Posted 12/28/2012 12:37:00 PM

1. More Petard

Recently the tenured chattering classes in Israel were hysterical
when it turned out that one of their own, the leftist political
science professor Dan Avnon, found himself the target of a campaign of
boycott against Israel. Avnon had wanted to spend some time at an
Australian University, at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at
the University of Sydney, no doubt churning out leftist propaganda,
but the local leftists were boycotting anything and anyone associated
with Israel. (An earlier posting about this is attached below.)

The Israeli tenured chatterers were rather upset. The same people
who have spent years promoting divestment and boycotts of Israel never
meant for it to apply to the GOOD Israelis, the anti-Israel leftist
Israelis. The chat forums of the Israeli professors overflowed with
cries of anguish. What about free academic inquiry for us good
leftists?, they squealed. Where is the democracy? The academic
freedom? The free scholarship?

Well, we will tell you where the free academic inquiry is. Just
ask Moshe Foxman Shaal. He is today a PhD student at Tel Aviv
University. But before going there, he did his MA at the Hebrew
University in their political science department.

While there, he approached a senior faculty member with his
proposal to write his Master's thesis about the "national-liberal"
philosophical doctrines of Menachem Begin. Yes, liberal. Begin was a
stickler for the rule of law, for due process, for liberal values, for
freedom of speech, and he even gave lip service to economic liberalism
(although failed miserably to deliver on that when he was in power).

Foxman-Shaal approached the Hebrew University don to be his thesis
supervisor. The professor replied that he would only agree to be the
supervisor if Foxman-Shaal wrote his thesis about how Menachem Begin
was really a fascist, and otherwise he refused.

And just who was that Hebrew University professor? You guessed it!
(Drumroll….) It was none other than Dan Avnon. You know, the
symbol of free academic inquiry, objective scholarship, and freedom of
speech, who is now the martyr saint of the Fascist Left. (Hat tip,
Makor Rishon, Dec. 21, 2012)

Foxman-Shaal is an interesting writer - see this (in Hebrew):
http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/270/346.html

***
Previous posting:
Don't you just love it when a leftist moonbat gets hoist with his own petard?

Well, meet the pro-Palestinian Professor Dan Avnon, from the Hebrew
University's School of Public Policy and its uniformly leftist
Political Science Department ( http://politics.huji.ac.il/avnon.html
). He is a leftist who objects to the idea that Israel should be a
Jewish state (http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/422/071.html?hp=1&cat=479&loc=5),
although he does not seem to have any problem with any Arab Moslem
states.

Well, he found himself boycotted by an anti-Israel institute in
Australia, one so anti-Israel that they hosted Ilan Pappe. The
anti-Israel crowd is upset because here Avnon is a leftist but he fell
victim to BDS (boycotting Israel, divestment, sanctions by the Bigoted
Dingbats and Scoundrels (BDS))! Boycotting OTHER Jews of course would
be no problem.

For more details, see also

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/across-the-divide-boycott-shocks-unity-professor-dan-avnon/story-e6frgcjx-1226532541040




2. There are some people out there who have the quaint idea that if
you want to get rid of a politician you do not like, you should
organize voters to vote against him or her.

Such an archaic notion of course is rejected by the enlightened
ones in Israel. When THEY want to get rid of a politician they do not
like, they get the partisan conscripted leftist Attorney General to
file criminal charges against that person, based upon the unsupported
allegations of a disgruntled ex-employee who had been canned with
cause by that same politician. When the leftist Attorney General
cannot find any actual law that was broken by that politician, he
makes one up.

The issue is not whether you approve or disapprove of Israel's
fiery Avigdor Lieberman. I myself have mixed feelings about him.
People who dislike him can vote against him.

But Leftwing fascism rejects voting as a way to determine who
should be in power.

Lieberman is being indicted by a partisan and biased Attorney
General who has the political agenda and interests of the Left as his
guidebook for jurisprudence. He wants to indict Lieberman for
something that is not even a crime: A different Israeli diplomat
leaked to Lieberman that Israel had requested information about
Lieberman's personal financial affairs from a foreign country for an
investigation. Lieberman did not run to the cops to rat on that
diplomat. Since when is THAT a crime?

Lieberman later appointed that same diplomat to another post.
Lieberman claims he was the most qualified person for it. It was for
a smaller less-prestigious country than his earlier post. There is no
evidence Lieberman appointed the diplomat for any other reason than
his credentials.

The Attorney General "suspects" that it was reward/payback for that
diplomat leaking what he leaked to Lieberman. The Attorney General
has no evidence other than his suspicions. He now also has one Danny
Ayalon, who had been Lieberman's Deputy Foreign Minister. Ayalon was
fired by Lieberman for conducting unauthorized negotiations with
Hillary Clinton behind Lieberman's back
(http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=6676 ).
Ayalon has a chip on his shoulder, a personal axe to grind. He is no
reliable witness.

And he now is the STAR witness in the prosecution, by which I
mean persecution, against Avigdor Lieberman by the leftist conscripted
Attorney General.

Posted 12/27/2012 10:37:00 AM

The Anti-Democratic Israeli Left Defends Hanin Zoabi's "Freedom"


A few days ago, the Israeli Elections Commission banned the
violent terrorist Hanin Zoabi from running for the next Knesset.
Zoabi had attacked Israeli soldiers violently when they boarded the
Turkish terrorist Flotilla ship on which she was riding to support the
Hamas. Zoabi has been a Knesset Member from the Arab fascist BALAD
party, which is little more than a surrogate party for the Hamas. She
openly supports terrorism and the destruction of the state in whose
parliament she wants to sit. Letting her sit in the Knesset makes
about as much sense as having open Nazi supporters sit in the British
parliament of 1942. And let us note that Churchill not only
prohibited such a thing but he jailed the leadership of the British
Fascist Party, a policy that would make infinite common sense with
regard to BALAD.

But Israel's fascist Left is upset by this. Radical
anti-Zionists, tenured extremists, haters of democracy and freedom of
speech and ultra-leftists of all stripes have been rallying to show
their solidarity with Zoabi. A large petition appears in the Israeli
press today under the caption, "Not for Jews Alone." It is a
solidarity petition with Zoabi and a protest against her having been
banned from running for election. It is also a smear campaign against
Israeli non-leftist public figures. It is signed by a gaggle of
tenured extremists plus some other prominent leftists.

The signers of the petition are posturing as if they are free
speech absolutists, such that even a violent terrorist like Zoabi
should be granted her "democratic rights," including the right to run
for parliament. But just how many of the signers of this petition
ever in their lives protested against the most outrageous violation of
freedom of speech in Israel, the banning of the Kahanists and the
denial of freedom of speech to them? How many of these free speech
absolutists favor freedom of speech when it comes to rightwing fringe
extremists? How many of these objected to the Labor-party-led
McCarthyist campaign in the 1990s to paint the exercise of freedom of
speech by non-leftists as the weapon that murdered Rabin? The answer
is zero. Not a single one is on record protesting THAT denial of
freedom of speech or THAT McCarthyism!!

This being the case, the more appropriate caption for their
petition should be "For Arabs and Leftists Alone." Freedom of
speech, that is! These are decidedly NOT people who favor democracy
and freedom of expression for all. Many signers have been involved in
other petitions to deny parties and public figures from the Right the
ability to run in parliamentary elections or exercise THEIR freedom of
speech.

But it gets worse. The petition claims that while Zoabi was
banned, other "convicted felons" are free to run in the election.
Their examples? They mention Moshe Feiglin, now on the Likud slate,
who they write was "convicted of sedition and imprisoned in the wave
of incitement that produced the Rabin murder." That single sentence
reveals the true nature of the signers of the petition. Every part of
that sentence is false and reveals the fascist inclinations of the
petition signers. Feiglin was not convicted of incitement producing
the Rabin murder; he was "convicted" by a politicized kangaroo court
of blocking a traffic intersection, he did some community servive and
not jail time. If the petition signers were democrats, they would
protest the conviction of Feiglin for "sedition" when all he did was
block a traffic intersection, something leftists do all the time.
And the obsessive repetition of the McCarthyist mantra that right-wing
"incitement" produced the Rabin assassination proves that the leftwing
anti-speech fascism that engulfed the country after the Rabin
assassination still drives the anti-democratic radical Left in Israel.

The petition also adds that Avigdor Lieberman faces criminal
indictment as proof that criminals are being allowed to run. But no
indictment has yet been filed against Lieberman, let alone any
conviction having been reached. And the single pending charge against
Lieberman is the absurd accusation that he failed to run to the cops
when a diplomat leaked to him that Israel had asked a foreign
government to provide material about Lieberman's financial affairs.
This is not even a crime, at least not one by Lieberman (maybe that
other diplomat broke the law, maybe).

