Original articles on Israel and related issues written by Steven Plaut, a professor at an Israeli university.
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1. The Kidnapped Leftists in Iraq and Gaza
In recent months, numbers of leftist moonbats from the West have been
kidnapped by the very same Islamofascists and terrorists they came to
help. These include people kidnapped by the Iraqi terrorists, bleeding
hearts in the country to help the terrorists "resist occupation", and
other Westerners grabbed up by Hamas and Jihad terrorhoids in the Gaza
Strip and West Bank.
We think the greatest comment on or spoof of such people comes from a
character played by Anthony Quinn. In a movie not very well know, but in
fact an Eastern European Holocaust saga, The 25th Hour (Director: Henri
Verneuil), Anthony Quinn plays a Romanian farmer mistaken for a Jew and
cast about Europe for the better part of a decade. Quinn's farmer is
arrested by a fascist collaborator trying to get him out of town so that
the latter can make a pass at Quinn's wife.
In the most notable and famous scene, Quinn is being deported to a
concentration camp with a group of Romanian Jews, after the fascist
constable has turned Quinn over to the nazis claiming he is a Jew. Quinn
stands in the middle of the throng in a daze, whining to the Jews around
him about to be murdered that he himself was deported even though he is
not even a Jew. The Jews are not overly sympathic to his plight.
"Yes, I agree, in YOUR case it is an injustice," whines the Quinn
character, "but in MY mistake it is a MISTAKE!""
We can sit and delight ourselves over popcorn while imagining the
kidnapped leftists in the Gaza Strip and in Iraq, waiting with others to
be beheaded, making the exact same statement.
2. Israel's Leaders Shun the "V" Word
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21811
3. Tel Aviv University Goes Red:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21798
4. The Jihad comes to Jersey:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21828
5. Harvard's Hucksters:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21813
6. The Last of the Non-Lemmings to run the Mossad:
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=49459
7. Computer Jokes:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=20282
8. Ilan Pappe lies about writing a book (last page):-
http://www.ee.bgu.ac.il/~censor/katz-directory/01-11-22gelber-pappe.pdf
9. Ilan Pappe lies about his employment history (half-way down):-
http://www.meretzusa.org/ih200601oddsends.shtml
1. The Israeli Election Summed Up, Part I:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=20257
2. The Israeli Election, Part II. For anyone still undecided how to
vote, my suggestion: just read Haaretz and see which party scares Haaretz
the most and is denounced in the strongest terms by Haaretz and then vote
for THAT party!
Let Haaretz help you decide!
3. http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21798
The Communist "Jewish Arab" Professor of Tel Aviv University
By Steven Plaut
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 27, 2006
Tel Aviv University is crawling with anti-Israel "Post-Zionist" professors
and with openly communist faculty members. It would be hard to pinpoint
the very worst and most outrageous of these, but Yehouda Shenhav is surely
a serious contender.
Shenhav is Associate Professor and past department chairman of sociology
at Tel Aviv University He was born Yehouda Shaharabani to Iraqi parents
who had immigrated as refugees to Israel, and later changed his name to a
less obviously Oriental one. He teaches Marxism and anti-Zionism to Tel
Aviv University students and he edits the hardcore Marxist pseudo-academic
Israeli journal calling itself "Theory and Criticism." It publishes
anti-Israel propaganda and boilerplate Marxism (in academic Newspeak,
"critical" means Marxist). "Theory and Criticism" was founded in 1990 by
a gaggle of communists, Arabs and far-leftist anti-Zionists in Israel.
Shenhav also sits on the board of another Marxist anti-Israel "journal"
published by extremists at Israel's Ben-Gurion University.
Shenhav was a visiting faculty member at Columbia University when the
extremists at Edward Said's campus were turning it into an anti-Jewish
madrassah. Unsurprisingly, Shenhav did not speak out against the rising
campus anti-Semitism there nor denounce the academic pogromchiki.
Instead, Shenhav attended leftist antiwar events throughout the region,
starring Columbia faculty and others opposed to the American war against
Iraqi Baathism and Islamist terrorism. At these, Shenhav compared the war
in Iraq to "Israeli acts of aggression in the West Bank," calling them
"acts of colonialism" led by "crude military men." Collecting his
taxpayer-financed salary at Tel Aviv University has never struck him as an
immoral act of oppression and colonialism.
Shenhav is a "critical" part of the leftist junta that has taken over a
one-time serious Israeli think tank, the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem,
turning it into a little taxpayer-supported gulag of anti-Jewish Marxist
propaganda and activism. He is one of the charter members of a
far-leftist group of Oriental Jews (those whose families immigrated to
Israel from Islamic countries) calling itself the "Mizrahi Democratic
Rainbow Coalition". The group does not publish membership rolls but it
is unlikely that its entire membership could fill all the seats on a bus,
and probably not even a park bench. While pretending to be a lobby group
for underprivileged Oriental Jews in Israel, the "Rainbow Coalition"
spends most of its time promoting the Communist Party's formula for ending
"occupation" and bringing peace to a future Middle East that evidently
will not contain a Jewish state. The "Rainbow" is one of the anti-Jewish
Israeli groups celebrated by the Marxists at Z magazine, Noam Chomsky's
favorite stomping ground. While having a picayune membership, the
"Rainbow" nevertheless is awash in funds it gets from the seditious New
Israel Fund and similar foreign groups.
Shenhav is clearly the star of the "Rainbow Coalition" web site, which is
crouded with pieces by anti-Israel writers, including pro-terror Stanford
professor Joel Beinin, "Professor" Smadar Lavie, a feminist extremist
anti-Zionist who is not a professor at all, and even a Bash-Israel article
by UFO crackpot conspiracist Barry Chamish! The web site publishes
articles endorsing the campaign by European anti-Semites to boycott
Israeli universities.
More generally, Yehousa Shenhav is among the better-known of Israel's
anti-Israel leftist academic extremists. He signs many of those
anti-Israel petitions, collected regularly by Israeli academic leftists,
including one endorsing the Jewish leftist woman arrested for helping her
Palestinian boyfriend plan terror bombings, and another proposing
international intervention to end Israeli sovereignty. Shenhav's main
"academic thesis" has long been the claim that Oriental/Sephardic Jews who
came to Israel from Arab countries are in fact Arabs of the Mosaic
persuasion, Arabs of the Jewish faith. He insists that their national
identity is determined, like throughout the West, by language, whereas
anyone with the slightest familiarity with the Middle East knows that
nationality groups there are defined primarily by religious identity.
(That is why secular Jews who do not practice Judaism are still Jews.) In
trying to stake out for himself Marxist "multiculturalism" as his
cosmopolitan watering hole, Shenhav in fact shows he is a victim of his
own Western provinciality, lacking any understanding of so basic a fact of
life!
While a Sephardic (Oriental Jewish) chauvinist himself, Shenhav's "Jewish
Arabs thesis" is a purposeful and egregious misapplication of the modern
European Jewish liberal posturing, designed to make Jews more accepted by
claiming to be Germans (or Hungarians, or whatever) of the Jewish
religion, and misapplying it in a tendentious manner to Jews from Arab
countries. Arabic-speaking Jews are Jews, and not Arabs, just as
Hebrew-speaking Arabs are still Arabs. Shenhav might be able to find
perhaps 20 Sephardic Jews worldwide who agree with his "Jewish Arabs
thesis", holding that they are Arabs of the Jewish religion, and I would
not be surprised if they all turned out to be communists.
Shenhav has promoted his view that Oriental Jews are Arabs in numerous
articles and in a recent book: "The Arab Jews: Nationality, Religion and
Ethnicity", which got raving reviews from Arab extremists and from PLO
front groups. I keep waiting for him to approach some Sephardic toughs
from some gang in a working-class Israeli neighborhood or development town
and then for him to explain to them that they are really Jewish Arabs. It
should be fun picking up the pieces.
Shenhav considers Zionism to be a form of colonialism. His writings are
carried with affection by Al-Jazeera and by the web site of the
anti-Semitic pseudo-Jewish cult Neturei Karta. Shenhav is celebrated on
PLO propaganda web sites and has been at the forefront of those leftists
OPPOSING the idea of conditioning any Israeli compensation, reparations,
or financial tribute to the "Palestinians" on offsetting reparations paid
to Jewish refugees from the Arab countries (or to their children).
Shenhav has long argued that Oriental Jews and Palestinians need to unite
to fight Zionism, that old "common cause" of the communist party in
"Palestine" from the 1920s onward. Indeed, Oriental Jews and Palestinians
are, in his view, two wings of the same struggle in absolutely everything
except Oriental Jews getting compensation from Arabs. As the child of
immigrants to Israel from Iraq, Shenhav wants his own family and those of
all other Jewish refugees from Arab countries to be denied their due
rights to compensation for property stolen from them, while at the same
time he endorses unlimited rights to "compensation" for Palestinians and
even their "right of return" to Israeli territory AFTER a Palestinian
state is created. This is all the moral equivalent of someone insisting
that Germans have the right to compensation for losses during World War II
while neither Jews nor Czechs do. Shenhav has been denounced by "Justice
for Jews from Arab Countries" and similar pro-Sephardic groups.
While a prominent Tel Aviv University professor, Shenhav has a long track
record of promoting crackpot and lunatic "theories" about a variety of
matters. He has promoted the long-discredited conspiracist "theory"
holding that Yemenite Jewish children from families who came to Israel in
its early years were "kidnapped" and surreptitiously handed over for
adoption to European Jews. Not a shred of evidence that any such
"kidnappings" took place has ever surfaced, including via DNA tests.
This makes Shenhav the academic equivalent of a UFO conspiracist.
Shenhav's latest Cause Clbre is the struggle against "neo-liberalism".
