare, albeit not completely non-existent.)
In most cases, politically-correct Bible thumpers are scripturally
motivated only under circumstances that they find convenient and with
respect to those political causes they happen to find appealing. Otherwise
they simply ignore everything else in scripture and halacha that does not
fit their political agenda.
These folks are generally not Jews whose lifestyles are determined by
Biblical rules regarding, say, diet, Sabbath, sexual relations, etc.
Indeed, when Scripture clearly favors a moral or political position that
is not fashionable, these same PC Bible thumpers suddenly decline to adapt
themselves to Biblical ethics.
At times they will go through contortions to force their supposed
understanding of these ethics into a PC mold. For example, there is
probably nothing as clear-cut as the Biblical prohibition against
homosexuality, yet the Thumpers insist that gay "marriage" is a grand
expression of Biblical values.
The very notion of gay rights is completely antithetical to biblical
morality; the Bible in fact explicitly labels sodomy an abomination and
makes it a capital offense.
(While such punishment was generally not literally applied in Jewish
tradition, there is no doubt as to the disgust and condemnation with which
the Bible views gay relations.)
But that did not stop the PC branch of the Reform movement from deciding
that Reform rabbis can ordain gay marriages. It is not clear why they did
not at the same time decide that inter-species marriages could be
ordained; after all, the Biblical injunction against the latter is no
less unambiguous than the prohibition against homosexuality.
Similarly, while the Jewish religious position on abortion is not
identical with the one espoused by the Roman Catholic Church and other
Christian denominations, abortion on demand when a mother's life is not in
danger is hardly a position held by traditional Judaism.
One can accept or reject the Scriptural view of homosexuality or abortion
- it's a free country. But if one is representing one's political agenda
as being Biblically-based, why the arbitrarily selective distortion?
The biggest problem with PC appeals to Prophetic Ethics and Jewish
compassion is that there is absolutely no support in Jewish tradition for
feel-good advocacy programs that actually exacerbate real-world problems.
In other words, one cannot conscript Biblical ethics and morality on
behalf of a political cause - even if doing so makes one feel righteous
and
moral - until one can at least show credibly that the cause would indeed
resolve or alleviate real-world problems.
The PC Biblical Ethics-poseurs are too lazy to go out and actually acquire
the analytic tools needed for assessing policy proposals. Learning economics,
statistics, cost/benefits accounting, etc., requires effort and
investment. The PC posturers prefer to practice effortless recreational
compassion and armchair peacemaking.
Besides, the very first thing one learns in social science and in policy
analysis is that all things have tradeoffs. That is the one truth with
which leftist Biblical Ethics-poseurs and other PC preachers simply cannot
cope. If a policy proposal has both costs and benefits (and which does not?)
there is no way that selective scriptural quotation and appeals to
Prophetic Ethics can resolve the dilemma.
If a proposal to improve the quality of the environment also produces
higher food prices or higher energy or transportation prices and so
impacts living standards (especially for the poor), what is one to do?
Should the proposal be adopted or rejected in the name of justice and
ethics? Social science has a tool for answering such dilemmas (namely,
cost/benefits evaluation). Those who issue vague and highly generalized
appeals to Biblical ethics do not. They simply want to make themselves
feel righteous without having to exert any real effort.
Similarly, one cannot rationalize any policy in the name of the Prophetic
love of peace unless it can first be shown to produce peace. The Oslo
peace formula cannot be rationalized by an appeal to the biblical yearning
for peace unless it can be shown analytically to lead truly to peace.
Those who think the Oslo process does NOT lead to peace are not only
justified - they are obligated - to oppose it, precisely because of their
yearning for peace and their ethical concerns.
Opponents of the Oslo process are no less fond of peace than its
politically correct supporters, just more skeptical or analytically
dissident. (For the sake of argument, I am intentionally ignoring those
sections of Scripture that seem to rule out territorial compromise in the
Land of Israel altogether, even for peace.)
In some cases the PC Bible thumpers take positions in such clear
contradiction to the scriptural ethics they claim to uphold that one does
not know whether to laugh or cry. For example, not only is there no
biblical case for animal rights (although the humane treatment of animals
is indeed mandated), but one of the most clear-cut messages of the Bible
is that human interests always take priority over those of animals.
It's true that the Bible does not explicitly prohibit vegetarianism
except on Passover, but
there is absolutely nothing therein that mandates it, and much rabbinic
commentary is concerned with the rules of kosher slaughter and diet.
Another example: While there is a clear Biblical basis for charity, it is
equally clear that the emphasis is on individual charitable acts over
which the giver exercises control, choice and personal responsibility.
There is nothing that can be interpreted as mandating a massive welfare
state that deprives individuals of control over their property; indeed, a
good deal of biblical and rabbinic law concerns the protection and
preservation of private property rights. The main rules of
Biblical mandatory income-distribution regard funding Levites and priests.
Finally, it should be abundantly clear to anyone reading the Bible, even
superficially, that Prophetic Ethics are premised upon and augment - and
in many cases are thought to be a means for achieving, protecting and
developing - Jewish national existence and national self-interest.
(Contrast this with the recent fatwa by Tikkun's Moonbeam Lerner - that
the jubilee laws mean Israel has to give back its lands to the Palestinians.)
The very same Jewish politically correct Bible thumpers who argue that
Prophetic Ethics mandate the Left's political agenda are generally the
first to distance themselves from (if not outright denounce) all acts and
ideas designed to promote and protect Jewish national existence and
national interests.
The hypocritical pretend-enthusiasm for Prophetic Ethics on the part of
the PC
Bible thumpers is best understood as part of the overall trend of Jewish
assimilation in North America. Liberalism has been the main avenue of
assimilation for North American Jews. In effect, assimilationist Jews long
ago substituted the liberal/left political agenda for Judaism as their
religion. They are as zealously attached to this pseudo-religion as most
Jews in the past were to authentic Judaism.
Like all religious beliefs, this devotion to liberalism is by definition
non-rational. Assimilated Jews adhere to this religion of liberalism even
when it is clearly harmful to their own self- interests, as in the case of
the apartheid racial preference policy euphemistically known as
affirmative action.
And the astronomical intermarriage rates of American non-Orthodox Jews
reflect the fact that, once liberalism has replaced Judaism as the
religion of the Jews, marrying a non-Jewish liberal is simply not looked
upon as marrying outside the faith. Jewish and gentile liberals observe
the same "religion".
Shakespeare's Hamlet is a play about a royal family of Danes. It uses
Danish images and symbols and takes place, as it were, inside a Danish
castle. But it would be absurd to represent Hamlet as a Danish play. It is
an Elizabethan English play. In the same way, the Jewish Politically
Correct Bible thumpers use Jewish imagery and symbols in order to market
the political agenda of the Left. But it is absurd to represent their
position as one motivated by and expressing Jewish traditional ethics and
Biblical morality. Theirs is a leftist ideology, and not, by any stretch
of the imagination, a Jewish one.
Steven Plaut teaches business and economics at the University of Haifa.
3. PETA - we must fight it to its bitter end!
http://jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=4582
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Subject: Do Animals Have Rights in Judaism?
Do Animals have Rights?
(Not in Judaism or in the Bible, they don't!!)
by Steven Plaut
Recent years have seen the growth at the margins of the Jewish
community of the United States a number of "Judaism and Animal Rights"
groups. They are groups allied to the more general "animal rights"
movement, but these are claiming that Judaism and the Bible are themselves
authoritative ethical sources for the claim that animals have "rights". A
number of books have been published promoting the claim that animal rights
have firm foundations in traditional Judaism (such
as http://www.micahbooks.com/animalrtsbooks/judaismanimalrts.html
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1568212402/026-2149011-5416425 ).
Animal rights have been an ongoing "cause" and banner for the
so-called "Eco-Judaism" fringe cult groups and their Tikkun Magazine gurus,
including "Rabbi" Michael Lerner (who has no rabbinical ordination from any
rabbinic seminary). These are people far more concerned about protecting
squirrels than protecting Jews from Islamofascist terror and anti-Semitism,
far more worried about the annihilation of whales than about the
annihilation of Israel. (See
http://www.somethingjewish.co.uk/articles/109_what_does_judaism_sa.htm and
http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/index.cfm/action/tikkun/issue/tik0107/article/010753.html
).
Several groups of radical Jewish environmentalists and militant
Jewish vegetarians have been promoting the doctrine of "the Jewish
foundations" for animal "rights" (see for example
http://www.jewishveg.com/schwartz/position-paper.html ). There have even
emerged several "animal rights" groups in Israel, and, in between their
vandalizing university laboratories in which animal testing takes place,
they have also taken to claiming that animal rights have traditional
Biblical and Jewish roots (http://www.chai-online.org/issues.htm and
http://www.chai-online.org/slaughter.htm). Animal rights have shown up in
the list of causes promoted by the Reform synagogue movement in the US, and
here and there among individual Conservative and other synagogue "social
action" committee causes as well.
At the same time, the "animal rights" militant groups have long
targeted Jews with special vengeance and ferocity. Kosher slaughtering
has long been the target of the animal rights lobbies, which claim that
Jewish traditional slaughtering practices are inhumane. Curiously, these
same groups generally have NOT targeted Moslem religious slaughter
practices, especially in Europe, where they fear antagonizing the large
Moslem minorities there. As a result of their lobbying against the
"inhumanity" of kosher slaughtering, a growing number of European countries
have banned kosher slaughter altogether, creating enormous hardships for
Jews in those countries seeking to live a traditional lifestyle.
Meanwhile, PETA, the main animal rights lobby in the US (PETA stands
for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, but I have argued for
years that it really should call itself People for the Equitable Treatment
of Animals ) has not only denounced kosher slaughter practices (see
http://pop-pr.blogspot.com/2005/01/peta-doesnt-play-kosher.html and
http://www.jewfaq.org/peta.htm), but has outraged Jewish groups repeatedly
by comparing the eating of meat to the Holocaust of Jews, most notably with
its recent scurrilous "Holocaust on your Plate" campaign
(http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Northeast/02/28/peta.holocaust/ and
http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.02.28/news8.html ). Interestingly,
a number of noenazi and Holocaust Denial web sites have picked up on the
PETA campaign against kosher practices to denounce Jews and Judaism in
general (for example, http://www.rense.com/general60/kosher.htm ).