Among the signers of the petition against "criminals' running for
the parliament is Amiram Goldblum, Hebrew University professor and
founder of Peace Now. A criminal indictment was filed against
Goldblum himself a few years back for his violations of Israeli
campaign finance laws, but the court procedures were indefinitely
"postponed" when Goldblum admitted guilt. This of course is the same
Goldblum who begat the recent distorted pseudo-poll that claimed that
Israeli Jews support apartheid. The same Goldblum pretending here to
be a free speech absolutist is the Israeli champion for filing
frivolous SLAPP suit harassments designed to deny critics of the Left
freedom of speech and to attempt to get the courts to censor
non-leftists.

Then there are the communist professors and anti-Israel Stalinist
author Sami Michael who are signed onto the petition, whose notions of
freedom of speech are manifested in Stalin's regime. They are joined
by Marxist anti-Zionist professor Daniel Bar-Tal from Tel Aviv
University, whose career has been devoted to churning out propaganda
for anti-Semitic agencies claiming to prove that Israeli Jews are
racists. Bar-Tal has been opening calling for suppressing watchdog
groups like Isracampus.com that monitor and expose the anti-Israel
Left. Some free speech absolutist!

Then there is Chaim Gans, the law professor at the Tel Aviv
University law school, whose devotion to freedom of speech is evident
in the fact that he organized the petition there to bar a woman army
colonel from lecturing in the Law School because Gans does not like
her political opinions. He is joined by Alon Liel, the ex-diplomat
now organizing world boycotts against Israel. Retired Professor Gabi
(Gavriel) Salomon (from Haifa University) is also there. Between
articles he churns out for Aljazeera, Salomon for years ran a
classroom indoctrination program at Haifa's school of education in
"peace education," where students were re-educated North Korea style
into leftist dogma. Some believer in freedom of speech!

Then there is Hebrew U's David Shulman, serving as a one-man lobby
for convicted violent thug and child molester Ezra Nawi. Ze'ev
Sternhell, the Marxist Hebrew University professor who urges the
Palestinians to murder settlers and who denounces settler children as
Hitler youth, is one more great defender of freedom of speech in the
petition. Airhead singer Avinoam Nini is there. The Orthodox-bashing
Klansman Sefi Rachlevski is there. I will spare you the thumbnail
sketches of the three dozen others on the petition.


A partial list of signatories appears in this article in Hebrew -
http://www.kr8.co.il/BRPortal/br/P102.jsp?arc=485716
Hebrew news story on the petition:
http://www.mako.co.il/news-law/legal/Article-1ae3ccf6f79db31004.htm&sCh=31750a2610f26110&pId=786102762
And http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/424/894.html?hp=1&cat=404&loc=20

Posted 12/26/2012 01:24:00 PM

Iris Almog lost much of her family on October 4, 2003. They were in a
Haifa restaurant, Maxim, owned by a Christian Arab, when the
28-year-old Palestinian suicide bomber Hanadi Jaradat, an educated
lawyer, detonated the explosive belt she was wearing in the
restaurant. She murdered 21 Israelis, many of them children, and
wounded 51 others. Five members of Iris' family were murdered,
including her father, who was a senior navy officer, her mother, her
brother, and her two nephews, aged 9 and 11.

These days Iris has been taking courses at the Beit Berl "College,"
which is a pseudo-college run by the Kibbutz Movement in Israel. This
past week she was attending a course taught there by one Michal
Chacham, a radical anti-Israel pseudo-academic who teaches "women's
studies." Chacham (whose name is more than ironic) is a sponsor of
calls for world boycotts against Israel, was a supporter of t e
traitor/spy Azmi Bishara, and was one of the extremists calling for
Israeli soldiers to mutiny and refuse to serve. She claims Israel is
an apartheid regime that carries out ethnic cleansing. She supports
the "Palestinian right of return" that would destroy Israel (see
http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Petitions%20-%20the%20Ogla%20document.htm
). She was a supporter of Tali Fahima, the convicted
girlfriend-accomplice of a terrorist who helped him plan atrocities.

In Chacham's course, which turned out to be largely a recital of the
Palestinian pseudo-history of the "Nakba," Chacham screened the
slanderous anti-Israel propaganda film "Jenin Jenin," produced by
terrorist Mohammed Bakri. The film portrays Israeli soldiers as
Nazi-like monsters who committed mass massacres in the Battle of Jenin
in 2002. Bakri himself admits his film is a tissue of lies. In
street to street fighting there against entrenched terrorists, perhaps
20 Palestinians died and almost as many Israeli troops, thanks to the
reluctance of the military to use artillery to dislodge the
terrorists. Bakri was sued for libel by a group of Israeli fighters
who took part in the battle, but a leftist court judge (who has been
in the news for years because of allegations of corruption) exonerated
him.

You can imagine Iris' reaction when she saw that the course in which
she was registered morphed into a celebration of the genocidal
terrorists who murdered her own family. She and other students walked
out of the classroom in outrage when the "film" was screened. The
full story (in Hebrew) is here:
http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/424/697.html?hp=1&cat=402&loc=3.
Iris was subject to abuse by the "college," forced to relive the
murder of her parents and other family members while her lecturer
celebrated the murderers.

Beit Berl campus officials defended this atrocity and the lecturer.
The time has come to strip Beit Berl of its accreditation and to shut
it down.


If you would like to express your anger about this, write to
President of Beit Berl College
Dr. Tamar Ariav
Tel: 972 (9) 747 8701
Fax: 972 (9) 7478700
Email: ariavt@beitberl.ac.il

And

The Council for Higher Education in Israel
(governmental body that funds and supervises Israeli universities and colleges)
Prof. Manuel Trachtenberg
Chairman, Council on Higher Education
Email: manuel@post.tau.ac.il
POB 4037, Jerusalem 91040, Israel

Aharon Beit-Halahmi
Planning & Budgeting Committee Chairman
Council for Higher Education
Email: betha@eurofund.co.il
P.O.B. 4037, Jerusalem 91040, Israel
Tel: 02-5679911
Fax: 02-5679969
E-mail: info@che.org.il

Ministry of Education
The Honorable Gideon Sa'ar
Minister of Education
Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports
Kiryat Ben Gurion, Jerusalem
Email: gsaar@knesset.gov.il
Additional Email: sar@education.gov.il
Phone: 972-2-6408131
Fax: 972-2-6753525
Shalomit Amichai
Director General of the Ministry of Education
Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports
Kiryat Ben Gurion, Jerusalem
Email: mankal@education.gov.il

Posted 12/23/2012 11:27:00 AM

1. A few days ago we posted something about the refusal of the
Israeli dual justice system to convict Ezra Nawi, the violent
convicted child molester, of calling an army officer a "war criminal."
(see http://zioncon.blogspot.co.il/2012/12/israels-tenured-left-rallies-to-support.html
)

Well the New York Slimes is beatifying the hoodlum Nawi this week.
Here is its take:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/world/middleeast/28westbank.html?emc=eta1&_r=0
But the most amusing segment is this citation from the Hebrew
University's tenured extremist David Shulman:

'"Since I've known the man for decades and seen him in action in many
extreme situations, I'm certain that the charge is untrue," David
Shulman, a Hebrew University professor and peace activist, wrote in
the newspaper Haaretz. Of Mr. Nawi, he added, "He is a man committed,
in every fiber of his being, to nonviolent protest against the
inequities of the occupation." (This about the same Nawi who did hard
jail time for violent assault and was convicted of pedophilia! -- SP)
'Mr. Nawi attributes his activism to two things: as a teenager, his
family lived next door to the leader of Israel's Communist Party,
Reuven Kaminer, who influenced him. And he is gay.
'"Being gay has made me understand what it is like to be a despised
minority," Mr. Nawi said.'
The piece also cites a second Hebrew University tenured extremist:
'"Ezra knows Palestinians better than any of us," said Amiel Vardi, a
professor who works closely with him. "This is not only because of the
language, but because he gains their confidence the minute he starts
talking with them. He has all sorts of intuitions as to what should be
done, what are the internal relations — things we hardly ever
notice."'


2. This is simply delicious:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/163424
When the Far Left Calls for Modest Clothing

Despite left-wing criticism of hareidi modesty rules, the far left
does support modest dress – when it comes to the PA.
Maayana Miskin
While the Israeli left has been extremely critical of hareidi Jews who
pressure others to dress modestly, it turns out that sometimes the
left supports modest dress. The extreme-left Magazine Hakibush
(Occupation Magazine) recently called on its readers to dress modestly
and respect community norms – when visiting Palestinian Authority Arab
areas.

The magazine called on readers to join Arabs in the Hevron hills, and
added, "Remember to bring your ID card, water, a hat, and modest
clothing that respects the sensitivities of the Palestinians."

The appeal mentioned shorts and sleeveless shirts as two things that
should not be worn.

The planned visit to the Hevron hills area is part of an ongoing
campaign. While far-left and anarchist groups say the purpose of the
campaign is to help Arab farmers fight for their rights, Jews living
in the region say the campaign deliberately foments conflict.

