Original articles on Israel and related issues written by Steven Plaut, a professor at an Israeli university.
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Thursday, November 29, 2012
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.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article:
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.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article:
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/steven-plaut/just-what-was-fundamentally-wrong-with-bolshevism/
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, November 26, 2012
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.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: 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.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/steven-plaut/why-netanyahu-blinked/
Monday, November 19, 2012
Just a couple of weeks back, Haaretz together with the so-called
"Dialogue" public opinion polling group published an enormously biased
and twisted pseudo-poll, one initiated by Hebrew University
far-leftist professor Amiram Goldblum, a founder of Peace Now,
claiming to show that most Israeli Jews are racists and support
apartheid. So obviously nothing this gang does in teh area of opinion
polling should be accepted at face value.
But even this gaggle of Far Leftists cannot hide the ENORMOUS public
support for the military operations against teh Gazan savages,
Haaretz headline today reads that over 90% of Israeli Jews (84% when
Arabs are counted) support the operation. That probably really means
that 99.98% of Jews outside of Ben Gurion University support the
operations.
There is actually something amusing about those numbers. About 18% of
Israelis are Arabs. When Arabs are added to teh survey results,
support for the war drops by 6%. Well, you do not have to be a
mathematician to understand from this that 2/3 of Israeli Arabs ALSO
are supporting the operations!
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/haaretz-poll-more-than-90-percent-of-israeli-jews-support-gaza-war.premium-1.478903#
"Dialogue" public opinion polling group published an enormously biased
and twisted pseudo-poll, one initiated by Hebrew University
far-leftist professor Amiram Goldblum, a founder of Peace Now,
claiming to show that most Israeli Jews are racists and support
apartheid. So obviously nothing this gang does in teh area of opinion
polling should be accepted at face value.
But even this gaggle of Far Leftists cannot hide the ENORMOUS public
support for the military operations against teh Gazan savages,
Haaretz headline today reads that over 90% of Israeli Jews (84% when
Arabs are counted) support the operation. That probably really means
that 99.98% of Jews outside of Ben Gurion University support the
operations.
There is actually something amusing about those numbers. About 18% of
Israelis are Arabs. When Arabs are added to teh survey results,
support for the war drops by 6%. Well, you do not have to be a
mathematician to understand from this that 2/3 of Israeli Arabs ALSO
are supporting the operations!
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/haaretz-poll-more-than-90-percent-of-israeli-jews-support-gaza-war.premium-1.478903#
I thought that the current situation and the experience of recent
years could be best summarized by this picture, actually creatd
several years back:
http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/9973/drstrangedoveya4.jpg
In fact, the missiles landing near Tel Aviv and Jerusalem should more
appropriately have pictures of Ariel Sharon riding bronco upon them
(he enthroned Hamas in Gaza!), but Ehud Barak is second choice, since
he has been Minister of Defense while israel attempted to defeat the
Hamas by turning the other cheek. The only Jewish state onthe planet
has long adopted Christianity as its defense policy!
I have argued for years that only when Hamas or Hezb'Allah rockets
land in Tel Aviv and especially in Ramat Aviv, where the secular
yuppie elite and political leadership live, would the Israeli
government stop pharting around and get serious about dealing with the
terrorists, rather than simply waiting for them to run out of
ammunition. The rockets are getting closer to Ramat Aviv.
There is no alternative to R&D = Re-Occupation and Denazification!
Everything else is delusion!
years could be best summarized by this picture, actually creatd
several years back:
http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/9973/drstrangedoveya4.jpg
In fact, the missiles landing near Tel Aviv and Jerusalem should more
appropriately have pictures of Ariel Sharon riding bronco upon them
(he enthroned Hamas in Gaza!), but Ehud Barak is second choice, since
he has been Minister of Defense while israel attempted to defeat the
Hamas by turning the other cheek. The only Jewish state onthe planet
has long adopted Christianity as its defense policy!
I have argued for years that only when Hamas or Hezb'Allah rockets
land in Tel Aviv and especially in Ramat Aviv, where the secular
yuppie elite and political leadership live, would the Israeli
government stop pharting around and get serious about dealing with the
terrorists, rather than simply waiting for them to run out of
ammunition. The rockets are getting closer to Ramat Aviv.
There is no alternative to R&D = Re-Occupation and Denazification!
Everything else is delusion!
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Rockets from Gaza landing near Tel Aviv. Arabs and Jewish leftists at
my own University of Haifa and at other universities demonstrating
their solidarity for the Hamas (see
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4306316,00.html) . I was
being facetious before when I suggested that such people would mourn
the death of the uber-terrorist Ahmed Jabari but this is PRECISELY
what they were doing all day today on Israeli college campuses!
The following article appeared on January 29, 2009 at
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=33875
It is remarkable how little was learned from the previous round of
warfare in Gaza:
The most important lesson of the past eight years, at this late stage
understood by everyone except university leftists and most Israeli
politicians, is that nothing will really put an end to the terror and
rockets other than some good old-fashioned R&D - Reoccupation and
Denazification.
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=33875
The Lessons of Gaza
By: Steven Plaut / The Jewish Press
Thursday, January 29, 2009
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Separating reality from illusion at the war's end.
The great untold story of Operation Cast Lead was the level of
euphoria and national unity that gripped Israel. Those who think the
era of miracles is over will have to explain this sudden wall-to-wall
political consensus in Israel.
In what is arguably the most contentious society on earth, public
opinion polls were showing a 94% approval rating among Israeli Jews
for the military action against Hamas. Almost the same percentage
opposed any cease-fire that did not include the release of kidnapped
soldier Gilad Shalit.
The emergence of this sudden national consensus came against a
backdrop of an international wave of naked anti-Semitism on a level
not seen in decades, and of Israeli Arabs almost uniformly expressing
both opposition to the operation and outright hatred of Jews and the
Jewish state.
The really amazing thing, however, was that the man responsible for
the surge of good feelings and patriotism among Israelis was the most
unpopular and probably the most corrupt politician in modern Israeli
history.