Those of you living in the real world . meaning outside of campuses -
might be confused by that terminology. As you know, back in the 19th
century liberalism used to mean free markets, democracy, and the right to
pursue equal opportunity. By the 1960s, American "liberalism" had come to
mean the very opposite of traditional liberalism, while the banners of
19th century liberalism had been adopted by American conservatives. Then
the Far Left in recent years adopted "neo-liberalism" as its favorite
nonsense term, and its main political crusade today is directed toward
attacking what it calls - at one and the same time - "neo-liberalism" and
"neo-conservatives". To paraphrase George Orwell, some ideas are so
stupid that one can only learn about them from professors.
Shenhav is part of that crusade. What he and his ilk really mean by
"neo-liberalism" is economic freedom. They may not understand first-year
economics but certainly they know that economic freedom is evil and must
be suppressed at all costs. Writing in Haaretz, March 22, 2006, Shenhav
declares that "neo-liberalism" is a "destructive" form of "religious-like
fundamentalism," a "new form of global imperialism controlled by
multinational corporations," which develop "anti-democratic styles of
management, laws, justice and morality," all designed to oppress the poor
workers. He has said, "Patriotism and national solidarity are eroded from
below by social injustice, and from above by globalization."
Shenhav, who could probably not pass a spot quiz in any Principles of
Economics course, pronounces sociological pontifications on how he thinks
markets operate, recites long-discredited Marxist "theories," all the
while singing sycophantic praises of the recent book "A Brief History of
Neoliberalism" by David Harvey. His guru Harvey is a Professor of
Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and
a far-leftist moonbat, someone who writes books full of Newspeak about the
"Conditions of Postmodernity" (another favorite leftist nonsense word) and
"imperialism."
For Shenhav and the rest of the cadre of Marxists in the sociology and
political science departments at Tel Aviv University, the solution to
"neoliberalism" is the same as the solution to the problems of the
Palestinians and the "Jewish Arabs". It is to convert the Middle East,
Western Europe and North America into large communist gulags, modeled upon
Belarus and similar progressive egalitarian societies.
4. Tenured Traitors in Israeli Academia:
http://www.paulbogdanor.com/seliktar.pdf
5. Web Site argues that Barry Chamish is a Hamas Agent, an anti-Semite,
and a liar:
http://www.britam.org/Questions/QuesChamish.html
6. . Hot Air Hysteria:
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/milloy032406.htm
7. The Academic Sources of those Harvard Quacks:
http://www.nysun.com/article/29741
8. At least not everyone at Harvard these days is a quack:
http://israelnn.com/news.php3?id=100794
1. Postmodern College Admissions Test:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=20221
2. The Israel Conspiracy
By Bret Stephens, The Wall Street Journal
March 25, 2006
Imagine a conspiracy so vast the only person not in on
it is you. In 1998, Hollywood indulged that conceit in
.The Truman Show,. a film about a reality show so
all-encompassing that its unwitting hero, Truman
Burbank (Jim Carrey), has no idea the very world he
inhabits is a stage. Now imagine a conspiracy that
makes Trumans of us all. According to professors John
Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen
Walt of Harvard, it.s called .The Israel Lobby..
The professors make their case in an extensively
footnoted .working paper. from Harvard.s Kennedy
School of Government, a revised version of which is
published in the current issue of the London Review of
Books. Their premise is that Israel is a huge
strategic liability for the U.S., which wrecks our
reputation in the Arab world, complicates our
diplomacy at the U.N., inspires Islamic fanaticism and
terror, goads us into misbegotten wars and makes us
complicit in Israeli human-rights abuses, all the
while costing some $3 billion a year.
But here.s a puzzle: If Israel is so damaging to U.S.
interests, why do consistent and broad majorities of
Americans support it? A Gallup poll from last month
shows that Americans are more sympathetic to Israelis
than to Palestinians by 59% to 15%. Among Americans
who claim to follow world affairs .very closely,.
Israel.s favorable ratings rise to 66%. I went back
over polling data since the mid-1970s, and the
percentages hold roughly constant. Americans also tell
pollsters that Israel deserves support even if it puts
the U.S. at greater risk of oil boycotts or terrorist
attacks.
The answer, according to Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt,
is .the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby,. which
they define as a .loose coalition of individuals and
organizations who actively work to steer U.S. foreign
policy in a pro-Israel direction..
They might have underlined the word loose. In their
reading, the Lobby comprises much more than just the
American-Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and
other pro-Israel lobbies. It also pairs such opposites
as the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal and
the New York Times; the right-of-center American
Enterprise Institute and the left-of-center Brookings
Institution; Republican Tom DeLay and Democrat Joe
Lieberman; Bush Administration ambassador John Bolton
and Clinton Administration ambassador Martin Indyk.
These aren.t your usual political bedfellows. But for
Israel, it would seem, they come together in a sordid
cause.
What are the Lobby.s methods? Money, political and
academic infiltration and moral blackmail. Drawing on
some boastful self-appraisals by AIPAC staffers, the
professors paint a picture of an organization able to
funnel untold sums of money to elect or defeat
political candidates virtually at whim. Capitol Hill
is said to be swarming with Jewish staffers, who all
but write the script on Israel policy. The
proliferation of .Israel Studies. curricula is seen as
an insidious propaganda effort. Those who depart from
the approved line on Israel are said to run the risk
of being labeled anti-Semitic.
Finally there is the Israel Lobby.s control of the
media, which in the Mearsheimer-Walt telling is
near-total. .The Lobby doesn.t want an open debate,.
they write, .because that might lead Americans to
question the levels of support they provide [to
Israel].. Cowed or complicitous publishers and editors
are alleged to act as gatekeepers for the Lobby.
By now the gist of the Mearsheimer-Walt hypothesis
should be clear. So should its pedigree. The authors
are at pains to note that the Israel Lobby is by no
means exclusively Jewish, and that not every American
Jew is a part of it. Fair enough. But has there ever
been an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that does not
share its basic features? Dual loyalty, disloyalty,
manipulation of the media, financial manipulation of
the political system, duping the goyim (gentiles) and
getting them to fight their wars, sponsoring and
covering up acts of gratuitous cruelty against an
innocent people . every canard ever alleged of the
Jews is here made about the Israel Lobby and its
cause. No wonder former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke
was quick to endorse the article, calling it a .great
step forward..
I do not mean to suggest that Messrs. Mearsheimer and
Walt are themselves anti-Semitic. But as outgoing
Harvard President Larry Summers once noted, what may
not be anti-Semitic in intent may yet be anti-Semitic
in effect. By giving aid and comfort to people who
have no trouble substituting the word .Jews. for
.Israel Lobby,. the Mearsheimer-Walt article is
anti-Semitic in effect.
It is also incredibly dumb, as an anecdote well-known
to the staff of this editorial page will illustrate.
Our late editor, Robert Bartley, is cited by Messrs.
Mearsheimer and Walt as among the more notorious
fellow travelers of the Israel Lobby. .[Yitzhak]
Shamir, [Ariel] Sharon, Bibi [Netanyahu] . whatever
those guys want is pretty much fine by me,. the
article quotes him as saying.
I can vouch for that quote, since Bartley said it to
me. But what the authors take as evidence of the
thrall in which the Israel Lobby held the editor of
The Wall Street Journal was closer to the opposite.
.My support for Israel,. he once half-jokingly
remarked to his staff, .is directly proportional to
their willingness not to meet with me..
Robert Bartley was a man of modest Christian beliefs
and principled political convictions. He supported
Israel for much the same reason he supported Great
Britain, Poland and Taiwan . because they were friends
of the United States, because they were democracies,
because they were places where his core beliefs in
free men and free markets held sway.
In this respect, and like so many of us who are
friends of the Jewish state, he was not privy to an
Israeli conspiracy but part of an American consensus.
3. From the new edition of Yoav Gelber, PALESTINE 1948:-
Propaganda as History: What Happened at Deir Yassin?
http://www.ee.bgu.ac.il/~censor/katz-directory/05-12-14gelber-palestine-1948
-appendix-II-what-happened-in-deir-yassin-english.pdf
Folklore Versus History: The Tantura Blood Libel
http://www.ee.bgu.ac.il/~censor/katz-directory/05-12-14gelber-palestine-1948
-appendix-III-the-tantura-blood-libel-english.pdf
4. On a non-political matter, read the fascinating story of Robert
Whitehill, the Jewish kid from an assimilated family in Lubbock, Texas,
an autodidact who became a great Hebrew poet:
http://commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12103047_1
Similarly, you will find the story of Omar Hasnin interesting. Omar is an
Arab Haifa local rap singer, who sings rap "music" in Hebrew and performed
in Hebrew and Arabic in front of 20,000 fans in Alexandria Egypt. His
group, all from Haifa, consists of two other singers, a drummer, and two
dancers.
They appeared with several Egyptian bands, the best known of whom was
M.T.M.
5. Phillips on the Harvard Quacks:
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001643.html
6. Defend Western Exhibits of Art from the Left and the Islamofascists!
One of the most amusing phenomena among the Western campus Left is how
they always march about demanding "multi-cultural studies", just as long
as no one requires that they take a course in a foreign language.
Even more amusing is the fact that multi-culturalism, in the sense of
respect for other people's cultures, only exists in Western civilization.
So anyone promotong multi-culturalism should really be celebrating Western
civilization and its values. Tell that to the campus intifaders.
To see some good illustrations, compare the Islamofascist violence over
the cartoons with the deep respect given to Islamic art and culture by
Western cultural institutions. The Museum of Modern Art in New York is
currently presenting Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, an
exhibit on some of the finest achievements of Islamic civilization -
before the modern growth of Islamist fascism, that is.
One of the finest museums in Jeruealsm is the Israeli Museum of Islamic
Art. In a city crawling with world-class museums, it is still a must-see.
The Met, in NY, also has a great exhibit, as do dozens of other Western
museums.
Now compare this respect and tolerance for Islamic civilization to the
uncivilized neo-fascism of Alexander Cockburn and Counterpunch magazine,
the web magazine for leftist neo-nazis and pro-terror anti-Semites.
