Original articles on Israel and related issues written by Steven Plaut, a professor at an Israeli university.
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For those who require empirical proof that God has a sense of humor, along comes the delicious story of Amira Hass and Ilan Pappe being prohibited from speaking at the West Bank Bir Zeit "university."
Amira Hass is the Tokyo Rose of the Middle East conflict. She is the most openly anti-Israel and pro-jihadi "journalist" at Haaretz, challenged for the title only by Gideon Levy. She has been convicted of libel and lying in court (http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-45190101.html ). Here she announces that she can't stand Jews: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/148601#.VClL2vmSz-o Ilan Pappe is the Lord Haw Haw of the conflict. One-time lecturer at the University of Haifa where he was hired entirely on the basis of his anti-Israel diatribes, he is now in the UK at the University of Exeter, where he churns out malicious Goebbels-like propaganda pieces about how Israel commits "ethnic cleansing." Pappe is the inventor of the Tantora Massacre Hoax (see http://zioncon.blogspot.co.il/2013/10/the-continuing-devastating-damages-from.html ).
It turns out both clowns wanted to speak at an anti-Israel event being held on the "Palestinian" campus. It was a conference about "alternatives to neo-liberal development." For those of you unaware of it, "Neo-Liberal" is a nonsense word used by leftists and basically means non-communist. That is why leftists always condemn neo-liberalism (see http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/steven-plaut/the-lefts-war-on-neoliberalism/ ). The problem is that the campus has a rule that no Jew may step foot there. So the two anti-Semitic Jews were denied entry because they are Jews. Tokyo Rose was denied entry into Tokyo. None of their followers issued any condemnation of the apartheid evident in the Bir Zeit policy of No Jews or Dogs Allowed.
Tokyo Rose went so far as to DEFEND in Haaretz the decision by Bir Zeit to exclude her from campus because she is a Jew. After all, she is part of the nation that is oppressing the poor "Palestinians" and denying them their rights. I am sure she would also justify Kristallnacht in Germany with a similar argument. For more, see this: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/185540 . Haaretz defended the Bir Zeit apartheid rule here: http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/.premium-1.618007
2. The "Palestinian" terrorist "President" Abu Mazen claims in the UN that Israel committed "genocide" in Gaza. This from the most notorious Holocaust Denier in the Middle East. Meaning the Jews and not Nazi Germany are guilty of genocide. So just why does anyone in the Israeli Left think there is anything at all that can be "discussed" with this animal? Since the Pestilinians and their amen choruses have been insisting for months that firing 5000 missiles at Israeli civilians just does not count, and certainly does not constitute a war crime or terrorism, why should Israel not respond to the "genocide speech" by Pestilinian "president" Abu Mazen by firing 5000 tomorrow morning at Gazans?
3. Obama upset because too many Israelis want to abandon appeasement (which he calls abandoning peace): http://www.timesofisrael.com/obama-calls-for-dismantling-is-network-of-death/?utm_source=The+Times+of+Israel+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=34621ba6fa-2014_09_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_adb46cec92-34621ba6fa-54439693#
4. Breaking news: The murderer in Oklahoma was just anti-dandruff!
"Police Say No Evidence Muslim Beheader Who Called for Beheadings in the Name of Islam is Linked to Terrorism"
The funniest thing about the 21st century is that all those radical Islamists really would like it if Westerners decided they wish to become Muslims, and the radicals seriously think that all the beheadings will make the Westerners want to convert!
5. The Metropolitan Opera in NY has just announced it will be staging Titanic II, a sequel to the highly successful movie about the Titanic from the 1990s. In it, the Jack character played by Leonardo DiCaprio gets fished out of the sea and is set down in a wheelchair to recover. But just then a group of Palestinians take over the ship and toss "Jack" with his wheelchair into the waves. In the background is a face of Yassir Arafat and the song being sung by Celine Dion, Everynight I Dream of You I Bomb You I Keeeeel You!