A few years back, one of PETA's sister group in Los Angeles called
itself "JIHAD", for Justice through Insurrection by Humans for Animal
Defense (http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0498/plaut.html ). These
"Jihadniks" were upset at the Carl's Jr. fast food chain because it was
running ads for its greasy burgers as part of its "Eat Meat" campaign,
which mocked vegetarians. "The vegetarians will get over it," taunted one
ad. "Don't let them make you feel guilty, ok?" Deliciously, some Los
Angeles area Islamic groups, including the Orange County Islamic Society,
led by Haitham Bundaki, were upset with the use of the term "jihad" by the
animal rights nuts. "Jihad," they insisted, is a term that should be
reserved only for the random murder of Jewish children, not for animal
rights wackiness.
Ingrid Newkirk, co-founder and vice-president of PETA has stated: "A
rat is a pig is a dog is a boy,"
(http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0498/plaut.html )
and so, it thus follows, "Medical research is immoral even if it's
essential. Even if animal testing produced a cure for AIDS, we'd be against
it." And best of all: "Six million people died in concentration camps," she
told the Washington Post, "but six billion broiler chickens will die this
year in slaughterhouses." A new counter-PETA group, by the way, is now
available on the internet, also calling itself PETA, but this counter-PETA
standards for People for Eating Tasty Animals (see
http://www.mtd.com/tasty/ and http://wave.prohosting.com/antiar/peta1.html ).
While PETA and its sister animalist lobbies are generally dismissed
by all non-institutionalized people as little more than crackpots and
fruitcakes, what are we to make of those Jewish "animal rights" groups
claiming that Biblical and traditional Jewish sources confer "rights" on
animals? Is there any basis to these claims?
The simple answer to the question is that animals have no "rights"
at all in Judaism and the Bible, and those claiming to confer such "rights"
on the basis of Biblical or Talmudic sources are charlatans at best, and
pagans polytheists trying to invent "souls" for animals at worst.
The total absence of any "rights" for animals in Jewish sources
should not be confused with any approval of wanton sadism or unnecessary
cruelty towards animals. The rule regarding animals is as simple as could
be. It is spelled out in the Talmud in the Avoda Zara Tractata
(Yud-Alef). "The mistreatment or cruelty towards animals is prohibited
ONLY when there is no profit or utility therefrom."
Nothing could be simpler. Cruelty towards animals that does not
serve any human purpose, cruelty for its own sake, is prohibited. Cruelty
required to serve any human need or desire or benefit is justified,
although not mandatory.
Let us be even more clear about this. According to Jewish tradition,
we are not talking about restricting cruelty towards animals when it is
necessary to save a human life, even in a probabilistic sense, such as in
medical experimentation (which the animal rights kooks insist cannot
possibly produce any cures for human ailments, dozens of counter-proofs not
withstanding). We are talking about any use of animals to serve ANY human
desires other than senseless sadism. Period.
In the Bible, animals are part of the bounty of the earth put here by
God for humans to enjoy, like trees and rocks. Humans may enjoy these,
should they choose, in nature preserves and parks, or they may enjoy them
by eating them, turning them into shoes and belts or fur coats, doing
medical experiments upon them, keeping them in zoos, or in any other use.
There is absolutely no religious compulsion in Judaism to forgo
eating meat or living as vegetarians. In fact, at least once a year
vegetarianism is outright prohibited. Refusing to eat the meat in the
Passover sacrifice out of concern for the "rights" of animals would have
been grounds for expulsion from the Jewish people. While vegetarianism is
not explicitly prohibited the rest of the year, it is looked down upon,
just like those who foreswear wine are considered to be senseless recluses,
upon whose behavior the Bible frowns. Sabbath pleasure and holiday
festivals are thought to require the eating of meat, except where it cannot
be afforded in terms of budget constraints (Shulkhan Arukh).
None of this precludes giving up meat eating for health reasons, for
those who believe it is unhealthy. But such Jewish vegetarianism has
nothing to do with any imagined "rights" for the animal. Where health
requires it, the same Jew would be expected to give up salads, eggs, or
spices, things obviously not having any "rights". In other words, the fact
that animals and fish might or might not feel pain has absolutely no
bearing in the general Jewish traditional affirmation for eating meat and
poultry and fish.
Meat eating is nearly everywhere celebrated by Biblical stories and
heroes. Among the only cases of Biblical vegetarianism is Daniel, and he
gives up meat because he has no access to kosher-slaughtering
facilities. Moses, David, Jacob and many others work as herders of
animals, and the animals they raised were for the purpose of being
eaten. Animals were eaten in the Temple as party of its daily
ritual. Animals were also killed for purposes other than ritual, such as
for signing treaties or for establishing a covenant with God. Jewish
tradition has long held that the world will dine on whale meat when the
Messiah comes.
Animals are not only killed in the Bible for purposes other than
eating. The Children of Israel are explicitly ordered to wrap the holy
utensils of the Tabernacle in animal furs when moving from camp to
camp; these were furs of animals that were unclean for purposes of eating,
which is essentially equivalent to saying they were hunted for their pelts,
not killed for food with the fur simply put aside. Animals could be used
cruelly for frivolous purposes as well, such as Samson tying torches to the
fox tails and setting them loose in the fields of the Philistines. And
they could be mass exterminated just to make a point, such as when Moses
asks God to exterminate the frogs of Egypt, heaping them in rotting piles,
as part of the ongoing negotiations with Pharaoh over the freeing of the
Israelite slaves. God chooses to drown all of Egypt's horses and kill the
livestock of the Egyptians as part of His plan to liberate the
Israelites. Nothing was stopping Him from selecting an alternative plan
that did not involve violating the "rights" of these animals.
There is some debate in Judaism over hunting. It is clear that the
legitimate killing of animals is NOT restricted in the Bible or in other
Jewish sources to purposes of eating, as noted above regarding the use of
fur pelts to wrap the Tabernacle utensils. An animal killed by a hunter
may not be eaten because its killing was not according to the slaughtering
rules needed for the food to be kosher. But its carcass can be used for
other purposes, such as making clothing or to protect other farm animals or
fields, and there is no prohibition on wearing fur. Some Jewish sources
frown upon hunting if its only purpose is the sheer enjoyment of the hunt,
that is, if the animal is not being hunted for some other use. But
decorating a wall with a moose or deer's head, or simply human enjoyment
from the hunt itself, could arguably be claimed to be legitimate human
purposes, and so one could make a plausible argument in their favor, even
though most Rabbinic sources discussing hunting do not go that far.
Any Biblical prohibitions on mistreating animals refer to situations
where the mistreatment serves no utilitarian purpose. Maimonides traces
the Jewish compassion to animals to the story of Bilaam and his donkey
(Numbers 22, 32) and any Jews coming across a talking donkey would be
will-advised to treat th ebeast with respect. The Book of Proverbs says
that evil people mistreat animals wantonly (chapter 12, verse
10). Animals rest on the sabbath, but so do machines, so this cannot be
considered to be any acknowledgement of an animal's "rights", merely a part
of the sabbath shutting down all creative activity for all property owned
by a Jew. Fields, unlike animals, get one year "off" out of seven for a
sabbatical. There is no prohibition on keeping pets or zoos, although
deliberate neutering of animals is often regarded as a violation of one of
the commands from God for animals to be fruitful and multiply. None of
this contradicts the clear Biblical case for human domination and
exploitation of animals and nature.
But when serving a human need, such as medical research, there is no
basis whatsoever for hesitation in using animals, even mistreating them if
this is what is necessary for the research. An authoritative rabbinic
ruling on this was Rabbi Yehiel Yaakov Weinberg in his book "Seridei
Esh". There he states explicitly: the only proper role for compassion is
to avoid needless suffering of the animal when the suffering serves no
human purpose or benefit.
Traditional kosher slaughtering is explicitly designed for the
stated purpose of minimizing unnecessary animal suffering
(http://www.jewfaq.org/kashrut.htm#Shechitah ). Traditional Jewish
butchers must kill the animal with a razor sharp knife so that the animal
feels no pain. Animals killed with a knife with a dent or chink may not be
eaten; having suffered unnecessarily, a Jew may not eat the meat, although
it may be sold to any non-Jews less concerned with the suffering of the
animal who wish to buy it. The intense concern with avoiding pain in
kosher-slaughtered animals makes a mockery out of the campaigns by PETA and
its sister activist groups against "inhumane" kosher butcher
practices. Indeed it reveals these for what they really are anti-Jewish
propaganda campaigns, not very different from those campaigns by neonazis
and other anti-Semites who noisily claim that gentiles are being
"exploited" by being "coerced" into paying for kosher inspections of food
products with kosher certification symbols upon them. (As a side note,
some Israeli anti-religious leftists have expressed similar "outrage" to
being "coerced" into paying for kosher inspections.) In reality, the
presence of so many kosher products on the shelves everywhere is simply a
marketing response to the fact that it is profitable for many for
manufacturers and marketers to sell kosher products sought out by many Jews
and non-Jews, and has nothing to do with any "coercion".
There is absolutely no basis in Judaism for arguing that vegetarianism
makes people more humane, and there is plenty of counter-evidence, such as
the famous concern for animal "rights" by the Nazi German leadership (see
http://constitutionalistnc.tripod.com/hitler-leftist/id11.html)
. Ecological concern is alright in Judaism, as long as protecting the
environment and endangered species is being done as part of servicing human
needs, pleasures, and desires. If it is done for the sake of the animals'
"rights", it is nothing better than paganism and is an abomination.
The environmentalist extremists and animalist kooks within the Jewish
community tend to emerge close to the Jewish "New Year of the Trees" named
Tu B'shvat. They have attempted to hijack the day and turn it into a day
in which environmentalist extremist is misrepresented as Biblical
ethics. There is nothing in the day and nothing in the Bible that can be
seen as conferring "rights" on animals. Enjoy you burger, fish to your
heart's content, wear a fur coat and leather shoes with pride! It is what
the Bible wants you to do!
1. Important new Web Sites:
http://www.divestmentwatch.com/
and
http://www.israel-academia-monitor.com
2. Pandering to the Enemy
Rael Jean Isaac
On December 10, the Jewish Community Relations Council, the American
Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League jointly sponsored a
luncheon whose guest speaker was Sari Nusseibeh, the Arafat-appointed head
of Al Quds University and a prominent defamer of Israel.