Cockburn runs a raving piece attacking the NY Musuem of Modern Art
exhibit, crayoned by one Maymanah Farhat. She is upset because the exhbit
is not anti-American enough. The pro-terror Farhat objects to the exhibit
as a crime of Western colonialism:
"Without Boundary and the discourse surrounding the exhibition demonstrate
the desperate need for an extensive and critical examination of the
mainstream art world. Art historical definitions used by academia,
institutions and galleries remain imbedded in the cultural and social
hierarchies that have resulted from the colonial and imperial geopolitical
policies and activities of Western nations in Latin America, Asia, the
Middle East, Africa and the Pacific Islands. These policies have been
primary factors in the denigrated classification, documentation and
representation of art and visual culture created by non-Western
populations. The political, theological, ethnic and class biases of
institutionalized art activity today must be held accountable for defining
non-Western cultures as inferior.
She then gets all PMS over the representation of male chauvinism in Arab
culture in the exhibit: "To associate the keffieh (Arab headdress) with
oppression and male dominance is to dispel the need for an examination of
the larger sociopolitical picture."
Israeli university campuses have long been open to radical anti-Israel
extremists and communists. Indeed, as reported two years back, the
University of Tel Aviv has turned its campus over to the Israeli Communist
Party to conduct indoctrination in communist dogma under the pretense of
operating a non-accredited "Socioeconomic College" for its followers (see
below). In these corners we dubbed this the Felix Dzerzinsky College at
Tel Aviv University. I attach below a reprint of the full report on
that, from 2004. Tel Aviv's other on-campus indoctrination in hatred of
Israel is described here:
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/Articles/Political%20Indoctrination%20at%20Tel%20Aviv%20University.htm
Tel Aviv of course is not alone. The other campuses routinely allow
communists, Arab fascists, pro-terror cheerleaders, and mourners of the
"catastrophe (al-Naqba) of Israel's creation" to use campus facilities.
It is all free academic speech, you see.
Well, Israel's campuses are open to ALMOST anyone. There is one group for
whom they are NOT open: pro-Israel Jewish Holocaust survivors.
Maariv March 24, 2006 reports that representatives of the "New Zionism
Party", a small party running in the elections to be held next week in
Israel, were expelled from the Hebrew University campus this week by
campus security at the orders of the university administration. The party
consists almost exclusively of Holocaust survivors, and the main plank in
its platform is assisting Holocaust survivors still alive. Because the
average age of its members, by the nature of things, is probably in the
80s, it has very few 23 year old activists. So when it wanted to hand out
its fliers to students on campus, it sent to the Hebrew University campus
some elderly and retired persons.
The Hebrew University authorities suddenly decided that leafleting for
political causes on campus is restricted to students only. Never mind the
long track record of hosting non-student commies and non-student
anti-Israel radicals. So the authorities ordered the elderly Holocaust
survivors off campus.
Juden, raus.
Here is the earlier posting about Tel Aviv University:
It is conservatively estimated that communism directly caused about
100 million deaths in the twentieth century. These of course include the
millions starved to death by communist forced collectivization of
agriculture, by the intentional famines in the Ukraine and in China, and
by the massive shortages and upheavals and repressions, not to mention the
Gulags and mass murders. In China, massive cannibalism was produced by
communist food shortages, where families swapped children so parents would
not be forced to eat their own children.
A disproportionate number of those killed by communism were Jews. Jews
were always subjected to special venom and animosity by communists, and
the fact that some of the communist leaders and "thinkers" were Jews or
ex-Jews does not change anything, in fact it probably explains the
anti-Semitism that has always characterized both communism and some forms
of anti-communism.
Communists today lead the movement for a Second Holocaust of Jews. They
seek the annihilation of Israel and its population. The communist
countries have always been allied with Arab fascism and aggression and
today support Islamist terror.
All of which might have been regarded by most people as more than a
sufficient reason why a College of Communist Indoctrination should not
operate within the auspices of Tel Aviv University.
But they would be wrong.
Today is the inauguration ceremony of the opening of the College of
Communist Indoctrination at Tel Aviv University. Really. The official
name of the "college" is the "Socioeconomic College", and it operates on
the Tel Aviv University campus, although evidently not with direct funding
by the Israeli taxpayer, at least not yet. The comrades will, however, be
using the university facilities paid for by Israeli taxpayers.
The initiator of the College of Communist Indoctrination is Madame Gulag,
Tamar Gozansky, who was until recently the Stalinist Rent-a-Jew sitting in
the Knesset as representative for the Hadash Stalinist Party in the
Israeli parliament. Hadash is an Old-Left anti-Israel Arab-national
communist party, one that never quite got around to renouncing Stalinism.
Madame Gulag has been unemployed, as are most people under communism, ever
since her own party got tired of her hogging one of its parliament seats.
So she and her fellow commissar, a lawyer named Aviv Wasserman, came up
with the idea. They decided they were sick and tired of the "capitalist
hegemony in Israeli academia" (in their words, see Haaretz July 23, 04),
and you can see right away how someone who had spent the last few decades
in some other galaxy might not be aware of the Far-Leftist hegemony that
actually operates in Israeli academia.
Students in this new re-education Gulag center to open at Tel Aviv
University will be indoctrinated in the "theories" of Marxism that were
totally debunked more than 160 years ago. They will learn the communist
party's principles and its correct thinking about class struggle and other
"social issues". The "college" will be administered by a newspaper
journalist named Efraim Davidi. Its "degree" will not be recognized at
first as a bona fide academic degree, although it might be enough to get
you a job in a Cuban torture facility.
The "faculty" at the "college" will consist of the usual Israeli
Far-Leftist tenured radicals, including a Marxist economist (that is
actually an oxymoron) from
Ben-Gurion University, the extremist "Post Zionist" Moshe Zuckerman from
Tel Aviv University, the Stalinist Dov Chanin, who was supposed to replace
Madame Gulag as the Hadash Party Rent-a-Jew but the party decided to do
without further Jewish reps, some Arab non-academics whose academic
credentials are that they are anti-Israel, and others. They do not get
paid, I guess as there way of showing what happens to employees under
communist regimes.
If you want to tell the heads of Tel Aviv University what you think of
this new "college" on their campus, contact:
President of Tel Aviv U:
Prof. Itamar Rabinovich
His fax and email are
FAX 03-6422379 itamarr@tauex.tau.ac.il
Here is a list of other university officers (you will need to look up
their addresses if you want to contact):
http://www.tau.ac.il/officers-eng.html
You may want to let any donors to TAU know about what is going on!
By the way, a few years back we posted a story about a senior lecturer
at the business school at Tel Aviv University, associated with the
Chabad-Lubavitch movement, who petitioned the university authorities on
behalf of a group of religious women students to be allowed
to us empty classrooms in off-hours to study Talmud and the weekly Torah
portions. The university turned them down flat. THAT would have been
inappropriate use of campus facilities, unlike setting up a Stalinist
Indoctrination College on campus, run by the communist party apparatchiks.
Also, you may recall that when Tel Aviv University decided to accept a
large donation from a Swiss industrialist to build a synagogue building on
campus, some leftist faculty and students held angry protests against the
decision, maintaining that a synagogue would pollute the largely
secularist campus. I guess Judaism pollutes Tel Aviv University, but not
Stalinism.
1. Pseudo-Rabbis for a Second Holocaust:
http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=6110
2. I am not publicly endorsing any party in the coming Israeli election.
I just wanted to mention the one party most successfully providing public
distraction and amusement. There is a party officially running in the
election, I am not kidding you, called the PUTZ Party and its platform is
a single issue - war against Israeli banks. It wants a law making it
illegal for banks to foreclose on deadbeats who do not pay their debts.
I could have mentioned the Pot-for-All Green Leaf Party, which has run
in the past 3 or 4 elections, but this time it
is actually taking its campaign seriously and just might make it into the
Knesset. Its first act will no doubt be free joints in the Knesset
cafeteria and issues of Tikkun magazine....
3. "Peace Studies" Atrocities:
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/jonah032206.asp
4. Hillary losing Hollywood Moonbats:
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/3/21/140020.shtml?s=ic
5. Item of the Week:
http://www.calpatriot.org/article.php?articleID=445
6. In B'nai Brith, trips to Israel are considered too dangerous, so:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1139395667068&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
1. From CAMERA:
Harvard Backs Away from "Israel Lobby" Professors;
Removes Logo from Controversial Paper
We have good news to report! A controversial research report, The
Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by Harvard professor Stephen
Walt and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, that
criticizes the ~@~\Israel lobby~@~] for allegedly distorting the
foreign policy of the United States to the detriment of U.S.
interests, and which has been severely criticized as inaccurate and
wrongheaded, no longer sports the Harvard or Kennedy School of
Government logos that previously appeared on the report's front page.
The original first page, with the Harvard and KSG logos, and the
usual small disclaimer. The revised first page -- no Harvard logos
and a much stronger and prominent disclaimer.
In a further sign that Harvard and the University of Chicago are
distancing themselves from Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, the
other research reports on that Harvard website. In its place is a far
stronger disclaimer, in much larger type. The original disclaimer
read:
The views expressed in the KSG Faculty Research Working Paper Series
are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of
the John F. Kennedy School of Government or Harvard University.
Copyright belongs to the author(s). Papers may be downloaded for
personal use only.
The new, much more prominent disclaimer reads:
The two authors of this Working Paper are solely responsible for the
views expressed in it. As academic institutions, Harvard University
and the University of Chicago do not take positions on the
scholarship of individual faculty, and this article should not be
interpreted or portrayed as reflecting the official position of
either institution.
It is especially notable that while the original disclaimer merely
stated that Harvard did not necessarily share the views expressed in
the article, the revised disclaimer goes much further, stating that:
1. The two authors are "solely responsible" for the content.
2. This article should not be interpreted or portrayed as reflecting
the official position of either institution [Harvard or Univ. of
Chicago].
3. The institutions take no position on the "scholarship of
individual faculty."