"We had discussions and agreements with the Arabs. There was
co-existence and dialogue, but since the leftist activists entered the
picture, everything has changed," residents of the area told Arutz
Sheva in a 2010 interview.

Far-left groups claim to be helping Arab farmers to cultivate their
own land. However, local Jews say, in reality they target plots of
land within Jewish communities that were not previously cultivated by
Arab farmers.

***
Please note: Leftist anti-Israel women "protesters" have been
repeatedly molested and some raped by Palestinians in the West Bank
when they come to support Palestinian terrorism.


3. You will also like this:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/163216


4. Remember how upset the Left and its captive media were when a
handful of demented Chareidim were putting up vulgar anti-Zionist
graffiti in Jerusalem? Well,
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/162544


5. Zman Haifa, a Haifa weekly, reported on Dec. 21 that the
University of Haifa has approved the appearance on the campus of Kamal
Chatib, deputy director of the northern branch of the Islamofascist
movement in Israel. This is the group run by the openly genocidal
Sheikh Raed Salah. The sheikh had been permitted to speak on campus a
few years back in an auditorium where campus guards prevented Jews
from entering and there he called for suicide bombings against Jews.
His deputy is best known for calling Jews "fleas plotting to harm the
al-Aqsa Mosque." (See this older item on him:
http://www.acpr.org.il/English-Nativ/06-issue/medad-6.htm where he is
cited saying: "We will not shed tears if Al-Aqsa is harmed, for we
shall shed blood.")

University students, including the Im Tirtzu Zionist movement,
demanded an explanation from the school's new president and he refused
to answer them. The paper cites a number of un-named professors on
the campus as being outraged by the decision to invite Chativ. No
doubt everyone reading this thought they meant me, except I only heard
about it for the first time from the paper itself.

The Islamofascist will address campus Arab students and I suspect Jews
will again be barred from entering. No dogs either.

Want to express an opinion? Write:
University of Haifa:

President of the University of Haifa

Prof. Aaron Ben-Ze'ev

University of Haifa

Mt Carmel, 31905 Haifa Israel

Tel: 972-4-8240101

Fax: 972-4-8240281

E-mail: abenzeev@univ.haifa.ac.il



Rector of the University of Haifa

Prof. David Faraggi

University of Haifa

Mt Carmel, 31905 Haifa Israel

Tel: 972-4-8288094

Fax: 972-4-8342101

Email: faraggi@stat.haifa.ac.il

Chairman of the Board of Governors

Mr. Leon Charney

Law Office of Leon H. Charney

Broadway 1441

New York, NY 10018

Phone: 212-819-0994

E-mail: charney@lhcharney.com

University "Friends of" Offices Outside Israel are listed here:
http://www.haifa.ac.il/html/html_eng/friends.htm

Posted 12/22/2012 07:13:00 PM

1. First of all, there was an error in one in one of the numbers in
the data from the public opinion survey that I posted on Friday. And
the corrected number is interesting and significant and has some
important implications.

Here is the error (with my apologies). I wrote: "Of the general
population, when asked if they favor the existence of a Palestinian
state, 66% OPPOSE, 23% favor, and 11% are undecided or have a more
ambiguous position." I accidentally switched the numbers for those in
favor and those undecided (dem agin' eyes of mine!). The correct
numbers for responses to this question are that ONLY 11% said they
favor such a "two state solution," 66% oppose, and 23% are undecided
or gave some other non-decisive answer.

Aside from not wanting to leave the error uncorrected, that 11%
number is important. The survey appears to have included Arabs in the
sample, and Arabs are 18% of Israelis. The 11% of Israelis who say
they still favor such a "two-state solution" or a Palestinian state
are less than the portion of Arabs in the population.

If indeed the 11% response in the survey is mostly Arabs, this
shows that the proportion of Israeli Jews who favor a "Palestinian
state" or think that peace can be achieved with such a "state" is
close to zero. The support for the "solution" of the Left has
disintegrated among Israeli Jews. Oslo is dead, not just on the
ground but among the Israeli Jewish population. Netanyahu can pay lip
service all he wants to such a "solution" but there is no support at
all for further Oslo-style "experimenting."

I cannot emphasize enough how important and dramatic this change
is. In the mid-1990s, support in Israel for Oslo was so overwhelming
that I felt all the time like a leper. My neighborhood in Haifa is
filled with middle class yuppies. On almost every car there was a
pro-Oslo sticker. I doubt there were more than a handful of opponents
to Oslo within a 2 kilometer radius from myself. The Israeli media
were almost unanimously ecstatic in support of Oslo. It was almost
impossible to read a dissenting opinion, and on the TV and radio it
really was literally impossible to hear any dissent.

The University of course was far worse. I do not recall a single
faculty member other than myself who said that Oslo was an idiotic
idea that would not work and would produce escalation in Arab
aggression and violence against Israel. My kids had reputations in
their school for being the ones with the crazy father who did not
understand that Oslo would produce peace. At official University
rites and ceremonies, speaker after speaker proclaimed Oslo peace and
the two-state solution as just around the corner, statements that
invariably triggered my walking out. Seemingly intelligent people
were swept along by the bandwagon, planning out international
pipelines, business and trade deals, joint university programs - with
the Palestinians and other Arab neighbors. I have visited
psychiatric wards, but the feeling there cannot compare to the feeling
of walking the street in 1994 Israel.

And today the consensus among Israeli Jews OPPOSING Oslo and the
"two state solution" is almost as broad as was that pro-Oslo consensus
back in the days of the Cuckoo Nest.


2. The time has come to clear the air about Moshe Feiglin.

I have long had ambiguous feelings about Feiglin and his
political activities. Many are asking me about him these days. I
would like to explain why Feiglin has morphed into a disgrace.

I was among the early supporters of Feiglin when he was organizing
anti-Oslo mass street demonstrations as part of what he called the "Zo
Artseinu" organization in the 1990s. I praised him and his efforts.
I denounced the persecution of Feiglin by the Judicial Left when it
decided to prosecute him for "sedition," after he and his protesters
had blocked a traffic intersection. I opposed blocking the
intersection on tactical grounds, because it antagonizes people, but
lots of protesters in Israel do it, including the Left and the
Histadrut. Prosecuting Feiglin for "sedition" because of it was just
an ugly side of Israel's anti-democratic entrenched Left. In fact I
consider it an act of Leftwing Fascism. And like most of the outrages
of the Judicial Left, it was carried out under a Likud government.

I had two serious criticisms of Feiglin's political behavior and
agenda, both of which I think ultimately reflected his poor judgment.
I long ago communicated both criticisms to Feiglin himself directly.
The first is that he failed to distance himself from Kahanists. His
number two back then, who is still his number two today, is Samuel
Sackett, an open Kahanist. Feiglin's refusal to distance himself from
Sackett is one reason for Feiglin's chronic weakness and political
failures. The second problem is that Feiglin is basically a theocrat,
even though he insists he is not, a person whose policies ultimately
rest upon doing politically what he thinks religion requires
(regarding strategic questions) and leaving the rest for God to sort
out. That is also a self-defeating position.

Feiglin is a nice guy, a truly religious guy, speaks well, and
most of his other priorities are spot on.

Feiglin's other perpetual problem is his insistence on running as
part of the Likud, as a small internal opposition to the party machine
that controls Likud, hoping that grassroots support will push him to
power. He has stubbornly fought this Quixotic battle over and over
again, losing every time, rather than throwing his support behind
non-Likud smaller movements or parties that are closer to his
political philosophy. The Likud machine is not so dainty and
vulnerable as he thinks and will always confine him to being little
more than a small nuisance factor within the party.

All the above explains why Feiglin fails, and it raises
questions about his judgment. But his newest behavior raises the most
serious questions about his sincerity and integrity.

The rising star of the Israeli anti-Oslo "Right" is Naftali
Bennett and his Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) party. He has galvanized
not only the rump leftovers from the old National Religious Party, but
he is almost a superstar among secularist college students and other
secularist Zionists in Israel. He draws listeners to his talks by the
hundreds. A talk he gave this past week at the Technion, which was
NOT about politics, produced a crowd that overflowed the hall. He
speaks well, is a bit of a legend in his time (the young Bennett is a
very rich high-tech entrepreneur and he made his money on his own and
honestly, with no political favors). He is a dynamo, and **THE** guy
worth watching in the coming election.

Bennett in a sense is also a more-intelligent Feiglin than
Feiglin himself. He is also religious and militantly anti-Oslo.
(Fair disclosure - Bennett's American parents are friends of mine.)

