According to UK Channel 4, the "Israel Lobby" (AKA World Jewish conspiracy) is poised to take over Britain when and if the Conservative party comes to power, since an all powerful Jew conspiracy has permeated the corridors of British power. The next British monarch will be Ikey I, by the grace of God, King of Great Britain, and the Menorah will be printed on British bank notes. The Channel 4 documentary evidently has compiled a list of the Jew lovers in the Conservative party, preparing to subvert the innocent British people, about to pass legislation that forces pubs to serve Manischewitz wine and kosher snacks. It must be the influential Jewish conspiracy that is responsible for tacit recognition of Sharia law and other pro-Zionist moves of the Zionist Occupied British government. The same Jew lobby was no doubt responsible for the spate of British Boycott Israel initiatives. Them Jews will get you every time, right?
Or is the documentary evidence of a quite different trend in Britain? What do you think?
A British documentary has alleged that any future Conservative government will be disproportionately influenced by a powerful pro-Israeli lobby in the country.
Channel 4's Dispatches programme on Monday said that at least half of the Conservative shadow cabinet are members of the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), one of a number of pro-Israel lobby organisations.
The prorgramme, entitled 'Inside Britain's Israel Lobby', said that such organisations make up "one of the most powerful and influential political lobbies in Britain", but that "little is known" about these groups and their associated individuals.
CFI members and their businesses are alleged to have donated more than $16.8m to the Conservative Party over the past eight years.
The alleged donations include tens of thousands of pounds to William Hague, after he was appointed shadow foreign secretary in 2005.
The documentary alleged that Lord Kalm, a CFI member and significant donor to the Conservatives, threatened to remove Hague's funding after he said that Israel had used "disproportionate" force during its war in Lebanon in 2006.
David Cameron, the Conservative leader, is alleged to have promised not to repeat the conjecture.
'Transparent'
Stuart Polak, CFI's director, disputed the figures in the UK's Guardian newspaper.
"CFI as an organisation has donated only £30,000 [$50,000] since 2005. Each of these donations has been made transparently and publicly registered," he said.
"In addition to this £30,000, it is undoubtedly the case that some of our supporters have also chosen, separately, to donate to the party as individuals."
The Dispatches documentary also claims that Poju Zabludowicz, a Finnish billionaire and chairman of Bicom (the British Israel Communications and Research Centre), gave $25,000 and $84,000 donations to Cameron and the Conservative Central Office respectively.
Zabludowicz has a business interest in a shopping centre in Ma'aleh Adumim, an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank deemed illegal under international law.
Bicom organises briefings on and trips to Israel for journalists. The CFI and the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) group, which is described in the documentary as "less unquestioning in its support of the Israeli government than CFI", plays a similar role, accounting for 13 per cent of the total number of paid-for foreign trips for MPs and candidates.
'Openness needed'
Zabludowicz told The Jerusalem Post newspaper that the Dispatches programme "seems to have a predetermined agenda".
"Some people have suggested that the production team felt compelled to 'balance out' their two recent programs exposing the footprint of radical Islamism in the UK," he said.
"I come to this conclusion with a heavy heart, having been led [through] a not-so-merry dance over the past 10 days by the programme-makers.
"Bicom is an advocacy organisation. We work with journalists every day. It is in our DNA to put our side of the story forward and to be transparent."
While the programme said that the donations are legal, one of its makers, David Oborne, a political columnist for the British Daily Mail newspaper, said that more needs to be known about the Israeli lobby's workings and power.
"There is nothing resembling a conspiracy," he wrote in the Guardian.
"The pro-Israel lobby, in common with other lobbies, has every right to operate and indeed to flourish in Britain.
"But it needs to be far more open about how it is funded and what it does ... mainly because politics in a democracy ... should be out in the open for all to see."
In 2006, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, two American academics, released a paper stating that Washington's support for Israel was predicated by a hugely powerful Israeli lobby in the US.
The Hebrew Scripture is replete with passages of unforgettable beauty, and many of the most beautiful are to be found in the Book of Psalms. Psalm 119, the longest in the book, is studded with such pearls, in particular verses 103-05, which read (in the King James translation):
How sweet are thy words unto my taste! Yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth! Through thy precepts I get
understanding: therefore I hate every false way. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.
These words resonate ironically today, when the words one hears and reads everywhere around us about Jews, about Zionists, and about the state of Israel are not "sweet" but sharp and bitter. The "precepts" we receive in the various media, print and electronic, do not promote "understanding" but seem instead to justify "every false way." The biblical "lamp" seems to have been extinguished and the "path" is shrouded in darkness.
The most recent case in point comes from the left-leaning Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet, which reported in a double-truck spread on August 18, 2009, that Israeli soldiers regularly abduct Palestinians to harvest their innards for the international organ trade. (This is the same daily that, on Easter 2003, referred to "the crucifixion of Arafat.") The source for this ludicrous fable consists of a number of Palestinians whose depositions are accepted as gospel. How Swede are their words! The story now comes full circle back to its Palestinian source to be confirmed by the Palestinian news agency Ma'an (which is, incidentally, financed by Denmark and Holland). The feature cites a certain "expert" whose evidence for the claim consists of a rather peculiar factoid, namely, that Israel returns the bodies of Hezbollah fighters minus their organs! The obvious question remains unasked: why would Israel send back these scavenged bodies if it wished to avoid detection and avert a scandal? The absurdity is palpable, but logic and common sense are clearly beyond the cognitive abilities of anti-Semites. And then, as we know, there is the inconvenient medical fact that the organs of people who do not expire under clinical conditions, when organs can be removed immediately, are not viable for transplant.
Anyone who is even remotely familiar with the Palestinian propaganda machine and the robust Antisemitism of the Swedish media and officialdom (not to mention Norway, Spain, the UK, and several other European countries) might consult another verse from Psalm 119: "The wicked have laid a snare for me." And indeed they have. The most popular Dutch newspaperDe Telegraaf, cleared the way for its Swedish counterpart to launch its newest calumny, publishing an article on August 8, 2009, accusing Jews of creating swine flu as part of a pharmaceutical conspiracy to profit from the sale of antidotes.
The despicable lies perpetrated by Aftonbladet and De Telegraaf are only the latest in what seems like an endless chain of defamatory utterances and slanderous fictions about the Jewish people and the Jewish state. We recall the notorious Mohammed al-Durah hoax , in which the Palestinian 12-year-old was ostensibly shot by the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) at the Netzarim junction in Gaza on September 30, 2000, propagated by the France TV 2 network and picked up by every major news outlet on the planet. We now know that the episode was rehearsed, directed, and staged with the collusion of Palestinian stringers and cameramen. It constitutes perhaps the most conspicuous contemporary chapter in the never-ending and constantly mutating hate-campaign against the Jewish people.
Then we had the so-called Jenin massacre , which turned out to be anything but, except for the 22 young Israeli soldiers who died trying to avoid civilian casualties when an American-style air strike would have done the job of scrubbing out the terrorist nest. Next, the blame for the 2006 Lebanon war was laid at Israel's doorstep although the conflict was triggered by the Hezbollah incursion into Israeli territory, resulting in the kidnapping and killing of several Israeli soldiers. Britain's Independent went so far as to accuse Israel of using uranium-tipped weapons, a claim so manifestly outrageous it defies both reason and belief — and should rightly have defied publication.
An investigation is now proceeding under the auspices of the United Nations Human Rights Council into Israel's conduct during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. There is not so much as a mention in its mandate of Hamas' seven-year rocket barrage against civilian communities in southern Israel which provoked the long-deferred Israeli response. Note well. It is not Hamas - a terrorist organization whose charter promises the annihilation of the Jewish state, which has deliberately violated international law by using its own civilians as human shields, firing missiles from its own population centers, storing ammunition in hospitals and mosques, and commandeering ambulances as troop carriers, and that continues to hold a kidnapped Israeli soldier in illegal detention - which is being investigated. It is Israel that is being singled out for condemnation, the country of which British military expert Richard Kemp, in a BBC interview in January 2009, said: "I don't think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more efforts to reduce casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza."
The world is once again thirsting for Jewish blood, an ironic reversal of the old blood libel canard. We see this vampiric appetite expressed in a multitude of different ways: in the international media, as we have observed; in the theater (My Name Is Rachel Corrie , Seven Jewish Children ; in film (Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ ); in opera (the antiphrastic staging of Camille Saint-Saen's Samson et Dalila in Antwerp in May 2008, with the Philistines cast in the role of the Israelites and the Israelites as the oppressors of the Philistines); in the tarnished and largely one-sided reports of NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (the latter soliciting funds from Saudi Arabia ); in international conferences on racism (Durban I and II , which turn into flagrant anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatefests); in the General Assembly of the United Nations (whose current president, Miguel d'Escoto Brockman , is an outspoken opponent of the Jewish state); on university campuses where Israel Apartheid Week i s one of the hottest shows around; in Barack Obama's defaulting on the commitment of the previous American administration regarding the natural growth of Israeli settlements and construction in East Jerusalem; and so on, ad vomitatum.