They did this despite the pleas of Yitzhak and Rivka Markus, who had sent
a letter to the Jewish Community Relations Council describing how
Nusseibah on June 29, 2002 had appeared on Al Jazeera with the mother of
the suicide bomber who had murdered their son Asher and four of his
friends, students at Atzmonah Yeshivah. On the program Nusseibeh had said:
"What comes to mind when I hear my sister Uhm Nidal speak is the verse in
the Koran which proclaims that 'The Garden of Eden has been designed for
these mothers.' All the more honor goes to every Palestinian mother, to
every fighter and to all those women who fight for the Palestinian Jihad
in our land." They conclude their letter: "I don't understand how our
Jewish brothers and our Jewish sisters in Boston can honor a person who
endorses and praises those who murder our children."
Disgracefully, the Jewish organizations went right ahead, with one of the
organizers dismissing what the Marcuses wrote concerning Nusseibehs
statements on Al Jazeera as "disinformation." Apparently she was content
with Nusseibeh's assurances and did not want to be bothered with the
awkward reality that the Al Jazeera broadcast had been documented in
transcripts and translated from the Arabic.
Here are some additional facts about Nusseibeh which mainstream Jewish
organizations would prefer not to hear. The following comes from an
article in the Israeli daily Yediot Achronot on August 20, 2002 by Yoram
Ettinger (formerly Israeli consul in Texas).
"In a January 21, 2001 letter to Saddam Hussein, Nusseibeh wrote: 'In the
name of Al-Quds University...allow me to express the admiration of the
Palestinians for your honorable position...You represent the vanguard of
steadfastness...We, in Jerusalem, are inspired by you...We are proud to
belong to a nation which considers you a symbol of resistance and a symbol
of its greatness....
"Ten years earlier, during the 1991 Gulf War, Nusseibeh was arrested by
Israel's police for collaborating with Saddam in an attempt to improve the
accuracy of Saddam's Scud missiles fired at Israel. Acccording to the
February 8, 1991 issue of the Ha'aretz (dovish) daily, Yossi Sarid, a
leader of Israel's Left, told supporters that he would not attend any
rally on behalf of Nusseibeh, 'since the arrest was not politically
motivated.'
"Roni Milo, another dovish politican, then the Minister of Police, stated
on February 7, 1991 (Ha'aretz) that 'Nusseibeh performed severe acts of
treachery and collaboration with the enemy.' Judge Vardi Zeiler, President
of the Jerusalem County Court, confirmed (Ha'aretz, February 4, 1991) that
'Nusseibeh's arrest was on national and personal security grounds.' On
January 31, 1991 Ha'aretz reported that Nusseibeh transferred hundreds of
thousands of dollars to Palestinian terrorist cells during the Gulf War.
"It was Arafat who appointed Nusseibeh to the post of Presidency of Al
Quds University in Jerusalem....An August 2001 document submitted to
Arafat by Nusseibeh confirms that Al-Quds University has become -- under
the leadership of Sari Nusseibeh--the Jerusalem headquarters for the
PLO/Palestinian Authority, preoccupying itself with the organization of
anti-Israel rallies, anti-Israel propaganda, illegal construction in order
to 'stop the Judaization of Jerusalem,' support of families of Palestinian
terrorists, the repartitioning of Jerusalem and other illegal activities."
Also writing in Yediot Achronot in 2002, then cabinet secretary Gideon
Saar noted that Nusseibeh, again on Al Jazeera, this time appearing with
Majd A-Zir from the Palestinian Return Organization said of the "right to
return" (code name for Israel's destruction): "There is no argument or
disagreement between brother Majd and myself, and the PLO leadership holds
fast by all decisions on this issue."
Saar observes that Nusseibeh, who had been appointed by Arafat to "the
Jerusalem portfolio" after the death of Faisal Husseini filled the shoes
of his predecessor in more ways than one. "In one of his last interviews,
to the Egyptian weekly Al Arabi, Husseini likened the Oslo agreement to a
'Trojan Horse' that the PLO infiltrated into the Land of Israel and the
current intifada to the 'pouring out from the belly of the
horse....Nusseibeh, exactly like Husseini is among the most prominent
standard-bearers of the PLO's 'stages doctrine.' He is now the Trojan
Horse that the PLO is cleverly attempting to infiltrate into the heart of
Israel's capital. Are there still Israelis who want to open the walls of
Jerusalem to him?"
Alas, the answer is yes. And there are Jewish organizations eager to place
this Trojan Horse into the center of the American Jewish community,
willing dupes who arrogantly and blindly pander to Israel's enemies.
From http://www.mideastoutpost.com/
3. More on the Israeli Dual Justice System:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1105418778440&p=1006953079865
4. The Tale of the Lying Post-Zionist Twits:
http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=4650
5. Campus Protests:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=12294
6. Jacoby on The PETA Fruitcakes:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/jeff/jacoby040201.asp
7. Pagan Liberation has a New Cause:
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20050108-120519-9586r.htm
I had the names wrong on the demographic study. The two profs in question
criticized the study, and did not author it. Here are the correct
details. Apologies:
Report claims to debunk 'demographic bomb'
By Yair Ettinger, Haaretz Correspondent
An extra-academic document that debunks one of the foundations of the
disengagement plan, "the demographic bomb," will be presented in
Washington on Monday to a prestigious academic institution with
substantial influence on the Bush administration. The document, which
Haaretz has obtained, argues that 2.4 million Palestinians live in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip today, and not the 3.8 million claimed by the
Palestinian Authority.
In sharp contrast to population studies conducted in Israel by professors
Arnon Sofer and Sergio della Pergola, the document argues that Jews
continue to maintain a solid 60 percent majority between the Jordan River
and the Mediterranean Sea.
An Israeli-American group whose members are clearly identified with the
right authored the ABC Demographic Project. The group undercuts a
prevailing assumption in Israel's public debate - that Jews have ceased,
or will soon cease to be, a majority in that territory. The demographic
danger is not "all it's made out to be," the writers state.
Della Pergola called the document "groundless," politically slanted and
baseless from a research perspective. None of the signatories to the
document is a professional in demographicresearch. Among its authors are
former Israeli consul in Texas Yoram Ettinger (no relation to this
reporter), former West Bank Civil Administration head Brigadier General
(res.) David Shahaf and former Israeli health official Prof. Ezra Zohar.
The research was initiated and funded by Los Angeles Jewish businessman
Ben Zimmerman and U.S.-based partners, historian Dr. Roberta Seid of the
University of South Carolina and businessman Michael Wise.
A great deal of the interest in the document stems from the seal of
approval it received from U.S. demographers which paved the way for the
invitation to its authors to present their findings to influential
conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
Later this week, the document will be presented in New York to the
Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations.
The document claims the updated 2004 statistic presented by the Central
Bureau of Statistics on the Palestinian population in the territories -
3.8 million people - is unreliable. It doesn't incorporate emigration from
PA territory, which they estimate at hundreds of thousands, a drop in
fertility, or tens of thousands of deaths, and it includes about 200,000
residents of East Jerusalem, who are also counted in the Israeli census.
According to the document, Palestinian population growth was 2.4 percent
in 2003, not the 4.5 percent reported by the Palestinian Central Bureau of
Statistics.
In 2003, the population in Israel grew 1.7 percent.
PCBS data is based on a 1997 census. The figures are controversial, a
controversy revived in recent days prior to the Palestinian elections,
when the Palestinian legislature decided to update the voter registration
list, adopting statistics from the population registry, which added
600,000 eligible voters to the rolls.
Various Palestinian and foreign sources claim the population registry
includes data on many who are dead or living abroad.
The ABC document claims data from Israeli Border Police indicates
consistent negative emigration from the territories of about 10,000
departures annually. Its authors allege that 300,000 Palestinian
expatriates living in the U.S., Arab countries, Europe and Latin America
appear in the population registry. They support the claim by quoting
Norwegian research institute Fafo, situated in Ramallah, that found
negative Palestinian immigration of 100,000 in 2001-2002.
Yoram Ettinger said, "The demographic issue has great importance in
shaping the approach of the administration, the press and the public on a
critical matter to the future of Israeli society. These positions should
be determined based on facts and not distortions."
Works by Sofer and della Pergola, based largely on data from the PCBS,
find the Jewish population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean
Sea is currently about 50 percent. Della Pergola deducted the population
of East Jerusalem and found there were 3.53 million Palestinians in PA
territory at the beginning of 2004. Sofer estimates Jews will be a
minority of 40 percent in 2020, while della Pergola maintains the figure
will be 46.7 percent (including foreign workers and non-Jews).
But della Pergola rejects the new document entirely. He refers to a figure
that has no basis in the Israeli population registry, a claim in the
document that 300,000 Palestinians have become Israeli citizens since
1967, noting the lack of segmentation of the statistics according to age,
"critical in any Israeli-Palestinian demographic study."
He added, "The authors seek to prove the political theory that the status
quo is good for us and time is on our side. They are trying to attach some
demographic claims to that thesis."
The demographer claims there are distorted figures in the document, in
addition to a lack of familiarity with professional literature and
accepted research methods." Sofer's response was unavailable.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Friday, January 07, 2005
1. All last year the treasonous Israeli Far Left was campaigning fo rthe
Goebbels-like propaganda film of Mohammed Bakri, "Jenin Jenin". The film
was a tissue of lies and a set of anti-Jewish blood libels, which was why
the Left insisted it be screened wherever possible. The anti-Israel
Jerusalem Cinematek, funded by the Jerusalem taxpayer (I propose it change
its name to Enemantek) screened it, as did groups of tenured traitors on
the campuses. Well:
Suing the bastards:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42257
Thursday, January 6, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TROUBLE IN THE HOLY LAND
IDF troops sue filmmaker over war-crimes charge
While new documentary exposes 'massacre' at Jenin as sham
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: January 6, 2005
By Aaron Klein
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2005 WorldNetDaily.com
Five Israeli Defense Force soldiers are suing a Palestinian filmmaker for
allegedly falsifying information in a documentary claiming Israeli forces
committed genocide in a refugee camp, while a French producer is screening
a film using video footage to dispute the Palestinian claims.
The five IDF soldiers were seen in still footage in "Jenin, Jenin," a
documentary by Mohammed Bakri that alleges Israel committed genocide in
the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002, killing a "large number" of
civilians, mutilating Palestinian bodies, randomly executing and bombing
women, children and the mentally and physically impaired, and leveling the
entire refugee camp, including a wing of the local hospital.
The documentary doesn't show footage of the alleged atrocities, but in
some scenes, faces of the soldiers now suing Bakri were superimposed over
"eyewitness testimony," and it was indicated they had committed "war
crimes."