A sensible Feiglin would realize that this is the golden
opportunity he always dreamed of. Bennett is polling at the moment 11
or 12 Knesset seats (out of 120). Feiglin could pop this up to 20 or
so, making Bennett's party perhaps the second largest in the next
Knesset and the number-two power in the next government, by publicly
breaking with the Likud Party and joining Bennett, calling on his
supporters to do the same. Feiglin would not be the number one in
such a new party and would need to dump Sackett to join in. But the
result could be a real political alternative that was honest, clean,
and had an unambiguous anti-Oslo ideological vision. Unlike most
Likud members, the new party would not consist of incompetents who are
in politics because they are incapable of finding a job. And a strong
Bennett-led party that absorbed the Feiglin "camp" would be a major
factor in affecting Israeli history over the next decade and beyond.

Even without the Feiglin support, Bennett and his party already
have Netanyahu foaming at the mouth. Netanyahu knows that a
middle-sized Bennett party would join his coalition only by shoving it
to the right, blocking Netanyahu's silly ideas about freezing
settlements and appeasing the "Palestinians" or their US State
Department advocates. Netanyahu's range of maneuver would be sharply
reduced.

And Netanyahu has been increasingly directing his rhetoric
AGAINST Bennett and Bayit Yehudi, rather than the Labor Party, urging
Israeli voters from the Right (keep in mind the above public opinion
poll) to stick with Likud rather than voting Bennett.

So where is Feiglin in all this? The answer is that Feiglin has
agreed to be Netanyahu's button man in attacking Bennett! After being
spat upon (I had a different bodily emission in mind but decided to
spare you the image) by the Likud leadership for two decades, Feiglin
is suddenly performing Netanyahu's dirty work against Bennett! Even
though Bennett represents Feiglin's agenda and priorities FAR better
than Bibi.

You can draw your own conclusions from this. Mine is that
Feiglin's stock as a political thinker and man of vision is crashing
to the curb. Feiglin's role in this is a shande.

Posted 12/21/2012 03:01:00 PM

I find public opinion polls fascinating, at least when they are
real polls, as opposed to that manipulative pseudo-poll from a couple
of weeks back, run by Peace Now's Amiram Goldblum (Hebrew University,
pharmacy studies) and his far-leftist cronies, claiming to "prove"
Israelis were pro-apartheid. In the past the Israeli media used to
publish 3 or 4 polls a week. The number dropped to near zero in
recent years, and my guess is it is because the leftist media do not
want you to know what Israelis actually think.

But with elections nigh, there are a lot of polls coming out. The
one in today's Maariv is, I think, interesting. It is a survey of the
general population (including Arabs), and a sub-survey just of those
who identify themselves as leaning to the Right.

You can draw your own conclusions.

Of the general population, when asked if they favor the existence
of a Palestinian state, 66% OPPOSE, 23% favor, and 11% are undecided
or have a more ambiguous position. Bear in mind that about 18% of
Israelis are Arabs. When asked if they favor construction in the E-1
area between Jerusalem and the Maaleh Adumim suburb, which has been in
the news recently as a "controversy," 51% support construction, 9%
oppose, and 40% are not sure (probably do not know what it is about).
When asked about allowing Jews to pray on the Temple Mount, 71%
support and 7% oppose. When asked what they think of Supreme Court
judicial review of laws, 48% OPPOSE it, 41% support, and only 10% did
not know.

When restricted to Israelis defining themselves as leaning Right,
54% of these are secularists, 27% say they are religiously
"traditionalist," 11% modern Orthodox, and 8% Chareidi. This is
notable because the media stereotype of the "Right" is as the
"Religious Right." But more than half of Rightists are secularist,
larger probably than the numbers among the Left or Center. Women are
more likely than men to identify with the Right, and the young more
than the old. About 24% of Rightists have college or post-high school
education, probably a bit less than the general population but not a
lot less. Income distribution of Rightists looks similar to that of
the general population.

Posted 12/21/2012 10:58:00 AM

Once again the Israel dual justice system has showed its ugly face.
This is the court-cum-prosecution system that promotes the agenda of
the Left and refuses to convict leftist criminals of anything, while
at the same time refusing to defend the freedom of speech and other
basic constitutional rights of non-leftists.

The Jerusalem District court just overturned a conviction of the
far-leftist child molester Ezra Nawi for calling an army officer a war
criminal. Seems that this is protected speech, unlike - say - saying
that people who want to enjoy rights should also comply with duties
and obligations (THAT slogan was just banned as "racist" by the
leftists on Israel's elections commission because it was thought to
offend the delicate sensitivities of Arabs).

Nawi is a violent leftist hooligan who has been involved in a
long series of violent confrontations with soldiers and police, as he
pursues his promotion of Palestinian violence. He was arrested in
2007 for violence and hooliganism. He was convicted of assault and
sentenced to a month of hard jail time plus 3 years of probation.

In 2009 he was in a protest in which he called a military officer
a war criminal. Nawi was part of a violent anti-Israel demonstration
there that the soldiers were dispersing. He was charged in 2010 with
insulting a public official, which is a crime in Israel. The problem
is that it is a crime that the courts are only willing to convict
Jewish Right-wingers for. As far as I know, no Arab or leftist was
ever convicted for it.

Nawi was convicted, but appealed and the Jerusalem appeals court
just overturned the conviction. After all, under the dual justice
system, laws for the geese never apply for the ganders.

But there is more to the Nawi story. Nawi is a convicted child
molester. Nawi was convicted in 1992 of sexual relations with a 15
year old boy. Nawi is also chummy with the Irish Senator David
Norris, who was running last year for Irish Prez. When Nawi was
indicted for sexually molesting a minor, Norris rushed to defend him
and even sent a letter praising Nawi to the Israeli court where Nawi
was being tried. In that trial, by the way, the star witness for Nawi
was Yehudit Karp, a Meretz politician who had been the deputy Attorney
General.

Because he is both anti-Israel and gay, Nawi became the hero and
mentor of some of the worst anti-Semites on earth. He has been
celebrated by Neve Gordon and Noam Chomsky, among others. For
example, here is Gordon proclaiming Nawi his idol, in the anti-Semitic
Neo-Nazi web magazine Counterpunch:
http://www.counterpunch.org/gordon05082009.html . Gordon also raised
funds for Nawi. As you can see, Gordon claims Nazi was arrested for
"caring about people's homes." Sure and Gordon was hired and
promoted at Ben Gurion "University" thanks to his being a serious
scholar. The Hebrew University's tenured leftist David Shulman has
also spent years beatifying Nawi.

The great irony of course is that Nawi, this darling of
Palestinian terrorism, would himself be tortured and murdered for
being gay if he were to fall into the hands of certain Palestinian
peace organizations like the Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

Well, this darling of the Israeli Left and the Caring Classes was
also convicted for having engaged in some illicit relations with a
minor. Curiously, his crimes later threatened to end the political
career of a candidate for the Irish Presidency.

The Irish media got wind of Norris's ties to the convicted
pedophile and last year made life tough for Norris. Many members of
his staff suddenly resigned. The media in Ireland smell blood.

And while we have the conscripted judicial Left in our sites, let
us also mention that today's Israeli press carries large paid ads of
solidarity with Hanin Zoabi, signed by leading leftist law professors.
Zoabi was the Arab woman Knesset member who personally participated
in violent attacks against Israeli troops in the "Turkish Flotilla"
terrorist incident. She was also running for re-election to the
parliament of the state which she does not recognize and which she
seeks to destroy. Except the Knesset ethics committee voted to bar
her from running, due to her participation in violence (and open
support for terrorism).

A group of tenured law dons are unhappy with this. After all,
they insist, why should Zoabi be any less entitled to run for the
Knesset than Bin Laden would be to run for the US Senate?

Well, 17 of the worst leftist law dons in Israel signed the
petition, opposing the banning of the terrorist form running for the
parliament. And among them was the above-mentioned Yehudit Karp.

Can it take much longer before the Tel Aviv University Law School
hires Ezra Nawi to teach a course in family law?

Posted 12/17/2012 05:23:00 PM

1. You no doubt know the old quip definition about "chutzpah" being
where a man kills his parents but then asks mercy from the court on
grounds that he is an orphan.

Well, THAT definition is WAY out of date. A much better definition is
this: Abu Mazen, the Holocaust Denying "president" of the "state" of
Palestine," just sent a condolence message to President Obama and the
American people regarding the deaths of school children in Newtown,
Connecticut (children plus adults murdered evidently was 26, not
including his own mother). You can see the text of Abu's message
here: http://www.israellycool.com/2012/12/16/mahmoud-abbas-puts-the-con-into-condolences/

THIS is the very same guy who personally planned and initiated a
massacre of 25 school children at Maalot in Israel in 1974. (See
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/143782 )


2. You no doubt have been reading the stories about the anti-Semitism
from the small Hungarian fascist party Jobbik, which has some seats in
the Hungarian parliament. Jobbik fascists have burned an Israeli flag
and recently one of them proposed that Hungary collect an official
list of all the names and residency addresses of all Hungarian Jews
(guess for what purpose). The other Hungarian political parties
denounced the fascists.