And there seems no way at present of evading the growing pandemic of anti-Jewish feeling and anti-Israeli denunciation that is infecting the contemporary world. "What is new about the new Antisemitism," writes Phyllis Chesler in The New Antisemitism , is "that it is worldwide. … Jews are being verbally and visually attacked everywhere." The Jew is someone for whom there is no elsewhere. This is my definition, but there have, of course, been many definitions of the Jew over the millennia, most of them pejorative. I need not rehearse them once again, for the Dictionary of Received Opinion is open to all and readily available. It is, in effect, the one dictionary that need not be purchased, lodged in the inner life of the West like a demonic version of the Gideon Bible in hotel room drawers.
There is no disputing this. What the great English Renaissance author Sir Thomas Browne called the Pseudodoxia Epidemica (or Dictionary of Received Opinion) is especially rich and hospitable when it comes to the vilification of the Jew. In his master work of that title, Browne set out to dispel common prejudices of every kind, a Herculean effort which, fraught with "discouragment of contradiction, unbelief, and difficulty," he described as the "disswasion from radicated beliefs." Concerning the Jews, he is in no doubt about the ubiquitous and diabolical error of such "radicated beliefs." "In the conceit of the evil order of the Jews," he writes, "Christians without a farther research into the verity of the thing, or enquiry into the cause, draw up a judgment upon them." It is only the "more ocular discerners" who know otherwise.
Today, it is not only Christians (or Muslims) who "draw up a judgment upon them" but, as Chesler indicates, a vast, secular, politically correct, mainly liberal-left constituency busily adding a sheaf of extra pages to the common Pseudodoxia, comprising a thick appendix of stigmatic designations. Obviously, this has mainly to do with Israel, conceived as the new Jew on the block and the national incarnation of the "longest hatred" as it manifests among us. Anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli sentiment has become so pervasive that it reminds me of the philosopher Nicholas of Cusa 's definition of God as a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. But in our demented age the definition applies not to love but to hatred, not to the worship of the Lord but to the derogation of the "satanic" Jew.
The fact must be faced. Although there are writers of integrity, talent, and impressive scholarship, truly "ocular discerners," who have taken up the defense of Jews and of Israel, it seems increasingly like a fruitless struggle. The words of Israel's defenders in the infosphere are simply unable to fill the ever-expanding circle of hostility, deprecation, and vengefulness in which Jews and the Jewish state now find themselves. It is, rather, the words of their adversaries that proliferate and block out the horizon of discourse — the invidious message of those who should never be taken at their word.
Thankfully, there is a countervailing fact as well, which has to do with the long history of courage against all the odds and the unprecedented resilience of the Jewish people — and, of course, with those honorable and gracious advocates for truth and decency who come to the defense of Israel. As hapless as the battle may seem at times, there can be no reneging. "Nor have we let fall our penne," wrote Browne, even though we "are oft-times fain to wander in the America and untravelled parts of truth." Browne was a devout man who would have based his practice on a passage like that of verse 130 of the above-quoted psalm: "The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding to the simple." I would add only the hopeful rider: and to the sophisticates as well.
But for those of us who are not religiously observant, the imperative to speak, write, and act remains in force. In the interests of the survival of Israel and the integrity of the West, and despite all the impediments raised against the simple truth, we need to get the word out.
David Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist. He is the author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity , and is currently working on a sequel, Living in the Valley of Shmoon. His new book on Jewish and Israeli themes, Hear, O Israel!, will be released by CanadianValuesPress, an imprint of Mantua Books, in the fall.
The problem of Israel boycotts is not new. This piece by Amos Kenan originally appeared in the Israel daily newspaper Yediot Achronot shortly after the Six-Day Way and was widely circulated among American Jewish students in North America looking for an answer to the anti-Israel New Left. Please keep in mind the context of the late-Sixties as you read these words.
I am for Cuba. I love Cuba. I am opposed to the genocide perpetrated by the Americans in Vietnam. But I am an Israeli, therefore I am forbidden to take all these stands. Cuba does not want me to love her. Someone has decided that I am permitted to love only the Americans. I don't mind so much that someone, especially the good people everywhere, have decided to outlaw me. I shall be able to get along without their help. But I do mind that I am not permitted any longer to love and hate according to my feelings, and according to my political and moral inclinations, and that I am refused invitation or even admittance to parties held by the good people. I am not permitted any longer to toast justice with a glass of champagne. I am not permitted to eat caviar and denounce the Americans. I am not permitted to stroll in the sun-drenched streets of Havana, arm-in-arm with my erstwhile good friends from St. Germain, Via Veneto and Chelsea, and celebrate the memory of Che Guevara, casting a threatening look at imperialism. I am also finally and absolutely forbidden to sign petitions of all sorts for human rights.
This situation drives me slightly out of my mind. Therefore I wish to relate a few confused, disconnected stories. Perhaps some good man will find the connection. One day an Israeli submarine sank in the Mediterranean with its 69 crew members. Its SOS was answered, among others, by the British, Turkish and Greek fleets. The Russian navy, which cruised very close to the location, did not join in the search. Moscow radio, in its Arab broadcasts, took the trouble to denounce the countries whose ships rushed to help the lost submarine. It is a sacred principle of seamen of all nations to hasten to the aid of distressed vessels. The Israeli submarine was not on a war mission, and Israel is not in a state of war with the Soviet Union.
I am not so naive as to believe that this is anti-Semitism, Soviet style. I have never believed that the Russians are guided, in their calculations, by such powerful and sincere emotions as anti-Semitism, which is common to both progressive and reactionary camps. I know that the Russians conduct a cool and considered pragmatic policy, and are guided by clear political considerations. This was a political move, carried out as a part of a political game. The meaning of this move can only be: Israel must be isolated from the civilised human community. The rules that apply to the civilised community, rules of honour, consideration and mutual aid, do not apply to me. I am out. There is only one more step to the conclusion: the shedding of my blood is no crime.
Forgive my brutal way of putting things. I cannot conceive of it otherwise. If this was a move in a game, the game must have an object. The object is the penetration of the Middle East, and let us assume, for the sake of arguments, that this is for the purpose of advancing world revolution and the overthrow of imperialism. The Middle East contains 100m. Arabs and 2.5m. Israelis. But it is not so easy, in our enlightened world, to wipe out 2.5m. people. A reason, and a justification, are needed. You cannot wipe out just like that. First of all you must outlaw. Therefore you must not invite an Israeli communist party to a convention of communist parties. Therefore you must not invite a leftist Israeli author to a conference of leftist authors in Havana. There are no more class distinctions. There are only national distinctions. Even an Israeli leftist is an imperialist. And an oil sheikh is a socialist. Therefore it is permissible to compare me to the Nazis. It is permissible to call me a Gauleiter. It is permissible to mobilize all of the world's conscientious people against me—and without them you cannot do it—and all this because there is an object looming beyond the horizon, an object for the sake of which this tactic is justifiable and useful.
Until quite recently, I also belonged to the Good People. Meaning that not only did I sit in cafes and sign petitions for the release of political prisoners in countries not my own, not only did I join proclamations, after sipping my aperitif, for the release of the downtrodden from the yoke of imperialism in places I shall never reach; I also did something against what seemed to me to be oppression and injustice in my own country. During the 20 years of the existence of the State of Israel I helped with my pen, in my regular newspaper column, the fight against the injustices committed against the Arab minority. And not by the pen only, but also in demonstrations, and also when arraigned before a military tribunal. I am used to being called a traitor by local patriots. During the Six Day War, in June 1967, the battalion I served in was ordered to supervise the demolition of four Arab villages: I considered it my duty to desert from my unit, to write a report of this action, and to send the copies to the General Staff of the army, to members of the government and to Knesset members. This report has been translated and circulated in the world as a proof of Israel's crimes.
But permit me to conclude the story. The action I undertook was in flagrant violation of any military law. I have no idea what would have happened to a Red Army soldier were he to violate national and military discipline in such a manner. After returning to my unit, I was ordered to present myself—I, in rank a private—before the general commanding all the divisions on that front. He told me that he had read my report, and considered it his duty to inform me that what had occurred was a regrettable error, which will not recur. Deep in my heart I disbelieved his statement that this was only a mistake. I was convinced that whoever ordered such an action did not expect such resistance from within—the men of my battalion refused to carry out the order—and was alarmed at the impression such an action might create abroad. But I was glad that he found it necessary to announce that this was only an error. I asked him how he intended to ensure that the 'error' will never recur. On the spot he signed an order permitting me free movement in all occupied territories, so that I could see with my own eyes that such an action had not recurred.
But since then, in all the peace-papers in the world, my report about the destruction of villages has been reprinted over and over again, as if it happened only yesterday, as if it is happening all the time. And this is a lie. It is like writing that witches have been burnt at the stake in England—omitting the date. I hereby request all those who believed me when I reported a criminal act, to believe me now too. And those who do not believe me now, I hereby request to disbelieve my former report too, and not to believe me selectively, according to their convenience. I should also add that the town of Kalkiliya, which began to be demolished during the writing of my report, is now in the process of being rebuilt, after the expelled inhabitants have been brought back.