Get your tickets now!
6. "Understanding" Islam: http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB122669909279629451
7. PPPSSSSTTTTT! Let Obama know. Gazans are emitting greenhouse gases!!
8. Remember how the US wanted Israel to pay "reparations" for having killed some Turkish terrorists on the "Gaza Flotilla" terror ships? Well: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4575328,00.html
9. He was just giving her a Heads Up! http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/02/07/closing-arguments-begin-new-york-beheading-murder-trial/
It's no wonder that I feel abused
I never write a thing that ain't confused
I'm wearing now my chador
For my Tokyo Rose pose
Tokyo Rose pose
For it's the jihad I chose
My mind is so closed
Even my chador in the parlor
My Schocken Daddy bought for just a dollar
Treasonous snarlin'
I'm your Tokyo Rose darlin'
I never get a single think that's Jew
Even Ahmed bomber, he's a man I adore
He had the noyve to tell me he'd exploded before!
Everyone knows that I'm just
Tokyo Rose
From Jihad Avenue!
From Jihad Avenue!
The Palestinians are also to blame -
If the Palestinians had truly wanted to be liberated from the metastasizing occupation and establish a Palestinian state before it is too late, they should have aspired to a swift separation.
By A.B. Yehoshua | Sep. 23, 2014 | 8:42 PM http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.617508
In the Shulkhan Arukh, marijuana plants or cannabis are prohibited for use as Succah coverage. They cannot be held together with the lulav as a sort of Fifth Kind of Fifth Min. The Orthodox establishment has failed to endorse the psak of several Tikkun Rabbis holding that smoking hashish on the sabbath is not only permitted but is downright mandatory. The time has come for a Million Manperson Tikkun March. Bring your own LSD and weed, dude.
Michael of Meaning, Rabbi Moonbeam, Michael Lerner the LSD-touting "liberation theology" pseudo-rabbi publisher of Tikkun magazine, has announced that he has just learned that communism does not work and that only capitalism can lift the masses of people out of starvation and poverty. Accordingly he will be changing the name of Tikkun Magazine to Tycoon Magazine.
The late eminent jurist Prof. Robert Bork once said that Israel has the worst Supreme Court in the democratic world (http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/07/the_threat_to_israeli_liberties_from_the_israeli_supreme_court.html ). While in its early decades it was governed by moderation and respect for the rule of law, in recent decades Israel's Supreme Court has behaved as an imperious threat to democracy, seeking to impose the will of a gang of unelected judges upon the country, vetoing the will of the people as expressed in the legislature of elected representatives. The Court has been dominated by the anti-democratic doctrine of judicial activism, under which judges can just make up the law as they go along and overturn laws passed by elected representatives of the people on a whim. Aharon Barak as Chieg Justice insisted that it is the job of the Court to impose "enlightened opinion" on the country, meaning leftist ideology. He was not impeached. In fact you cannot impeach any judge in Israel.
One of the worst outrages of judicial activism just took place, when the Supreme Court voted to veto a law passed by the Knesset and to order the freeing of all illegal African infiltrators being held in Israeli prisons. Interestingly, the Chief Justice himself voted against the ruling and denounced his colleagues on the bench for it. Almost no one in the country approves of the verdict. And there is no constitutional basis whatsoever for it.
If Netanyahu had any backbone he would order the government to ignore the ruling altogether. There are proposals for a "bypass Supreme Court" act of legislation in this regard in the Knesset, but such proposals have often been heard and never passed. The imperious justices do not live in the neighborhoods that have been turned into high-crime disease-ridden Third World slums by the presence of thousands of illegal infiltrators from Africa.
To make matters worse, the government led by the Likud and Netanyahu just announced the appointment of two MORE justices to the Supreme Court and they are both leftwing judicial activists. One is the anti-democratic ex-Attorney General, Manny Mazuz. As Attorney General, he unabashedly pursued the agenda of the Left under Likud governments. He attacked the Jewish National Fund (but not the Islamic Waqf) for purchasing and using lands it owns to advance Jewish national goals. He warred against freedom of speech for non-leftists and indicted rabbis for daring to express opinions and for writing books.