Go here for the full update:
http://camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=35&x_article=1101
and here:
http://camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=35&x_article=1099
2. The Jericho Raid:
http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/8714/Thoughts_On_The_Jericho_Prison_Raid.html
3. Spitting On Our Friends, Slobbering Over Our Enemies
By Don Feder
GrasstopsUSA.com | March 23, 2006
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21753
One thing must be noted at the outset . Not only is there nothing
authentically Jewish about the agenda of the Jewish Left . It is, in fact,
anti-Jewish in every detail. It rejects Torah-based morality, sanctions
Muslim and left-wing anti-Semitism and champions causes that would lead to
the extinction of the Jewish people . not to mention the end of
civilization.
OK, now I.ll tell you what I really think.
Though they occasionally try to justify themselves with vague references
to what they call "Jewish tradition" . and often include in their ranks
those to whom the title "rabbi" is misapplied . there is nothing remotely
Jewish about their worldview.
By Jewish left, I mean those occupying the modest territory to the left of
the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Reform Judaism.s Religious Action
Center.
Which brings me to an article in the influential Jewish Forward by E. J.
Kessler, published on March 17th ("Activists Prepare for New Church-State
Battle").
The Forward quotes me on the upcoming War On Christians Conference (March
27-28), where I.ll be speaking on a panel called . "Jews Confront The War
On Christians," along with Rabbi Aryeh Spero, Michael Horowitz (a Hudson
Institute scholar), and Joseph Ben Ami of the Institute for Canadian
Values.
For an opposing point of view, the Forward presented a website called Jews
on First! . whose self-proclaimed mission is to "expose the intimidation"
tactics of "right-wing Christian fundamentalists." (As opposed to
middle-of-the-road Christian fundamentalists? But then Jewish leftists
have always been big on verbal overkill.)
The Forward says Jews on First! (love that exclamation point) was formed
to "expose and counter the people at the March 27-28 conference." The site
is the joint project of Jane Hunter ("a one-time Pacifica Radio journalist
and longtime leftist organizer") and Rabbi Chaim Dov Beliak.
Point of information: California-based Pacifica Radio makes the rest of
Public Radio look like the Rush Limbaugh Show. In June of 2003, Pacifica.s
KPFK-FM in Los Angeles hosted a 32-hour marathon by one Dr. Kwanku
Person-Lynn (could I make up something like this?) called "African Mental
Liberation Weekend."
Among other liberating factoids, Person-Lynn claimed Jews ran the slave
trade and that Jews and white gentiles were "the pale horse (of
Revelation) with Death as its rider and Hell close behind" . probably not
intended as a compliment. These reflections were interspersed with
pre-recorded ravings of the always informative Louis ("Judaism is a gutter
religion") Farrakhan.
How proud Ms. Hunter must be of her association with Pacifica. And what
excellent credentials for putting oneself forward as a defender of the
Jewish people.
Jews on First! and its allies . Tikkun Magazine, Michael Lerner, Noam
Chomsky, Barbra Streisand, Ed Asner, etc. . might be called the Left.s
kvetching amen corner.
The site warns of the "intimidation of judges by Christian
fundamentalists." By "intimidation" it means . criticism, analysis, reform
proposals . really, anything other then acting like a puppy that wants its
belly rubbed, in the face of judicial assaults on representative
government.
Among other smears, Jews On First! accuses Focus on the Family of "an
anti-Semitic attack on (a) federal appeals judge."
Focus is headed by Dr. James Dobson (who would bleed for Israel, if it
came to it). The anti-Semitic outrage in question? The February issue of
the organization.s Citizen magazine contains a cover story on Appeals
Court Judge Stephen Reinhardt (think Ruth Bader Ginsburg on crack
cocaine), who, in a recent ruling, said parental rights stop at the school
house door. Reinhardt also wants to take God out of the Pledge of
Allegiance.
According to Jews On First!, the Focus publication "unnecessarily called
attention to the fact that Judge Reinhardt is Jewish in a way we find
offensively anti-Semitic." (To wit: It interviewed his ex-wife, who
observed that Reinhardt "thinks about his Jewish heritage a lot.") Oh, no,
say it ain.t so!
How I wish all of the long, bloody, history of Jew-hatred amounted to no
more than this. Imagine the stereotypical Nazi from central casting in a
bad B-movie, telling his victim: "Ve haf vays of unnecessarily calling
attention to the fact that you are Jewish." Not exactly "Schindler.s List"
stuff.
The site also denounces another stalwart friend of Israel, Pat Robertson,
for calling Islam "satanic."
Now, let.s see:
The imam who.s paid $76,600 a year to serve as a chaplain for New York
City.s correctional system rails against Zionist control of the media;
French Muslims fire-bomb synagogues, and Jewish day schools;
a French Jew named Ilan Halimi is kidnapped and tortured to death by a
Muslim street gang;
the president of Iran says Israel "should be wiped off the map;"
Saudi clerics preach the annihilation of Jews (calling us "the descendants
of pigs and apes");
Egyptian television serializes a dramatization of "The Protocols of The
Elders of Zion";
Syrian President Basher al-Assad told Pope John Paul II that Jews "try to
kill all principles of divine faiths with the same mentality of betraying
Jesus Christ and torturing Him"; and
the party that constitutes the new government of the Palestinian Authority
boasts that its minions drink the blood of Jews.
...And Jewish leftists run around denouncing Pat Robertson for saying mean
things about the religion that introduced "jihad" into our political
vocabulary? (On the other hand, no Moslem publication has unnecessarily
called attention to the fact that Judge Stephen Reinhardt is Jewish. So
there.s still hope for universal brotherhood and understanding.)
By the way, with his "satanic" observation, Robertson joins that hoary
hate-monger Winston Churchill, who said of Islam, "No stronger retrograde
force exists in the world." Britain.s World War II prime minister also
admonished that the religion of peace was a breeding ground for
"improvident habits," "a degraded sensualism," and a "murderous
fanaticism" . as well as for exerting an influence that "paralyzes social
development."
Would you like to know just how dogmatically reality-disconnected the
Jewish Left is? On March 13th, FrontPageMagazine.com ran a story by David
Meir-Levi noting that an organization called Brit Tzedek v.Shalom (the
so-called Covenant of Justice and Peace) has assembled 387 RINOS (rabbis
in name only) who.ve signed a petition opposing a move in Congress to cut
off aid to the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.
The Hamas Covenant . which says the end-times will unfold after every Jew
on earth dies . recently posted a video on its website where a suicide
bomber in-waiting joyfully proclaimed: "My message to the loathed Jews is
that there is no God but Allah...We are a nation that drinks blood; and we
know that there is no better blood than the blood of Jews."
No matter how murderously psychotic its legions, Palestinian statehood is
an article of faith for the Left.
If Palestinian Muslims donned SS uniforms and began building gas chambers
and crematoria, the Jewish Left would still want to "maintain a dialogue"
with them, greased with millions from U.S. taxpayers, as they raged at the
Christian Right for wanting to display the Ten Commandments and ban gay
marriage. My generation had a term for this: "mind-boggling."
Writing in The Jewish Press on December 14, 2005 ("The Real Reason Liberal
Jews Fear Evangelical Christians.), Levi Sokolic asks: "What is it that
many Jews really fear from the perceived power of the Christian Right?
They fear for the secular, leftist causes, beliefs, practices and values
they espouse and hold dear. But then, Torah Judaism is even stronger in
its opposition to what secular Jews believe and how they define
themselves."
Abortion, gay marriage, mainstreaming homosexuality, feminism, radical
secularism (a religion-sanitized public square), philo-Islamacism . this
is the "Torah" of the Jewish Left. Its fear and loathing of Christian
conservatives is driven by their opposition to said agenda.
At least the Nazis hated Jews for the right reason: because they perceived
authentic Judaism as the principal moral force opposed to their values.
The Jewish Left hates Christian conservatives for upholding Jewish values.
It.s almost funny . in a sick sort of way.
This column originally appeared on GrasstopsUSA.com.
4. Lying about Israel in the media:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21764
5. Harvard's anti-Israel pogromchiki:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21758
6. Palestinians who listen to Pink Floyd:
In the first attack of its kind
A School Burned in Gaza on the Backdrop of Armed Clashes
A group of about 50 students burned the ground floor of the Nile Secondary
School for Boys in Tal El-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza City. The arson took
place on the backdrop of clashes between Palestinian police and a clan in
the Gaza.
7.
http://mediacrity.blogspot.com/2006/03/times-op-ed-page-sanitizes-hamas.html
Thursday, March 23, 2006
The Times Op-Ed Page Sanitizes Hamas
8. Livingstone renews anti-Jewish slurs
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1139395659565&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
By GEORGE CONGER
LONDON
Mayor Ken Livingstone has gone on the offensive, attacking his critics and
refusing to apologize for his comments Tuesday that two Jewish developers
should go back to where they came from.
Conservative London Assembly member Brian Coleman told The Jerusalem Post
that he was shocked by the mayor's response.
9. The Belfer Declaration
New York Sun Staff Editorial
March 23, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/29648
(on Harvard Pogrom)
10. THE HUMANITARIAN CASE FOR WAR IN IRAQ
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/22/the_humanitarian_case_for_war_in_iraq/
11. Call to all Red Students in Paris to Riot for something IMPORTANT!
We ordinarily are of the opinion that radical students damaging property
should have the fire hoses turned on them. We must concede, however, that
we are amused past the point of giggling by the operation of an intifada
by the yuppie students of Paris, attacking the French political
establishment, in between lattes. And now we are looking forward to
escalated violence when the rioters at last have something REALLY worth
fighting for.
We refer of course to iPods.
That is right! The amphibian politicians triggered student riots recently
by making it legal for employers to fire young workers, thus making the
employers much more willing to hire young French workers in the first
place. That drop in French unemployment was the trigger for the youth of
Paris to riot: to defend the cause of unemployment at all costs.
But now the government's assault against their iPods will result in
countless enraged Daniies-the-Red taking over the alleys of the Latin
Quarter and there is fire in their bellies!