This does not mean that other injustices are not perpetrated now. The less you fight me, the more you would help me fight them. Even the most leftist of men will not consent to be slaughtered when a sword is pointed at his throat. Even when the sword is a progressive one, it does not make it any the pleasanter. The trouble is that not a single serious person in the world believes today that Israel was really in danger of being annihilated. This is the optical illusion of 1968. The gigantic Goliath is threatening little David. The fact that Goliath is a giant, and that David is small, is only an optical illusion. If Goliath triumphs and tramples David under his feet, it is a sign that he really is a giant. But if little David beats the giant, people say: the giant David has trampled poor little Goliath in the dust. I claim that Israel played the role of David. And I claim that even now, after the stunning victory, it still is little David who has indeed beaten the stunned Goliath, but Goliath still is a menacing giant. Today, no less than in June 1967, Israel is in danger of annihilation. Unless the enlightened world mobilises now, immediately, perhaps it will be too late. But I am afraid that there are not many people in the world today who will be sorry if victorious David is destroyed. A bitter suspicion rises in me that even the most enlightened among the most progressive people still adhere to the Christian tradition that they imbibed with their mothers' milk: Jew, stay on the cross. Never get off it. The day you get off the cross and hurl it at the heads of your crucifiers, we shall cease to love you. Today the Arabs boast of waging a revolutionary guerrilla warfare. They claim to have copied the Viet Cong method of warfare and to apply it in the Middle East. They march with Che Guevara's picture. This makes me laugh. Just as Che Guevara's picture hanging in the luxurious salons of Montparnasse made me laugh. I have always wondered whether Che Guevara had a picture of Che Guevara hanging in his salon. What is a Viet Cong? The Viet Cong is not white flags on buildings. The Viet Cong means fighting to the last man. The Viet Cong of the Middle East, whether those who demonstrate with Che Guevara's picture like it or not, are we. We are prepared, at any moment to wage the battle to the death. After the death camps, we are left with only one supreme value: existence.
Our existence today, is inconvenient for those who work at the global balance of power. It is more convenient that there should be two camps, one white, the other black. We number, as I said before, only 2.5m. people. On the global map, what is the value of a few hundred thousand leftists, opposing the Eshkol government policy and striving for a genuine peace with the Arabs, who strive to liberate themselves from the one-way dependence on American power? Somebody has already decided to sacrifice us. The history of revolution is full of such sacrifices since the days of the Spanish War. At one time world revolution had been sacrificed on the altar of the revolution in one country. Today the calculation is somewhat subtler. Today they try to explain to us that there is an Arab socialism. That there is an Egyptian socialism, and an Algerian socialism. There is a socialism of slave-traders, and a socialism of oil magnates. There are all kinds of socialism, all aiming really at one and the same thing—the overthrow of imperialism, which happens to be one and indivisible. Once there was only a single kind of socialsm, which fed on principles, some of them moral. On the day that morality died there was born the particular, conventional socialism, changing from place to place and from time to time, for which I have no other name but National Socialism.
I want to live. What can I do if Russia, China, Vietnam, India, Yugoslavia, Sartre, Russell, Castro, have all decided that I am made all of a piece? It is inconvenient for them to admit that there is an opposition in Israel too. Why should there be an opposition in Israel if in the Popular Democracies in Cuba or Algeria, there is only one party? And perhaps they do have pangs of conscience, but they have made their calculation, and found out that I am only one, only 10, only 100,000; and on the other side there are tens of millions, all led like a single man, in a single party, towards the light, towards the sun. And if so, who am I? I will tell you who I am: I am the man who will confuse and confound your progressive calculations. I have too much love for this vain world, a world of caviar, television, sunny beaches, sex and good wine. You go ahead and toast the revolution with champagne. I shall toast myself, my own life, bottle in one hand, rifle in the other. You send Soviet arms to Egypt. You isolate me. And in order to make it easier to isolate me, you change my name. My flesh, which you eat, you call fish. You don't want to protect me— neither against the Arabs, nor against the Russians, nor against Dayan or Johnson.
Moreover, when I try to call on you and tell you that I am against Dayan, against Eshkol, against Ben-Gurion, and ask for your help, you laugh at me and demand that I should return to the 4 June borders, unconditionally. Hold it! I refuse to play this game. If you give me back the pistol with which I tried to kill you, I won't kill you. Because I am a nice fellow. But if you don't give it back to me, I shall kill you, because you are a bad fellow. Why were the 4 June borders not peace borders on 4 June but will become peace borders now? Why were not the U.N. partition plan borders of 1947 peace borders then but will become so now? Why should I return the bandit his gun as a reward for having failed to kill me? I want peace peace peace peace peace peace peace. I am ready to give everything back in exchange for peace. And I shall give nothing back without peace. I am ready to solve the refugee problem. I am ready to accept an independent Palestinian state. I am ready to sit and talk. About everything, all at the same time. Direct talks, indirect talks, all this is immaterial. But peace. Until you agree to have peace, I shall give back nothing. And if you force me to become a conqueror, I shall become a conqueror. And if you force me to become an oppressor, I shall become an oppressor. And if you force me into the same camp with all the forces of darkness in the world, there I shall be.
There is no lack in Israel of rabid militarists. Their number is steadily increasing, the more our isolation becomes apparent. Nasser helps Dayan, Kosygin helps Eshkol. Fidel Castro helps the Jewish chauvinists. Who of the world's giants cares how many more Jews, how many more Arabs, bleed to death in the Sinai sands? There is no lack here of mad hysterical militarists. All those quiet citizens who went out to war with K.L.M. handgrips and in laundry trucks, who scribbled on their tanks: 'We want Home' . All those who fought without anger, without hatred, only for their lives, are becoming militaristic, convinced that only Israeli power, and nothing else in the world, will ever help us.
The only ones who are prepared to defend me, for reasons I don' t like at all, are the Americans. It is convenient for them, for the time being. You are flinging me towards America, the bastion of democracy and the murderer of Vietnam, who tramples the downtrodden peoples and spares my life, who oppresses the Negroes and supplies me with arms to save myself. You leave me no other alternative. You don' t even offer me humiliating terms, to be admitted through the rear door into the progressive orgy. You don' t even want me to overthrow my government. You only want me to surrender, unconditionally, and to believe the spokesmen of the revolution that henceforth no Jewish doctors will be murdered, and that they will limit themselves to the declaration that Zionism is responsible for the riots in Warsaw.
Very funny. The truth is that I and Sartre, two people with the same vision, more or less, with the same ideal, more or less, and if I may be permitted to impertinence, with the same moral level, more or less, are now at the two sides of the barricade. We have been pushed to both sides by the cold calculations of the people who sent us, or abandoned us. But the fact remains—these are not Americans shooting Russians, or capitalists shooting socialists, or freedom-fighters shooting the oppressors. It is I, shooting Sartre. I see him in my gun sights; he sees me in his gun sights. I still don' t know which of us is faster, more skilled, or more determined to kill or be killed. Neither do I know who shall be more lucky—the one who has no other alternative, or the one who acts out of choice. One thing is clear to me; if I survive, I shall mourn Sartre's death more than he would mourn mine. And if that happens, I shall never be consoled until I wipe from under the heavens both the capitalists and the communists. Or they me. Or each the other. Or all destroy all. And if I survive even that, without a god but without prophets either, my life will have no sense whatsoever. I shall have nothing else to do but walk on the banks of streams, or on the top of the rocks, watch the wonders of nature, and console myself with words of Ecclesiastes, the wisest of men: "For the light is sweet, and it is good for the eyes to see the sun
The Swedish government retracted its ambassadors condemnation of an an anti-Semitic canard published in AftonBladet, Sweden's largest newspaper, that claimed that the IDF kills Palestinians in order to harvest their organs for transplants. After Sweden's ambassador to Israel, Borsiin Bonnier, apologized for the article, opposition Green Party spokesman Per Gahrton said Bonnier should be recalled and taught the basics of Swedish freedom of speech. YNET reported:
Sweden's Foreign Ministry on Thursday said a response by the Swedish Embassy in Israel to a report by the Aftonbladet news saying IDF soldiers killed Palestinians in order to harvest their organs does not represent the government's stance.
The embassy had stated that the report was "appalling". But the Foreign Ministry's spokeswoman said, "The embassy in Tel Aviv responded in accordance to Israeli public opinion, however the Swedish government is committed to freedom of the press."
She added that Israel had not issued an official complaint on the report.
Another Swedish government spokesperson, Anders Jorle said, "The Foreign Ministry would not have acted in the same way" as the ambassador.
The editor of Aftonbladet, Jan Helin, said, "It's deeply unpleasant and sad to see such a strong propaganda machine using centuries-old anti-Semitic images in an apparent attempt to get an obviously topical issue off the table." Helin called it an opinion piece raising questions of Israel in the context of a suspected link to Israel in that U.S. case. He denied any suggestion of anti-Semitism from his paper.