Ehud Olmert already had one foot out the door of the Prime Minister's
Office before the shooting started, and many believed his other foot
was headed straight for prison. Olmert's approval ratings before the
Gaza war were not significantly above zero. Yet within moments of his
ordering the commencement of operations, Israelis were closing ranks
behind him in a way that caught nearly everyone by surprise.
The rest of the world may be united in denouncing Israeli "brutality"
and the supposedly disproportionate level of Palestinian casualties.
But Israel was just as united, at least for the moment, in celebrating
the beginning of the end of its era of national self-debasement and
capitulation.
Israeli television stations and newspapers reported in great detail on
the countless anti-Israel demonstrations all over the world, down to
and including the swastikas and the chants that Hitler had been right.
This only seemed to augment the sense of national unity and
determination among Israelis.
The devotees of Hamas could march on Western campuses all they wanted,
Israelis seemed to be saying, but we will deal with the savages in our
own way.
The new Israeli national unity manifested itself even in the face of
the distorted and maniacal denunciations of Israel for its alleged
insensitivity to the plight of Palestinian civilians.
Of course, the same world media that failed to challenge the lies
surrounding the infamous "death" of the Gaza boy Muhammad al-Dura back
in 2000 kept repeating the Hamas "estimate" as if it were a scientific
finding from an unimpeachable source.
In any case, clearly the bulk of the Palestinian dead were armed
genocidal terrorists. The usual "human rights" organizations, which
have never acknowledged that Jewish civilians in the Negev are
entitled to their human rights, kept claiming that a quarter of the
dead were "children." Of course, they count any 17 year old killed
while firing a bazooka at Jews as a "child."
My youngest son spent most of the war dodging rockets in Netivot, a
town of 26,000 in the Negev near the Gaza Strip best known for serving
as the spiritual center for Moroccan Jewry, with its shrines of
leading Moroccan rabbis. Netivot was hit by more than its fair share
of Hamas rockets.
Home for a weekend, my son watched the televised images of a
Palestinian man sitting on a pile of rubble that had once been his
home and sobbing about how there is no justice.
"You do not like having your house blown up?" my son responded to the
TV screen. "So who told you to start firing rockets at me?" He speaks
for nearly all Israelis.
And then of course there was all the whining by the media about how
Israel was preventing convoys of supplies from entering Gaza, as if
the Allies in World War II had sent convoys of supplies to Berlin when
it was under siege. A caller to an Israeli radio program put it rather
succinctly: "So release Gilad Shalit and stop shooting rockets at us
and you can have all the supplies you want; in fact you can shop in
Israel and use our hospitals and beaches."
Even some - though certainly not all - members of the country's
dwindling far left came out in support of the operation. (I say
"dwindling far left" because half have woken up to the fallacies of
leftist thinking while the other half have morphed into outright
anti-Zionists.)
Consider the following developments, which would have been unthinkable
a month ago and which are a very small sampling of the changed mindset
in Israel:
The novelist A.B. Yehoshua, leader of Israel's leftist literary
soviet, wrote a scathing article telling off an anti-Israel columnist
at the far left anti-Zionist daily Haaretz.
The popular singer Arik Sinai, long associated with Tel Aviv bohemian
leftism, suddenly went on a Zionist crusade, complete with bashing of
leftist anti-Zionists.
Street protests in Israel against the war consisted almost exclusively
of Arab students and Jewish members of the pro-terror HADASH communist
party.
The Israeli national consensus opposing the declaration of a
cease-fire by the Olmert team was almost as broad as the consensus in
support of the actual fighting.
* * *
Within days of the new cease-fire, however, it was becoming clear that
Olmert had blown the whistle before the team had finished its work.
The abandonment of Gilad Shalit was just part of it. The new
cease-fire would allow Hamas to re-stock its armories and replenish
its rocket warehouses.
Hours after the cease-fire went into effect, Hamas's smuggling tunnels
were being repaired and returned to operations. Worst of all, most of
the Hamas leadership remained alive.
Even more worrisome, the Olmert people were reverting to the approach
that had produced the rocket blitz on Israel in the first place. After
eight years of a policy of restraint that had achieved absolutely
nothing, turning the other cheek was being restored as the national
defense policy.
Olmert and Livni were back to offering land for peace, reaffirming
that two decades of giving up land and getting war in return had
taught them nothing. For decades Israeli leaders had agreed to one
unilateral cease-fire after the next. These bought Israel nothing but
demonization in the world media.
After their brief incarnation as fierce Zionist warriors, Olmert and
his pals were once again pretending that Mahmoud Abbas and the PA were
something different from the Hamas; that they were reasonable people
who yearned for peaceful coexistence with Israel and with whom deals
could be struck. And Israel was again offering to release hundreds of
terrorists from captivity.
If there was one lesson Israel should have learned over the past eight
years, it was that Israeli restraint buys neither goodwill for the
country nor moderate behavior on the part of Palestinians. For eight
years Hamas and its affiliates in Gaza fired rockets at Jewish
civilians, while the Israeli government's main response was to turn
the other cheek and order the country just to wait passively for Hamas
to run out of ammunition.
Israeli leaders had deluded themselves into thinking that if only the
world would clearly see unprovoked Palestinian aggression and terror,
Israel would enjoy a public relations Xanadu. Especially after the
Israeli government, for the sake of peace, drove all Jews out of Gaza.
The expectation that restraint would boost Israel's image was among
the stupidest of the delusions of Israel's Osloid leadership. The
world not only ignored the thousands of rockets fired at Jewish
civilians, it went to contorted moral lengths to justify them.
For decades Israel's leaders misunderstood and misjudged anti-Semitism
and they continue to do so now.
Anti-Semites and those with totalitarian ideologies always reverse
cause and effect. For them, every atrocity against Jews is a righteous
protest against Jewish wrongdoing and Israeli misbehavior. Every
retaliation by Israel is an unprovoked criminal act of malice and
Nazi-like aggression. It is exactly like claiming the Japanese were
the victims of American aggression at Pearl Harbor.