The French assault against iPods was reported by the Wall Street Journal.
France's National Assembly on Tuesday adopted a bill to prohibit Apple
from selling the digital "iTunes" songs that can be played only on its
iPod music players. Microsoft, Sony and other companies that use digital
rights management (DRM) software code -- which limits the use of certain
files, such as music files, to certain hardware devices -- would be
affected as well. Rather than complying, Apple may simply close shop in
France. Sales of iPods and iTunes there account for less than 5% of the
company's revenue. The Wall Street Journal calls it an attack on
technology by French Luddites.
Deprived of iPods by the snotty chain-smoking snail-eating
Jerry-Lewis-movie-watching French politicians? No self-respecting
Sartre-reading beret-toting Sorbonne student will stand for THAT! It is
time for some serious CAPITALISM!
We suggest that the rest of you capitalist pigs immediately provide the
young Parisian intifaders with bludgeons manufactured by American
multinational corporations in East Asian sweatshops to use against the
constables and the amphibious politicians, along with lots of contraband
iPods!
1. Embracing Islamo-Fascists
By P. David Hornik<http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=1978>
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 22, 2006
The Jewish Left is failing the Hamas test. Seemingly, the election of the
fanatically-religious Hamas would have enabled the Jewish Left to join most
other Jews in solidarity behind Israel as a country facing a threat. The
Left tends to view religion as irrational and destructive, and secularism as
rational. During the early period of Oslo terrorism ca. 1993-1996, the
Jewish Left constantly assured us that the terror came from fundamentalist
"enemies of peace"?Hamas and Islamic Jihad?whereas the ostensibly-secular
Arafat and his PLO remained committed to conciliation.
But the empowerment of Hamas?now promoting suicide terrorism for
children<http://www.pmw.org.il/>on its children's website?has caused
no change in the Jewish Left's mindset.
True, for Israeli leftist author Amos Oz, who has steadily vilified
"fundamentalist" Jewish settlers, it is still not Hamas itself that is
yearning to make peace with Israel.
But in an op-ed called "Someone to Talk
To"<http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3229453,00.html>on the
ynet news site, Oz complains that both "Ehud Olmert and Benjamin
Netanyahu . . . claim there is no one to talk with on the Palestinian side"
and want to take unilateral measures. Instead, Oz suggests that Israel "try
to strengthen the moderate elements amongst the Palestinians, the ones
concentrated around [President Abbas's] office, to negotiate with them and
to sign agreements with them. . . . Were negotiations with the presidential
establishment to produce even a draft agreement, it could signify a
breakthrough for a 'bypass road' to avoid Hamas and could lead to victory
for the moderate Palestinian camp."
Apart from the fact that Oz predictably upholds Abbas's wholly
undeserved<http://www.science.co.il/Arab-Israeli-conflict/Articles/Ettinger-2005-01-14.asp>reputation
for moderacy?not to mention efficacy, even after over a year of
rule in which Abbas never lifted a finger against the Palestinian terror
organizations?this may also be the first time anyone has suggested simply
"bypassing" a serving totalitarian government and "negotiating agreements"
with selected elements in the regime.
And should that fail to work, "Israel," Oz assures us, "has got one other
way to bypass Hamas: to negotiate with Arab governments for a general
resolution to all elements of the conflict on the basis of the 2003 Arab
League proposal (the so-called 'Saudi Proposal')." In other words, skip over
the PA regime altogether and do it all in one shot?with the whole Arab
world, with its great fondness for Israel. For Oz, it is better to engage
publicly in ludicrous mental contortions than to join the rest of us folks
who just think we're going to have to fight Hamas.
The editorial board of Israel's left-wing daily *Haaretz*, though, accepts
the fact <http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/695993.html> that "the
Palestinians elected the parliament and government that Hamas will
apparently rule," and criticizes Labor prime-ministerial candidate Amir
Peretz for, like Oz, "want[ing] to establish a moderate track for
negotiations with the Palestinians and strengthen pragmatists, while
intentionally ignoring the fact that Hamas is in power."
Does this mean *Haaretz* has, for the time being, despaired of its dreams of
turning Israel and its environs into a southern version of the EU?peaceful,
nonchalant, and more or less productive? Not at all: "it is with these
elected [Hamas] bodies that Israel must hope to reach an agreement. . . .
while Israel's intelligence services think there is a slim chance for
political negotiations with Hamas[,] we must remember that the same
intelligence was mistaken in its assessment of Hamas' political power, and
it's possible that it is mistaken in its assessment of the changes that will
take place."
In other words, for *Haaretz *the partner for peace is?Hamas itself.
As for the American Jewish Left, the emergence of House and Senate bills
calling for an end to aid and ties with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority
has prompted objections. The notion that anyone, anytime, might act
assertively toward the Palestinians, hold them accountable for their
actions, and redirect aid to someone more deserving proves too much for the
devotees of the peace ideology.
Seymour Reich, for example, of the Israel Policy
Forum<http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20582>insists
in a
*Jerusalem Post*
op-ed<http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1139395582395&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter>
that
"US policy?and any Congressional legislation?should . . . provide
opportunities and inducements to Palestinians to publicly commit to
achieving a two-state solution using nonviolent means and accepting the
State of Israel, and allow for engaging with those Palestinians who make
such a commitment." Read: sustain the dream of bribing the Palestinians to
adopt Western values after, seemingly, it had been painfully discredited.
At the same time, Reich pontificates, the US must "make certain [its] funds
are not used to advance the goals or methods of Hamas." Read: micromanage a
distant, corrupt, anarchic, Third World society to ensure that funds end up,
and stay in, the hands of alleged good guys and in no way abet the aims of a
terrorist government and a general population of people inundated with
anti-Semitic propaganda since earliest childhood.
For the Jewish Left both in Israel and abroad, dreams die hard. But so do
the Israeli victims of Palestinian terror that is enabled by those who lack
the courage to look at reality and substitute fantasies of friendship with
those who loathe them.
2. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21758
David Duke and Harvard's New Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
3. Liberal pseudo-research:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=20198
4. Justice in Jericho:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21727
5. What Israel Lobby?
March 22, 2006
Israel Lobby
By RUTH R. WISSE
March 22, 2006; Page A16
In Boston in the early 1980s, I was asked by an Irish cab driver what
language I had been speaking with a fellow passenger we had just dropped
off. When I told him, Hebrew, the language of Israel, the man exclaimed:
"Israel! That's America's fighting front line! Israel fights our battles
better than we could fight them ourselves."
Now Professors Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and
John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago would have us believe that
the Boston cabbie was a dupe of the "unmatched power of the Israel Lobby."
Their essay in the latest London Review of Books -- based on a longer
working paper on the Kennedy Center Web site -- contends that the U.S.
government and most of its citizens are fatally in thrall to a "coalition
of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer U.S. foreign
policy in a pro-Israel direction." Though not all members of said
"coalition" are Jews, and though not all Jews are members, the major
schemers are such key organizations as the America-Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish
Organizations, joined by neoconservatives, think tanks, and a large
network of accomplices including (they will learn to their surprise) The
Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
The thesis of Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer is remarkably broad and
singleminded: A loose association of special-interest groups has persuaded
the country to sacrifice its interests to a foreign power, thereby
jeopardizing "not only U.S. security but that of much of the rest of the
world." Israel, it is claimed, hurts every facet of American life: U.S.
emergency aid to Israel during the War of 1973 triggered a damaging OPEC
oil embargo. Israel is a liability in the war on terror: It goaded the
U.S. into the war in Iraq, betrays America through espionage, and destroys
American democracy by quashing all criticism. Recently the Israel Lobby --
a term the authors render with a sinister capital "L" -- has begun to
intimidate the universities by trying to create a field of Israel Studies
and monitoring anti-Israel bias.
Were it not for the Lobby, the U.S. would have nothing to fear in the
world, not even a nuclear threat from Iran: "If Washington could live with
a nuclear Soviet Union, a nuclear China or even a nuclear North Korea, it
can live with a nuclear Iran. And that is why the Lobby must keep up
constant pressure on politicians to confront Tehran." Not Iran but the
Lobby is the true threat to America's security by trying to compel the
U.S. to oppose Iran against its interests. Most dangerously, Jews control
the man at the top: In the spring of 2002 "[Ariel] Sharon and the Lobby
took on the president of the United States and triumphed." Given the
creative scope of these charges, one is surprised to find no hint of
Israel's role in the spread of avian flu.
Organized as a prosecutorial indictment rather than an inquiry, the essay
does not tell us why the "Israel Lobby" should have formed in the first
place. The 21 countries of the Arab League with ties to 1.2 billion
Muslims world-wide are nowhere present as active political agents. There
is no mention of the Arab rejection of the United Nations's partition of
Palestine in 1948; no 58-year Arab League boycott of Israel and companies
trading with Israel; no Arab attacks of 1948, 1967 and 1973; no
Arab-Soviet resolution at the U.N. defining Zionism as racism; no monetary
and strategic support for Arab terrorism against Jews and Israel; and no
Hamas dedication to destroying the Jewish state. The authors do not ask
why Arab aggression and Muslim "rage against Israel" should have morphed
into a war against the U.S. and the West. Israel's existence elicits Arab
and Muslim hostility, hence in their view Israel is to blame for Arab and
Muslim carnage.
Judging from the initial reaction to their article (one of my students
called it "wacko quacko"), the two professors may be subjected to more
ridicule than rejoinder. Several Web sites are in the process of listing
all their bloopers, distortions and omissions. Their tone resembles
nothing so much as Wilhelm Marr's 1879 pamphlet, "The Victory of Judaism
over Germandom," which declared of the Jews that "There is no stopping
them . . . German culture has proved itself ineffective and powerless
against this foreign power. This is a fact; a brute inexorable fact." A
parallel edition of these two texts might highlight some American
refinements on the European model, such as the anti-Semitic lie that
"Israeli citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship." In fact,
unlike neighboring Arab countries, Israeli citizenship is not conditional
on religion or race.