If this sounds bizarre, it is important to emphasize that the main goal of all Likud governments has always been to implement the political agenda of the Labor Party. Basically, the Likud's position has always been that people should vote for it because it will pursue the Labor Party's agenda even better than the Labor Party. Most of the leftist judicial activists on the bench in Israel were put there by Likud governments.
And it is not only in such judicial appointments that the Likud promotes the Left. In state prizes, anti-Israel activists are guaranteed to get the "Israel Prize" under the Likud, and films comparing Israel to Nazi Germany are guaranteed state funding. Limor Livnat, the Likud's "Minister of Culture," just announced an award will be granted to Yehoshua Sobel, the country's most extremist anti-Israel playwright.
2. Who really are the BDSholes? See www.pacbi.com
3. Lying about discrimination with statistics: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/do-statistical-disparities-mean-injustice/
4. Save the goats: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/isis-launches-new-push-to-put-pants-on-goats/#.VCBDqoYmu2U.facebook
It was in the year 2018 The Israelis at long gave up their attempts to resist the pressures of the world. They elected a new government headed by Prime Minister Yossi Beilin, the original promoter of the Oslo Peace Process, in coalition with the Jewish and Arab parties of the Left. They announced that Israel was willing to accept the unanimous proposal for peace supported by every single country in the world, and would return to its pre-1967 borders, remove all Jewish settlements from the territories of the new state of Palestine, recognize Palestine, and grant Palestine all of East Jerusalem, that is, all of the city located east of a line running north-south through Zion Square, renamed Jihad Square.
The world had not seen celebration like it since the fall of the Berlin Wall or the transferal of power in South Africa to the black majority. All-night celebrations were held in every city on the planet, but none so enthusiastic as the party held in Tel Aviv in Rabin Square. Speaker after speaker appeared under a banner "Liberation at Last", and praised the decision to agree to the terms of the accord as the ultimate completion of the work and dreams of Yitzhak Rabin.
The settlers were marched out of the lands of Palestine at bayonet point, with crowds of jeering Israeli leftists pelting them with garbage as they moved into their temporary transit camps inside Green Line Israel. Liberal Jews in the United States organized a million man march in Washington together with Arabs and the Nation of Islam to celebrate the breaking out of peace and final settlement of the conflict. Peace at Last was the number one pop single. The State Department sent out a message urging Israel and Palestine to conduct good-faith negotiations and round-the-clock talks on all outstanding issues of disagreement still separating the two sovereign states. At long last, there were two states for two peoples. Land had been exchanged for peace. Peace had at long last broken out in the world's most troubled region.
The morning after the Palestine Independence Celebrations, the message arrived in the Israeli parliament, brought in by special messenger. The newly formed government of Palestine had only a small number of issues it would like to discuss with Israel. It proposed that peaceful relations be officially consummated as soon as Israel turned over to Palestine the Galilee and the Negev.
Israeli cabinet ministers were nonplussed. We thought we had settled all outstanding territorial issues by giving the Palestinians everything, they protested. The spokesman for the Palestine War Ministry explained. The Galilee was obviously part of the Arab homeland. It was filled with many Arabs, and in many areas had an Arab population majority. Israel was holding 100% of the Galilee territory, and Palestine none at all, and surely that was unfair. As for the Negev, it too has large areas with Arab majorities, but is in fact needed so that Palestine can settle the many Palestinian refugees from around the world in lands and new homes.
Israel's government preferred not to give offense and sour the new relations, and so offered to take the proposal under consideration. Within weeks, endorsements of the Palestinian proposal were coming from a variety of sources. The Arab League endorsed it. The EU approved a French proposal that the Galilee and Negev be transferred to Palestine in stages over 3 years.