I was recently in Hungary and made a suggestion to the local Jews
about how I thought they should respond to the call to record and
register the names and addresses of all Hungarian Jews. My suggestion
was that the Hungarian Jews issue a call for the Hungarian government
to collect and publish an official list of all the barnyard animals
with whom the mothers of the Jobbik fascists had intimate relations.

Alas, their sense of political street theater was not the same as my
own and they failed to embrace my suggestion.




"

Posted 12/15/2012 09:21:00 PM

The Martyrdom of Avigdor Lieberman
By Steven Plaut


In 1999, Benjamin Netanyahu lost the Israeli election to leftist
Ehud Barak to the squealing delight of Israel's conscripted media and
of many in its judicial system. At the time, a criminal investigation
was launched against Netanyahu for supposedly misappropriating
property from the Prime Minister's residency. He had to leave it in
a hurry to turn it over to his successor, and supposedly had absconded
with some trinkets and gifts that had been given to him as Prime
Minister but really belonged to the residency, not to him personally.
Nothing much came of the "investigation," other than it serving as an
illustration of how the judicial Left in Israel and the chronically
politicized Prosecutor's Office file politically-motivated indictments
and open politically-motivated criminal investigations.

In Israel there is a long tradition of the Left using prosecution to
get its way, especially when the Israeli voter refuses to endorse what
the Left wants. In the investigation of Netanyahu, it was naked
lawfare payback for Netanyahu's having dared to beat the Left in the
previous election.

All of which brings us to the political persecution of Israeli Foreign
Minister Avigdor Lieberman. The Left has always had a problem with
Lieberman, and it is NOT just political ideology. Avigdor started a
political career from nothing and turned his party into the second
strongest in Israel. He recently merged it into the Likud and the
merger is expected to capture a third of Knesset seats according to
polls. Lieberman, with his chunky demeanor and very heavy Russian
accent, basically took the entire Russian-Israeli vote away from the
better known Natan Sharansky and channeled it into his own powerhouse.
And he is increasingly attracting non-Russian Israeli voters who like
what he represents. One of his senior party co-leaders is the
intelligent sabra professor Uzi Landau. (For the sake of full
disclosure, I should reveal that my wife was Landau's student.)

Lieberman is blunt spoken and has no qualms about denouncing
anti-Israel Israeli Arabs. That makes the Left hysterical, and there
have been attempts by the Left to get him barred from running on
grounds that he is a "racist." This same Left, by the way, just
managed to prohibit the election slogan of a different party as
"racist," when that party put up posters that read: "Without duties
and obligations there can be no rights." The same Left, which insists
that the terrorist and anti-Semitic fascist Haneen Zoabi should be
free to run for the Knesset of the very same country she insists has
no right to exist at all, has been insisting that this previous slogan
is anti-Arab and so must be prohibited as "racism." You need to
understand that in the conscripted Israeli media, the word racism can
ONLY refer to Jewish resentment regarding the behavior of Arabs and it
can never refer to Arab mass murders, Arab plans for genocide, nor
Arab hatred towards Jews.

Ten years ago, the politicized Prosecutor's Office opened an
investigation against Lieberman, supposedly for corruption. It
dragged its feet for a full decade. It regularly attempted to prevent
Lieberman and his party from succeeding in the elections by releasing
statements a few weeks before every single election in those ten
years, saying criminal charges were about to be filed against him.
But none ever were.

The upcoming elections and the current campaign season in Israel have
been no different. For months the Prosecutors were playing
Whispering Down the Land with the media, and leaking that they had
found horrific dirt about Lieberman and were about to file criminal
charges against him, making it sound as if he were dirtier than a
Moscow oligarch gangster.

And just when the election season was reaching its climax, this past
week the Prosecutor made a startling announcement. It was dropping
95% of the prospective charges it had been investigating against
Lieberman for lack of evidence, while hinting clearly they thought he
was guilty of them, citing things like witnesses having died over the
decade and misplaced evidence. Many of these involved "suspicions"
that Lieberman had continued to draw salary and income from various
businesses he ran even while sitting as a Knesset Member, which he is
not supposed to do, some nominally managed by his daughter. The
companies themselves were all legitimate though.

Aside from the 95% dismissal, the Prosecutors retained basically one
single charge against Lieberman, claiming he was guilty of corruption
and accepting a bribe in what the media are calling the "Ambassador
Affair," and demanding that he resign. Let us bear in mind that
Lieberman was not CONVICTED of any crime, just that the Prosecution
announced plans to indict him for one! At first Lieberman dismissed
the charges as silly, but then late Friday afternoon he announced he
was resigning as Foreign Minister. It is not clear yet if he will
nevertheless run for the next parliament as part of his joint slate
with the Likud.

So just what was that single charge against Lieberman? The only one
the prosecution believes that it can make stick? Ironically, I doubt
that one Israeli in 100 knows or can answer that question, and I only
found one story in the entire weekend press that answered the
question. I will let you in on the answer in a minute.

Before spilling the beans, let us note the long list of cases of
out-and-out corruption that the Prosecutor's Offices in Israel have
NOT pursued in indictments. The most notorious is Ehud Olmert, whose
sleaze and criminality would be remarkable even in the worst Third
World countries. Olmert openly demanded and accepted envelops stuffed
with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in order to assist
developers in bypassing Israeli zoning laws and getting other corrupt
favors. (Like with Tony Soprano, the cash was always inside
envelops!) Olmert is walking around free and has yet to be indicted.
Does that have anything to do with the fact that he abandoned his
"hawkish" political ideology and served the agenda of the Far Left
while in office?

Leftists Ehud Barak and Amram Mitzna, who spent most of their public
careers in the Labor Party, are only marginally less dirty than Olmert
and neither was ever indicted for anything. The election financings
for both of these were masterpieces in bypassing or defying Israeli
campaign finance laws. And they are not the only ones never indicted
for such violations. The leftist founder of Peace Now, Hebrew
University professor Amiram Goldblum, was also (by his own admission)
involved in breaking those same campaign finance laws on behalf of
Barak, but the Prosecutor decided to "postpone" prosecution of
Goldblum. Forever.

Other examples of the dual judicial and prosecutorial system that
operates in Israel, one for the Far Left and the other for everyone
else, could fill an encyclopedia.

But back to Lieberman. I cannot tell you that I consider him to be a
squeaky clean politician nor one with the personal ethical standards
of, say, Menachem Begin or George Washington. And frankly I suspect
he is involved in some corner cutting and rule bending. But any
misbehavior on his part is peanuts compared with the blatant
criminality of Ehud Olmert and some other politicians from the Left.

So just what was Avigdor's horrid crime? The one the Prosecution
plans to move forward with to trial?

It turns out that a few years back the Prosecution's Office was trying
to solicit evidence against Lieberman from the Belarus government,
including about a bank account supposedly under Lieberman's control in
some local Belarus bank. The Israeli ambassador to Belarus at the
time, one Ze'ev Ben Aryeh, learned about the formal request for the
information that the Israeli prosecutor had sent to the Belarus
government. Ben Aryeh then tipped off Lieberman about it, and even
gave him the number of the bank account whose information the Israeli
prosecutors had requested.

Now I am no lawyer, Thanks be to the Creator, and I am not even sure
that passing on that information to Lieberman was a crime at all. And
if it were one, then it was a crime committed by Ben Aryeh, not
Lieberman. Lieberman by the way says he never even looked in the
envelop with the bank number. I cannot say that I believe him but I
must also say that I would have peeked myself if it were me. Note how
upset the Prosecutor is over this envelop, but not over any of those
envelops stuffed with dollar cash handed over to the don Ehud Olmert!!

The end of the saga though is that, a couple of years later, Lieberman
was made Israeli Foreign Minister. As such, he had the power to
appoint diplomats and he appointed the very same Ben Aryeh as
Ambassador to Latvia. Now Belarus is a much bigger country than
Latvia, and I am not even sure this counts as a promotion. The
Prosecution "suspects" that it was a payback reward for Ben Aryeh
helping Lieberman out by having passed on the information about the
criminal investigation against him. Lieberman says he appointed him
because he was competent, experienced, and speaks fluent Russian.

Lots of luck to the Israeli Attorney General in proving otherwise.
Lots of luck to Israeli democracy in surviving when the Prosecutor's
Office functions as a partisan wing of the Left!

Posted 12/15/2012 07:54:00 PM

Posted 12/13/2012 10:00:00 AM

Don't you just love it when a leftist moonbat gets hoist with his own petard?



Well, meet the pro-Palestinian Professor Dan Avnon, from the Hebrew
University's School of Public Policy and its uniformly leftist
Political Science Department ( http://politics.huji.ac.il/avnon.html )
. He is a leftist who objects to the idea that Israel should be a
Jewish state ( http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/422/071.html?hp=1&cat=479&loc=5
), although he does not seem to have any problem with any Arab Moslem
states.