Yet it would be a mistake to treat this article on the "Israel Lobby" as
an attack on Israel alone, or on its Jewish defenders, or on the
organizations and individuals it singles out for condemnation. Its true
target is the American public, which now supports Israel with higher
levels of confidence than ever before. When the authors imply that the
bipartisan support of Israel in Congress is a result of Jewish influence,
they function as classic conspiracy theorists who attribute decisions to
nefarious alliances rather than to the choices of a democratic electorate.
Their contempt for fellow citizens dictates their claims of a gullible and
stupid America. Their insistence that American support for Israel is
bought and paid for by the Lobby heaps scorn on American judgment and
values.
No wonder David Duke, white supremacist and former leader of the Ku Klux
Klan, claimed that this article "validated every major point I have been
making since even before the [Iraq] war started." But he and
Walt-Mearsheimer have it backwards: Americans don't support Israel because
of the strength of any lobby; Israel earns American support the hard way,
for the very reasons the Boston cabbie cited several decades ago.
Ms. Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and
professor of comparative literature at Harvard.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114299039902704761.html
1. Harvard Biased Pogrom against Israel:
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5342
Please read this piece in full, but here is a short excerpt from it:
Harvard Professor Stephen Walt and University of Chicago Professor John
Mearsheimer have just published a lengthy diatribe against what they call
the .Israel lobby.. Their article appeared in the London Review of Books,
and a longer version has been released as a Harvard Kennedy School working
paper. The two professors are employed by prestigious universities. But
their new paper, a collection of innuendo, half truths, and outright
misrepresentations, fails the test of academic integrity and honest
research.
It is a work without a trace of balance, in essence no more than an angry
polemic disguised as academic research. .The Israel Lobby. is a long,
bitter, op-ed piece given a patina of respectability because of where the
authors are employed. They may feel themselves protected from criticism
by tenure and their titles. They live and work in the proverbial ivory
towers of an academic environment that has become an Arab-subsidized lobby
against Israel.
Walt and Mearsheimer have an axe to grind. They don.t much care for
Israel, and they resent the power of those whom they believe have
influenced American policymakers to support Israel in its long conflict
with some of the Arab states and the Palestinians. The authors do pay lip
service to defending Israel.s right to exist. But their attacks on Israel
fail every basic test of fairness, and lead one to believe they would
prefer a world without Israel.
One blatant example of this concerns Israel.s role in the 1991 Gulf War.
The authors condemn Israel, though it did exactly what the US asked, by
electing not to enter the war despite absorbing Iraqi scud missile attacks
that killed and wounded hundreds of Israelis. Israel.s crime, according to
the authors, was the placement of Patriot batteries in the country to
defend against the scuds. The Patriots, of course, were a failure, and
given the American instructions for Israel to stay out of the war, were a
minimum contribution by the US to Israel.s self-defense.
But the real problem for Walt and Mearsheimer would seem to be Israel.s
existence at the time of the conflict. If it were not there, the US could
have ignored it. And were Israel gone, the US could focus on what Walt
and Mearsheimer have elsewhere argued should be the real strategic goal of
our policy in the Middle East: securing a continuing source of cheap oil
from the region.
See also: http://www.nysun.com/pf.php?id=29380
David Duke Claims to Be Vindicated By a Harvard Dean
BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
March 20, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/29380
A paper recently co-authored by the academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy
School of Government about the allegedly far-reaching influence of an
"Israel lobby" is winning praise from white supremacist David Duke.
The Palestine Liberation Organization mission to Washington is
distributing the paper, which also is being hailed by a senior member of
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization.
But the paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," by the Kennedy
School's Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago,
is meeting with a more critical reception from many of those it names as
part of the lobby. The 83-page "working paper" claims a network of
journalists, think tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials have
seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq.
Included in this network, the authors say, are the editors of the New York
Times, the scholars at the Brookings Institution, students at Columbia,
"pro-Israel" senior officials in the executive branch, and
"neoconservative gentiles" including columnist George Will.
Duke, a former Louisiana state legislator and one-time Ku Klux Klan
leader, called the paper "a great step forward," but he said he was
"surprised" that the Kennedy School would publish the report.
2. Overeating Terrorhoids:
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=9556
3. Shirt Story
By Jay D. Homnick
Published 3/20/2006 12:05:16 AM
Recently I visited my brother's home and met his sister-in-law for the
first time in more than a decade. "You know," she said, "when you close
your eyes you sound just like your brother." "Yes," I responded. "That's
why I always keep my eyes open." Sometimes you have to believe your eyes
more than your ears.
The New York Times editorialized in a huffing tone this weekend on
Israel's raid to "free" prisoners from the Palestinian prison in Jericho.
These men, who numbered among them the assassin of an Israeli Cabinet
Minister, were terribly humiliated, snapped the shirty Times editorialist,
by being marched out in their underwear. This "trampled the dignity of any
Palestinian watching that spectacle." Well, for once I agree. And do you
know why? Because they were all fat.
Yep, fat. Portly. Stout. Chubby. These killers and terrorists, ostensibly
being held in maximum security, all look like Firestone execs advertising
their spare tires. On second thought, nothing spare about these fellows.
Full and fulsome. Not having to impress any women until they arrive in
Paradise has really gone to their heads, or more accurately, to their
hips. So this is certainly a diplomatic embarrassment for the
Palestinians, as their prisoners are shown to be eating better than the
populace. Luncheon in the dungeon turns out to be double portions in the
oubliette.
Sure enough, the Times of London reveals, it turns out that these boys had
been sitting pretty in those erstwhile jails. They were keeping exotic
birds, communicating with their cronies by cell phone, and smoking Cuban
cigars. One piece is notably missing from this story about the "country
club" prison: where is the deluxe weight room? The only weight those
fellers were lifting was just some of that "settling by volume" they warn
about on the cereal box. That's really putting the ham back into Hamas.
Which brings us to the Palestinian leadership, if that's not an oxymoron.
Clearly, they were not running a jail in any penal sense. Either they were
trying to, in which case they're inept, or they were not, which makes them
corrupt. Howbeit, their job they were certainly not doing. And what good
are a bunch of fascists if they can't even make the trains run on time?
This answers the complaint of Israeli disrespect; the other side doesn't
deserve respect. The problem still remains: what about tomorrow? Israel
retaking those areas is not an option, nor has democratization produced a
really viable government. What is the answer? Is there an answer? Allowing
the situation to slide into anarchy is rife with the greatest danger of
all, namely a combustible tinderbox in Israel's backyard.
And to be very honest, no one has a real solution short of importing a
million old schoolmarms to civilize the heathens. Neither Sharon nor
Olmert nor Netanyahu nor Peretz nor Peres knows how to turn these guys
into mensches. Sharon used to think he could beat it out of them and Peres
used to think that the chance to make a buck would turn them all into
be-bopping yuppies. All of those illusions have long since sunk deep into
the human quicksand that is "the Palestinian people."
The only sliver of hope is that they will somehow take control of their
own destiny and conclude that violence, to use a phrase from twelve-step
programs, "avails them naught." That they had ought do aught more
productive. It's just that they don't want to hear it from us. No amount
of lecturing or posturing by Israelis or Americans will penetrate their
hauteur. Olmert (extending Sharon's policy) is gambling that if he parks
them behind a wall and lets them do their own thing, they just might defy
all odds and get a grip. It's an awfully slender reed to build a future
upon.
One thing is clear. For that to happen, they must get as disgusted with
the bloodthirsty Hamas guys as they are with the sleazy and
social-drinker-bloodthirsty Fatah fellas. The last election was a very
sharp step in the wrong direction. They bought the image of the lean, mean
fighting machine, Bruce Dern playing Cassius or some such thing. Elect
Hamas and watch these grim inexorable proto-Zarqawis send the Jews back to
Europe.
So Israel decided it was time to make them take their shirts off. In a
nation of skinny people, the great warriors turned out to be a bunch of
paunchy couch potatoes smoking Cuban cigars. The Times wrings its hands
about the Palestinians feeling humiliated because their great
civilian-killers are down to their drawers instead of drawing down. But
they miss the populist anger that will register when they see their
swashbucklers with more avoirdupois than savoir-faire.
The emperor has no clothes: a sallow and adipose specimen is he. He needs
to put his palate on a stricter regimen, then who knows? Maybe he'll
produce a more palatable regime.
4. Goobers:
http://joshuapundit.blogspot.com/2006/03/jimmy-carter-soils-himself-in-print.html
5. It's for the boyds:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=49346
6. You know how holidays of one day in Israel take two days in the
Diaspora?
Well:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1139395642558&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
7. The Left loves terror so much it is silent even when terrorists kkill
leftists:
http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock200603200806.asp
8. Toilet Socialism:
http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock200603060822.asp
9. Columbia U and Libya:
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/eljahmi200603200808.asp
10. Harvard students for liberating Iran:
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/kavulla200603201155.asp
11. Yale Atrocity:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110008115&ojrss=wsj
1. I assume by now everyone has heard about the ludicrous "study" made by
two Bash-Israel "academics", published by Harvard
(http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf)
, claiming that Israel controls US forign policy and hence US foreign
policy serves Israel's interests and not America's. The authors have
trouble explaining why US foreign policy so often COMPROMISES Israel's
interests and overtly harms them. But on second thought, seeing which
sorts of lemmings and proponents of national self-annihilation have run
Israel for the past 15 years, I am starting to wonder if the thesis that
Israeli politicians control US foreign policy might not be correct after
all. Why else would the US be pursuing such foolish and harmful policies
- harmful to Israel?
If these "academics" had a shred of intellectual honesty, they would of
course document the obvious, namely, that it is not America's foreign and
defense policies that are dominated by Israeli pressures, but rather it is
Israel's foreign and defense policies that are dictated by American
pressures. Down to and including every nook and twist in the "defense
wall".
