Original articles on Israel and related issues written by Steven Plaut, a professor at an Israeli university.
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Amos Schocken is the editor of the anti-Israel Haaretz. He took it over from his own father, Gershom Schocken, who ran it from 1939 until 1989 after Amos' grandfather bought the paper in 1937. Gershom was moderate compared with his pro-terror pro-jihad son.
This week was the anniversary of the attack by the Irgun (Etsel) on the military headquarters of the British in the King David Hotel in 1946 before Israeli Independence. See http://www.etzel.org.il/english/ac10.htm. Lots of chatter about it in the press this week.
At the time, Gershom Schocken published a condemnation of the attack in shrill terms that included the comment that if an attack like that on the King David were the price to be paid for Israeli statehood, then maybe it was preferable to forego it. This a year after the Shoah ended. His son seems to think that if the price of Israeli statehood is Israelis burping, then maybe it is preferable to forego it.
I mention this because almost every day Haaretz under the hegemony of Amos Schocken argues that that if mass terrorist attacks by Palestinians against Jewish women and children are the price to be paid for a Palestinian state, it is worth it and only fascists would say otherwise and besides it is not terrorism!!
By the way,TREASON does not sell. Haaretz market share is now down 1/3 to 3.9%of newspaper readers, or about 1% of all Israelis. .
The residuals read it for the Marker.
The latest crisis in Israeli philistinism involves the artsy-phartsy arts "college," Shenkar College. Seems that one of the final projects by a student there was to make a painting of Israel's religious Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked wearing only her smile. See http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4830419,00.html
The philistine president of the philistine "college" is Yuli Tamir, one-time Minister of Education and Tel Aviv University professor. She ordered the painting removed, not because it was porno defamation of Shaked but because it was disrespectful towards all women.
Huh?
And who exactly is this Yuli Tamir so concerned with the honor of women? She is a world advocate of female circumcisions.
Read all about that here:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/2274
Yuli Tamir Goes A-Snipping
Can the procedure be performed from the neck up?
Hold on to your -- er -- hats!
Before pouncing upon me for posting a tasteless spoof, let me forewarn you that this is NOT a spoof. It is for real, and any nausea you feel should be directed against the actual cause, not your humble messenger.
Nevertheless you can check it all out for yourself. It is there in black and white. Never mind that the Israeli mainstream media have hidden the story for the past 11 years, trying to protect the rep of the Labor Party's daffiest leader.
Israel's Minister of Education, Yael "Yuli" Tamir, has campaigned publicly for the common form of female mutilation in the Third World known as "Clitoridectomy." It means what you think it means. "Yuli," back in 1996 when she launched her campaign, was a Professor at Tel Aviv University and had just joined Labor. Previously she had been Shulamit Aloni's sidekick in the "RATZ" party. She was in the news the past few weeks for proposing that Arab students in Israel learn from textbooks that portray Israel's very existence and creation as a "Naqba" or catastrophe.
The "Boston Review" is a left-leaning political and literary quarterly in Boston, the sort "anarchists" read. In its summer 1996 issue it ranTamir's own article entitled, "Hands Off Clitoridectomy." Its theme was that all those Westerners expressing revulsion at the practice of slicing up female genitalia in certain parts of the world are themselves evil insensitive chauvistic philistine racists. Westerners should stop criticizing and allow the Third World to carry on with its enlightened multicultural clitorectomies.
She rants thus in the article:
'In discussions about multiculturalism, clitoridectomy is now the trump card, taking over the role once played by cannibalism, slavery, lynchings, or the Indian tradition of Sati: "Is this the kind of tradition you would like to protect?" liberals ask embarrassed multiculturalists, who immediately qualify their cultural pluralism. Clitoridectomy defines the boundary between us and them, between cultures we can tolerate and those we must condemn....