Within Israel, many voices were heard in favor of the proposal. Large rallies were held on the universities. The Israeli press endorsed the idea almost in full unison, with only some regional weeklies from the north and south dissenting. Israeli film producers began turning out documentaries on the sufferings of Galilee and Negev Arabs under Israeli rule. Sociologists from around the world produced studies showing that these Arabs were victims of horrible discrimination and that Israel is characterized by institutional racism. Israeli poets and novelists wrote passionate appeals for support of the Galilee and Negev Others.
When Israel's cabinet rejected the proposal, the pressures mounted. A Galilee and Negev Liberation Organization was founded and immediately granted recognition by the UN General Assembly. It established consulate facilities in 143 countries.
Weeks later the infiltrations began. Squads of terrorists infiltrated the borders between Palestine and Israel, and suicide bombers produced a carnage of 75 murdered Jews a day. The border fences were reinforced, but to no avail. The US State Department proposed that Israel defuse the situation by considering compromise on the matters of the Galilee and Negev.
Six months later, the Galilee and Negev victims of Jewish discrimination decided to escalate their protests. Gangs of Arabs lynched Jews throughout the disputed territories. Roadblocks were set up, and entire families of Jews were dragged from their cars by the activists and beaten to death or doused with flames. The EU sent in observers, but warned Israel that there is no military solution to the problems of terrorism and violence. When Israel arrested gang leaders from the riots, the General Assembly denounced Israeli state terrorism against Galilee and Negev Arabs. French universities gave the pogrom leaders, Ahmed Tibi and Azmi Bashara, honorary doctorates.
Meanwhile, boycotts of Israel arose throughout Europe. Professors at the US Ivy League colleges demanded a total embargo and divestment from ties with Israel until it ended its racist apartheid regime. The leaders of the Reform synagogue movement supported the State Department and demanded that Israel end its obstinacy.
Israel's own leftists launched a Movement against Apartheid, and the foreign press reported that 400,000 protested attended a rally by the Movement in Rabin Square. Cars around Israel had bumper stickers that read "My Son Will Not Die for Nazareth", and "Peace Now". The Israeli Labor Party proposed erecting a series of separating barriers throughout the Galilee under the slogan "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors".
But Palestine could not sit idly by. Barrages of rockets and mortars drenched Israeli cities. The death toll rose to 7000 Israelis per month. The White House and State Department threatened to cut off all supplies from Israel if it dared to launch reprisal raids against independent Palestine. Large cargo ships from Egypt laden with advanced arms entered the port of Gaza. Thousands of volunteers streamed into Palestine to assist in the campaign to rescue the Galilee and Negev Arabs from Israeli oppression.
On the afternoon of Yom Kippur, tank columns cut Israel in two just north of Tul Karem. Palestine offered to withdraw in exchange for transferring the Negev and Galilee to its control. An Israeli newspaper and the Israeli Peace Movement proposed transferring the disputed areas to EU control until things could be settled.
Synagogues in Belgium and France were torched. Teach-ins for Palestine were held on US campuses. A new conference was called in Durban to denounce Israeli apartheid. The White House insisted that Israel not expel the invading Palestine troops who had divided the country, for it was a matter for negotiations and dialogue. The President invited both sides to Camp David, with observers from the Negev and Galilee militias present.
Increasing numbers of Israeli politicians urged that Israel respond to the situation by granting limited autonomy to the Negev and the Galilee. The Americans offered to send in ground troops to protect the remaining Israeli territories if Israel decided to accept the proposal to give up the Negev and Galilee. Let's at long last have peace in the hills that Jesus roamed, suggested the President.