There was nothing in the presentation of the article to indicate that it was supposed to be an opinion piece rather than a factual article. The dodge of disseminating lies as facts and then claiming it is "opinion" is a common one, though some journalistic standards officially forbid such behavior. Helin now has the best of both worlds, since he can defend the libel as just "opinion" while at the same time insisting that it is a "topical issue" that should be discussed, implying that it is true or has some basis in fact. It seems the blood libel is always "topical."
If a person publishes an opinion piece stating that a Martian is impersonating the President of the United States, is it just nonsense or a topical issue that should be discussed? If I write that Holocaust survivors remember Jan Helin's father as a volunteer SS Einsatzgruppenfuhrer who participated in the Babi Yar massacre, I am after all just quoting a source, right? It doesn't have to be true. Is it an opinion piece or a topical issue? How about if I quote witnesses who insist they saw a homosexual orgy with the participation of Donald Bostrom, author of the article, and editor Helin, both dressed as Gestapo officers? How can the public be protected from random inventions of racists and sensationalists if every such claim can hide behind the defense of "opinion piece" and get the protection of "freedom of the press?"
"Legitimate criticism" of Israel reached new lows of depravity in Sweden when Sweden's leading daily newspaper revived the medieval blood libel accusation against the IDF. in a sensational article titled ""Our sons plundered for their organs"(Swedish article is here: aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5652583.ab). Based on this accusation, "Anti-Zionist" Web sites and e-mail lists are hurrying to circulate the "news" that the IDF kills Palestinian Arabs in order to extract their organs for transplants.
The reporter, one Donald Bostrom, assembled a farrago of unrelated stories about illegal organ trafficking from Israel, including a story about the arrest of a New York Jew engaged in selling kidneys contrary to Israeli law. He used hearsay and rumor from Palestinians about the fate of relatives killed during the Intifada:
I was in the area and worked on a book when I several times was contacted by UN staff who were concerned about the development. Those who contacted me felt that body theft actually took place, but that they were unable to act. On behalf of a television company, I then went around and spoke to a large number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza....
"'Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,' relatives of Khaled from Nablus said to me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin as well as the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who all had disappeared for a few days and returned by night, dead and autopsied. - Why did they keep the bodies up to five days before we can bury them? What happened to the bodies in the meantime? And why is the autopsy when the cause of death is obvious, and in all cases against our will? And why are the bodies returned at night?".
Evidently, the rumors spread due to ignorance of forensic autopsy procedures and Jew hate, encouraged by UN personnel. Bostrom described in detail the case of one Bilal Achmed Ghanian, 19, whose body was returned after autopsy after he was killed in 1992. It is probable, but unclear, that the victims were dead when they were evacuated. Of course, organs cannot be harvested from cadavers. Bostrom quoted an IDF denial and explanation that the autopsies were routine, but Bostrom implied that the denial is false:
The routine autopsy of killed Palestinians, as told by the army spokesman is not true in reality in the Occupied Territories. .
The use of rumor and hearsay, and more especially the unrelated material about illegal organ traffic, make it clear that Bostrom set out to intentionally libel Israel and the Jewish people. The Israeli ambassador lodged a strong protest, but this can hardly be a deterrent to people like Bostrom. If a similar report about Muslims had been published in a Scandinavian journal, wouldn't there be violent world wide demonstrations as there were after the Danish Muhammad cartoons?
Swedish Jews claim Bostrom is a known anti-Semite and AftonBladet has published similar articles. The Swedish Embassy in Israel has apologized, but a culture editor of Aftonbladet told Haaretz that the publication stands by the story and insists on an "international investigation" of the alleged nefarious Jewish activities.
The libel of organ stealing is not new and may have originated with Yasser Arafat himself. According to a 2002 Honest Reporting article:
the Islamic Association for Palestine reported that Yasser Arafat "has accused the Israeli apartheid regime of murdering Palestinian children and youths and extricating their vital organs for organ transplants."
It is one thing when racist Palestinian leaders make accusations of Jewish blood libel, but quite another phenomenon and much more ominous when they appear in a respected northern European "Nordic" country journal. It seems that there are no longer any real limits to what may be published under the guise of supposedly "legitimate criticism of Israel." A competing Swedish newspaper has published a horrified editorial.The liberal Sydsvenskan - southern Sweden's major daily ran an opinion piece of Mats Skogkär called "Antisemitbladet" (a play on the name Aftonbladet):
"We have heard the story before, in one form or the other. It follows the traditional pattern of conspiracy theory: a great number of loose threads that the theorist tempts the reader to tie into a neat knot without having been provided with any proven connection whatsoever..."
"Whispers in the dark. Anonymous sources. Rumors. That is all it takes. After all we all know what they [the Jews] are like, don't we: inhuman, hardened. Capable of anything," the opinion piece says. "Now all that remains is the defense, equally predictable: 'Anti-Semitism' No, no, just criticism of Israel."
The tale is not told in a cultural vacuum of course. The stories of Bilal Achmed Ghanian and the others are backed by a rich European tradition of "legitimate criticism" of Jews. They have joined the European pantheon of fraudulent blood libel martys, which includes numerous "saints" revered by the Catholic church for many years, such as Saint Andreas of Rinn , Saint Simon of Trent, and Saint Hugh of Lincoln. Aftonbladet has carried on in a more modern tradition of Nordic journalism, illustrated by the following twentieth century cartoon from the Westdeutchen Beobachter, also considered "legitimate criticism" by its defenders:
A letter from Dexter Van Zile. He has asked us to blog about it - everyone, so we have. It is truly pitiful that Mennonites are carrying on a shameful relation with the worst Ayatollahs in Iran while they are murdering their own people.
Hello Everyone:
As you know, the Mennonite Central Committee has been one of the more vociferous and unfair critics of Israel.
This pacifist group has allowed its prophetic voice to be used as a weapon of war against Israel.
Its activists have also worked to legitimize Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the eyes of the American people.
When I've spoken with the people from the MCC about their dialogue with Ahmadinejad, they respond by saying that it is a good thing to keep the lines of communications open even with people we regard as "enemies." They also state that they have expressed their concern to Ahmadinejad about his comments regarding Israel.
Now that the Iranian regime has revealed itself to be quite willing to use violence to suppress its opposition, the MCC, whose activists have met with Ahmadinejad, have fallen silent.
They are not using the lines of communication that they said were so necessary to maintain.
On June 15, I wrote a post on CAMERA's website about this silence.
I have recently updated this post with some new information that frankly caused my jaw to drop. In short, the MCC has engaged in dialogue with with scholars from the Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute (IKERI) located on Qom, Iran. This institute is directed by Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, described by The Star (Toronto) as "spiritual adviser to Iran's hard-line president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."
One dissident described Mesbah-Yazdi as "the most dangerous Mullah in Iran." The Toronto Star reported that Mesbah-Yazdi is "is a strong advocate of the death penalty, public flogging and the use of suicide bombers against "enemies of Islam."
It's obvious enough to state that if Israel were behaving the way the regime in Iran is behaving, the MCC would not hesitate to issue a ringing condemnation.
I don't know how any of you want to use this information, but please, read the post [article is below ]. If you've got a blog, please blog on it. Feel free to quote my message in its entirety. [That's what we did!]
Dexter Van Zile Christian Media Analyst CAMERA PO Box 35040 Boston, MA 02135-0001 617-789-3672 Voice 617-851-0912 http://www.camera.org email: dexter@camera.org
When it comes to rehabilitating his image in the United States, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can count on the Mennonite Central Committee for assistance.
The organization has sponsored two dinners and an interfaith pilgrimage to Tehran during which Christian leaders have met with the Iranian President and offered kind words about the man afterwards.
Now that events demonstrate that Ahmadinejad is the public face of a brutal regime willing to suppress the people it governs, the organization has fallen silent.
After more than two days of protests and violence in Iran, the MCC has not published any statement about the regime on its website, nor does it have any plans to.
On the morning of June 15, 2009, CAMERA sent an email to Ed Nyce, the MCC's Media and Education Coordinator asking whether or not the organization was going to issue any statement about Iran.
Nyce's response, which came on the afternoon of June 15, was succinct and direct:
"We have no plans to issue a statement."
When asked in subsequent communications (email and a voice message) why the MCC had nothing to say, Nyce reiterated in an email that the MCC has "no plans to issue a statement."
The MCC's silence about the events in Iran is remarkable given its highly visible campaign to legitimize Ahmadinejad in the U.S. This campaign began in February 2007 when the MCC organized a meeting of Christian leaders with the Iranian President in Teheran. The delegation held a press conference in Washington, D.C. upon its return to the U.S. Christian leaders reportedly challenged Ahmadinejad about his anti-Semitic statements, but their complaints had little apparent effect. Four days after the delegation's meeting Ahmadinejad appeared in Sudan, where according to Islamic Republic News Agency (Iran's official news service), he said "Zionists are the true manifestation of Satan."
In September 2007, the MCC organized an ecumenical dinner attended by Ahmadinejad and numerous Christian leaders in New York City.