'Furthermore, it seems clear that Western conceptions of female beauty encourage women to undergo a wide range of painful, medically unnecessary, and potentially damaging processes -- extreme diets, depilation, face lifts, fat pumping, silicone implants. Of course, adult women do these things to their own bodies, and, it is said, their decisions are freely made. But would our gut reaction to female circumcision be very different if it were performed on consenting adults? It is not unlikely that girls at the age of 13 or 14, who are considered in traditional societies as adults mature enough to wed and bear children, would "consent" to the mutilation of their bodies if they were convinced that marriage and children were contingent on so doing. Many women who followed the tradition of Sati seemed to do it as a matter of choice....
'But our own culture fosters false beliefs of a similar kind. According to Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, some 75 percent of women aged 18-35 believe that they are fat, whereas only 25 percent are medically overweight.1 Still more heartbreaking is the fact that the majority of the 30,000 women who responded to a Glamour questionnaire preferred losing 10-15 pounds to success in work or in love. So the fostering of such beliefs cannot differentiate their culture from our own and explain our hostility to it....A fulfilling sex life is certainly one good, but there are others. ...
'My purpose, however, is not to justify clitoridectomy, but to expose the roots of the deep hostility to it -- to reveal the smug, unjustified self-satisfaction lurking behind the current condemnation of clitoridectomy. Referring to clitoridectomy, and emphasizing the distance of the practice from our own conventions, allows us to condemn them for what they do to their women, support the struggle of their women against their primitive, inhuman culture, and remain silent on the status of women in our society.'
We have a suggestion for the Olmert government. Remove the worst embarrassment in the cabinet by performing a small procedure of SNIP-SNIP!
The Uri Weiss Affair and Bar Ilan's Cowardice
By Steven Plaut
For years the anti-Israel academic Left in Israeli universities has defended the "right" of anyone and everyone to boycott Israel.. The BDS terrorists are just exercising freedom of speech. So are those who organize conferences on why Israel needs to seize existing. Every anti-Semitic loon has the "right" to appear on Israeli campuses, from Neo-Nazi Norman Finkelstein to Mister Khmer Rouge - Noam Chomsky. In addition, the Left wants everyone to have the right to boycott "settlers," which is why artists and performers who refuse to work across the Green Line must not be denied their cushy governmental subsidies. And of course Ariel University must be boycotted!
The one thing the Left will never tolerate is a boycott of violently anti-Israel leftwing academics. Students at Israeli universities must themselves never be allowed to boycott tenured traitors or radical anti-Israel howling pseudo-academics. THAT would be anti-democratic!
All of which brings us to the Uri Weiss Affair at Bar Ilan this University week. Bar Ilan is usually not the campus of choice for the leftwing ultras in Israel, although it does have a few, like political science prof Menachem Klein, who thinks Sephardim are Jewish Arabs and who wants the Old City of Jerusalem to be judenrein.
Another faculty member at Bar Ilan is one Uri Weiss, who studied law at the radical leftist law school of Tel Aviv University and teaches a course in the Bar Ilan business school. To clarify, Weiss is not a tenure-track appointee but an outside adjunct, which in the world of academia makes him well below the janitors in terms of status or importance. More to the point, adjuncts who do not have a quorum of students for their course get that course cancelled and they do not get paid.
Now Komrade Uri has been in the news a lot in recent days. In particular he published ghoulish attacks against settlers whose children were murdered by terrorists. http://www.timesofisrael.com/anger-at-bar-ilan-lecturer-who-accused-settlers-of-psychosis/ The settlers not only deserved to see their children murdered but are themselves guilty of psychosis for living in places the Palestinians want. Never mind that the Palestinians also want the Sarona Market in Tel Aviv.
Weiss accused IDF soldiers of committing "war crimes" when they raided the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara terror ship in 2010. The flotilla's goal according to him was "to break through a combination of a cruel naval and land siege imposed on an entire population." He also praised controversial Arab Joint List MK Hanin Zoabi, who was aboard the ship and last week caused a furor in the Knesset when she accused IDF soldiers of committing murder during the raid. Weiss has published trash on the Neo-Nazi web magazine "Counterpunch" accusing Israel's Supreme Court of "engaging in apartheid." See http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/01/28/apartheid-at-the-israeli-high-court/ .