Well, he found himself boycotted by an anti-Israel institute in
Australia, one so anti-Israel that they hosted Ilan Pappe. The
anti-Israel crowd is upset because here Avnon is a leftist but he fell
victim to BDS (boycotting Israel, divestment, sanctions by the Bigoted
Dingbats and Scoundrels (BDS))! Boycotting OTHER Jews of course would
be no problem.

For more details, see also

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/across-the-divide-boycott-shocks-unity-professor-dan-avnon/story-e6frgcjx-1226532541040

Posted 12/05/2012 05:57:00 PM

The pseudo-rabbis in the paganistic "Reform" pseudo-syngogue in New
York, part of the Reform pseudo-Jewish movement, hoisted the flag of
the PLO Nazis on their building as part of their celebration of the
declaration of the terror state of "Palestine"

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/bnai-jeshurun-synagogue-leaders-congratulate-palestine-on-un-vote/2012/12/05/

Posted 11/29/2012 10:01:00 AM

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/steven-plaut/just-what-was-fundamentally-wrong-with-bolshevism/

Just What Was Fundamentally Wrong with Bolshevism?

Posted By Steven Plaut On November 29, 2012 @ 12:25 am In Daily
Mailer,FrontPage | 2 Comments

I recently read the new biography of Trotsky by Oxford don Robert
Service, published in 2009 by Pan Books. It is well-written and
surprisingly interesting. The book does a great public service in
describing the life of the actual Trotsky, whose previous
"biographies" were little more than hagiographies written by his toady
worshippers (people like Isaac Deutscher). The last time that I had
taken any interest in Trotsky was when I was a teenager and had
fleeting delusions of believing in "socialism." Reading the new book
as an adult and as an economist, I found it a useful opportunity to
contemplate the rise of one of the most oppressive regimes in human
history. I have gathered some thoughts and impressions here and I
hope they will be of interest.

Hunger and starvation have so often accompanied "political revolution"
that it would be safe to suggest that they are intrinsic parts of it.
Communist revolutions have invariably produced famines and terror.
The immediate trigger for "revolutionary terror" in early Soviet
Russia was the same as in the French Revolution: the inability of the
regime to obtain food for urban residents.

The Bolsheviks had never had very much interest in the peasants in the
first place. As great believers in Marxist theology, they advocated
the imposition by the "proletariat" of urban workers of "its" will
upon the country, including upon the agricultural laborers who
constituted the bulk of the population. Even if the Bolshevik party
could seriously be thought to represent the urban "proletariat," they
would still have constituted a movement representing only a very small
portion of Russian society. Thus bolshevism's most basic operating
principles were anti-democratic.

The Bolsheviks represented a movement seeking to impose the interests
of this minority "class" over the interests of the bulk of Russian
society (and later over non-Russian populations in the Soviet empire).
The role assigned by the communists to the peasants was to sit back
and turn over food to the "revolution," either without getting paid
for it or without getting paid very much. The Bolshevik state
procurement of food operated through a state-run monopoly, preventing
peasants from seeking better prices, and increasingly turned violent
when peasants refused to cooperate. The communists considered
payment of incentives to peasants for delivering food to be
anti-revolutionary and capitalist. The most violent stages of the
French Revolution had been triggered by similar inability of the
"revolutionary state" to procure adequate food for urban "workers."
Armed gangs of Soviet foragers, like Parisian foragers before them in
the French revolution, emptied the stores of food in rural areas in a
desperate attempt to prevent their own loss of power.

The other problem for the Bolsheviks was of course that they claimed
to represent "the working class" of urban workers, but never
considered it necessary to allow those same members of the
"proletariat" a say in what they themselves considered their "class
interests" to be. The communist party leaders claimed to represent
the proletariat automatically, supernaturally, by dint of their having
studied Marx and Engels. Under their theology they could
automatically divine from the dusty 80 year old writings of Marx what
served the interests of the Russian "working class," without having to
ask any actual workers, and in most cases without having to engage in
actual work. Party leaders, led by Lenin and Trotsky, lived bourgeois
lives even in the most difficult days of the Russian Civil War, often
living in luxurious royal apartments inside the Kremlin (which had
been the royal residence before the Revolution). Soviet leaders were
attended by large numbers of servants, and Trotsky himself never went
anywhere during the Civil War without both his large flock of servants
and a 35-member military band. Bolshevik leaders (Trotsky in
particular) generally had never done a day of honest labor in their
lives in any factory or farm; their entire "careers" consisting of
political activism.

The Bolsheviks believed that they could divine the answers to what the
"workers" collectively needed in much the same way that Church clergy
could conjure up the agenda of God, by reading the holy scriptures.
And like other manifestations of theology, the Bolsheviks tended to
bicker and break up into small factions over minor questions of
belief. Like in the Church, the factionalism was suppressed by means
of the proclamation of official dogma approved by the party's Pope.
It was the beginning of the thought police system, later perfected by
Mao.

In the case of communists, these scriptures meant Marx and Engels, and
later Lenin. The problem of course was that Marx and Engels never
spelled out the nitty gritty details of what "workers" would need, and
basically had no understanding whatsoever of economics. They can
hardly be excused for this ignorance on grounds of writing before the
advent of modern economic understanding, because it was already well
on the course of development at that time.

As just one example of the problem, should the price of shoes in a
"workers' state" be high in order to benefit shoe workers producing
shoes, or low to benefit workers who are consumers? And if the
representatives of the proletariat cannot make up their minds about
the price of shoes, then how the Devil can they decide what
constitutes "worker interest" in thousands of other dilemmas. Asking
the workers themselves what they wanted was quickly ruled out by the
Bolsheviks as a counter-revolutionary nonstarter.

The solution of the early Soviet regime was essentially to suppress
and terrorize urban workers, not just the peasants. Before the end of
the Civil War, Lenin and Trotsky were ordering all independent labor
unions, meaning those that were not simply servile fronts for the
party, to be suppressed. Lenin and Trotsky insisted that unions
represented and promoted only the narrow interests of selected groups
of "proletarians" and not of the entire "class." Exactly!

In fact, the "alienation" of the "urban workers" by the party had
occurred even earlier. The Bolshevik coup and the storming of the
Winter Palace were uprisings of the "working class" only in party
mythology. The bulk of those rising up in support of the Bolsheviks
were soldiers in the Czarist or Kerenski armies, who supported the
party because of the promise by Lenin to surrender to the Central
powers and end all fighting and mobilization of troops.

The Bolshevik banner may have featured the hammer of the urban worker
with the sickle of the peasant, but at the time of the Revolution it
was little more than a party of disgruntled soldiers and sailors, most
from rural background, reluctant to be sent back to the World War I
front to defend Russia. Their opportunistic support for the
Bolsheviks largely vanished in thin air as soon as the party tried to
mobilize them and send them out to fight the "whites" during the civil
war. Trotsky was forced to recruit ex-czarist officers to serve as
commanders in the Red Army.

The main groups of soldiers supporting the party with enthusiasm were
non-Russians desiring the end of Russian domination over their native
lands, like the brigades of Latvian riflemen who served as Lenin's
praetorian guards. By 1921, the same Kronstadt sailors who had been
critical in bringing the Bolsheviks to power in 1917 were shooting
them and organizing a massive mutiny, brutally suppressed by the
communists. The suppression of the rebellion led Whittaker Chambers
to label bolshevism a form of fascism, and persuaded many of those who
contributed later to the book, "The God that Failed," to abandon
communism. As in the French Revolution, all opposition was
automatically attributed by the "Revolutionaries" to foreign
conspiracies. Dissent was a form of treason.

Bolshevik thinking in the early days carried strong features of
theology. The Bolsheviks believed that if they were to follow the
precepts of Marx to the letter, and pronounce the correct
incantations, then magic would take place and socialist revolutions
would spring up all over the world like adorable leprechauns. This
voodoo Marxism eventually led to the rise of Stalin and totalitarian
"socialism in one country." And an ice pick in the skull of Trotsky.

Most Bolshevik leaders had no skills or experience in government
administration, management, business, or anything else. Their only
claim to legitimacy was their assertion that they understood the needs
of the "proletariat." Trotsky believed in command control and
central "planning" of the economy until his last breath, and he was
hardly alone. Within days of seizing power in their coup d'etat, the
Bolshevik leaders were seeking to impose their "dictatorship of the
proletariat," by which they meant the dictatorship of those party
officials, more often than not from middle class backgrounds, claiming
to represent the proletariat. The Russian economy imploded under
their rule. Output of Russian factories and mines in 1921 was only a
seventh of what it had been under the Czar in 1913.

Their understanding of foreign powers and diplomacy was even more
pathetic than their ignorance of economics, and was also dominated by
belief in magic. During the first years of the Soviet regime, its
leaders quite seriously expected communist revolutions to break out
all over Europe. And they were truly surprised when none did, except
pathetic attempts – quickly suppressed – to install bolshevism in
Germany and Hungary.