Similar claims of a massacre were made in 2002 by the Palestinian
leadership, which spoke of upwards of 500 civilians killed and thousands
wounded, but it was later determined 56 Palestinians, mostly gunmen, were
killed, and 23 Israeli soldiers died in the battle.
Media accounts, documentary evidence and investigations by several
international humanitarian organizations quickly proved there was no
massacre.
Israel entered Jenin, which was considered a center for terrorist
recruitment and operations, as part of its Operation Defensive Shield to
crack down on increased suicide bombings by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al
Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Israel sent infantry units to fight house-to-house
and lost nearly two dozen soldiers to ambushes, Palestinian snipers and
booby-trapped houses.
Bakri's film features several "witnesses" describing "brutality" by the
IDF, claiming Israel attacked and killed "many, many" Palestinians with
tanks, planes and snipers, although Bakri never lists the exact number of
Palestinians killed.
But a film by Pierre Rehov, "The Road To Jenin," seems to disprove many of
Bakri's claims, and has been cited in the lawsuit against the Palestinian
filmmaker.
One charge by Bakri is that Israel fired 11 missiles at a Jenin hospital,
leveling the facility while patients were inside, and later wouldn't allow
emergency personnel to access the area. Hospital manager Dr. Mustafa Abo
Gali tells Bakri's audience, "The whole of the west wing was destroyed.
Fighter planes launched their missiles every three minutes."
But in "The Road to Jenin," Rehov also interviews Gali, who shows the
filmmaker the extent of the damage a small hole on the outside of a
building, with the entire west wing intact. Rehov also provides aerial
images of the hospital on the last day of the Jenin incursion showing all
sections of the hospital standing normally.
With regard to Bakri's claim that ambulances weren't able to reach the
area, Dr. David Zangen, the IDF chief medical officer in Jenin during the
incursion, describes to Rehov how the soldiers treated many wounded
Palestinian fighters, including members of Hamas. Rehov even cuts to a
scene of an Israeli soldier authorizing Gali in person to receive any
medical supplies he needs for the Jenin hospital.
Writes Tamar Sternthal of the Committee for Accuracy in Reporting in the
Middle East, "Even casual observers will notice apparent inconsistencies
in the 'witness testimony' on which Bakri relies. For example, an older
interviewee charges that the Israelis made Palestinian prisoners fully
undress: 'Some people were completely undressed in front of their
brothers, sisters and children, who were used as human shields.' Yet, the
accompanying image does not support this claim; it shows a group of
Palestinians, some of them without shirts. All wore pants."
Bakri also claims the IDF shot in the hands an unarmed Palestinian
villager, Ali Youssef, and when he couldn't stand up, they shot his feet.
But Rehov found Youssef for his documentary and reveals Youssef was
standing in a housing complex with Hamas gunmen when he was shot once in
the hand. Israeli medics treated Youssef's wound, found a congenital heart
problem, no foot injury and brought him to Israel for treatment at a
hospital in Afula. Hospital papers disclose Youssef was not shot in the
leg at all.
Zangen says Bakri uses deceptive filmography techniques to create the myth
of a massacre. He cites one scene of a tank heading toward a crowd. The
scene then blacks out, falsely suggesting the people were all killed, says
Zangen. Also, Bakri, who Zangen says was not on scene at any time during
the battle to get footage, deceptively juxtaposes images of Israeli tanks
and snipers taking aim with pictures of Palestinian children.
Some of the juxtaposed soldiers include the five who filed suit against
Bakri in Tel Aviv court seeking more than $500,000 in damages. The
lawsuit, filed in Hebrew and obtained by WorldNetDaily, charges Bakri
falsely claims the soldiers committed war crimes.
The five plaintiffs are current reserve soldiers and say their
professional lives require constant contact with Arabs who may recognize
their faces from Bakri's documentary and seek to attack them.
"Bakri's blatant use of lies and deception to build his one-sided case
about Palestinians suffering at the hands of brutal Israel disqualifies it
from having contributed to any 'big truth.' Rather, 'Jenin, Jenin' amounts
to incitement fueling vicious propaganda that claims Jews 'are not even
human.'" writes Sternthal. She credits Rehov with exposing the
"inflammatory and defamatory falsehoods spread by works like 'Jenin,
Jenin.'"
Rehov is screening his film, "The Road to Jenin," Jan. 9, 10 and 11 at the
Pierre Rehov Film Festival in New York.
2. Duke's Nuremberg Rally:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11901058_1
3. Welcome to the University of DUH: The State Department has discovered
that anti-Israel hatred is a form of anti-Semitism:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/523550.html
4. Please vist BBC Watch - at www.bbcwatch.com
5. Chomsky Dumbsky:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=12204
6. Queer Talmud Seminary:
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/24576/format/html/displaystory.html
Thursday, January 06, 2005
1. Esau sold his birthright for a kettle of porridge. The misnamed
United Torah Judaism party, a corrupt "religious" party that has joined
the two large Israeli parties of appeasement in a coalition, sold its
entire soul for the porridge it will get from the Treasury as part of the
deal.
2. Israel's dual judicial system is back, with a vengeance. As you know,
there operate in Israel TWO parallel judicial systems, one for Far
Leftists and one for everyone else. Far Leftists cannot possibly be
prosecuted for incitement to violence, for violent rioting, for law
breaking, for racism, or for organizing mutiny and insurrection. Far
Leftists enjoy free speech absolutism. As for non-leftists, THEIR free
speech has been under attack for many years.
In the new manifestation of the dual system, the Attorney General is
opening criminal investigations against two "settler leaders" with the
intent of indicting them for "incitement". As you know, the word
"incitement" in Israel means the expression of an opinion with which Yossi
Beilin would not agree.
The two in question expressed the opinion that soldiers should not carry
out orders to evict innocent Jews from their homes in the Gaza Strip.
Reasonable people may agree or disagree with the content of the statement.
As far as I know, neither actively organized soldiers for mutiny,
incontrast wth the tenured traitors from the Left. The two may now be
sent to jail.
Now the most important aspect of this is that Far Leftists have been
urging soldiers for many years not to serve in the army and to refuse to
obey orders,
as long as Israel has not adopted those policies advocated by the
communist party. While a handful of people who actually refused to serve
have been sent to prison for short wrist-tap sentences, those issuing
calls for and support of the "refusers" have never been indicted as long
as they are nice cuddly leftist extremists.
3. I have to say I am really torn over this. My moral dilemma is that I
oppose the government's plan for appeasement and capitulation in
the Sharon-Mitzna plan for making Gaza judenrein. But I also oppose
fighting the government via politicalizing the army. I believe the way to
stop the government is democratically and politically and if opponents of
the appeasement have not succeeded in blocking the decision, then it
is a sign of our own failure and weakness.
Yes, I understand that the Left has been trying to politicize the army
and organize refusal and mutiny there and that the anti-Oslo Right is just
following their example. But the Right should NOT follow their example.
After all, the Left seeks Israel's destruction and politicizing the army
is part and parcel of that program for them. The Right seeks to save
Israel and that is why it should NOT follow the Left's example in this
and should know better.
Having said this, I nevertheless feel an overwhelming desire to be
named as one of the people indicted for exercising his free speech,
alongside the two victims named yesterday by the Attorney General. I
would like the Attorney General to indict me as well for the crime of
expressing my opinion. I think it was
Rousseau who said that when there is a government of dishonor, the only
fit place for a man of honor is in prison. But I cannot bring myself to
advocate something that I actually oppose, simply to be made into a test
case for Israeli leftist McCarthyism.
4. I really do not think Israelis should wait until they are 86!
Poland hunts Jew, 86, over 'revenge' killing of Nazis
BY Inigo Gilmore in Jerusalem and Michael Leidig
(Filed: 02/01/2005)
Poland is demanding the extradition from Israel of an elderly Jewish man
accused of the deaths of hundreds of Germans in a post-war detention camp.
Solomon Morel, 86, faces charges of "crimes against humanity" in relation
to
more than 1,500 inmates at a camp in southern Poland, many of whom
perished
in "barbaric" circumstances.
The investigation is the first in Poland into a Jew accused of retaliating
against the Germans, and poses potentially awkward questions for Israel
about its attitude towards those allegedly involved in revenge killings.
Israeli officials turned down a previous extradition request six years ago
when there were suspicions that the case was politically motivated.
Mr Morel, who fled to Israel from Poland in 1994 and lives in hiding in
Tel
Aviv, was held in Auschwitz as a young man. More than 30 members of his
family were wiped out by the Nazis.
In November 1945, after the Soviet occupation of Poland began, he was one
of
many Jews appointed by Stalin to supervise the brutal "de-Nazification"
camps, where up to 80,000 ethnic Germans are believed to have died as a
result of torture, starvation and typhus.
Stalin deliberately picked Jews as camp commandants in the knowledge that
they would show little mercy to the inmates.
According to John Sack, the late author of An Eye for An Eye: The Untold
Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Morel made his desire for
revenge clear from the first day the camp at Swietochlowice opened.
In a television interview before his death earlier this year, Mr Sack
said:
"On the first night at Swietochlowice, when the first contingent of
Germans
arrived, at about 10 o'clock at night he walked into one of the barracks
and
he said to the Germans, 'My name is Morel. I am a Jew. My mother and
father,
my family, I think they're all dead, and I swore that if I got out alive,
I was going to get back at you Nazis. And now you're going to pay for what
you did.' "
In his book, Mr Sack, himself a Jew, describes in detail the alleged
atrocities committed at the camp: "The guards put the Germans into a
doghouse, beating them if they didn't say `bow-wow'. They got the Germans
to beat each other; to jump on each other's spines and to punch each
other's noses, and hit the Germans so hard that they once knocked a
German's glass eye out."
Guards also raped German women and trained dogs to bite off German men's
genitals on command, he said.
Mr Morel is thought to have changed his name, although his whereabouts are
understood to be known to the Israeli authorities.
A request for his extradition by Poland in 1998 was rejected by Israel on
the grounds that the statute of limitations on the charges had run out.
Prosecutors claim to have built up a stronger case, based on fresh
testimony from survivors in Poland and Germany, and have upgraded the
charges to crimes against humanity, on which there is no time limit.
The Polish public prosecutor leading the case, Eva Kok, insisted that even
though Mr Morel was a frail, elderly man, the claims could not be "swept
under the carpet".