The real problem is that the Anti-Israel Lobby does not consider Jews
to be human. Therefore Jewish deaths never matter and Jewish lives are
expendable. Because Jews are not quite human, they can never be
entitled to the right of self-defense or permitted to engage in it.
Anti-Zionism has now been thoroughly Nazified. There can be no other
word for people who insist that Jewish life is worthless and that
Jewish deaths never count.
If Olmert had responded to the firing of thousands of rockets at
Israel by merely sneezing in the general direction of the terrorists,
thousands of protesters would have take to the streets and the
campuses in Europe and America to denounce this as a disproportionate
response and a war crime; many would no doubt describe it as an act of
biological warfare.
Absolutely nothing can ever be gained by Israeli restraint, except to
demonstrate weakness and fan terrorism. But that insight, clear to any
reasonably intelligent seven year old, was too complicated for Israeli
officials who for eight years ordered residents of Sderot and the
other towns of the Negev to sit and take it. Sderot had been turned by
the Israeli government into an undefended Guernica, its children
traumatized, its families reduced to paupers.
* * *
Another delusion that fell victim to Operation Cast Lead was the
notion that Israel's far left, while perhaps dangerously naïve, is not
at all anti-Semitic or self-hating.
Over the past two decades a malignant plague of anti-Semitism has
swept the left, including the Jewish left. It affects Jews in the
United States, in Europe, and even in Israel. While 94 percent of the
Israeli public was solidly behind the soldiers and the attack on the
Hamas infrastructure, the Jewish left was out at the forefront of the
pro-jihad Nuremberg marches, waving Hamas and PLO flags, demanding
international boycotts of Israel, calling for a Hamas victory.
The Jewish-born British Member of Parliament ranting about how Israel
is a Nazi regime was just the tip of the iceberg. While the Arab
regimes themselves were letting everyone know the contempt they felt
for Hamas, Jewish leftists were out displaying their contempt for
Jews, from the members of J Street to the Reconstructionist "rabbi"
leading a pro-Hamas rally in Philadelphia,.
Those who thought that "Jewish anti-Semite" was an oxymoron will have
to think again. Increasingly, the left, and especially the campus
left, produces a mass of Jewish collaborators with the enemy, the
Jewish equivalents of Taliban John. Just about every Israel-bashing
newspaper and Internet site now features anti-Jewish columnists and
writers, many of them Israeli faculty members.
But the rudest awakening of all at the end of Cast Lead came with
regard to the Israeli far left, led by the academic fifth column. For
years, the pursuit of leftist silliness has been just as fashionable
on Israeli campuses as it's been on campuses in the U.S. and Europe.
As Orwell wrote, some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals can
believe them. As the guns in Gaza began to fall silent, a number of
Israeli leftists emerged from their bunkers with a vengeance,
sabotaging the consensus of patriotism that had filled Israel during
the war.
Ben-Gurion University, the campus with arguably the largest number of
anti-Israel extremist faculty members, was shut down for weeks as
Hamas rockets bathed Beersheba. Several rockets landed close to the
campus. Public-school buildings in Beersheba were destroyed by
rockets. Yet leftist faculty members at BGU went on the warpath
against Israel and in support of Hamas. In an article titled "Black
January," BGU sociologist Lev Grinberg proclaimed Hamas terrorists to
be the true Maccabees, struggling against the evil empire:
I admit that I find the name "Cast Lead" in bad taste because of its
allusion to Chanukah and the Maccabees who fought against a mighty
conqueror. If indeed there is a struggle here of the weak against an
occupying empire, it is the struggle of Hamas against Israel, not the
other way around. Our self-image as the weak victim is utterly surreal
and trapped in the mythology of the Jews as the ultimate victims,
regardless of reality.... The firing of missiles by the prisoners in
protest against their starvation was interpreted as aggression, while
their oppression by their jailers was interpreted as self-defense.
Grinberg had earlier denounced Israel's targeting of terrorist leaders
as "symbolic genocide."
Neve Gordon, a BGU lecturer now serving as the chairman of political
science at the university, turned out one pro-terror anti-Israel
article after the next for anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi websites,
denouncing Israel as a criminal entity. In one, he excoriated Israel
for bombing the Islamic "university" in Gaza that was serving as the
storage warehouse for the very same rockets being fired at his own
university campus.
Oren Yiftachel, a professor of geography at Ben Gurion University who
has made a career out of denouncing Israel for being an "apartheid"
regime, cheered the firing of rockets at the children of Sderot and
Netivot as the moral and just response of Palestinians "imprisoned" by
Israel firing at their "jailers."
At my own University of Haifa, left-wing faculty members exploded in a
wave of outraged protests when the campus heads decided to fly Israeli
flags as a gesture of solidarity with the embattled residents of the
Negev towns. The leftists claimed this would be insensitive because it
would offend the pro-jihad Arab students who fill the campus.
The most important lesson of the past eight years, at this late stage
understood by everyone except university leftists and most Israeli
politicians, is that nothing will really put an end to the terror and
rockets other than some good old-fashioned R&D - Reoccupation and
Denazification.
Everything else is a delusion.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
my own University of Haifa and at other universities demonstrating
their solidarity for the Hamas (see
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4306316,00.html) . I was
being facetious before when I suggested that such people would mourn
the death of the uber-terrorist Ahmed Jabari but this is PRECISELY
what they were doing all day today on Israeli college campuses!
The following article appeared on January 29, 2009 at
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=33875
It is remarkable how little was learned from the previous round of
warfare in Gaza:
The most important lesson of the past eight years, at this late stage
understood by everyone except university leftists and most Israeli
politicians, is that nothing will really put an end to the terror and
rockets other than some good old-fashioned R&D - Reoccupation and
Denazification.
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=33875
The Lessons of Gaza
By: Steven Plaut / The Jewish Press
Thursday, January 29, 2009
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Separating reality from illusion at the war's end.
The great untold story of Operation Cast Lead was the level of
euphoria and national unity that gripped Israel. Those who think the
era of miracles is over will have to explain this sudden wall-to-wall
political consensus in Israel.