Part of their problem was that Marx and Engels were themselves wrong
with regard to just about everything. They were wrong, first and
foremost, with regard to the claim that there exists some sort of
monolithic "working class" with some sort of uniform set of "class
interests." Urban workers share no common interest, as the above
example involving shoe prices illustrates. Urban workers indeed were
a "class" with a common interest only in the most tautological sense,
only in the sense that all those assigned to any "class" would favor
increases in the incomes and wealth for all members of that "class."
By the same token, people with curly hair constitute a "class,"
because any proposal to raise incomes for all those with curls would
be supported by them. But regarding any other issue that would
arise, the curly headed would have no common interest. Ditto for
urban workers. And in the exact same sense, there is no capitalist
class. An assembly of the "capitalist class" would similarly be
incapable of agreeing over whether shoe prices should be high or low.

And just why were urban "workers" even considered to be politically
superior to everyone else in society? Marx, Engels and the Soviet
leadership had great difficulty conceiving of anyone doing productive
work unless they were making "things." And heavy "things" were more
valuable, important, and productive than light "things." Certainly
producing services was not understood by them as productive labor,
explaining why the quality of services of all sorts in the Soviet
block remained abysmal all the way down to the fall of communism.

But just what was a "worker"? Do not bankers and teachers and
dentists and engineers and pharmacists work? In many cases, they
work longer hours than factory workers. Marx and Engels had insisted
that urban factory workers must seize political control of society,
and they must do so by means of a dictatorship by the party claiming
to speak in their name. In any case, Marx and Engels were pretty sure
that peasants did not really provide important "work." After all,
they just produce food. So they need not really be part of any
revolutionary regime.

Peasant reluctance to deliver food products to the urban "masses"
without getting paid was "counter-revolutionary" and could be resolved
by starving them to death, terrorizing them, and locking them up in
non-productive collective farms. There food production would prove
too low even to feed the peasants themselves, let alone export food to
the cities. The Bolsheviks were truly surprised when it turned out
that their policies had driven the bulk of the peasants to support the
"whites" and other opposition forces in the Civil War. While agrarian
collectivism was relaxed briefly under the "New Economic Policy" of
Lenin's last days, it then became an instrument of genocide under
Stalin.

The other problem of the Bolsheviks was that, at least in the early
stages of the "Revolution," they were truly captivated by utopian
delusions. The problem of all utopians is that they advocate systems
and ideas that can only work with imaginary idyllic humans, but never
with real human beings. When they discover that real human beings
refuse to knuckle under and behave according to utopian expectations,
the utopianists respond with violent rage. The greatest strength of
capitalism is that it actually works with real human beings, people
who are lazy, base, narcissistic, self-indulgent, foul-smelling,
mean-spirited, and unsophisticated. Capitalism does not require
idyllic fictional humans in order for it to work.

The most violent terrorists and oppressors of others have always been
the utopians. The French Revolution turned violent and the guillotine
was introduced to attempt to terrorize actual humans into behaving
according to the expectations of the utopianists. The leaders of the
Soviet Revolution were no slower or more squeamish in following the
same route.

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Posted 11/28/2012 07:05:00 PM

http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/HebrewU%20-%20Amiram%20Goldblum%20-%20lifework%20as%20anti-Israel%20agitator.htm


Hebrew University - "Outpost," the Magazine of the Americans for a
Safe Israel, blasts Amiram Goldblum (Dept of Pharmaceutical Studies)
as an Anti-Israel Anti-Democratical Fanatic
The article recounts Goldblum's lifework as a fanatical anti-Israel
agitator and calls for sanctions against his employer, the Hebrew
University, until Goldblum is dismissed.

The AFSI article in Full:

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/israels-institutions-of-lowly-education-ruth-king.html


Written on November 27, 2012 at 2:41 pm by Ruth King
Israel's Institutions of Lowly Education Ruth King
It is alarming enough to witness the outright libel against Israel so
prevalent in American media and academia. It is even more appalling
when tenured academics in Israel are the genesis of these canards.
Hebrew University is considered one of the world's great institutions.
How is it then that its administration and its thousands of generous
supporters throughout the world sanction tenured professors who libel
Israel and abet the goals of its enemies?
Exhibit A: Amiram Goldblum, tenured professor of pharmaceutical
studies at Hebrew University.
It would be better to say his sub-specialty is pharmaceutical studies,
since his primary agenda is demonizing Israel as an "apartheid regime"
and filing "lawfare" harassment suits against those who criticize him
and the far Left.
Goldblum set up and leads Peace Now's "Tattletale" SWAT team, which
feeds "information" to hostile foreign groups about Israel's
settlement activities, in order to trigger international pressures
against Israel. He claims to have been present on the day in 1983 that
Emil Grunzweig became a martyr, when a lone lunatic tossed a grenade
into a Peace Now demonstration. Goldblum today claims that Grunzweig
was in fact murdered by Likud leaders. This smear comes from the
loudest whiner in the Israeli Left about how he himself is supposedly
being targeted by a "smear" campaign.
Goldblum was behind the recent "Apartheid Survey" campaign against
Israel. He himself had commissioned a blatantly manipulative "survey"
of attitudes among Israeli Jews towards Arabs. It was financed by the
"Yisraela Goldblum Foundation," a far-leftist fund set up by Goldblum
in memory of his dead wife, who had been a senior apparatchik in the
New Israel Fund (on whose board Amiram continues to serve.) The
"Foundation" commissioned a handful of far-leftists, including Alon
Liel (a radical ex-diplomat who calls for boycotts against Israel) and
Michael Sfard (an ultra-leftist lawyer-agitator) to write "survey
questions" designed to elicit responses that Goldblum and his friends
could misrepresent as indications that Israelis favor "apartheid."
(Naturally Goldblum and his cadre never bothered to solicit measures
of Israeli Arab hatred towards Jews.)
As part of "surveygate", Goldblum and his hit team insisted that if
Israeli Jews favor separate roads in the West Bank for Jews and Arabs,
because of the daily attempts by Arabs there to murder Jews, it shows
that Jews are racists who favor an apartheid regime. The survey
evidently used the term "hafrada" in Hebrew, meaning separation, a
word that can also mean apartheid. So when many Israeli Jews indicated
that they favor hafrada, Goldblum and his Smeartroopers had their
headline: Israelis favor apartheid.
Other indicators of "Jewish support for apartheid" were found by the
Goldblum team when many Israeli Jews favored affirmative action
preferences in hiring in favor of Jews. Never mind that the entire
Left in Israel has long lobbied for racist quotas in favor of Arabs!
Even the predominantly leftist Israeli press including Ha'aretz
denounced Goldblum and his smear campaign, some comparing it to the
lies and distortions of the UN's "Goldstone Commission." On October
26, 2012, the deputy editor of Maariv, Ben Dror Yemini, called
Goldblum an anti-Israel anti-democratic fanatic. The pseudo-survey was
so ridiculous that even the New Israel Fund, with which the Yisraela
Goldblum Foundation is tied, repudiated the entire "survey" and its
"findings."
But Goldblum also has another rap. He was involved in violations of
Israeli campaign financing laws in the election of 1998, when he
surreptitiously placed illegal media ads in favor of leftist contender
Ehud Barak. When Goldblum got nailed for this, a criminal indictment
was filed against him. But in Israel, far-leftists are never really
prosecuted by the politically-biased Attorney General's office. So
after Goldblum signed a statement in which he confessed his guilt,
criminal prosecution against him was "postponed," meaning it was
indefinitely frozen. Goldblum likes to tell people that this
"postponement" means he was cleared of his legal woes. It does not but
The Hebrew University Friends offices in New York ignores the fact
that this scoundrel remains in the faculty and donations keep pouring
in.
Goldblum was also involved in another disgrace, when it turned out
that a convicted PLO terrorist was being employed in Goldblum's own
laboratory at the Hebrew University, a lab in which dangerous
chemicals are kept. An Israeli Channel Two TV news broadcast accused
Goldblum of personally intervening on behalf of the terrorist and
hiring him out of ideological solidarity with terrorists. Goldblum
denies he himself made the decision to hire the terrorist, and then
badgered Hebrew University spokespeople into issuing a statement
saying that some other mysterious nameless campus officials were in
fact the ones who had made the decision to hire the terrorist, not
Goldblum himself. Channel Two then issued a partial retraction of that
part of its story. Except we do not know of a single case in the
entire world where someone gets hired to work in a professor's
university lab without that same professor's approval and
confirmation. But again, these inconvenient truths are airbrushed by
the administrators of the university and those who solicit funds.
Goldblum's anti-Israel agitation did not start yesterday. He has
proclaimed that "messianic" Judaism is a worse threat to Israel than
Iran or Hamas.
As far back as October 23, 1990 the Los Angeles Times reported that
outraged residents of Jerusalem protested his support for Palestinian
terrorism and Iraqi missile aggression against Israel. What is new is
his open hostility toward democracy, freedom of speech, and the rule
of law. At a convocation of Israel's far Left this past spring,
Goldblum called for Israeli democracy and sovereignty to be suppressed
and for the world to impose upon Israel the Left's (Palestinian)
agenda by force. Never mind that 95% of Israelis reject that agenda.
Goldblum, who loves to whine that the Right "smears" him, is active in
the "Stop Moscowitz" smear campaign directed at vilifying
industrialist Irving Moscowitz, run by anti-Israel pseudo-rabbi Haim
Dov Beliak (known in the Jewish community as "Rabbi Bellyache"). The
same Goldblum, whose delicate sensitivities are so injured whenever
anyone dares to disagree with his political opinions likes to libel
critics of the radical Left as "Kahanists" and "Fascists." He
published on Wikipedia a subliterate attack against his critics in
English, calling them "nose pickers."
But the very worst part of Goldblum's misbehavior is his serial
harassment of critics of leftist extremism. Goldblum has discovered
the delights of political "lawfare," using the courts for ideological
warfare to suppress freedom of speech, a harassment tactic developed
by Islamofascists and other anti-democratic extremists. He has filed
endless frivolous SLAPP nuisance suits against conservative
professors, NGOs, web sites, a radio personality, and others, all
designed to force them into silence and bear the costs of fighting off
his SLAPP suits. Israel has no penalties against SLAPP suit
harassment. Goldblum never wins any of these but misuses the courts as
a "lawfare" weapon to "punish" his ideological opponents, seeking to
convert the courts into bludgeons of censorship.
It is tempting to dismiss Goldblum as a self-hating Jew. On the
contrary, like many of his ilk, he thinks immensely highly of himself
as an Olympian resting on the moral heights. No, Goldblum does not
hate himself, he hates Israel.
As concerned American supporters of Israel and its many academic
institutions, we must make it clear to the Mt. Scopus officials that
our support for their university is contingent upon their dismissal of
Amiram Goldblum for his misbehavior, and his outrageous assaults
against freedom of speech.