In the past, in 2014, in response to his cheerleading for terror, students demanded that they be allowed to drop his course and swap it for a different course with someone else. Back then, Bar Ilan agreed. http://www.haaretz.co.il/news/education/1.2386146 But Bar Ilan quietly let him sneak back in, until his comments this week. Bar Ilan students led by Im Tirtzu Zionists demanded that the university allow them to boycott the course. The problem is at this point in the summer the course is done and there is just the exam to take. The university proposed as compromise that the students who so requested should be allowed to opt out of the exam and just take a "pass" as their course grade. That way the students could still be boycotting the pro-terror anti-Israel lecturer. Freedom to boycott - just what the loony Left says it wants.
Ah but then the radical academics together with Haaretz went on the war path. Why should these students claim the right not to be indoctrinated in anti-Israel hate! Isn't that why we have Israeli universities in the first place?
Bar Ilan's courage lasted less than 24 hours. It then cancelled the deal with the exam and ordered students in the course to take it after all. http://www.iba.org.il/bet/?type=1&entity=1170438
And so the bottom line is this: in Israel Thou must NOT boycott leftwing dingbat faculty members nor get their propaganda courses shut down!!
In the mid-1960s came the Eureka moment the conspiracists had long awaited. At last they had found a Yemenite child who had been put up for illicit adoption to an Ashkenazi family, one from Bulgaria, well probably Ashkenazi cause some Bulgarian Jews are Sephardic. The girl was named Miriam Shukar. She had been born to Yemenite parents in a maabara transit camp, albeit well after the 1950-1 period when all the "kidnappings" were supposed to take place, and the girl was in the hospital before being adopted.
GOTCHA, bellow the conspiracy nuts. PRIMA FACIE proof.
Or is it?
Shukar's parents were in the process of getting divorced. The baby was placed for adoption behind the back of the father but evidently not that of the mother. The adoption was deemed legit by the Commission of Inquiry into the "kidnapping." Miriam grew up and traced her biological parents to meet them. The case was kicked around the media as proof that there were all sorts of other illicit adoptions. No one has found any, although a handful of legit adoptions occurred. If Miriam's adoption was illicit, the problem was the adoption procedure and law in the 1960s and exploitation of it by parents in a divorce conflict, not a grand conspiracy by Ashkenazim who were too stupid to know that the orphanages of Israel were full of Ashkenazi orphans waiting for a home.
No kidnapping. No conspiracy.
2. Loon Alert - you first heard it here:
It is only a question of time before the yemen-kidnap-conspiracy nuts start comparing dismissal of their "theory" to Holocaust Denial.
3. Shifra Shvarts, of Ben Gurion University, who has researched the early years of Israel's medical system, said that she never found "even a shred of evidence" that there was any systematic kidnapping. "I have examined some 30,000-40,000 files form that period," she said. "It is inconceivable that, if so many babies had indeed been kidnapped, I would not have found even a single document that proves it. But I did not." She did find "doctors, nurses, and patients who came from different countries and cultures and could not even communicate in a common language, and almost total chaos."
Ami Hovav, a private investigator who served the first two commissions that examined the fate of the Yemenite babies, also said "there were no kidnappings." Speaking on an Israeli TV program in 2013, Hovav said that he'd investigated 650 cases of missing babies, and he was unable to solve 80 of those cases; the rest of the babies died, "except for a few dozen who were put up for adoption when their parents could not be traced."
"I myself am a Yemenite," he said. "I wanted to find justice. But I never found even a hint of the kidnappings. Babies were transferred from nurseries and hospitals, with staff and patients who couldn't speak the same language."
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/194601/disappeared-yemenite-babies
4. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4825751,00.html