In what is arguably the most contentious society on earth, public
opinion polls were showing a 94% approval rating among Israeli Jews
for the military action against Hamas. Almost the same percentage
opposed any cease-fire that did not include the release of kidnapped
soldier Gilad Shalit.
The emergence of this sudden national consensus came against a
backdrop of an international wave of naked anti-Semitism on a level
not seen in decades, and of Israeli Arabs almost uniformly expressing
both opposition to the operation and outright hatred of Jews and the
Jewish state.
The really amazing thing, however, was that the man responsible for
the surge of good feelings and patriotism among Israelis was the most
unpopular and probably the most corrupt politician in modern Israeli
history.
Ehud Olmert already had one foot out the door of the Prime Minister's
Office before the shooting started, and many believed his other foot
was headed straight for prison. Olmert's approval ratings before the
Gaza war were not significantly above zero. Yet within moments of his
ordering the commencement of operations, Israelis were closing ranks
behind him in a way that caught nearly everyone by surprise.
The rest of the world may be united in denouncing Israeli "brutality"
and the supposedly disproportionate level of Palestinian casualties.
But Israel was just as united, at least for the moment, in celebrating
the beginning of the end of its era of national self-debasement and
capitulation.
Israeli television stations and newspapers reported in great detail on
the countless anti-Israel demonstrations all over the world, down to
and including the swastikas and the chants that Hitler had been right.
This only seemed to augment the sense of national unity and
determination among Israelis.
The devotees of Hamas could march on Western campuses all they wanted,
Israelis seemed to be saying, but we will deal with the savages in our
own way.
The new Israeli national unity manifested itself even in the face of
the distorted and maniacal denunciations of Israel for its alleged
insensitivity to the plight of Palestinian civilians.
Of course, the same world media that failed to challenge the lies
surrounding the infamous "death" of the Gaza boy Muhammad al-Dura back
in 2000 kept repeating the Hamas "estimate" as if it were a scientific
finding from an unimpeachable source.
In any case, clearly the bulk of the Palestinian dead were armed
genocidal terrorists. The usual "human rights" organizations, which
have never acknowledged that Jewish civilians in the Negev are
entitled to their human rights, kept claiming that a quarter of the
dead were "children." Of course, they count any 17 year old killed
while firing a bazooka at Jews as a "child."
My youngest son spent most of the war dodging rockets in Netivot, a
town of 26,000 in the Negev near the Gaza Strip best known for serving
as the spiritual center for Moroccan Jewry, with its shrines of
leading Moroccan rabbis. Netivot was hit by more than its fair share
of Hamas rockets.
Home for a weekend, my son watched the televised images of a
Palestinian man sitting on a pile of rubble that had once been his
home and sobbing about how there is no justice.
"You do not like having your house blown up?" my son responded to the
TV screen. "So who told you to start firing rockets at me?" He speaks
for nearly all Israelis.
And then of course there was all the whining by the media about how
Israel was preventing convoys of supplies from entering Gaza, as if
the Allies in World War II had sent convoys of supplies to Berlin when
it was under siege. A caller to an Israeli radio program put it rather
succinctly: "So release Gilad Shalit and stop shooting rockets at us
and you can have all the supplies you want; in fact you can shop in
Israel and use our hospitals and beaches."
Even some - though certainly not all - members of the country's
dwindling far left came out in support of the operation. (I say
"dwindling far left" because half have woken up to the fallacies of
leftist thinking while the other half have morphed into outright
anti-Zionists.)
Consider the following developments, which would have been unthinkable
a month ago and which are a very small sampling of the changed mindset
in Israel:
The novelist A.B. Yehoshua, leader of Israel's leftist literary
soviet, wrote a scathing article telling off an anti-Israel columnist
at the far left anti-Zionist daily Haaretz.
The popular singer Arik Sinai, long associated with Tel Aviv bohemian
leftism, suddenly went on a Zionist crusade, complete with bashing of
leftist anti-Zionists.
Street protests in Israel against the war consisted almost exclusively
of Arab students and Jewish members of the pro-terror HADASH communist
party.
The Israeli national consensus opposing the declaration of a
cease-fire by the Olmert team was almost as broad as the consensus in
support of the actual fighting.
* * *
Within days of the new cease-fire, however, it was becoming clear that
Olmert had blown the whistle before the team had finished its work.
The abandonment of Gilad Shalit was just part of it. The new
cease-fire would allow Hamas to re-stock its armories and replenish
its rocket warehouses.
Hours after the cease-fire went into effect, Hamas's smuggling tunnels
were being repaired and returned to operations. Worst of all, most of
the Hamas leadership remained alive.
Even more worrisome, the Olmert people were reverting to the approach
that had produced the rocket blitz on Israel in the first place. After
eight years of a policy of restraint that had achieved absolutely
nothing, turning the other cheek was being restored as the national
defense policy.
Olmert and Livni were back to offering land for peace, reaffirming
that two decades of giving up land and getting war in return had
taught them nothing. For decades Israeli leaders had agreed to one
unilateral cease-fire after the next. These bought Israel nothing but
demonization in the world media.
After their brief incarnation as fierce Zionist warriors, Olmert and
his pals were once again pretending that Mahmoud Abbas and the PA were
something different from the Hamas; that they were reasonable people
who yearned for peaceful coexistence with Israel and with whom deals
could be struck. And Israel was again offering to release hundreds of
terrorists from captivity.
If there was one lesson Israel should have learned over the past eight
years, it was that Israeli restraint buys neither goodwill for the
country nor moderate behavior on the part of Palestinians. For eight
years Hamas and its affiliates in Gaza fired rockets at Jewish
civilians, while the Israeli government's main response was to turn
the other cheek and order the country just to wait passively for Hamas
to run out of ammunition.
Israeli leaders had deluded themselves into thinking that if only the
world would clearly see unprovoked Palestinian aggression and terror,
Israel would enjoy a public relations Xanadu. Especially after the
Israeli government, for the sake of peace, drove all Jews out of Gaza.
The expectation that restraint would boost Israel's image was among
the stupidest of the delusions of Israel's Osloid leadership. The
world not only ignored the thousands of rockets fired at Jewish
civilians, it went to contorted moral lengths to justify them.