Posted 11/26/2012 05:54:00 PM

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/steven-plaut/why-netanyahu-blinked/

Why Netanyahu Blinked

Posted By Steven Plaut On November 26, 2012 @ 12:44 am In Daily
Mailer,FrontPage | 12 Comments

The Hamas terrorists fired over 1,500 rockets into civilian areas of
Israel just before and during the recent "Pillar of Defense" military
operation, rockets that killed at least five Israelis, wounded many
others and did loads of damage. Southern Israel underwent the
regional equivalent (and the moral equivalent) to the Londoners of the
1940s who endured the German Blitz.

Israel had learned in its 2006 war with the Hezb'Allah Islamofascist
terrorists in Lebanon that bombing from the air does not achieve very
much against entrenched terrorist infrastructure. Nevertheless, that
was essentially the same failed military strategy used against the
Hamas savages by the Netanyahu government in the "Pillar of Defense"
campaign. Air attacks with conventional weapons not only failed in
Lebanon, they also failed to end the aggressions by Germany and Japan
in World War II, and they generally failed elsewhere.

Air bombings without ground incursions were tried for well over a
decade by Israel against the Gaza terrorists and failed. In part,
this was because of the insane Israeli practice of warning the
terrorists which buildings were about to be attacked so that the
denizens of those buildings could escape. While Israel was not
officially admitting sending similar sly messages in the "Pillar of
Defense" operations, I would not rule out the possibility that such
messages were sent, no doubt in order to "reduce the death count."
As had become clear in the "Cast Lead" military operation back in
2008, terrorists can only be eliminated with ground troop operations.

The pursuit of air war against the genocidal terrorists pales into
mere silliness when compared with the incomprehensible agreement by
Netanyahu to a ceasefire, this before the terrorists and their
infrastructure were eliminated, before most of the rockets were
destroyed, and in fact only a few hours after a Tel Aviv bus was
attacked by a Hamas bomb. Even worse was the fact that Netanyahu
reportedly agreed to halt targeted assassinations against terrorist
leaders and partially lift the blockade of the Gaza Strip as
conditions for the ceasefire.

Targeted assassinations are the most effective tool in the Israeli
arsenal (and of course are also used effectively by the US against
al-Qaeda). They, and not Israel's "security wall," are entirely
responsible for the end to suicide bombings of Israeli buses and cafes
in recent years. And the blockade of Gaza is motivated by the need to
make it more difficult for the savages to import Iranian missiles and
other weapons. True, there is also a political dimension to the
blockade, much as there is for the American embargo of trade with
Cuba, while the "human costs" of the one are no more serious than
those of the other.

Meanwhile, by agreeing to the ceasefire even while the wounded and
wreckage of the Tel Aviv bus bombing were still being gathered up,
Israel sent the signal that it was capitulating to Hamas demands. The
ceasefire allowed the terrorists to claim that their "victory" against
the children and women riding in that Tel Aviv bus had resulted in the
Israeli concessions. The Hamas handed out celebratory candies in
Nazi-like ghoulishness.

Hillary Clinton's glowering and threatening presence no doubt
contributed to Netanyahu's decision to wimp out and call off the
ground invasion, even though tens of thousands of reserve troops had
already been mobilized in Israel. (Rumors in Israel also hold that
Obama was coercing the ceasefire by threatening to withhold crucial
military spare parts.)

But just what did Netanyahu have to show for it all? The ceasefire
will prove to be like all previous "ceasefires" with the Gaza savages,
where the Hamas and its clones continue to fire rockets at the Jews
but the Jews turn the other cheek. Rockets landed in Israel almost
every day during the years before the "Pillar of Defense" operation.
They were ignored by the media, which does not consider attempted
murder of Jews to be newsworthy. Israel's stance was that as long as
these did not cause "too many" civilian deaths and damages, they were
"tolerable."

The Hamas, as expected, issued its usual "reports" about civilian
deaths caused by the Israeli operations and these were gobbled up by
the Western media, by and large hostile to Israel. I am convinced
that if the current staff at the BBC were reporting about the Battle
of the Bulge, they would feature press releases by the German
authorities that claim that only babies and women were being targeted
by the Americans in their aggression against the German homeland in
that battle. In the "Cast Lead" operation in 2008, the same media
were filled with reports of hundreds of civilian deaths, while later
proofs that almost all those "civilians" were in fact armed terrorists
were lucky if they made it to page 37 at the bottom in small fonts.

The Israelis living in Israel's Negev south had borne the brunt of the
Hamas rocket aggressions, but these were also the most vocal in
denouncing the ceasefire that Netanyahu had signed. In essence they
were chanting, "All We are Saying is Give War a Chance." Countless
previous "ceasefires" had simply left them abandoned by the Israeli
government as sitting-duck targets for Hamas weapons.

Without elimination of the terrorist infrastructure, nothing of
significance had been achieved. A snap poll by Israel's Channel Two
TV station confirmed the impression. The poll found that 70 percent of
the Israeli public opposed signing a cease-fire with Hamas, 24 percent
were in favor and 6 percent were undecided. Naftali Bennett, the
rising star within the Israeli Right, credited with energizing the
opposition to Netanyahu from that end of the spectrum, not only
denounced the ceasefire but openly called for tearing the Gaza Strip
in half and then conducting anti-terror search-and-destroy operations.

And then there was the media's use of the term "militants," the code
word used by anti-Semites to refer to the Gazan genocidal terrorists
and fascists. Calling them "militants" is equivalent to asserting
that they are no more murderous or evil than marchers in protests
against AIDS and killing of whales, and in fact have legitimate
grievances. The BBC, in particular, took care never to refer to a
terrorist act of violence without appending the "militant"
terminology, even when Hamas terrorists dragged the bodies of
still-living "collaborators" through the streets of Gaza with their
legs tied to the backs of motorcycles. I personally am of the opinion
that any journalist characterizing terrorists as "militants" or
"activists" should be regarded as directly participating in aggression
against Israel and treated as an enemy combatant. During the military
operations Israel repeatedly bombed the "Media Tower" in Gaza, which
held the communications offices of terrorist organizations, but also
housed the crews of reporters for the BBC and other British media.
Israel claimed it bombed the building because of the former
terrorists, but I prefer to think it was because of the latter
terrorists.

Ultimately, stability and tranquility will be created only when it is
understood that the real cause of terrorist violence in the Middle
East these days is not Israeli "occupation" but rather the REMOVAL of
Israeli "occupation." Terrorism will continue as long as the world
is dangling out "hopes" to the Palestinians that they will eventually
get their own state, a state they know will serve no other purpose but
to escalate the war of Arab aggression against Israel.

The most important lesson of recent years, and it is by now understood
by everyone except university leftists and anti-Israel journalists, is
that nothing will really put an end to the terror and rockets from
Gaza other than some good old-fashioned R&D – Reoccupation and
Denazification. Everything else is a delusion. Israel must re-occupy
the Gaza Strip, subject it to martial law, and carry out a
decades-long program of Denazification.

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