The leaders met with the Iranian president after he addressed the United Nations on September 26, 2007. According to The New York Times, Albert Lobe, executive director of the Mennonite Central committee told Ahmadinejad "We meant to extend to you the hospitality which a head of state deserves."
Lobe's obsequiousness was apparently a response to the treatment Ahmadinejad received at Columbia University on Sept. 24, when the school's president Lee Bollinger called him "a petty and cruel dictator."
The MCC organized a similar dinner with Ahmadinejad in September 2008. After this meeting, MCC officials reassured the American people that the Iranian President had no desire to destroy Israel militarily, but merely supported a "one-state solution" to the conflict in which "Israelis and Palestinians elect a single government to represent both peoples."
When it comes to portraying Ahmadinejad in a sympathetic light, or condemning Israeli policies, such as the construction of the security barrier, the Mennonite Central Committee has been quite vocal. But when it comes time to assess the behavior of the Iranian regime in light of the Christian gospel (which it uses so often to judge Israel), the group falls silent.
UPDATE - June 24, 2009
In addition to sponsoring the two dinners and interfaith pilgrimage mentioned above, the Mennonite Central Committee has had multiple face-to-face contacts with scholars from the Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute (IKERI) located on Qom, Iran. This institute is directed by Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, described by The Star (Toronto) as "spiritual adviser to Iran's hard-line president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."
According to a report in the The Star, a May 2007 meeting between scholars from the institute and Mennonite scholars at the University of Waterloo sponsored by the MCC provoked a protest from Iranians in Canada. The Star reported:
"We're not against dialogue but the Mennonites are naïve if they think they can open one with these people," said Haideh Moghissi, a YorkUniversity sociologists who with 17 others signed a protest letter sent to the university.
She says Mesbah-Yazdi and his followers are "at the forefront of oppression in Iran," responsible for silencing all intellectuals who disagree with the regime.
"It hurts to know that while people are losing their lives over there, some people are opening the door to 'dialogue' over here. Why doesn't the institute open it back there?"
The Star also reports that Mesbah-Yazdi "is a strong advocate of the death penalty, public flogging and the use of suicide bombers against "enemies of Islam."
"He is the most dangerous mullah in Iran," says Saeed Rahnema, director of York University School of Public Policy and Administration, who spearheaded the protest.
Despite complaints from Iranian dissidents about the meeting in 2007, the MCC sponsored another dialogue with scholars from IKERI in Qom on May 24-27, 2009.
According to an article about the most recent meeting published on the website of ConradGrebelUniversityCollege (which sent scholars to the dialogue), the participants witnessed "active campaigning on behalf of presidential candidates."
The article also states that at the conference's end, "the Mennonite delegation expressed its gratitude to IKERI for unsurpassed hospitality, delicious meals, comfortable accommodations, and excellent conference meeting space."
IKERI apparently treated its Mennonite guests with more respect and deference than the Iranian government has shown to its own citizens. According to CNN, witnesses report that government security forces are beating people like "animals."
Jun. 9, 2009 Associated Press , THE JERUSALEM POST
Jewish groups across Europe reacted to far-right gains in the European parliamentary elections by urging the EU on Tuesday to do more to tackle racism and intolerance.
The European Jewish Congress, which represents Jewish communities across Europe, said winning seats in the European Parliament based on "racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic platforms" pointed to an erosion of tolerance.
Results of voting for a new European Union assembly showed that far-right parties in the Netherlands, Britain, Austria, Hungary, Denmark and Romania posted significant victories.
In a statement, the Paris-based Jewish Congress called that a "clarion call" for the EU to tackle racism and intolerance through legislation and dialogue.
"Europeans of all backgrounds, ethnicities and religions are looking to our elected officials to unite, rather than divide us," it said.
The congress also said the victory of groups using racist and xenophobic platforms "belies a disturbing acquiescence of government to this type of incitement and a need for immediate action and education."
It said it was troubled by the fact that far-right forces did better than in the last EU assembly elections in 2004 and that they were scattered across the 27-nation EU.
"The success of such rabid groups as The Freedom Party in the Netherlands, the Freedom Party in Austria... the British National Party, and Jobbik in Hungary, among others, will sadly only serve to embolden those who espouse the dangerous concepts of extreme nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia," the congress said.
It urged the European Parliament and the European Commission, the EU executive, to work for effective anti-racism legislation.
Think how much the world has changed in your life time. If you were born just after World War II, you saw the birth of dozens of new nations, the sun setting on the British Empire, the virtual disappearance of the rural way of life, the restoration of the Jewish people, the fall of the USSR, jet air planes, the end of segregation in the southern USA and the end of Apartheid in South Africa, computers, transistors, cellphones and rockets to Mars. So much has changed in our lifetimes. Isn't it comforting to know that the heart of European culture remains as hateful as ever?
Anti-Semitism, though not "politically correct," is probably still as strong as ever in Europe. 23% of Europeans openly blame the Jews for killing Christ (talk about holding a grudge!) and 31% blame Jews for the financial crisis. The rest are too sophisticated to voice their real opinions. The beast is not dead, just sleeping.
By Natasha Mozgovaya, Haaretz Correspsondent, and Haaretz Service
A recent survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League found that anti-Semitic attitudes in seven European countries have worsened due to the global financial crisis and Israel's military actions against the Palestinians.
Some 31 percent of adults polled blame Jews in the financial industry for the economic meltdown, while 58 percent of respondents admitted that their opinion of Jews has worsened due to their criticism of Israel.
The ADL, a Jewish-American organization polled 3,500 adults - 500 each in Austria, France, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom - between December 1, 2008 and January 13, 2009.
According to the survey, 40 percent of polled Europeans believe that Jews have an over-abundance of power in the business world. More than half of the respondents in Hungary, Spain and Poland agreed with this statement. These numbers were 7 percent higher in Hungary, 6 percent higher in Poland and 5 percent higher in France than those recorded in the ADL's 2007 survey.
Nearly half of the respondents in each of the countries said that Jews were more loyal to Israel than to their home country. Twenty-three percent said that their opinion of Jews was influenced by Israel's military and political activities.
Another 44 percent of respondents said it was "probably true" that Jews reference the Holocaust too much, while 23% said that they still blame Jews for the death of Jesus.
"This poll confirms that anti-Semitism remains alive and well in the minds of many Europeans," said Abe Foxman, the National Director of Anti-Defamation League. "In the wake of the global financial crisis, the strong belief of excessive Jewish influence on business and finance is especially worrisome."
Late last year, the ADL reported a major upsurge in the number of anti-Semitic postings on the Internet relating to the financial crisis engulfing the United States.
The Jewish-American organization cited hundreds of posts regarding the bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers and other institutions affected by the subprime mortgage crisis.
The messages railed against Jews in general, with some charging that Jews control the U.S. government and finance as part of a "Jew world order" and therefore are to blame for the economic turmoil.
The arrest of Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff, who allegedly swindled $50 billion from investors, prompted an outpouring of anti-Semitic comments on mainstream and extremist Web sites, according to the ADL.
The ADL said some of the posts on the highly trafficked sites spread conspiracy theories about Jews stealing money to benefit Israel and suggest that, "Only Jews could perpetrate a fraud on such a scale."
These and other anti-Jewish tropes about Jews and money have appeared on popular blogs devoted to finance, in comment sections of mainstream news outlets and in banter among users of Internet discussion groups, according to the ADL.
"Jews are always a convenient scapegoat in times of crisis, but the Madoff scandal and the fact that so many of the defrauded investors are Jewish has created a perfect storm for the anti-Semites," Foxman said last year, following news of the Internet hate messages.
The Elders of Zion (yes the ones mentioned in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, us) have received the emails below. As critics of Israel have complained that not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, and that we are unfair in failing to publish their incisive comments, which are not racist at all and only directed at the crimes of the Zionists. These virtuous folks all support the progressive Hamas movement in its just struggle to wipe the JewsZionists off the face of the earth. I am publishing a sample herewith, so that the world will not be deprived of their wisdom. By all means contact these humanitarian paragons. Such deep thinking should not go unrewarded and unnoticed.
You people are FAR bigger terrorists than the Palestinians!! Because of our blind support, no matter what atrocities you commit, America is as hated worldwide as Israel. Your outrageous air strikes are killing hundreds of civilians. It's no wonder that, over the centuries, you've been expelled from every country in Europe. I"ve read the "Protocols"... I know how devious you are. Without our support Israel wouldn't even exist. Because of that support, Israel is the bully of the Middle East. You pick fights knowing your "big brother" (the US) will bail you out regardless of what atrocities you commit. You call the Palestinians terrorists. Well, I'm old enough to know that Israel coined the term.
I am a patriotic American. I deplore terrorism everywhere. We suffered through 9/11 because, and ONLY because, of our support of Israel. I hope and pray that the new administration (a Muslim) will turn our backs to Israel and force you to reap what you sow. On your own. There are worldwide protests about your slaughtering on innocent women and children. I truly hope that your days are numbered.