For decades Israel's leaders misunderstood and misjudged anti-Semitism
and they continue to do so now.
Anti-Semites and those with totalitarian ideologies always reverse
cause and effect. For them, every atrocity against Jews is a righteous
protest against Jewish wrongdoing and Israeli misbehavior. Every
retaliation by Israel is an unprovoked criminal act of malice and
Nazi-like aggression. It is exactly like claiming the Japanese were
the victims of American aggression at Pearl Harbor.
The real problem is that the Anti-Israel Lobby does not consider Jews
to be human. Therefore Jewish deaths never matter and Jewish lives are
expendable. Because Jews are not quite human, they can never be
entitled to the right of self-defense or permitted to engage in it.
Anti-Zionism has now been thoroughly Nazified. There can be no other
word for people who insist that Jewish life is worthless and that
Jewish deaths never count.
If Olmert had responded to the firing of thousands of rockets at
Israel by merely sneezing in the general direction of the terrorists,
thousands of protesters would have take to the streets and the
campuses in Europe and America to denounce this as a disproportionate
response and a war crime; many would no doubt describe it as an act of
biological warfare.
Absolutely nothing can ever be gained by Israeli restraint, except to
demonstrate weakness and fan terrorism. But that insight, clear to any
reasonably intelligent seven year old, was too complicated for Israeli
officials who for eight years ordered residents of Sderot and the
other towns of the Negev to sit and take it. Sderot had been turned by
the Israeli government into an undefended Guernica, its children
traumatized, its families reduced to paupers.
* * *
Another delusion that fell victim to Operation Cast Lead was the
notion that Israel's far left, while perhaps dangerously naïve, is not
at all anti-Semitic or self-hating.
Over the past two decades a malignant plague of anti-Semitism has
swept the left, including the Jewish left. It affects Jews in the
United States, in Europe, and even in Israel. While 94 percent of the
Israeli public was solidly behind the soldiers and the attack on the
Hamas infrastructure, the Jewish left was out at the forefront of the
pro-jihad Nuremberg marches, waving Hamas and PLO flags, demanding
international boycotts of Israel, calling for a Hamas victory.
The Jewish-born British Member of Parliament ranting about how Israel
is a Nazi regime was just the tip of the iceberg. While the Arab
regimes themselves were letting everyone know the contempt they felt
for Hamas, Jewish leftists were out displaying their contempt for
Jews, from the members of J Street to the Reconstructionist "rabbi"
leading a pro-Hamas rally in Philadelphia,.
Those who thought that "Jewish anti-Semite" was an oxymoron will have
to think again. Increasingly, the left, and especially the campus
left, produces a mass of Jewish collaborators with the enemy, the
Jewish equivalents of Taliban John. Just about every Israel-bashing
newspaper and Internet site now features anti-Jewish columnists and
writers, many of them Israeli faculty members.
But the rudest awakening of all at the end of Cast Lead came with
regard to the Israeli far left, led by the academic fifth column. For
years, the pursuit of leftist silliness has been just as fashionable
on Israeli campuses as it's been on campuses in the U.S. and Europe.
As Orwell wrote, some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals can
believe them. As the guns in Gaza began to fall silent, a number of
Israeli leftists emerged from their bunkers with a vengeance,
sabotaging the consensus of patriotism that had filled Israel during
the war.
Ben-Gurion University, the campus with arguably the largest number of
anti-Israel extremist faculty members, was shut down for weeks as
Hamas rockets bathed Beersheba. Several rockets landed close to the
campus. Public-school buildings in Beersheba were destroyed by
rockets. Yet leftist faculty members at BGU went on the warpath
against Israel and in support of Hamas. In an article titled "Black
January," BGU sociologist Lev Grinberg proclaimed Hamas terrorists to
be the true Maccabees, struggling against the evil empire:
I admit that I find the name "Cast Lead" in bad taste because of its
allusion to Chanukah and the Maccabees who fought against a mighty
conqueror. If indeed there is a struggle here of the weak against an
occupying empire, it is the struggle of Hamas against Israel, not the
other way around. Our self-image as the weak victim is utterly surreal
and trapped in the mythology of the Jews as the ultimate victims,
regardless of reality.... The firing of missiles by the prisoners in
protest against their starvation was interpreted as aggression, while
their oppression by their jailers was interpreted as self-defense.
Grinberg had earlier denounced Israel's targeting of terrorist leaders
as "symbolic genocide."
Neve Gordon, a BGU lecturer now serving as the chairman of political
science at the university, turned out one pro-terror anti-Israel
article after the next for anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi websites,
denouncing Israel as a criminal entity. In one, he excoriated Israel
for bombing the Islamic "university" in Gaza that was serving as the
storage warehouse for the very same rockets being fired at his own
university campus.
Oren Yiftachel, a professor of geography at Ben Gurion University who
has made a career out of denouncing Israel for being an "apartheid"
regime, cheered the firing of rockets at the children of Sderot and
Netivot as the moral and just response of Palestinians "imprisoned" by
Israel firing at their "jailers."
At my own University of Haifa, left-wing faculty members exploded in a
wave of outraged protests when the campus heads decided to fly Israeli
flags as a gesture of solidarity with the embattled residents of the
Negev towns. The leftists claimed this would be insensitive because it
would offend the pro-jihad Arab students who fill the campus.
The most important lesson of the past eight years, at this late stage
understood by everyone except university leftists and most Israeli
politicians, is that nothing will really put an end to the terror and
rockets other than some good old-fashioned R&D - Reoccupation and
Denazification.
Everything else is a delusion.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ahmed Jabari, the Hamas arch-terrorhoid and mass murderer, the fella
who planned the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, has been recycled, sent to
his 72 year old virgin.
You can see the recycling program in operation here:
http://www.israellycool.com/2012/11/14/when-ahmed-became-a-dead-terrorist/
All around the Gazan Brush,
Our monkeys chased the weasel.
The Hamas stopped to pull up his sock,
Pop! went the weasel.