Jews living in the Galilee and Negev were under siege everywhere, and the roads were unsafe. The road through the Negev to Eilat was cut by militia gangs in four places. Leftist Israeli professors officially joined the Arab militias fighting for liberation. Two of them blew themselves up on a Jewish school bus to show their solidarity with the oppressed Arabs. Ahmed Tibi, head of the largest militia, insisted he was doing everything possible to stop the suicide attacks on Tel Aviv and Haifa from the Galilee, but the Americans demanded that he do more. The UK demanded 100% effort to stop the violence. The PLO proposed as a compromise that instead of being annexed by Palestine, the Negev and Galilee be allowed to form a separate state. The Arab League endorsed the idea.
CNN broadcast a series of specials on the plight of the Negev and Galilee Arabs, and the BBC started referring to Tel Aviv as illegally occupied Arab Jaffa. Netanya and Beer Sheba were described by them as illegal colonial settlements. When the carnage exceeded 10,000 a month, the New York Times for the first time expressed regret in having promoted the peace process and ran as its lead headline "Oops". The Washington Post however urged more Israeli flexibility and concessions. The publishers of Tikkun Magazine and the Reconstructionist movement announced they would be merging with the American Buddhist Society and ISIS.
The Negev and Galilee Liberation organizations raised their flags over their towns and proposed that the Jews living in their territories be resettled elsewhere. The Palestine War Ministry was shipping them guns and explosives. The first word came of a detention camp north of Nazareth in which Jews expelled from their Galilee homes were being concentrated, with a second camp opened in the Negev near Rahat. Strange black smoke rose from the chimneys.
But the repeated use of the word in this past week's portion may be the actual origin of the practice of using the word Amen as a response to blessings and prayers. But the matter is far more intriguing. In the portion, it is used there only as an answer to the curses read atop the Mount of Curses in the ceremony of the two mountains around Nablus/Shchem, and NOT as a response to the blessings read there. Indeed, in the Torah's "bitter waters" episode it is also a response to threats or a curse.
That is right - in the Torah, Amen (meaning roughly You Better Believe It Sonny) is a response to threats and curses, not to blessings. Blessings do not get answered with Amen. Perhaps it is all an interesting commentary on human nature and on just when and over what people are in need of hearing You Better Believe It, Boychik.
Making it an intriguing mystery how the use of the word altered over time to be the mechanical response to hearing someone say a blessing. And more generally, what exactly the Amen word was intended to convey.
It seems to me that the Torah-based appropriate response to hearing anyone say the Hamas terrorrhoids in Gaza should be bombed into the Stone Age - should be Amen.
Meretz Activist and Writer Demands that Tuvia Tenenbom be Murdered
By Steven Plaut
The Israeli media have been buzzing about the delicious story of Tuvia Tenenbom and his expose of the shenanigans of the radical Left operating in the West Bank. Tenenbom is a multilingual journalist and play-write. He is well known as the founder of the Jewish Theater in New York. Passing himself off as a clueless leftist German reporter, he allowed himself to be hosted by various far-Leftist propaganda groups operating in the West Bank, supposedly "aiding" Palestinians. He wrote his experiences up in a delightful book called "Catch the Jew," in Hebrew only for now (but in the process of being translated into English).
Much of the stories concern the anti-Israel NGO calling itself "Rabbis for Human Rights" run by Arik Ascherman, who claims to have Reform synagogue "ordination" together with his wife. Ascherman has long been a bit of a laughingstock but comes over in the book like the Fourth Stooge. Arabs working for Ascherman took Tenenbom to see how IDF soldiers harass and shoot poor Palestinians but all they could find was a soldier relieving himself behind a bush. Others took Tenenbom to Yad Vashem and explained to him that the entire Holocaust is a hoax that never happened. Excerpts from the book and articles describing Tenenbom's experiences have filled the Israeli media and web the past couple of weeks. Israelis have not laughed so hard since the Hamas issued its battle song in Hebrew.