She added: "The Israelis are extremely efficient in pursuing people they
have accused of such crimes - and they must accept that other nations want
to do the same."
Ms Kok insisted that suggestions that the case was politically motivated
were an insult. "The prosecutors are not motivated by politics and operate
in the interests of the law regardless of who is in power," she said.
The Israeli Justice Ministry said it was "in the process of examining" the
extradition request.
27 July 2001: Israelis warned against arrest for war crimes
Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005. Terms & Conditions of reading.
Commercial information. Privacy and Cookie Policy.
5. Dishonest Abe strikes again:
http://www.jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=4539
6. Wondering why the Hebrew U has such a huge deficit?
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/Printer&cid=1102563046504&p=1077423454793
7. Get yourself a new wardrobe:
http://www.rokemneedlearts.com/abrahamicapparel/infidel_apparel_designs.htm
8. Yet the Saudis have jillions for terrorism and suicide bombers:
http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=4631
9. Ben Shapiro on Feiglin:
http://web.israelinsider.com/views/4746.htmy
10. UN Funding for Terror:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=12188
11. What torture?
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=12187
12. The Democrats' Own Chamish:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/079tehyf.asp
13. Oppression of Palestinian in California:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16550
14. Terrorism's Gigolo Airhead:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16548
15. Mass Murdering Saudis:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16547
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
1. SO let us see if we have this correct. A group of Palestinian
terrorists
is firing mortars into Jewish civilian homes right under the protective
nostrils of the Palestinian Authority and a group of Palestinian
children is standing alongside them watching
(http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1104808684425)
The terrorhoids do not shoo the kids away. They enjoy having teh kids for
human shields.
Then, since the Palestinian Authority is not doing anything and its head
has just declared all Jews to be the "Zionist Enemy", in order to stop the
mortar shelling of Jewish civilians an Israeli tank wipes out the mortar
crew, dispatching them to their virgins. Except the kids standing
alongside the mortar, like the kids in
Berlin being bombed by Allied bombers in 1944, get killed by the
explosion.
And the Left and its amen chorus, having not a word to say about the
mortar shelling of Jews by the Palestinian fascists, is all caring and
upset about the death of the Palestinian minors. Of course, the Left and
its anti-Semitic amen choruses are not condemning the PLO and its
affiliates for causing the deaths of the minors. And no one is bothering
to point out that if the Palestinians would simply stop shelling Jews and
murdering Jews, no Palestinian children bystanders would ever get hurt
when the Jews shoot back.
2. Correction. The affirmative action Supreme Court Justice who opposes
free speech for criticsof the Supreme Court is Eliyahu
Matza and not Eliezer. Apologies.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/523075.html
3. The war of semantics
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Daniel Pipes, THE JERUSALEM POST Jan. 5, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We read that "prime minister" Mahmoud Abbas is running in the elections on
Sunday to succeed Yasser Arafat as "president" of "Palestine."
Excuse me, but prime minister, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica,
means the "head of the executive branch of government in states with a
parliamentary system."
Despite tens of thousands of references to Abbas as prime minister, he in
not a single way fits this description.
Oh, and there is also the small matter of there being no country called
Palestine. Arab maps routinely show it in place of Israel. The United
Nations recognizes its existence. So too do such telephone companies as
France's Bouygues Telecom and Bell Canada. Nonetheless, no such place
exists.
One can dismiss use of these terms as symptoms of the same unrealism that
has undermined Palestinian war efforts since 1948. But they also promote
the Palestinian cause (a polite way of saying, "the destruction of
Israel") in a vital way.
In an era when the battle for public opinion has an importance that rivals
the clash of soldiers, the Palestinians' success in framing the issues has
won them critical support among politicians, editorial writers, academics,
street demonstrators, and NGO activists. In the aggregate, these many
auxiliaries keep the Palestinian effort alive.
Especially in a long-standing dispute with a static situation on the
ground, public opinion has great significance. That's because words
reflect ideas and ideas motivate people. Weapons in themselves are inert;
today, ideas inspire people to pick up arms or sacrifice their lives.
Software drives hardware.
Israel is winning on the basic geographic nomenclature. The state is known
in English as Israel, not the Zionist entity. Its capital is called
Jerusalem, not Al-Quds. Likewise, Temple Mount and Western Wall enjoy far
more currency than Al-Haram ash-Sharif or Al-Burak. The separation barrier
is more often called a security fence (that keeps out Palestinian suicide
bombers) than a separation wall (that brings divided Berlin to mind).
In other ways, however, the Palestinians' wording dominates
English-language usage, helping them win the war for public opinion.
Collaborator means someone who "cooperates treasonably" and brings to mind
the French and Norwegian collaborators who betrayed their countries to the
Nazis. Yet this term (rather than informant, mole, or agent) universally
describes those Palestinians providing Israel with information.
The refugee status normally applies to someone who "owing to a
well-founded fear of being persecuted... is outside the country of his
nationality," but not to their descendants.
In the Palestinian case, however, children, grandchildren, and
great-grandchildren of refugees also merit refugee status. One demographer
estimates that over 95 percent of so-called Palestinian refugees never
fled from anywhere. Nonetheless, the term continues to be used, implying
that millions of Palestinians have a right to move to Israel.
A settlement is defined as a small community or an establishment in a new
region. Although some Jewish towns on the West Bank and in Gaza have tens
of thousands of residents and have existed for nearly four decades,
settlement, with its overtones of colonialism, is their nearly universal
name.
Occupied territories implies a Palestinian state existed in 1967, when
Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza, which was not the case, making
these areas legally disputed territories, not occupied ones.
Cycle of violence, a term President George W. Bush has adopted ("the cycle
of violence has got to end in order for the peace process to begin"),
implies a moral equivalence between the killing of Israeli civilians and
Palestinian terrorists. It confuses the arsonist with the fire department.
The peace camp in Israel a term that derives from Lenin's usage refers
to those on the Left who believe that appeasing mortal enemies is the only
way to end Palestinian aggression.
Those in favor of other approaches (such a deterrence) by implication
constitute the "war camp."
In fact, all Israelis are in the peace camp in the sense that all want to
be rid of the conflict; none of them aspires to kill Palestinians, occupy
Cairo, or destroy Syria.
Arabs may have fallen behind Israel in per capita income and advanced
weaponry, but they lead by far on the semantic battlefield. Who, a century
back, would have imagined Jews making the better soldiers and Arabs the
better publicists?
The writer is director of the Middle East Forum.
www.DanielPipes.org
1. The army heads are rolling their eyes over the fact that some
"settler leaders" and rabbis from the Right are calling upon soldiers to
refuse to obey orders to evict Jews from their homes for the purpose of
appeasing Palestinian fascists. The army brass are demanding that these
people issuing such calls be indicted, along with anyone even signing
petitions supporting soldiers who refuse the orders.
Now just exactly where were all these clergymen of law obeying and the
rule of law over the past decade, during which the treasonous Left was
busy organizing mutiny and insurrection among soldiers, demanding that
soldiers
not serve at all until the country embrace those policies being advocated
by the communist party? For the past decade, we have been lectured by
the army brass, an amazing portion of whom are leftist, and by the media
that those cuddly leftist traitors were
motivated by such fine feelings of patriotism and morality.
SO why the sudden horror at calls for law breaking from some on the
Right?
2. Well, we no longer have Judge Eliezer Matza to kick around any more.
Matza was the Supreme Court justice who wrote the majority opinion (two
against 1) creating affirmative action in Israel, according to which
standards must be lowered and dumbed down, and quotas established, to
promote women, Arabs, and any other group of fashion. The written ruling
was an open revelevation of the supidity of Matza, who pretended to know
something about how labor markets work and the entire opinion proved he
knew absolutely nothing at all.
On the day of his leaving his bench, long overdue, Matz gave a long
harangue against anyone who expresses criticism of Supreme Court rulings.
In short, Matza's idea of free speech is something that should not extend
to anyone disagreeing with any Supreme Court rulings, not even his own
senseless ruling on affirmative action.
3. Lori Berenson, terrorist, condemned by Court of Human Rights:
Inter-American Court of Human Rights Affirms Lori Berenson's / Condena de
20 A¤os para Lori Berenson
On December 2, 2004 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights upheld the
conviction of Lori Berenson, an American journalist and human-rights
activist whose case has been championed by Amnesty International as well
as the UNHCR's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Lori is currently
serving a 20-year prison sentence in Peru on charges of collaborating with
the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru. This verdict reversed the
unanimous decision of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights which,
on April 3, 2002, had declared that Lori's civilian trial had violated her
right to due process, that her rights under the American Convention on
Human Rights needed to be completely restored, that she be compensated for
her wrongful suffering, and that Peru bring its anti-terrorism laws into
compliance with the American Convention on Human Rights. Indeed, the
court's decision contradicted its own preliminary decision as of November
10, which Monroy Galvez (the ad-hoc judge representing Peru) stated had
called for Lori's release.
***
Berenson is a pathetic Stalinist who went to Peru to help the communist
terrorists there and participated in planning and logistics for
atrocities, including purchase and movement and hiding of arms. Her
"case" has been adopted by the misnamed "Religious
Action Center" of the Reform synagogue movement in the US. The RAC will
support any wacky PC cause, even if it is harmful for Jews. Were Lori
released, I have no doubt she'd be in Gaza with the ISM terrorists helping
the Hamas.
4. Down goes the newest pet "moderate Palestinian", goosestepping his way
to nazism:
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7230693
5. >A Fact to Ponder:
>
> Saudi Arabia has pledged $10 million for millions of Muslim refugees
of the
> tsunami disaster.
> Last year, Saudi Arabia raised $150 million dollars for the families
of suicide
> bombers.
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
1. Try to imagine a situation where the Democrats and Republicans in
Congress tried to set up a "national unity coalition" of the two
large parties, but the two leading parties together represented LESS than
50% of the seats of Congress.
That is precisely the situation right now in the Knesset. The two
large Oslo parties, the Labor Party and the Likud, have formed a national
unity coalition, but they only have 59 out of 120 seats between them.
That is correct, the two largest parties have lost so much support because of
their attempts to appease Israel's way to peace that the two together cannot
make a majority in the parliament, which requires 61 votes.
Going from 59 seats to 61 is not as easy as it sounds. To hold a
majority the twin parties of appeasement need to add at least one more
party.