I think now would be a good opportunity to send a condolence e-mail
note to as many Israeli tenured leftists as you would like, offering
condolences to them for their sad loss of their role model and hero,
Ahmed Jabari. Wish them a rapid recovery from their deep mourning so
that once again they can resume their constructive civic activities on
behalf of a Palestinian victory.
Don't forget to CC Mikey Lerner over at Tikkun.
.
who planned the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, has been recycled, sent to
his 72 year old virgin.
You can see the recycling program in operation here:
http://www.israellycool.com/2012/11/14/when-ahmed-became-a-dead-terrorist/
All around the Gazan Brush,
Our monkeys chased the weasel.
The Hamas stopped to pull up his sock,
Pop! went the weasel.
I think now would be a good opportunity to send a condolence e-mail
note to as many Israeli tenured leftists as you would like, offering
condolences to them for their sad loss of their role model and hero,
Ahmed Jabari. Wish them a rapid recovery from their deep mourning so
that once again they can resume their constructive civic activities on
behalf of a Palestinian victory.
Don't forget to CC Mikey Lerner over at Tikkun.
.
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
There is an old saying that a conservative is a liberal who has
been mugged by reality. It remains to be seen whether getting
himself mugged by Islamofascists in Sweden will have any effect upon
the socialist catechism of Ami Vatury.
Ami Vatury is so far leftist that he teaches (German Studies) at
Ben Gurion University. A Haifa native, he holds a PhD in history
from the University of Haifa, although he carried it out at Ben Gurion
University. He claims to be a "social activist," whatever that is.
His major feather in his pink cap is that he used to organize strikes
of workers at Ben Gurion airport that crippled the country, and he
brags that he organized the longest and most damaging of these
terrorist actions at the airport. He also "teaches" "courses" at the
so-called Socio-economic College, a non-accredited pseudo-college
operated by the Israeli communist party in which "courses" are
indoctrination sessions in leftist dogma. He is active in the
semi-communist "Mizrachi Rainbow (Keshet)," a group of Marxist
anti-Zionist Sephardic Jews in Israel. And he also is active in other
leftist causes. He claims to be a "social democrat."
Well, Comrade Social Democrat was in Malmo, Sweden a few weeks
back. Malmo is perhaps the worst city in Europe these days when it
comes to violent assaults against Jews by Moslems. There is a large,
violent, and militant local Islamist population there. There have
been countless incidents in which Jews from the small and disappearing
Malmo community were beaten.
Comrade Vatury had gone there in person to make friends with the
local Islamists and write about how misunderstood they are. As he
relates in his own words in an entry in the far leftist Haokets web
site (in Hebrew here:
http://www.haokets.org/2012/10/29/%D7%90%D7%96%D7%A2%D7%A7%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%A8%D7%92%D7%A2%D7%94-%D7%9E%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%91%D7%A2-%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%96%D7%A0%D7%92%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%93/
) he got the Marxist stuffing beaten out of himself there, when two or
three "locals" jumped him, did a Sopranos routine upon him, and left
him unconscious in the street. It is not clear whether they
identified him from his Hebrew or accent, but there is little
ambiguity as to who the attackers were. They were not blond
Lutherans. Vatury's wallet and money were NOT taken. So what do we
learn from that?
Vatury was taken to a local hospital, and the rest of his article
is devoted to singing the praises of the socialist Swedish medical
system. He notes that he was mugged near one of the low-income slums
of Malmo, and then goes to extreme contortions in order to try to
explain how his beloved Swedish socialism can even have low-income
slums and poverty. He tries to claim that it is all somehow the fault
of the rising Far Right in Sweden, but fails to notice the
contradiction in having a growing Far Right in a socialist utopia.
I know what you are thinking, and that is that Israel would be
such a better place if all of the OTHER Marxists and "social
democratic" utopianists could also be bludgeoned by Islamists in
Sweden into becoming guests of that nation's socialist medical system.
They might even wake up and smell the capitalist gourmet coffee!
been mugged by reality. It remains to be seen whether getting
himself mugged by Islamofascists in Sweden will have any effect upon
the socialist catechism of Ami Vatury.
Ami Vatury is so far leftist that he teaches (German Studies) at
Ben Gurion University. A Haifa native, he holds a PhD in history
from the University of Haifa, although he carried it out at Ben Gurion
University. He claims to be a "social activist," whatever that is.
His major feather in his pink cap is that he used to organize strikes
of workers at Ben Gurion airport that crippled the country, and he
brags that he organized the longest and most damaging of these
terrorist actions at the airport. He also "teaches" "courses" at the
so-called Socio-economic College, a non-accredited pseudo-college
operated by the Israeli communist party in which "courses" are
indoctrination sessions in leftist dogma. He is active in the
semi-communist "Mizrachi Rainbow (Keshet)," a group of Marxist
anti-Zionist Sephardic Jews in Israel. And he also is active in other
leftist causes. He claims to be a "social democrat."
Well, Comrade Social Democrat was in Malmo, Sweden a few weeks
back. Malmo is perhaps the worst city in Europe these days when it
comes to violent assaults against Jews by Moslems. There is a large,
violent, and militant local Islamist population there. There have
been countless incidents in which Jews from the small and disappearing
Malmo community were beaten.
Comrade Vatury had gone there in person to make friends with the
local Islamists and write about how misunderstood they are. As he
relates in his own words in an entry in the far leftist Haokets web
site (in Hebrew here:
http://www.haokets.org/2012/10/29/%D7%90%D7%96%D7%A2%D7%A7%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%A8%D7%92%D7%A2%D7%94-%D7%9E%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%91%D7%A2-%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%96%D7%A0%D7%92%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%93/
) he got the Marxist stuffing beaten out of himself there, when two or
three "locals" jumped him, did a Sopranos routine upon him, and left
him unconscious in the street. It is not clear whether they
identified him from his Hebrew or accent, but there is little
ambiguity as to who the attackers were. They were not blond
Lutherans. Vatury's wallet and money were NOT taken. So what do we
learn from that?