There are in occupied Palastine ca.6 mio zionist elements,
the arab world contains a folk of 850 Mio. muslims.
Laugh and eat the few days which are left for you,the slaughter will invade the shores of the country of "Israel". Who will stop the flood of judgement?
Manuel Turmes Luxembourg
The following letter is abridged, but you can gather that the author has discovered a great Jewish plot that existed to grant equality to black people, to which we plead guilty as charged. Yep, you can blame Barack Obama on us Jew-Zionists. He got us fair and square on that one. And Brown vs Board of Education too. All the folks opposed to racial equality gotta be anti-Zionists too, and all the rest of you commies better join us Zionists.
You can also gather that the author thinks the Bush family and the Rockefellers are Jewish,.which is not true. He alludes to the anti-Semitic accusation that the Kol Nidre prayer was meant to absolve Jews from promises to gentiles. He has a fake Ariel Sharon quote there and probably some of the others are fake too. He then asserts that his criticism of "ZIonism" is not antisemitic. A Jew in the Rockefeller is worth two Bushes, right? It is not known if Rockeller was a Zionist
"Don't worry about congress. We can take care of that"
David Rothschild
"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order. "
David Rockefeller
"Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs."
Henry Kissinger
We will have a world government whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that government will be achieved by conquest or consent."
Jewish Banker Paul Warburg
February 17, 1950, as he testified before the U.S. Senate
"If the American people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us"
George H.W. Bush
Let me issue and control a Nation's currency and I care not who makes its Laws
Amselm Meyer Rothschild
The difference between the Jewish soul ... and the soul of all the Gentiles ... is greater and deeper than the difference between the soul of a man and the soul of an animal.
Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak HaCohen Kook (1865-1935)
"Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it."
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, October 8th. [This quote is certainly a fabrication A.I.]
For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American Political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as `internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty and I am proud of it. David Rockefeller, from his autobiography "Memoirs"
"All vows, obligations, oaths or anthems, pledges of all names, which we have vowed, sworn, devoted, or bound ourselves to, from this day of atonement, until the next day of atonement (whose arrival we hope for in happiness) we repent, aforehand, of them all, they shall all be deemed absolved, forgiven, annulled, void and made of no effect; they shall not be binding, nor have any power; the vows shall not be reckoned as vows, the obligations shall not be obligatory, nor the oaths considered as oaths." Yom Kippur - The Talmud
"We must realize that our party's most powerful weapon is racial tensions. By propounding into the consciousness of the dark races that for centuries they have been oppressed by whites, we can mold them to the program of the Communist Party. In America we will aim for subtle victory. While inflaming the Negro minority against the whites, we will endeavor to instill in the whites a guilt complex for their exploitation of the Negroes. We will aid the Negroes to rise in prominence in every walk of life, in the professions and in the world of sports and entertainment. With this prestige, the Negro will be able to intermarry with the whitesand begin a process which will deliver America to our cause. Israel Cohen, A Racial Program for the Twentieth Century, 1912
....
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism
Normal human: What's anti-semitism? Zionist: Well, since Israel is a Jewish state, any criticism of Israel is anti-semitism. NH: Israel is a Jewish state and has acted despicably toward the Palestinians. It deserves criticism! Zio: Ooh! You anti-semite! How could you say such a thing! Are you a Nazi? Oh!oh!oh! Anti-semite! NH: Actually, Israel's despicable actions have made anti-semitism almost respectable. Zio: Oooohh!! [Faints rather than acknowledge facts evident to everyone else.]
Zionists are experts at propaganda, disinformation, denying facts and outright lying. Any criticism of Zionism or of Israel is labelled as "anti-semitism", where this is interpreted to mean "anti-Jewish". This is a slanderous falsehood. Criticism of Zionism is criticism of a particularly ugly political movement, not criticism of a religion or of the adherents of a religion. One may be critical of Zionism and of Zionists while at the same time being quite tolerant of, or well-disposed toward, or even an adherent of, the Jewish religion (as we see from the websites cited above).
Here's a clear case of criticism of the state of Israel being classified as "anti-Semitism". It's a cheap trick and should never be allowed to pass without refutation. Israel has as much right to exist as you have to give your neighbor's house to your relatives and force your neighbour to live in the street, but to assert this is not to cast aspersion upon Jews. Israel is an apartheid state because of the way the Israeli government (with the support of most Israelis) treats Arabs within its borders as second-class citizens and because of its attempts to destroy Palestinian society in the occupied territories so as to rid the land of Arabs and make it suitable for Israeli annexation, but to suggest this is not to make any criticism of Jews, but rather, of Israelis — and they richly deserve it.
Ken Livingstone: This is about Israel, not Anti-semitism
For 20 years Israeli governments have attempted to portray anyone who forcefully criticises the policies of Israel as anti-semitic. The truth is the opposite: the same universal human values that recognise the Holocaust as the greatest racist crime of the 20th century require condemnation of the policies of successive Israeli governments — not on the absurd grounds that they are Nazi or equivalent to the Holocaust, but because ethnic cleansing, discrimination and terror are immoral.
There is a lot more to this letter, which has quotes from anti-Zionists like Israel Shamir, Jimmy Carter and Professor Mearsheimer. The above should certainly convince everyone that Anti-Zionism has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, right? The Talmud, which was written about 1600 years before Zionism existed was a Zionist document, correct? And George H.W. Bush is a famous Zionist, right? And the civil rights movement, that is certainly a disgraceful Zionist plot too,
These gentleman are all waiting to get your emails in praise of their courageous and progressive humanitarian stance against the Zionist menace, George H.W. Bush and racial miscegnation.
And meanwhile I would never expect to read the sort of criticism of Pakistan that I read every day about Israel. Yet of these two states, born at almost the same moment at the close of Britain's imperium, can it really be said that Israel is so much the greater offender in terms of democratic rights for citizens, invasions of neighbours like Afghanistan, oppressions of non-Punjabi minority inhabitants, massacres of co-religionists as in Bangladesh, and illegal acquisition of nuclear weapons? One can just about picture a worldwide campaign to redress the injustices of Pakistan, in which unions of British teachers and journalists would join with their own courageous boycotts, but I confess to a slight difficulty in picturing the same level of enthusiasm and commitment. There is some sense in which any challenge to what can be viewed as specifically Jewish power is more exciting and possibly more "transgressive", and we might be more honest if we admitted as much. Here's a thought experiment: you get an email telling you that all the Anglo-Saxons left the World Trade Center just an hour before the planes hit (not having merely stayed away with all the benefit of their advance warning, but having actually gone to all the trouble of turning up at 8 a.m. and trustingly assuming that the terror-strike would take place just on schedule and thus give them time to check their Rolexes for an orderly and early departure). See what I mean? It's just not such a thrilling hypothesis. When directed at the Jews, however, it at least adds insult to injury, and the true bigot knows that every little helps.
However, both MacShane and Hitchens operate from the naive and optimistic viewpoint that if only we can get a logically correct description of anti-Semitism, the anti-Semites will be convinced of the error of their ways, and the problem will disappear.
Ami Isseroff
November 19, 2008 The new anti-Semitism? How ancient prejudice and outright hostility have re-emerged since the Nuremberg Trials Christopher Hitchens
I was once introduced, in the Cosmos Club in Washington, to Willis Carto of the Liberty Lobby, a group frequently accused of being insufficiently philo-Semitic. Mr Carto unburdened himself of quite a long burst about the power of finance capital, whereupon our host, to lighten the atmosphere, said, "Come on Willis, you're sounding like Ezra Pound". "Ezra Pound!" exclaimed Mr Carto. "Why, I love that man's work. Except for all that goddam poetry!" I thought then that if one ever needed a working definition of an anti-Semite, it might perhaps be an individual who esteemed everything about Ezra Pound except his Cantos.
Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith has a different definition. For him, anti-Semitism is revealed not when someone criticizes the state of Israel, but when someone denies the right of Israel to exist. This, however, will not do, since many Orthodox Jews and Marxist Jews were opposed ab initio to the founding of a Jewish state, and indeed, for the first few years of the Zionist movement's existence, almost all its enemies were Jewish. (By the same token, the idea of a Levantine state into which European Jewry could be decanted often found favour with those who were not all fond of Jewry per se.)
The overt expression of anti-Semitic views has been extremely muted since the Nuremberg Trials, and the somewhat later decision of the Roman Catholic Church to withdraw its historic charge of "deicide" against the Jewish people as a whole. But the Labour MP Denis MacShane, who chaired an all-party commission of inquiry into the subject, argues that this most ancient and fierce of hatreds is undergoing a worldwide recrudescence. Rather dauntingly, he begins his book Globalising Hatred with a taxonomy of six distinct kinds of anti-Semitism, as compiled by the no less dauntingly named Professor Armin Pfahl-Traughber. The disease, it seems, can present as religious, social, political, racist, secondary or anti-Zionist, and of course these symptoms are not mutually exclusive and may often be found in clusters.