But they may be unable to add one. The far-left Meretz party, the
communist party, and the Arab fascist parties will not sit with the Likud
or at least the Likud will refuse to sit with them. The small right-wing
parties are rejected out of hand by the Labor Party. The religious parties
so far have refused to join the Coalition of the Twin Appeasers, although
one of the religious party has been wavering.
That only leaves Shinui. If I were a betting man, or at least if my
salary were high enough to be able to afford to bet, I'd put my shekels on
Shinui being brought in. But I acknowledge that this is not a certainty
either.
The real message here is that Israeli voters have by and large rejected
the Twin Appeasers, Labor and Likud. The porblem of course is that few of
the alternatives have come out clearly AGAINST more Oslo-style appeaement
of the Palestinians fascists. The only exception is the National Unity
party, but it has only a tiny parliamentary representation. The National
Religious Party is mildly anti-Oslo but is not a reliable opponent of
appeasement.
2. A peace plan that makes sense at long last:
http://israelnn.com/news.php3?id=74640
3. Lefties Discover the Cause of the Tsunami (this is in the
trashy anti-Semitic magazine published by anti-Semite Alexander Cockburn):
http://www.counterpunch.org/rajiva12302004.html
4. Anyone know if Barry Chamish has yet proved that the tsunami was
caused by the publishers of Foreign Affairs Magazine? Or by UFOs?
5. Those Japanese-American internments in WWII and Gust Katif:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/522647.html
6. Susan Sontag - Airhead:
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=7572
7. Wesleyan goofiness:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16517
8. The PLO's new "moderate": http://frontpagemag.com/blog/index.asp
9. A concise explanation of why the Israeli Left is so wrong about
Barak's capitulation to Syria in Lebanon (and about just about everything
else as well):
Just because a disaster has not yet happened does not mean it will not
occur!
The Probability of Catastrophe . . .
By RICHARD A. POSNER
January 4, 2005; Page A12
The Indian Ocean tsunami illustrates a type of disaster to which policy
makers pay too little attention -- a disaster that has a very low or
unknown probability of occurring, but that if it does occur creates
enormous losses. Great as the death toll, physical and emotional suffering
of survivors, and property damage caused by the recent tsunami are, even
greater losses could be inflicted by other disasters of low (but not
negligible) or unknown probability.
The asteroid that exploded above Siberia in 1908 with the force of a
hydrogen bomb might have killed millions of people had it exploded above a
major city. Yet that asteroid was only about 200 feet in diameter, and a
much larger one (among the thousands of dangerously large asteroids in
orbits that intersect the earth's orbit) could strike the earth and cause
the total extinction of the human race through a combination of shock
waves, fire, tsunamis, and blockage of sunlight, wherever it struck.
Other catastrophic risks include, besides earthquakes such as the one that
caused the recent tsunami, natural epidemics (the 1918-19 Spanish
influenza epidemic killed between 20 and 40 million people), nuclear or
biological attacks by terrorists, certain types of lab accident, and
abrupt global warming. The probability of catastrophes resulting, whether
or not intentionally, from human activity appears to be increasing because
of the rapidity and direction of technological advances.
* * *
The fact that a catastrophe is very unlikely to occur is not a rational
justification for ignoring the risk of its occurrence. Suppose that a
tsunami as destructive as the one in the Indian Ocean occurs on average
once a century and kills 150,000 people. That is an average of 1,500
deaths per year. Without having to attempt a sophisticated estimate of the
value of life to the people exposed to the risk, one can say with some
confidence that if an annual death toll of 1,500 could be substantially
reduced at moderate cost, the investment would be worthwhile. A
combination of educating the residents of low-lying coastal areas about
the warning signs of a tsunami (tremors and a sudden recession in the
ocean), establishing a warning system involving emergency broadcasts,
telephoned warnings, and air-raid-type sirens, and improving emergency
response systems, would have saved many of the people killed by the Indian
Ocean tsunami, probably at a total cost below any reasonable estimate of
the average losses that can be expected from tsunamis. Relocating people
away from coasts would be even more efficacious, but except in the most
vulnerable areas or in areas in which residential or commercial uses have
only marginal value, the costs would probably exceed the benefits. For
annual costs of protection must be matched with annual, not total,
expected costs of tsunamis.
Why weren't any cost-justified precautionary measures taken in
anticipation of a tsunami on the scale that occurred? Tsunamis are a
common consequence of earthquakes, which themselves are common; and
tsunamis can have other causes besides earthquakes -- a major asteroid
strike in an ocean would create a tsunami that would dwarf the Indian
Ocean one.
There are a number of reasons for such neglect. First, although a
once-in-a-century event is as likely to occur at the beginning of the
century as at any other time, it is much less likely to occur in the first
decade of the century than later. Politicians with limited terms of office
and thus foreshortened political horizons are likely to discount low-risk
disaster possibilities, since the risk of damage to their careers from
failing to take precautionary measures is truncated. Second, to the extent
that effective precautions require governmental action, the fact that
government is a centralized system of control makes it difficult for
officials to respond to the full spectrum of possible risks against which
cost-justified measures might be taken. The officials, given the variety
of matters to which they must attend, are likely to have a high threshold
of attention below which risks are simply ignored. Third, where risks are
regional or global rather than local, many national governments,
especially in the poorer and smaller countries, may drag their heels in
the hope of taking a free ride on the larger and richer countries. Knowing
this, the latter countries may be reluctant to take precautionary measures
and by doing so reward and thus encourage free riding. Fourth, countries
are poor often because of weak, inefficient, or corrupt government,
characteristics that may disable poor nations from taking cost-justified
precautions. Fifth, people have difficulty thinking in terms of
probabilities, especially very low probabilities, which they tend
therefore to write off. This weakens political support for incurring the
costs of taking precautionary measures against low-probability disasters.
The operation of some of these factors is illustrated by the refusal of
the Pacific nations, which do have a tsunami warning system, to extend
their system to the Indian Ocean prior to the recent catastrophe. Tsunamis
are more common in the Pacific, and most of the Pacific nations do not
abut on the Indian Ocean. An even more dramatic example concerns the
asteroid menace, which is analytically similar to the menace of tsunamis.
NASA, with an annual budget of more than $10 billion, spends only $4
million a year on mapping dangerously close large asteroids, and at that
rate may not complete the task for another decade, even though such
mapping is the key to an asteroid defense because it may give us years of
warning. Deflecting an asteroid from its orbit when it is still millions
of miles from the earth is a feasible undertaking. In both cases, slight
risks of terrible disasters are largely ignored essentially for political
reasons.
In part because tsunamis are one of the risks of an asteroid collision,
the Indian Ocean disaster has stimulated new interest in asteroid defense.
This is welcome. The fact that a disaster of a particular type has not
occurred recently or even within human memory (or even ever) is a bad
reason to ignore it. The risk may be slight, but if the consequences,
should it materialize, are great enough, the expected cost of disaster may
be sufficient to warrant defensive measures.
Mr. Posner, a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit,
is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110480332257116121,00.html
Hyperlinks in this Article:
(1) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110480346630016123,00.html
Sunday, January 02, 2005
1. I often get crank mail in response to things I post or publish.
Usually the worst comes from the nutjobs and fruitcakes who are foillowers of
UFO-conspiracy "researcher" Barry Chamish, but after publishing my piece
on the politicization of the Reformies I got an unusually large dose. I
will not bore you with most of them but the one I paste below is of
particular note, I think.
Notice how the writer describes himself as a "religious, practicing Reform
Jew", a term upon which I shall not comment:
"NrthrnLght@aol.com Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 17:12:57 EST
Subject: Re: Religious Coercion, Reform Style
To: steven_plaut@yahoo.com
"As a religious, practicing Reform Jew (sic), I find your vitriolic hatred
alarming. Pious espousal's (sic) of biblical passages to support
denigration of
homosexuals is but a pathetic attempt to impose your own loathing upon a
religious framework -- thank God many truly religious Jews do not share
your abominable views (and I use the word "abominable" advisedly).
Similarly do I condemn your simplistic characterization of the illegal and
immoral wall knifing through Palestinian communities as a "security"
measure. Surely if Jews have learned anything, we've learned that teaching
children hatred (in this case Palestinian children) is the best way in the
world to ensure that Israel -- and Jews worldwide -- face increased
hostility and attacks in the future.
One last thing: I claim and own my 5,000 year heritage as strongly as you
do. How dare you imply that I am somehow less Jewish because I embrace and
espouse pluralistic and progressive principles of loving kindness.
PS. I live in Seattle, Washington, and I had the great honor to work with
Congressman Dennis Kucinich during his presidential campaign. He is not
Jewish -- but he is a great and spiritual man, and he is motivated by love
instead of hate. You would do well to emulate him.
Matt Harris
NrthrnLght@aol.com"
[Dennis Kucinich is of course the closest thing to an open practicing
communist in American politics. -- SP]
2. Communist Lawyer Hoodlum:
Terrorists' Lawyer Assaults Security Guards
Thursday, December 30, 2004 / 18 Tevet 5765
A lawyer who has defended numerous terrorists in court was, herself,
questioned by police today, for assaulting security guards at Jerusalems
court house, last week.
Leah Tzemel, an Israeli human rights lawyer who frequently represents Arab
terrorists in court, is suspected of attacking security guards at the
Jerusalem Magistrate's court. She allegedly assaulted the guards after
they prevented her Arab client from accepting a package his family tried
to pass to him during his court hearing.
According to police, Tzemel originally claimed the guards had attacked
her. Following todays questioning, however, she claims that the police
assaulted her client together with the court security guards.
3. The cult of 'self-esteem":
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=12088
4. More leftist hate speech:
http://jewishworldreview.com/jeff/jacoby1.asp
5. Paleo-lefties:
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson123004.html
6. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11901035_1
Arafat Lives
Efraim Karsh
No sooner was Yasir Arafat declared dead at the French military hospital
to which he had been dramatically rushed in early November than a vast
cohort of world leaders, from King Abdullah of Jordan to French President
Jacques Chirac, began to voice hopes for a quick revival of the Middle
East peace process. The best tribute to President Arafats memory will be
to intensify our efforts to establish a peaceful and viable state of
Palestine, declared the European Unions foreign- policy chief, Javier
Solana. At the same time, Solana unveiled a new plan to facilitate the
so-called road map drafted in 2003 by the EU, the U.S., Russia, and the
UNbut in a less incremental manner: that is, by deleting the proviso
conditioning progress toward the creation of a Palestinian state on a
cessation of violence and terrorism.