2. The British Parliament wants to be Bombed by Al-Qaeda!
The tabloid SUN in the UK reports that the House of Commons had an
interesting guest this past week. A Palestinian terrorism allegedly linked
to al Qaeda has visited the Houses of Parliament as the guest of a Labour
Party MP. The terrorhoid in question is former detainee Mahmoud Suliman
Ahmed Abu Rideh, who even sat in the Commons public gallery for a debate.
He was invited to Westminster on Tuesday by Lord Ahmed, who met him at
Regent.s Park mosque three weeks ago. The terrorist was even given a
special security pass for his Parliamentary visit by his sponsor, allowing
him to enter and leave the premises through the special doorway for MPs,
without any search.
Shadow Home Secretary David Davis last night said Abu Rideh had been able
to.walk around one of the UK.s biggest terror targets..
Maybe Labor MPs were not concerned about al-Qaeda having blown up the tube
trains in London cause they never take the tube to "work"?
3, Shortest Books:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=20115
4. When knowing how to count is racist:
http://antiprotester.blogspot.com/2006/03/police-racism-in-math-test.html
5. Classroom Brainwashing:
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/thomassowell/2006/03/14/189664.html
6. The answer to those 400 anti-Semitic Rabbis
http://www.petitiononline.com/biac2006/petition.html
Please take a minute to sign this petition and share this message with
your list. Although completely non-binding, a significant number of
signers would impress any U.S. politician.
1. And Down Came the Jericho Walls!!
by Steven Plaut
Okay. SO let's put things in perspective.
Was the Israeli raid on the Jericho prison this past week necessary and
justified? Absolutely! The "prison" was little more than the headquarters
for the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and for other
terrorists, who were operating and directing terrorism openly from
there. They were just using the prison as their Ramada Inn, sleeping there
at night to keep the Americans happy, while allowing the Palestinian
Authority to maintain the pretense of keeping the terrorists and mass
murderers locked up. Under an earlier Israeli appeasement, instead
of Israel insisting that the Palestinian Authority live up to its Oslo
obligations and turn wanted terrorist murderers over to it, a pusillanimous
"compromise" was reached with American intervention, allowing the murderers
to be "jailed" in "prisons" run by the PLO. I have stayed at worse hotels
and motels.
Was the Israeli operation coordinated with the Americans and
British? Israel, the US and UK are all saying no, which means it probably
was. The Islamofascist savages are foaming at the mouth at all three
countries, which is no doubt the very best result of the raid. Just us
anti-terrorism democracies, getting together once again.
Western leftist "peace activists" are being snatched up from the streets of
Gaza and the West Bank by the Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Nearly all the
other anti-Israel bleeding hearts and busybodies who came into those areas
to help the Palestinians and their "armed struggle" have fled, with their
tails between their legs, back to the safety of "apartheid Israel". Gaza
and the West Bank have been cleansed of the International Solidarity
Movement, Western pro-terror activists, and their copycats. Suddenly the
pro-terror yuppies are not anxious to serve as human shields for the
Jericho terrorists in their soiled underwear! And that alone is such a
lovely benefit that it justifies the entire operation!
Was it timed to help acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert get a better
electoral victory? No doubt.
Was it an unqualified success? No, it was a qualified success, mixed with
the usual dose of Israeli stupidity, incompetence and muddle-headedness.
It was a success because the sight of Palestinian murderers, including the
Palestinian Authority "guards" ('concierges' would be a more accurate
term), being chased out of the "prison" in their stained underwear, unable
to control their bladders in fear, was the first real demonstration that
Israel was willing to use force to survive in quite a while! The sight of
Israeli leaders choosing to shoot mortars at terrorists rather than begging
them for talks was a shot of pride into the national vertebra. Terrorists
being marched off to an Israeli prison after hours of their usual rhetoric
being broadcast out of the prison, via satellite phones provided the
"prisoners" by their concierges, was the funniest thing since the Egyptian
soldiers in Sinai in 1967 ran off, leaving their shoes behind in the Sinai
sand!
So much for Islamofascist rhetoric about how they are all prepared to die
for their sacred cause. The PFLP terrorists had always been perfectly
willing to dispatch other people to their deaths as suicide bombers, but
prefer prison food to acting out a Palestinian Masada.
And all this on Purim, no less, the anniversary of the downfall of Haman in
the Scroll of Esther.
The Jericho operation was a typical Israeli boondoggle because the
terrorists, including the murderers of the Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam
Ze'evi, were not summarily killed, as they should have been. They were
foolishly captured alive, and so now serve as an open invitation for the
terrorist savages to grab Israeli civilians, as hostages to trade. It
would be impossible to find a better illustration of the mindlessness and
utter stupidity of Israel's refusal to institute a death penalty. When the
"prisoners" refused at first to surrender in Jericho, a single Daisy Cutter
could have made a far better statement about peace and Israel's
determination to resist than all the show trials Olmert's people now wish
to run for the captured terrorists: murderers who will be represented by
the usual Israeli Marxist Jewish lawyers, ever ready to defend Arab mass
murderers of Jews.
There are a number of interesting tangents to the Jericho story. First,
the terrorists holed up in the Jericho "prison" surrendered when the walls
started to be broken down by an Israeli bulldozer, no doubt a
Caterpiller. It was like something right out of the Book of Joshua, minus
the trumpets! For the past couple of years the Left has been demonizing
Caterpiller, Inc., because Rachel Corrie, the clueless undergraduate who
died when she positioned herself where an Israeli bulldozer driver could
not see her in her attempt to interrupt an anti-terror operation, died in a
Palestinian medical facility after being injured. The 'dozer in question
was a Caterpiller. After the Jericho raid, Caterpiller stock jumped by
more than a full percentage point on the New York Stock Exchange, and the
US stock markets boomed!
Second, the raid showed how ridiculous is the media representation of the
PLO's Abu Mazen as a "moderate". When Israel simply did what the PLO had
committed itself to do with the imprisoned terrorists in the Oslo Accords,
Abu Mazen foamed at the mouth at this nefarious Israeli "crime". He was
echoed by the pro-terror "anarchists" from the ISM, safe in their overseas
Starbucks. Marching the remaining ISM people out of Israel at bayonet
point in their underwear would make a great encore to the Jericho raid!
Third, the main target of the raid was one Ahmed Sa'adat, chief terrorist
in the PFLP, who had ordered the assassination of Israeli cabinet minister
Ze'evi, and the actual murderers, who were all in the Jericho
"prison". The leftist moonbats, especially the anarcho-fascists, are
already screaming out demands for the captured terrorists to be freed, and
expressing their "solidarity" with the Palestinian nazis. Amnesty
International rushed out to support the captured murderers, having never
uttered a word about the murders of Jewish civilians perpetrated by these
same people. The viciously anti-Jewish web site Counterpunch ran a piece
denouncing Israel's raid on the Jericho prison, written by anti-Semite
Jonathan Cook, who has a long track record of cheerleading terrorism. In
the past he also sang the praises of "The Engineer", a Palestinian mass
bomber of Jewish children.
Sa'adat and the Palestinian murderers had long been proclaimed heroes by
the Genocide of Jews Now crowd. Even some Israeli extremists, notably the
anti-Semitic lecturer in political science Neve Gordon, had in the past
served as human shields to prevent the Israeli army from seizing these same
terrorists from PLO-controlled buildings. Gordon had earlier gone to
Ramallah to embrace Arafat when Arafat was refusing to turn the terrorists
who killed Ze'evi over to Israel, and had been arrested for interfering
with Israeli military operations against terrorists. His "anarchist"
colleague from Ben Gurion University, the home of more anti-Israel
extremists than any other school in Israel, Kobi Snitz, was among the first
to rush forward to show his support for the captured murderers, quickly
joined by a group of Israeli Taliban Jakes. Perhaps Olmert should consider
sending in bulldozers for a siege of the Department of Political Science at
Ben Gurion University next? Maybe with the sociology department at Tel
Aviv University after that?
Gordon is not the only Israeli extremist who likes to lunch with
terrorists. A viciously anti-Israel ex-Israeli communist lawyer in the UK,
Daniel Machover, has been serving as the lawyer for Sa'adat for some time,
and is once again serving as mouthpiece for the mass murderer. Machover
led the campaign in Britain to boycott Israeli universities, and also was
behind the attempt to indict Israeli army officers visiting the UK as
private persons as "war criminals". Machover's father had set up a Maoist
pro-terror seditious organization in Israel in the 1960s (called Matzpen).
The Eurotrash were also coming out to denounce Israel's raid. The EU
condemned the actions by both Israel and the Palestinians. "We strongly
condemn the attack on the prison in Jericho by Israeli forces as well as
the resulting kidnappings and acts of violence in the Palestinian
territories," Josep Borrell, president of the European Parliament said in a
statement. [Now there is a courageous stand! Like denouncing bin Laden
and George Bush in the same breath.]
The cowardly evacuation of the prison in the first place by US and British
guards was as good a demonstration as any why Israel cannot rely on
"observers" and patrols manned by anyone other than Israeli troops.
Finally, since the term is once again being bandied about in the aftermath
of the raid, you know how the Left likes to whine about how Israel is an
"apartheid state"?
Well, I though you might want to learn the exact definition of Israeli
apartheid:
It is when a leftist Israeli Jewish professor of sociology spends the
morning getting his car fixed at an Arab-owned garage, stops to pick up his
pills at an Arab-owned pharmacy, calls his Arab renovations contractor
about the work on his house, pays his Arab gardener, checks the results of
his blood test with the Arab lab technician, stops for lunch at an
Arab-owned restaurant, takes a cab owned and driven by an Arab to campus,
and then lectures his Arab and Jewish college students about how Israel is
such an apartheid state.