I would propose to begin more economically, by separating anti-Semitism from other forms of prejudice. One might certainly begin by distinguishing it from any too obvious stratification: MacShane likes to put the word "upper-class" in front of his main noun, but it was the great German socialist August Bebel who characterized anti-Jewish ranting as "the socialism of fools" and identified it as a perverted form of class resentment. This may have been slightly reductionist, as if to place a creepy and occult belief on all fours with more ordinary styles of xenophobia. British people who dislike Pakistanis, say, or Sinhalese who dislike Tamils, or Ulstermen who look down on Gaels, will tend to express themselves in fairly vulgar terms. The disliked ones are dirty and lazy, and have over-large families and a generally low cultural level. Anti-Semitism, by contrast, has something almost vicariously admiring about it. The targeted and hated tribe is believed to have awesome secret power and a positive genius for finance, as well as an ability to infiltrate and annex large swathes of professional life, such as the law and medicine. Not only this, but the Jew is seen as so protean as to have been – in the course of the past century alone – the covert engineer of both capitalism and Bolshevism. Examples of this combination of envy with paranoia are not difficult to locate: a recent New York Times report from Egypt described a settled conviction at all levels of society that, while nineteen Arabs could not have brought down the World Trade Center, the Israeli Mossad had the means, the method, the motive and the opportunity to do so. (One might pause to note the element of Arab self-hatred that is latent in this view.) When asked for proof, the believers point to the fact, which "everybody knows", that all the Jews employed in the Twin Towers left work shortly before the planes arrived. I have myself heard this alleged at elite dinner parties in Islamabad, and MacShane has heard it from educated Muslims in his own constituency of Rotherham.
Perhaps over-anxious not to single out these as if they were the only offenders, MacShane is careful to spread his net wide. Neo-fascists in Argentina and Germany, the British National Party, the anti-Israeli American academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the demagogues of Radio Maria in Poland, the sneers of Alan Clark in his Diaries, the gibes of David Irving, and a few of the anti-Zionist positions taken by Noam Chomsky and Perry Anderson are all included in the trawl. Surely this is too indiscriminate, especially in the case of the last two named? More important, does it not run the risk of treating Islamist anti-Semitism as if it were merely one form of the malady among many? In point of fact, there is only one area of the world where pure, old-fashioned undiluted Jew-hatred is preached from the pulpit, broadcast on the official airwaves, given high-level state sanction and taught in the schools. All across the Muslim Middle East and well into Muslim Asia, the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion are freely available, often disseminated by ruling circles as well as by insurgent and now quasi-government movements such as Hamas and Hizbollah. (Incidentally, it is wrong to call this toxic document a "forgery", since a forgery is a copy of something authentic. The Protocols are a mere fabrication, put together by Eastern Orthodox Christian fanatics in the pay of the tsarist secret police. Despite their suggestive name, they contain no mention of Israel or Zionism, as MacShane appears to think.)
When he does turn his attention to this region, however, MacShane's treatment of the lucubrations of Tariq Ramadan and Sayyid Qtub is fairly comprehensive. Not everybody will agree with his generally lenient approach to the state of Israel, but he does argue convincingly, with some telling quotations, that resentment at Israel's occupation of the West Bank simply cannot explain some of the more lurid formulations of Arab and Muslim propaganda. The fairly temperate Ghada Karmi, for example, speaks of Israel "encircling the Arab world" (my italics), while regional self-pity – a natural sibling of self-hatred by the way, as is self-righteousness – often blames all the ills of a backward and benighted region on arcane Jewish manipulations. The relatively recent history of Europe shows how fantastically dangerous such delusions can be, and MacShane is right to stress the comparison as well as the implications.
When all this is taken into account, though, I am not sure that he is correct in so often using the prefix "neo" to describe the resurgent phenomenon. The pseudo-intellectual and superstitious tropes of Judaeophobia are very much the same as they ever were. They involve the hatred of the countryside for the urban (and the urbane), the hatred of the provinces for the capital (and for capital), the disdain of the settled establishment for the subversive, and the visceral loathing of the tradition-minded "organic" community for the rootless and the cosmopolitan. In this, one can understand both the nastier moments that one may encounter in the study of T. S. Eliot and also the mentality of those Argentine fascists who tortured the Jewish editor and journalist, Jacobo Timerman. As Timerman recalled the obsessions of the death-squad Right in his imperishable book Prisoner without a Name: Cell without a number, his interrogators believed that "Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space". I went to look this up after I had read MacShane citing Argentine military men who to this day believe that there is a Jewish conspiracy to annex and Zionize the remoter areas of Patagonia, the better, presumably, to extend Protocol power to the Jew-free wastes of Antarctica.
"You catch it on the edge of a remark", as Harold Isaacs phrases it in Chariots of Fire. I have felt myself "catching" it quite a few times of late, as when chaps from the BBC insisted despite repeated correction on saying Paul "Vulfovitz" with a special emphasis, instead of pronouncing the name correctly the first time round, as the BBC used to train people to do. Writing about the same person, the American isolationist and Charles Lindbergh admirer Patrick J. Buchanan referred to him as playing Fagin to George Bush's Oliver Twist which, an arresting image as it certainly is, makes rather the same point in an only somewhat different way. And meanwhile I would never expect to read the sort of criticism of Pakistan that I read every day about Israel. Yet of these two states, born at almost the same moment at the close of Britain's imperium, can it really be said that Israel is so much the greater offender in terms of democratic rights for citizens, invasions of neighbours like Afghanistan, oppressions of non-Punjabi minority inhabitants, massacres of co-religionists as in Bangladesh, and illegal acquisition of nuclear weapons? One can just about picture a worldwide campaign to redress the injustices of Pakistan, in which unions of British teachers and journalists would join with their own courageous boycotts, but I confess to a slight difficulty in picturing the same level of enthusiasm and commitment. There is some sense in which any challenge to what can be viewed as specifically Jewish power is more exciting and possibly more "transgressive", and we might be more honest if we admitted as much. Here's a thought experiment: you get an email telling you that all the Anglo-Saxons left the World Trade Center just an hour before the planes hit (not having merely stayed away with all the benefit of their advance warning, but having actually gone to all the trouble of turning up at 8 a.m. and trustingly assuming that the terror-strike would take place just on schedule and thus give them time to check their Rolexes for an orderly and early departure). See what I mean? It's just not such a thrilling hypothesis. When directed at the Jews, however, it at least adds insult to injury, and the true bigot knows that every little helps.
"The bitch that bore him is on heat again", as Brecht has his closing speaker say about Hitler at the curtain of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. The next nightmare will not take the same shape or form, but it will be sure to emit the same plain and unmistakable warnings. MacShane has done a service by giving us a handbook of the signs.
Denis MacShane GLOBALISING HATRED The new antisemitism 188pp. Orion. £12.99. 978 0 297 84473 0
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book, God Is Not Great: The case against religion, appeared earlier this year.
The dismissal of Hughes brought howls about the "Israel Lobby" from "anti-Zionist" Henry Makow who howled at henrymakow.com/jewish_lobby_vetoes_canadian_c.html, "Jewish Lobby Vetoes Candidate for 9-11 Views."
Well yes, and if a politician had claimed that Africans are all thieves, they would be dismissed as well.
The ZIM hoax about 9-11 is featured on thousands of "anti-Zionist" Web sites.
As we say in Israel, "go try and prove that you don't have a sister." (Said in response to allegations about your sister's immoral occupation).
By Anne BAYEFSKY ADC Gandel Oration -- Melbourne and Sydney, Australia July 6 and 8, 2008
Introduction
Human rights have become a weapon. A potent force for denunciation and defeat – not in the hands of the abused, but in the hands of the abusers. Those powerful few who know little - and want even less - of freedom or equality.
In little over half a century since the horrors that nearly vanquished an entire people, humankind has come almost full circle. The victims of the Nazis – and the Jewish homeland which is their refuge and their strength – are cast as the neo-Nazis of the 21st century. Human rights are now human wrongs.
The saga of the hijacking and corruption of universal rights and freedoms is one of profound betrayal. It is a betrayal of the victims of the Holocaust, the United Nations – the promised international beacon that rose from their ashes, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights envisioned by Eleanor Roosevelt and René Cassin as the gold standard for never again.
This plight is not a result of a sole cataclysmic event but the consequence of individual abominations, gone unnoticed or unchallenged. Ironically, the setting for this treachery has been the UN itself. An individual resolution of the UN General Assembly, a report of a UN special investigator, a decision of the UN Human Rights Commission – year after year after year. International norms are said to be nurtured through a constructive process in which the accumulation of state practice crystallizes beliefs that mirror the collective wisdom of nations. What has emerged instead – powered by a global, 20 billion-a-year megaphone – is the collective depravity of an immoral majority.
Discrimination
This story begins with discrimination against the Jewish state. Discrimination is the building block of hate and the UN has already erected a fortress.
Since the late 1940's until it was abolished in 2006, the lead UN human rights body was the Human Rights Commission. Over its lifetime it passed more resolutions condemning Israel than any other country on earth. It adopted nothing, ever, on serial abusers such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Zimbabwe.