Vatury was taken to a local hospital, and the rest of his article
is devoted to singing the praises of the socialist Swedish medical
system. He notes that he was mugged near one of the low-income slums
of Malmo, and then goes to extreme contortions in order to try to
explain how his beloved Swedish socialism can even have low-income
slums and poverty. He tries to claim that it is all somehow the fault
of the rising Far Right in Sweden, but fails to notice the
contradiction in having a growing Far Right in a socialist utopia.
I know what you are thinking, and that is that Israel would be
such a better place if all of the OTHER Marxists and "social
democratic" utopianists could also be bludgeoned by Islamists in
Sweden into becoming guests of that nation's socialist medical system.
They might even wake up and smell the capitalist gourmet coffee!
Monday, November 12, 2012
1. Summing it all up - The Little Difference:
By Steven Plaut
Democrats on Petraeus:
The man is unfit for office and must not be allowed to continue
to serve the country! He has no respect for women. His personal life
disqualifies him for office. He cannot be regarded as competent when
he behaves so badly with members of the opposite sex. A man who
betrays his own wife to pursue another woman has no place in high
office. His having issued an apology does not get him off the hook.
The CIA has its own code of conduct and Petraeus failed to live up to
it. No one behaving this way can be regarded as reliable in carrying
out his public service job. Nothing is more relevant for assessing
his public performance than his behavior in private life.
Democrats on Clinton:
The man is uniquely fit for office and must be allowed to
continue to serve the country! It does not matter at all with regard
to his public position that he showed no respect for women. His
personal life has nothing at all to do with his qualification for
office. He cannot be regarded as incompetent just because he behaves
badly with members of the opposite sex. What does this have to do
with his qualifications as president? Just because a man betrays his
own wife to pursue another woman, that is no reason to bar him from
high office. His having issued an apology should get him off the
hook. The Presidency does not have its own code of conduct and many
men fail to live up to expectations of marital fidelity. Just because
Clinton behaved badly in his private life, that is no reason why he
cannot continue carrying out his public service job. What is private
must stay private and is not relevant for assessing his public
performance.
2. "The Internationale" (also sometimes written without the last "E")
is the marching song of communists all over the world. You can see
its English lyrics here: http://www.uv.es/~pla/red.net/intaoter.html
. The song symbolizes the mindless stupidity of the Stalinist Old
Left, its love for anti-democratic oppression, suppression of human
rights, gulags, and devotion to the armed seizure of power by tiny
communist elites claiming to speak on behalf of "the people," while of
course "the people" are never allowed to have a say about anything.
This week the semi-Marxist Meretz Party of Israel's Far Left, a party
closely linked with "Peace Now," held its nominating convention. It
chose candidates that it believes will serve in the next Knesset based
on its assumption that the party will gain eight Knesset seats, or in
Israeli parlance, eight "realistic" seats. I personally think that
Meretz can realistically expect to get two seats and I hope it does
not even get those and will fail to get into the next Knesset
altogether.
Anyway, the current Madam Defarge of Meretz, having taken over after
Shulamit Aloni got tired of defaming Israel and Jews, is Zehava Galon.
(See http://meretzusa.blogspot.hu/2012/07/interview-with-zehava-galon-head-of.html)
She is a radical anti-Israel dingbat, loud mouthed and very
bad-tempered - ever since Hansel and Gretel managed to escape. She
was naturally chosen for the party's number one slot. The number two
slot however went to a relative unknown, one Ilan Gilon, whose name is
so similar to that of his gyno-Kommandant that most Israelis think
they are married (actually, not related). Gilon is an Old Left
marxie, even though he was born in Moldava and so should know better.
His main qualification for office is that he used to run a communist
restaurant where the waiters wore tee shirts with leftist slogans.
According to Yediot Ahronot
(http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4304069,00.html ), upon
hearing of his performance, Gilon and his comrades broke out into a
loud rendition of The Internationale.
So all I can say is this:
Arise Israelis from your slumbers
And trash those Meretz bolshies now!
Away with all your superstitions
Zehava is one heap big cow,
Servile masses arise, arise
Restore henceforth our old traditions
Tar and feathers must be their prize.
By the way, my son's apartment in Tel Aviv was being visited by an
obnoxious Tel Aviv rat, which entered through the window. He caught
the critter in a trap. He was reluctant to drown it, my first
suggestion to him. So I suggested that he just deliver it to the
Meretz Party, whose entire remaining membership could dine on it for a
week without having to go out for their usual seafood and bacon lunch
favorites.
3. Even the ultra-leftist ex-editor-in-chief at Haaretz denounces
Amiram Goldblum and the others involved in the malicious "Apartheid
Survey" Defamation of Israel:
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/HebrewU%20-%20Haaretz%20Editor%20calls%20Amiram%20Goldblum%20a%20biased%20radical.htm
See also http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/HebrewU%20-%20Amiram%20Goldblum%20must%20apologize%20for%20slandering%20Israel.htm
4. Leftism as Paganism:
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=291378
By Steven Plaut
Democrats on Petraeus:
The man is unfit for office and must not be allowed to continue
to serve the country! He has no respect for women. His personal life
disqualifies him for office. He cannot be regarded as competent when
he behaves so badly with members of the opposite sex. A man who
betrays his own wife to pursue another woman has no place in high
office. His having issued an apology does not get him off the hook.
The CIA has its own code of conduct and Petraeus failed to live up to
it. No one behaving this way can be regarded as reliable in carrying
out his public service job. Nothing is more relevant for assessing
his public performance than his behavior in private life.
Democrats on Clinton:
The man is uniquely fit for office and must be allowed to
continue to serve the country! It does not matter at all with regard
to his public position that he showed no respect for women. His
personal life has nothing at all to do with his qualification for
office. He cannot be regarded as incompetent just because he behaves
badly with members of the opposite sex. What does this have to do
with his qualifications as president? Just because a man betrays his
own wife to pursue another woman, that is no reason to bar him from
high office. His having issued an apology should get him off the
hook. The Presidency does not have its own code of conduct and many
men fail to live up to expectations of marital fidelity. Just because
Clinton behaved badly in his private life, that is no reason why he
cannot continue carrying out his public service job. What is private
must stay private and is not relevant for assessing his public
performance.