Tony Blair, the British prime minister, echoed Solanas view. In 2003, in
the run-up to the Iraq war, Blair had sought to pacify his domestic
critics by urging on George W. Bush at least the appearance of progress
between the Israelis and Palestinians before confronting Saddam Hussein.
As the war unfolded, and as his popularity at home and in Europe
plummeted, Blair kept on repeating the theme. In October 2004, he told a
Labor-party conference that he would make Middle East peace a personal
priority after the U.S. elections; a few weeks later, he responded to
Bushs reelection with an emphatic call for a renewed effort to resolve
this single most pressing political challenge in our world today. After
all, said Blair, an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians would
help critically in resolving the conditions and causes on which the
terrorists prey.
Blairs conviction that the revival of the Middle East peace process would
alleviate the situation in Iraq and reduce the threat of international
terrorism struck a responsive chord in some quarters in the United States
as well. As Mr. Blair, the Europeans, and Arab states like Egypt
constantly point out, the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate feeds Muslim anger
and despair, giving a larger rationale to terrorist groups like al Qaeda
and to the insurgency in Iraq, ran an editorial in the New York Times.
Before the Iraq war, the paper continued, Mr. Bush had been told that the
road to Jerusalem passed through Baghdad, but with Iraq today a magnet for
anti-Western fervor, it is increasingly believed in the region that the
formula is the other way around. Former Presidents Jimmy Carter and George
H.W. Bush, who during their own terms in office had helped foster
Arab-Israeli dialogue, hastened to add their separate articulations of
this same idea.
Nevertheless, when he arrived in Washington on November 11 as the first
foreign leader to visit the White House since the elections, Blair failed
to persuade the American President either to endorse an international
peace conference in London early next year or to appoint a personal envoy
to the Middle East. Im all for conferences, the President told a joint
press briefing, just so long as the conferences produce something. He then
proceeded to reiterate his commitment to the strategic vision he had
outlined in June 2002namely, that Palestinian democratization would have
to precede rather than follow the creation of an independent state. While
he promised to use the next four years to spend the capital of the United
States on the creation of such a state, Bush made it eminently clear that
the onus was on the Palestinians to ensure that this objective was
achieved:
It is impossible to think that the President of the United States or the
prime minister of Great Britain can impose our vision. I think its
unrealistic to say, Well, Bush wants it done, or, Blair wants it done,
therefore itll happen. . . . If you choose not to be helped, if you decide
you dont want a free, democratic society, theres nothing we can do. If you
think you can have peace without democracy, again, I think youll find
thatI can only speak for myselfthat I will be extremely doubtful that it
will ever happen.
At the heart of Bushs words is an approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict
fundamentally at odds with the one endorsed by most of the international
community. In order to understand the role played by Yasir Arafat in
creating the present impasse between Israel and the Palestinians, it helps
to have some notion of what is at stake between these two contending
visions.
The belief that Arabs and Israelis can be forced into a lasting peace by
outside influence is based on a perception of Middle Eastern politics as
an offshoot of global power politics. There is a long historypolitical,
military, and diplomaticbehind this perception, which informed the actions
of generations of modern policy-makers in Europe and elsewhere.
Unfortunately, the perception is wrong.
Even at the weakest point in their modern history, during World War I and
its immediate aftermath, local Middle Eastern actors were decisive in the
restructuring of their region. It was not British officialdom but Hussein
ibn Ali of the Hashemite family who drove the British to entertain
seriously the notion of destroying the Ottoman empire. Impressed by
Husseins promises to raise the Arabic-speaking Ottoman subjects in revolt,
Sir Arthur Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt, accepted
his vision of an Arab successor empire and (tentatively) agreed to his
main territorial demands. Husseins and McMahons initiative would have a
considerable impact on the future shape of the Middle East. The emirate of
Transjordan (later to be known as the Kingdom of Jordan), for example, was
established in 1921 to satisfy the imperial ambitions of Husseins second
son Abdullah, while in the same year the modern state of Iraq was created
on behalf of and very much at the instigation of Abdullahs younger brother
Faisal.
The bargaining power of local states was substantially enhanced during the
cold-war era, when global polarization and the nuclear balance of terror
constrained great-power maneuverability. For all their exertions, neither
the United States nor the Soviet Union, the two powers that had supplanted
the traditional European empires after World War II, had a decisive say in
their smaller allies grand strategies. Time and again they were powerless
to contain undesirable regional developments, whether it was Egypts
defection to the American camp in the mid-1970s or the 1979 Islamic
revolution in Iran, or were forced to acquiesce in actions with which they
were in total disagreement.
It was on the cardinal issues of war and peace that superpower influence
proved least effective. Just as the United States could not force its Arab
allies and Israel to accept its position on a political settlement, so the
Soviets failed to persuade most of their Arab partners to disavow their
total rejection of Israel. Just as Israel launched the 1967 Six-Day war
without Washingtons blessing when it saw its existence threatened, so
Egypts war of attrition (1969-70) and October war (1973), Syrias military
intervention in Lebanon (1976), and the Iraqi invasions of Iran (1980) and
Kuwait (1990) took place against Soviet wishes and advice. Only in
terminating hostilities did superpower intervention seem to carry any
weight, if of a very limited kind and mostly where Israel was concerned.
The Soviets failed to convince Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to accept a
ceasefire on the first day of the October 1973 war, or to force Syrian
president Hafez al-Assad to stop his offensive against the PLO in the
summer of 1976.
This is not to say that the U.S. and the USSR slavishly followed the
wishes of their junior partners. Rather, whatever success they had was due
largely to the convergence of their own wishes with indigenous trends. In
the late 1970s, it was the determination of Sadat and Israeli prime
minister Menachem Begin to end the long-standing enmity between their
peoples that rendered American mediation effective. But when the Carter
administration attempted to sustain the momentum and bring the
Palestinians into the picture, it ran into the brick wall of PLO
rejectionism. This is a lousy deal, Yasir Arafat told the American Edward
Said, who had passed him the administrations offer. We want Palestine.
Were not interested in bits of Palestine. We dont want to negotiate with
the Israelis. Were going to fight.
Twenty-one years later, Arafat aborted two more presidential attempts to
mediate peace with Israel by rejecting, in July and December 2000, Bill
Clintons proposals for the creation of an independent Palestinian state in
95 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with east Jerusalem as its
capital. Even after Israel had confined Arafat to his Ramallah compound
following the launch of his war of terror in September 2000, and even
after President Bush had urged the Palestinians to substitute a new and
democratic leadership for Arafats corrupt and oppressive regime, there was
little Washington could do to enforce this vision; Bush was forced to
watch helplessly as his own preferred candidate, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu
Mazen), was unceremoniously subverted by Arafat.
Let us assume for the sake of argument that combined U.S.-European
pressure succeeded in driving Israelis and Palestinians into a formal
peace treaty. Would this, as Blair and others assume, eliminate violence
from the wider Middle East or ameliorate the challenge of Islamic
terrorism? Hardlyfor the simple reason that the Palestinian question has
next to nothing to do with either of these.
For one thing, violence was an integral part of Middle Eastern political
culture long before the advent of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and physical
force remains today the main if not the sole instrument of regional
political discourse. For another, the Arab states have never had any real
stake in the liberation of Palestine. Though anti-Zionism has been the
core principle of pan-Arab solidarity since the mid-1930sit is easier,
after all, to unite people through a common hatred than through a shared
loyaltypan-Arabism has almost always served as an instrument for achieving
the self-interested ends of those who proclaim it.
Consider, for example, the pan-Arab invasion of the newly proclaimed state
of Israel in 1948. This, on its face, was a shining demonstration of
solidarity with the Palestinian people. But the invasion had far less to
do with winning independence for the indigenous population than with the
desire of the Arab regimes for territorial aggrandizement. Transjordans
King Abdullah wanted to incorporate substantial parts of mandatory
Palestine into the greater Syrian empire he coveted; Egypt wanted to
prevent that eventuality by laying its hands on southern Palestine. Syria
and Lebanon sought to annex the Galilee, while Iraq viewed the 1948 war as
a stepping stone in its long-standing ambition to bring the entire Fertile
Crescent under its rule. Had the Jewish state lost the war, its territory
would not have fallen to the Palestinians but would have been divided
among the invading Arab forces.
During the decades following the 1948 war, the Arab states manipulated the
Palestinian national cause to their own ends. Neither Egypt nor Jordan
allowed Palestinian self-determination in the parts of Palestine they had
occupied during the 1948 war (respectively, the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip). Palestinian refugees were kept in squalid camps for decades as a
means of whipping Israel and stirring pan-Arab sentiments. The
Palestinians are useful to the Arab states as they are, Egyptian president
Gamal Abdel Nasser candidly responded to an inquiring Western reporter in
1956. We will always see that they do not become too powerful. As late as
1974, Syrias Hafez al-Assad referred to Palestine as being not only a part
of the Arab homeland but a basic part of southern Syria.
If the Arab states have shown little empathy for the plight of ordinary
Palestinians, the Islamic connection to the Palestinian prf a holy war to
prevent the loss of a part of the House of Islam that Islamists inveigh
against the Jewish state of Israel. In the words of the covenant of the
Islamic Resistance Movement, better known by its Arabic acronym Hamas: The
land of Palestine has been an Islamic trust (waqf) throughout the
generations and until the day of resurrection. . . . When our enemies
usurp some Islamic lands, jihad becomes a duty binding on all Muslims.
In this respect, there is no difference between Palestine and other parts
of the world conquered by the forces of Islam throughout history. To this
very day, for example, Arabs and many Muslims unabashedly pine for the
restoration of Spain, and look upon their expulsion from that country in
1492 as a grave historical injustice. Indeed, even countries that have
never been under Islamic imperial rule have become legitimate targets of
radical Islamic fervor. Since the late 1980s, various Islamist movements
have looked upon the growing number of French Muslims as a sign that
France, too, has become a potential part of the House of Islam. Their
British counterparts have followed suit. We will remodel this country in
an Islamic image, the London-based preacher Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad
told an attentive audience less than two months after 9/11. We will
replace the Bible with the Quran.
This goal need not necessarily be pursued by the sword; it can be achieved
through demographcalls, there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the
messenger of Allah, are echoed all over the world.
Within this grand scheme, the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians
is but a single element, and one whose supposed centrality looms far
greater in Western than in Islamic eyes.