Well, now there is a new twist on this story. It involves a well-known Israeli leftist named Alona Kimche. She is an Israeli author, song writer, and actress. She made the news a couple of years back when she composed a malicious song about Israeli soldiers, accusing them of sadistic mistreatment of "Palestinians." The Israeli army radio station decided not to play the song, upsetting the radical Left. Here are a few excerpts from it:
Chorus: Learning to kill is a matter of a push
It begins with something small, then it comes easier
Patrolling all night in the Nablus casbah
Hey, what here is ours and what's yours
The beginning is an experiment
A rifle butt banging on the door
Fearful children, a terrified family
Then a closure, there's already danger
…They aren't men or women
They're only things and shadow
Learning to kill is a matter of routine.
…Learning cruelty is a matter of a push
It begins with something small, and then gets easier
Every boy is a man thirsting for conquests
Hands behind the head, feet spread apart
It's a time of danger, a time of terror
A soldier who weakens isn't worthy of mercy
Your cousin is like an animal
He's used to seeing blood.
He doesn't feel any pain
He's not a human being.
A field uniform, a jock itch, fragility and routine.
The distance between stupidity and evil is short.
The land of Israel is ours and ours alone
Learning cruelty is a matter of habit.
The Left denounced the army radio's refusal to play this jock itch song as "McCarthyism."
Kimche is active in and was on the Knesset election slate of the tiny semi-Marxist Meretz party, expected to disappear from parliament after the next election. She is active in various other leftist causes.
Kimche was not amused by Tenenbom's showing up the Far Left as a gang of circus clowns. As reported by various news media in Israel, on her Facebook page she issued a call for Tenenbom to be murdered. She said he should be burned at the stake for his "crime" of mocking the Left, and she added that she knows some shadowy friends of hers in Lod who "would be happy to do the deed."
The radical Left in Israel loves to whine about being victimized by the political Right. Just this week there is a petition being circulated that denounces "acts of violence against leftists by rightists" in Israel during the recent Gaza military operations. The petition refers to cases where communists, radical Arabs and others held anti-Israel solidarity-with-the-Hamas rallies, and passing by Israelis cursed at them and maybe threw some things at them. Dozens of prominent leftists endorse and cheer on terrorist attacks against Israelis. A number of leftist professors have openly demanded that rightists be murdered. But the petitioners have no interest in any of that.
Now in Israel it is supposed to be against the law to call for someone to be murdered. The problem is that leftists who openly call for people to be murdered are never prosecuted by the leftist Attorney General. Non-leftists can be arrested and indicted for things like saying they think Jewish women should only date Jewish men, or for wearing a tee shirt that reads "Without Loyalty there Can be no Citizenship." A number of people have demanded that Kimche be indicted, but there is little chance of that happening. Hers is protected speech in Israel, unlike that of rabbis who write controversial books about halakhic principles.
1. While it is true that ISIS beheadings of journalists are a particularly ghoulish form of murder, people murdered by other Islamists and Arab fascists in other manners are just as dead. Around 25,000 Jews have been murdered by Arab fascists and terrorists in the various Arab Israel wars and by "Palestinian" terrorism. So why is the American Administration so abhorred by the ISIS atrocities while demanding that Israel make concessions to and negotiate with the "Palestinian" terrorists so they can have their own state?
Why is PS (Palestinian State) any less repulsive or more acceptable than IS (Islamic State) ??
2. So tell me again why burying ISIS terrorists in pigskins is not the optimal response to the beheadings of Western journalists?
3. Honk if you want Haneen Zoabi imprisoned in Gitmo!
4. B'Tselem's Neo-Nazi Bedfellows: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4565828,00.html
5. Since the Likud is in power, only ultra-leftists can be appointed to the Supreme Court: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/184674#.VAWS5NKSw30
6. So let us see if we have this straight now. The "Palestinians" have been screaming for two months that Israel carried out a "genocide" against them in Gaza far worse than the Holocaust of Jews in Europe, which by the way they also say never took place. And then at the same time that they are supposedly being victims of genocide, they proclaim the Gaza military operation a stupendous victory over Israel.