2. "The Internationale" (also sometimes written without the last "E")
is the marching song of communists all over the world. You can see
its English lyrics here: http://www.uv.es/~pla/red.net/intaoter.html
. The song symbolizes the mindless stupidity of the Stalinist Old
Left, its love for anti-democratic oppression, suppression of human
rights, gulags, and devotion to the armed seizure of power by tiny
communist elites claiming to speak on behalf of "the people," while of
course "the people" are never allowed to have a say about anything.
This week the semi-Marxist Meretz Party of Israel's Far Left, a party
closely linked with "Peace Now," held its nominating convention. It
chose candidates that it believes will serve in the next Knesset based
on its assumption that the party will gain eight Knesset seats, or in
Israeli parlance, eight "realistic" seats. I personally think that
Meretz can realistically expect to get two seats and I hope it does
not even get those and will fail to get into the next Knesset
altogether.
Anyway, the current Madam Defarge of Meretz, having taken over after
Shulamit Aloni got tired of defaming Israel and Jews, is Zehava Galon.
(See http://meretzusa.blogspot.hu/2012/07/interview-with-zehava-galon-head-of.html)
She is a radical anti-Israel dingbat, loud mouthed and very
bad-tempered - ever since Hansel and Gretel managed to escape. She
was naturally chosen for the party's number one slot. The number two
slot however went to a relative unknown, one Ilan Gilon, whose name is
so similar to that of his gyno-Kommandant that most Israelis think
they are married (actually, not related). Gilon is an Old Left
marxie, even though he was born in Moldava and so should know better.
His main qualification for office is that he used to run a communist
restaurant where the waiters wore tee shirts with leftist slogans.
According to Yediot Ahronot
(http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4304069,00.html ), upon
hearing of his performance, Gilon and his comrades broke out into a
loud rendition of The Internationale.
So all I can say is this:
Arise Israelis from your slumbers
And trash those Meretz bolshies now!
Away with all your superstitions
Zehava is one heap big cow,
Servile masses arise, arise
Restore henceforth our old traditions
Tar and feathers must be their prize.
By the way, my son's apartment in Tel Aviv was being visited by an
obnoxious Tel Aviv rat, which entered through the window. He caught
the critter in a trap. He was reluctant to drown it, my first
suggestion to him. So I suggested that he just deliver it to the
Meretz Party, whose entire remaining membership could dine on it for a
week without having to go out for their usual seafood and bacon lunch
favorites.
3. Even the ultra-leftist ex-editor-in-chief at Haaretz denounces
Amiram Goldblum and the others involved in the malicious "Apartheid
Survey" Defamation of Israel:
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/HebrewU%20-%20Haaretz%20Editor%20calls%20Amiram%20Goldblum%20a%20biased%20radical.htm
See also http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/HebrewU%20-%20Amiram%20Goldblum%20must%20apologize%20for%20slandering%20Israel.htm
4. Leftism as Paganism:
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=291378
Tuesday, November 06, 2012
MAJOR Victory for the Good Guys!
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/haaretz-journalist-to-pay-settlers-50-thousand-for-slander/2012/11
Ha'aretz Journalist to Pay Settlers $50 Thousand for Slander
By: Jewish Press Staff
Published: November 5th, 2012
Latest update: November 6th, 2012
Long-time Ha'aretz columnist Neri Livneh has been ordered by a court
to pay NIS 200,000 ($50,000) in compensations for slander to two
residents of the settlement Itamar.
The complaint was filed last March, by Attorney Doron Nir Tzvi, legal
advisor for the Committee of Samaria Residents, following Livneh's
appearance on the Channel 1 TV program "Politics," where she described
Itamar residents' behavior as "especially aggressive," adding that
"every two years a murderer comes out of there," Walla reported.
The law suit claimed that Livneh referred to the two plaintiffs as
murderers who apparently were products of the settlement.
The court ruled that Livneh must to pay damages for slander after the
journalist failed to file a defense statement in time and had not
requested an extension to do so.
Last week Livneh, a veteran columnist at Ha'aretz, was called in for a
hearing, as part of a wave of cutbacks in the paper.
Members of the Committee of Samaria Residents were pleased with the
decision and said that "this verdict is a warning signal to anyone who
wants to lash out in an unrestricted and malicious manner against
Jewish settlers. The false and irresponsible statement reflects the
attitude of many in the media towards the Jews of Judea and Samaria
and it's a good thing that the court took a harsh approach against
her."
Livneh has not yet issued a response.
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/haaretz-journalist-to-pay-settlers-50-thousand-for-slander/2012/11
Ha'aretz Journalist to Pay Settlers $50 Thousand for Slander
By: Jewish Press Staff
Published: November 5th, 2012
Latest update: November 6th, 2012
Long-time Ha'aretz columnist Neri Livneh has been ordered by a court
to pay NIS 200,000 ($50,000) in compensations for slander to two
residents of the settlement Itamar.
The complaint was filed last March, by Attorney Doron Nir Tzvi, legal
advisor for the Committee of Samaria Residents, following Livneh's
appearance on the Channel 1 TV program "Politics," where she described
Itamar residents' behavior as "especially aggressive," adding that
"every two years a murderer comes out of there," Walla reported.
The law suit claimed that Livneh referred to the two plaintiffs as
murderers who apparently were products of the settlement.
The court ruled that Livneh must to pay damages for slander after the
journalist failed to file a defense statement in time and had not
requested an extension to do so.
Last week Livneh, a veteran columnist at Ha'aretz, was called in for a
hearing, as part of a wave of cutbacks in the paper.
Members of the Committee of Samaria Residents were pleased with the
decision and said that "this verdict is a warning signal to anyone who
wants to lash out in an unrestricted and malicious manner against
Jewish settlers. The false and irresponsible statement reflects the
attitude of many in the media towards the Jews of Judea and Samaria
and it's a good thing that the court took a harsh approach against
her."
Livneh has not yet issued a response.