This is not to deny that resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is
a pressing issue. But the global ramifications of any settlement will be
far narrower than is assumed by well-meaning statesmen like Tony Blair.
Quite to the contrary, the best hope of peace between Arabs and Israelis
lies in the rejection of the spurious link between this dispute and other
regional and global problems.
The pretense of pan-Arab or pan-Islamic solidarity has long served as a
dangerous elixir in Palestinian political circles, stirring unrealistic
hopes and expectations and, at key junctures, inciting widespread and
horrifically destructive violence. The sooner the Palestinians recognize
that their cause is theirs alone, the sooner are they likely to make their
own peace with the existence of the state of Israel and to understand the
necessity of a negotiated settlement. Toward this end, a good place to
start would be in eradicating the disastrous legacy of Yasir Arafat, the
so-called nation-builder.
With the exceptionrael and Palestine will be one united state in which
Israelis and Palestinians will live togetheruthat is, Israel would no
longer exist. And even as he shook Yitzhak Rabins hand on the White House
lawn, Arafat was assuring the Palestinians in a pre-recorded
Arabic-language message broadcast by Jordanian TV that the DOP was merely
an implementation of the PLOs phased strategy of June 1974. This
stipulated that the Palestinians should seize whatever territory Israel
was prepared or compelled to cede and use it as a springboard for further
territorial gains until achieving the complete liberation of Palestine.
During the next seven years, until the launch of his terrorist war in late
September 2000, Arafat played an intricate game of Jekyll-and-Hyde.
Addressing Israeli or Western audiences, he would habitually extol the
peace of the brave he had signed with my partner Yitzhak Rabin. To his
Palestinian constituents, he would simultaneously depict the peace accords
as momentary and transient arrangements. He made constant allusions not
only to the phased strategy but to the right of return, a standard
Palestinian euphemism for Israels destruction through demographic
subversion. He also leavened his speech with historical and religious
references, most notably alluding to the treaty of Hudaybiya, signed by
the Prophet Muhammad with the people of Mecca in 628 only to be disavowed
by Muhammad a couple of years later when the situation shifted in his
favor.
Further to discredit the idea of peace with the Jewish state, Arafats PA
launched a sustained hate campaign of racial and political incitement,
ongoing to this day and unparalleled in scope and intensity since Nazi
Germany. Israelis, and Jews more generally, have been portrayed as the
source of all evil, synonyms for iniquity, corruption, and decadence, and
responsible for every problem, real or imaginary, in the West Bank and
Gaza. Palestinians are not only indoctrinated in the illegitimacy of the
state f Israeli poisoning.
Arafat also utilized the immense inflammatory potential of Islam to
discredit his Israeli peace partners, if not the idea of peace itself.
Week after week, Palestinian preachers used their pulpits to discredit the
peace process and to instill hatred for Israelis and Jews. Worshippers
have been taught that Jews are the descendants of apes and pigs and warned
of Zionist machinations to divide the Palestinian people and spawn
internecine strife. After Arafat launched his war of terror in September
2000, the Friday preachers embarked on an orgy of anti-Jewish invective
and outright calls for the mass murder of Israelis and Jews wherever they
were found.
Children have occupied a place of pride in the PAs hate campaign. Over the
last decade, Palestinian children have learned about an evil Jewish
persona, traceable to biblical times and supposedly accounting for the
worldwide persecution of Jews through the ages. In particular they have
been indoctrinated with the idea that Jews are, and always have been,
implacable enemies of Islam. As they grow up, Palestinian children can
join various youth organizations where they are further brainwashed with
racist and anti-Semitic ideology. An extensive network of summer camps,
modeled on the Nazi youth organization, Hitler Jugend, provides a
carefully contrived mixture of ideological indoctrinationy approved the
murder of hundreds of Israelis by these groups. He also reconstructed the
PLOs old terrorist apparatus, mainly under the auspices of the Tanzim, the
military arm of Fatah (the PLOs largest constituent organization and
Arafats own alma mater). He frantically acquired large quantities of
prohibited weapons, and, eventually, resorted to outright mass violence,
first in September 1996 to discredit the newly elected Israeli prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then in September 2000, shortly after
being offered Palestinian statehood by Netanyahus successor, Ehud Barak,
with the launch of his terror war.
But Arafat is hardly the only Arab leader to have used mass violence for
political ends, to foster a cult of anti-Semitism, or to line his own
pockets at his peoples expense. He was a typical, if egregious, product of
the ruthless Arab political system and a quintessential representative of
a generation of cynical and self-seeking revolutionaries. Nor have his
main Palestinian associates been any better. While ordinary Palestinians
have scrabbled for a livelihood, PLO officials have enjoyed a luxurious
life in sumptuous hotels and villas, globe-trotting in grand style,
acquiring properties, and making financial investments worldwideall from
the billions of dollars donated by the Arab oil states and, during the
Oslo era, by the international community.
Neither was Arafat alone in his political philosophy. The rejection of the
state of Israel and the need for its violent destruction have been
constants within the PLO since the days of its hallowed founding document,
the Palestinian Covenant, adopted in 1964 and revised four years later to
reflect the organizations growing militancy. Having little to say about
the Palestinians themselves, the covenant devotes about two-thirds of its
33 articles to the need to destroy Israel, designating armed struggle as
the only way to liberate Palestine. Despite signing no fewer than five
peace agreements with Israel during the 1990s, the PLO has failed to
abolish its coven
Even Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), after Arafats death the acting chairman of
the PA and perhaps the foremost symbol of supposed Palestinian moderation,
has not shied away from denying the existence of the ancient Temple in
Jerusalem (or for that matter, the legitimacy of the Jewish claim to
Palestine) or from hinting at Isrg the whole of Palestine, expressing the
hope that in the future Jews and Palestinian Arabs will reach a state of
complete mixture in Palestine. This thinly veiled call for Israels
disappearance was repeated last October in a New York Times op-ed by the
PLOs legal advistical association between Zionism and Nazism. Among other
things, he argued that fewer than a million Jews had been killed in the
Holocaust, and that the Zionist movement was a partner to their slaughter.
In the wake of the failed Camp David summit of July 2000 and the launch of
Arafats war of terror two months later, Abu Mazen went to great lengths to
explain why the right of return was a non-negotiable prerequisite for any
Palestinian-Israeli settlement. Peace will not be achieved without the
refugees getting back their sacred rights, which cannot be touched, he
argued. It is the individual right of every refugee, and no one can reach
an agreement in this matter without his consent. To dispel any doubt about
the nature of this right, he emphasized that the right of return means a
return to Israel, not to a Palestinian state.
On the assumption that the elections scheduled for January 9 go as
forecast, Abu Mazens succession is thus no more likely to bring peace with
Israel, or democracy to the Palestinians, than a new Germany would have
been ushered in after World War II by the accession of one of Adolf
Hitlers erstwhile lieutenants.
It is true that, during the past couple of years, Abu Mazen openly urged
Arafat to scale down his war of terror and to return to the negotiating
table. But this was a matter of tactics: Arafat himself had been amenable
to negotiating so long as Israel proved sufficiently accommodating of his
demands, while Abu Mazen never precluded a return to the armed struggle
should circumstances so require. During his brief tenure as prime minister
in 2003, he made no effort to disarm the numerous armed gangs in the
territories as required by the Oslo accords, attempting instead to win
their consent for a temporary suspension of hostilities that would bring
about an Israeli withdrawal, something the Palestinians had failed to
achieve by military means.
For all their drastically different personalities and political style,
Arafat and Abu Mazen are warp and woof of the same fabric: dogmatic PLO
veterans who have never eschewed their commitment to Israels destruction
and who have viewed the peace process as the continuation of their
lifetime war by other means. (A younger and more direct reincarnation of
Arafat is Marwan Barghouti, the jailed Fatah terrorist with undisguised
political ambitions.) As late as July 2002, Abu Mazen described Oslo as
the biggest mistake Israel ever made, enabling the PLO to get worldwide
acceptance and respectability while hanging fast to its own aims. Shortly
after Arafats death this past November, in his address to a special
session of the Palestinian Legislative Council in Ramallah, he swore to
follow in the path of the late leader Yasir Arafat and . . . work toward
fulfilling his dream. . . . We promise you that our hearts will not rest
until the right of return for our people is achieved and the tragedy of
the refugees is ended.
One might have hoped that, eleven years and thousands of deaths after the
launch of the Oslo process, the international community would pay closer
attention to what the Palestinian leadership tells its own people and
wider Arab constituencies. But that is evidently a hope too far. Even Bill
Clinton, whose dream of brokering a Palestinian-Israeli peace was dashed
by Arafat in the July 2000 Camp David summit and again in December of the
same year, and who blamed the PLO leader for the collapse of the Oslo
process, could suggest five months before Arafats death that America and
Israel had no choice but to resume negotiating with him. Unless they . . .
seriously believe they can find a better negotiating partner in Hamas, he
told the British leftist daily Guardian, then they need to keep working to
make a deal.
It is precisely here that the great importance of the Bush Doctrine lies.
For while the EU seems all too happy to continue asking nothing of the
Palestinians, as if they were too dim or too primitive to be held
accountable for their own actions, Bush has tackled the issue of
accountability head on. In his correct perception, it is the total absence
of this factor from Middle Eastern political life that has allowed a long
succession of local dictators, from Gamal Abdel Nasser, to Saddam Hussein,
to Yasir Arafat, to inflict recurrent disasters and endless suffering on
their peoples, and mayhem upon the world.
So long as the Palestinian territories continue to be run by men of this
kind and by their terrorist organizations, there can be no true or lasting
reconciliation with Israel. And so long as the territories continue to be
governed by Arafats rule of the jungle, no Palestinian civil society, let
alone a viable state, can develop. Just as the creation of free and
democratic societies in Germany and Japan after World War II necessitated,
above and beyond the overthrow of the ruling parties, a comprehensive
purge of the existing political elites and the reeducation of the entire
populace, so the Palestinians deserve a profound structural reform that
will sweep the PA from power, free the territories from its grip,
eradicate the endemic violence from political and social life, and teach
the virtues of coexistence with their Israeli neighbors. Until this
happens, there will be no lasting peace in the Middle East. December 1,
2004
EFRAIM KARSH is head of Mediterranean studies at Kings College, University
of London. The paperback edition of his book, Arafats War, is just out
from Grove.
7. Open Nazi teaching at California State University at Long Beach:
http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/01/1712265.php