2. Le-Vine, Le Dope
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21675
3. Terrorist Cheerleaders defeated:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21702
4. Terrorism at Yale
http://media.yaf.org/latest/03_14_06.cfm
5. From the Wall St Journal:
March 17, 2006
Moussaoui's Mess
March 17, 2006; Page A12
The Zacarias Moussaoui legal circus may finally soon leave town, though
not without teaching everyone a few lessons about terrorists and civilian
courts. In the more than four years since he was charged with six counts
of conspiracy related to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the "20th hijacker"
has mocked the U.S. criminal justice system.
He finally pleaded guilty last year, and this week at his sentencing trial
the al Qaeda operative got some help from an unexpected quarter -- the
U.S. government. A lawyer working for the prosecution was found to have
improperly coached several key government witnesses, leading Judge Leonie
Brinkema to bar their testimony. As a result, Moussaoui may be spared the
death penalty and instead spend the rest of his life in prison.
The witness coaching was a prosecutorial blunder, which is a shame, but
that is not the main issue here. A bigger mistake was President Bush's
decision nearly four and a half years ago to assign Moussaoui to trial in
a civilian criminal court. As we know from captured al Qaeda training
manuals, recruits are instructed in how to exploit the West's legal system
if they are caught. The lesson of the Moussaoui trial is that the regular
criminal justice system isn't up to the job of trying most terrorists.
Moussaoui would have been the ideal defendant to inaugurate the
President's then newly announced -- and subsequently much maligned --
military commissions. Much of the evidence against him was unclassified
and could have been produced in open court. If he had demanded access to
classified information -- as he did during his criminal trial -- it would
have been an easy matter to seal the courtroom and show it to his lawyers,
all of whom would have had security clearances. The criminal prosecution
was a missed opportunity to show the world how trial by military tribunal
would work.
Which brings us to Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which the U.S. Supreme Court will
hear later this month. The case challenges the constitutionality of the
military commissions announced by Mr. Bush on November 13, 2001, to try
suspected terrorists. It further argues that the tribunals are unlawful
under the Geneva Convention. A lower court ruled in 2004 that military
commissions violated international law, a decision overturned last year by
the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The case was brought by Salim Ahmed
Hamdan, who was Osama bin Laden's driver and is being held at Guantanamo.
There's a twist, though, that raises another legal point. Since the
lower-court rulings in Hamdan, Congress passed and the President signed
the Detainee Treatment Act -- also known as the Graham Amendment. The law
narrows the right of Gitmo detainees to bring suit in federal court; thus
if the Supreme Court decides that Graham is constitutional, the High Court
will lack jurisdiction to proceed in Hamdan. (Under Graham, detainees can
still challenge either their designation as an enemy combatant or their
conviction in a tribunal to a single court, the D.C. Court of Appeals.)
And if that happens, the military commissions may at last proceed. Oral
argument in Hamdan is set for March 28. Meanwhile, as the Administration
decides whether to proceed with the death-penalty trial against Moussaoui,
there's a certain moral irony in a confessed terrorist being saved by the
very legal system that he spent three years railing against.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114256500513300970.html
6. Olmert's Anti-Missile Policy:
http://israelnn.com/news.php3?id=100300
7. The Pogromchiks come to Georgetown:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21700
8. A real hero!
http://israelnn.com/news.php3?id=100332
9. Conservative "rabbi" wants us to sympathize with Haman. Really:
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2006/03/sympathy-for-haman-and-hamas.html
1. The American Nazis Have a New Cause
The "National Socialist Movement" is a Nazi splinter, claiming to be an
actual nazi "party," with headquarters in Minneapolis. It is getting
harder and harder to tell the difference between it and Counterpunch.
The "National Socialist Movement" web site links to that of Norman
Finkelstein, the Holocaust Denier from DePaul "University" who is also a
regular on Counterpunch.
And new the "National Socialist Movement", whose motto is "Fighting for
Race and Nation", has taken up the cause of Rachel Corrie
(http://www.nsm88.com/index2.html). Corrie, you
recall, committed suicide as part of an attempt to interfere with an
Israeli military anti-terror operation. She placed herself in a position
where an Israeli bulldozer operator could not see her. She was crushed and
then died in a Palestinian medical facility, probably from improper
treatrment.
She is now a heroine for the American Nazis, the REAL ones and not just
the Alexander Cockburn group. The "National Socialist Movement web site is
outraged, almost like Vanessa Redgrave writing on Counterpunch, that the
propaganda play about Corrie celebrating Arab terrorism will not be staged
in New York, or - as it is called on the nazi web site - Jew York City.
Again like Counterpunch, the Nazi web site is full of rants about Jews
controlling the US government.
The main difference between Cockburn's site and the Nazi site is that the
latter has almost no readers, whereas the Counterpunch nazis do.
2. More on Rabbi Moonbeam:
http://marathonpundit.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_marathonpundit_archive.html#11423$
3. New Chamish Conspiracy Detected:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/46228
4. Olmert will ruin the Economy:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1139395612182&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
5. Florida Academic Jihadist:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21656
6. Bush's Light-fingered advisor:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21671
7. The People's Republic of DePaul, again:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21668
8. 'Hands Off My Fridge, Meathead'
By SHIKHA DALMIA and LISA SNELL
March 16, 2006; Page A12
LOS ANGELES -- Hollywood film director turned political activist Rob
Reiner believes that he ought to be exempt from accountability because of
his good intentions. That was the clear message from his press conference
on Tuesday, called to address accusations that he violated a state ban
when he diverted taxpayer dollars from First 5 -- an unelected commission
to promote children's health that he's headed for six years -- to run an
ad campaign promoting his latest ballot initiative called Preschool for
All. A bipartisan group of senators has ordered an audit of the
commission's funds. Mr. Reiner, who first rose to fame when he played
Meathead, Archie Bunker's liberal son-in-law on "All in the Family," vowed
not to resign, because he wants to do "right by the four-year-olds."
This is not the commission's only questionable contract. First 5 has
received to date $800 million -- about 20% -- of the tobacco proceeds that
Mr. Reiner convinced California voters to impose on themselves in a 1998
referendum. Of this, the commission has awarded contracts totaling about
$230 million to firms or individuals known to Mr. Reiner -- some of them
without competitive bidding. Meanwhile, the Sacramento County District
Attorney's Office is mulling whether to launch its own investigation to
determine if there was any cronyism involved in awarding the ad campaign
contract to a firm with long-standing ties to Mr. Reiner.
Mr. Reiner is unfazed by all of this. The commission's ad campaign, he
says, was perfectly legitimate because it was merely informing parents of
the benefits of preschool -- not telling them how to vote on his new
initiative. No doubt this is the kind of creative thinking that has made
him such a successful Hollywood director. If state authorities buy this
logic, however, they will effectively legitimize a scheme to leverage the
tax proceeds from one referendum to support another involving still more
taxes.
But now that Mr. Reiner has succeeded in putting his Preschool for All
initiative on the ballot, the most immediate issue for voters is not how
he financed it, but what he is selling them. The initiative sounds like a
great bargain: By imposing a 1.7% tax on couples making over $800,000
($400,000 for individuals), it seeks to generate $2.4 billion to fund
three hours of free preschool every day for California's four-year-olds.
Yet even the Reiner folks don't expect to enroll all four-year-olds in the
program -- just 70% of them. However, 66% of California's four-year-olds
already attend some form of preschool. This means that $2.4 billion will
fund 22,000 new kids -- about $109,000 per new preschooler, according to a
recent analysis by the Reason Foundation. For this kind of money, a lot of
poor parents could put their kids through a good state college and
graduate school and still have some change left for a family field trip to
the Galapagos.
Mr. Reiner's spokesman Nathan James disputes Reason's cost estimate on
grounds that although 66% of four-year-olds currently get preschool, only
about 25% get "quality" preschool. "It could be baby-sitting or throwing a
kid in front of a TV set," he told the New York Sun. The proof of the
pudding, however, is in the eating -- and what's coming out of Oklahoma
and Georgia, two states that implemented universal preschool over a decade
ago -- is not particularly appetizing. Last year, the gains in reading
scores of fourth graders in both states ranked among the bottom 10 on the
National Assessment of Education Progress tests -- the premier benchmark
for comparing student performance across states. Even more stunning, not
one of the 10 best performing states had universal preschool programs.
Even before Mr. Reiner went on the offensive this Tuesday, some California
Democrats were beginning to wonder about the wisdom of his scheme. Two of
them, Tom Torlakson of Antioch and Don Perata of Oakland, have publicly
withdrawn support from his initiative, citing concerns that it would only
subsidize kids who already have preschool, not those who most need it.
Indeed, because universal preschool programs are by definition not
means-tested, they help not the poor so much as middle-income or wealthy
families who are better at negotiating the system. In Quebec, for
instance, which implemented the most ambitious universal preschool program
eight years ago, about half of the government-funded day care spots are
taken up by families in the top 30% income bracket who can well afford to
pay out-of-pocket.
But this is not the only way that Mr. Reiner's attempt to play Robin Hood
would end up back-firing on the poor. An analysis by LECG, an economic
consulting firm in California, has found that the Reiner tax-hike would
actually result in more than $4 billion in general fund losses over the
first five years as rich taxpayers either flee the state or report less
taxable income. This would either mean cuts in health, welfare and other
programs for the poor -- or an even bigger fiscal deficit. There is a
better way to help poor parents without soaking taxpayers or jinxing the
budget. California already spends $3 billion on preschool. It would make
far more sense to hand this money to lower- and middle-income families in
the form of targeted preschool tax credits.
Mr. Reiner's ad campaign mentions neither the indifferent results of
universal preschool nor its budgetary consequences. This, in itself, would
not be a problem, because a democracy counts not on any one person's
script, but many partial ones from numerous interested parties, to get the
full story across to voters. But there is a problem when someone has
unfair access to taxpayer dollars to bankroll his script over others. This
is why California authorities need to give close scrutiny to Mr. Reiner's
tactics -- and California voters to his grand taxing plans. As Archie
Bunker would say: Hands off my fridge, Meathead.
Ms. Dalmia is a senior analyst and Ms. Snell the director of education
policy at the Reason Foundation.
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