In 2006 the Commission was replaced by the Human Rights Council. In its short life the Council has directed almost 60% of its decisions condemning specific states at Israel alone. And nothing at all on 187 of the UN's other 191 members.
The Council has had eight regular sessions which cover human rights in all countries – and four special sessions devoted only to human rights violations by Israel.
The Council – as the Commission before it – has a limited agenda of less than a dozen subjects. One is reserved only for condemning Israel. And one is called "human rights issues of concern" for all other countries.
The Commission and the Council have created only one UN human rights investigator with a job description which has no term limit – the investigator on Israel. The few other country investigators must be renewed frequently – or not. In the past 15 months, the Council has refused to renew or continue investigations on four states with some of the worst records on the planet – Belarus, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran and Uzbekistan.
The mandate of the Council investigator on Israel denies any possibility of finding human rights violations by any actor in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but Israel. Its only purpose is "to investigate Israel's violations of the principles and bases of international law."
The UN has only one standing human rights committee which has no generic theme, like civil and political rights or children's rights. The UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting Human Rights is now in its 40th year of operation.
In 1975 the UN created a committee to implement its notorious Zionism is racism resolution. The resolution was rescinded in 1991. But the Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People continues to sponsor events worldwide and year round.
There is only one whole UN secretariat Division devoted to a single group of people – the UN Division for Palestinian Rights. Created in 1977 it has a full-time staff of 16, while the number of UN staff for the entire Asia and Pacific Division is 22.
There is one refugee agency for Palestinian refugees. And one refugee agency assisting 26 million in the rest of the world.
The UN General Assembly has six subsidiary bodies which focus only on Palestinians. And none focusing on any other people anywhere.
There is only one UN online service dedicated to the claims of a single people – the enormous United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine. It transmits reports, resolutions, speeches, publications and press releases on a daily basis around the world.
Member states of the UN are divided into five regional groups – key vehicles for negotiating resolutions, obtaining important positions, and sharing information. Only one UN member is not permitted to become a full member of any regional group – Israel.
There have been ten emergency sessions of the UN General Assembly in its history – six have been about Israel – and the last and tenth one is effectively in permanent session having been "reconvened" fifteen times since 1987. A million dead in Rwanda and two million dead over two decades in Sudan never prompted one emergency session.
In 2007 the UN General Assembly – as is routine – adopted 20 resolutions condemning Israel for human rights violations, while adopting just a single resolution each on only six other countries. And nothing, for instance, on the egregious violation of the most basic civil and political rights of more than a billion Chinese.
The only condemnation of a country-specific violation of women's rights anywhere made by the Commission on the Status of Women is its annual resolution on Palestinian women. Nothing, for example, directed at Iran despite its practice of burying women naked to the waist and stoning them to death for alleged adultery.
Taken together, the country subject to more human rights criticism across the UN system every year is Israel. Last year, it was condemned twice as often as Sudan – where millions are displaced, hundreds of thousands are dead in Darfur, and unfettered genocide and rape are the daily norm.
The meetings are webcast – the documents are translated into six languages – and the reports are accessible globally via the internet for free.
In UN circles, it is called protecting human rights. In reality, it is discrimination – antisemitism – in which the Jewish state is subjected to different treatment and held to different standards than all other nations. Given its reach and impact, the UN is therefore the largest global purveyor of antisemitism in the world today.
Demonization
Israel emerges from this so-called human rights campaign demonized – a country engaged in heinous acts with the worst of intentions.
June 20th, 2008 at UN Headquarters in New York. The occasion is a day-long event entitled "Special meeting to mark sixty years of dispossession of Palestine refugees." A film – shown also at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris a few weeks earlier – is screened before a public audience in the main Economic and Social Council Chamber.
Produced by a Palestinian, the film was designed to draw parallels between the Nazis final solution and the Zionists design for Palestinians. It is commonly billed with these words: "…the late-19th century Zionists…drew up plans, put them into practice, then…used… force, often brutal."
Here is some of the script:
"Christians and Muslims alike…unite in their hatred of Zionism…I preferred to die as a martyr rather than be governed by the Jews …We were against the Jews…The number of Jews increased constantly…The children cried …The Hagana had no mercy, no pity. Zionists! They were Zionists!… The Jews were shooting at us, they were facing us…The Jews yelled "turn around you bastards, you dogs." They machine gunned us…They started killing people who were asleep…[We]…found a poor woman…pregnant. They had killed her and the baby came out of the womb. They started slaughtering them until morning."
This is how the UN marked the 60th anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel. This is antisemitism as human rights.
Perhaps the most virulent "human rights" theme which emerges repeatedly is the allegation of Jewish racism. In a February 2007 report UN special investigator on Israel John Dugard wrote:
"The IDF inflicts serious bodily and mental harm on Palestinians…Palestinians throughout the OPT are denied freedom of movement. Can it seriously be denied that the purpose of such action is to establish and maintain domination by one racial group (Jews) over another racial group (Palestinians) and systematically oppressing them?"
UN reports analogize Israel to apartheid South Africa. The UN's 2001 Durban Racism Conference produced a Declaration claiming Palestinians are victims of Israeli racism. Durban II – the next so-called "anti-racism" conference scheduled for 2009 is devoted to implementing that Declaration, and is therefore certain to include Israeli racism on its agenda.
Nobody cares that one-fifth of Israel's population is Arab with more democratic rights than in any Arab state. No one wants to hear that Arab states have essentially been rendered Judenrein following the creation of Israel, 850,000 Jews having been forced to flee. Though UN resolutions denounce Jews living in Arab-claimed territory as "Judaization," nowhere do people denounce "apartheid Palestine."
The Legitimization of Violence
What follows discrimination and demonization is all too familiar. A demonized adversary is a much easier target. In the name of resistance and struggle, Israeli civilians have become fair game.
On June 16, 2008 the UN Human Rights Council discussed the latest human rights report from Dugard on Israeli practices. He said: "a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror…and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation." The acts perpetrated upon Israeli civilians by Palestinians acting "against occupation" is the second kind of terror, the "inevitable consequence of occupation" and analogous to "the German occupation resisted by European countries in the Second World War." According to this major UN human rights authority figure, therefore, terrorizing Israelis is understandable and inevitable and their murderers are comparable to the liberators of Nazi Germany.
The European Union has a word for "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis" – antisemitism.
Antisemitism as human rights
This is not academic exegesis. During the Human Rights Council discussions, Pakistan responded to Dugard's hate-mongering on behalf of the 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference or OIC: "We must note the wise counsel of the special [investigator] to make distinction between mindless terror and acts committed in the course of war of national liberation against colonialism, apartheid or military occupation." As recently as four years ago, resolutions of the Human Rights Commission declared "the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples against foreign occupation and for self-determination" – (and incorporated by reference to an earlier General Assembly resolution) "by all available means, including armed struggle."
Denial of the Right of Self-Defense
The human right universe denies the Jewish state the existential entitlement to self-preservation. After all, why should the abuser have a right of self-defense against his victim?
Denying Israel an effective right of self-defense has become a centerpiece of international human rights and humanitarian law. Almost nothing that Israel does against its enemies is legitimate in the eyes of the human rights world. In UN and human rights NGO circles, the carefully targeted killing of combatants is extrajudicial execution. The building of a security fence on disputed territory, with a significant numbers of lives saved, violates international law. Checkpoints and barriers limiting movement among a population infiltrated by enemy combatants in a war zone are humiliating racist insults.
Targeting civilian infrastructure in response to thousands of rockets (which forced one million Israelis into bomb shelters for over three weeks and displaced 300,000) was not a legitimate action with a military objective in the middle of a war, but collective punishment. Incidental civilian casualties caused by Israel, of any number, in any context, whatever the target, are always disproportionate. Incidentally destroying crops in southern Lebanon in the course of responding to Hezbollah rockets violated international humanitarian law. In effect, despite a continuing state of war and the genocidal intent of the enemy combatants, Israel can't hit people, can't hit inanimate objects, can't even hit the ground.
Consider the case of Hamas leaders Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantissi. The governing instrument of the elected representatives of the Palestinian people – the 1988 Hamas Covenant – states: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad." With genocide as a frame of reference, Yassin and Rantissi exhorted their followers to violence, instigated suicide bombings, and in Rantissi's words "freed the hand of the brigades to do whatever they want against the brothers of monkeys and pigs." By the time Israel killed each of them with a missile attack upon their vehicles, there had been at least 425 Hamas attacks killing 377 Israelis and wounding 2,076 in less than three and a half years. Four civilians were killed with Yassin, none with Rantissi.
The UN response? UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned Israel's actions as "assassinations" and illegal "extrajudicial killings" – a charge which is potent – and totally false. Yassin and Rantissi were combatants in a war and not entitled to judicial process before being targeted. They were also unlawful combatants, seeking to make themselves indistinguishable from the civilian population. International Committee of the Red Cross manuals state that civilians who take a direct part in hostilities forfeit their immunity from attack. In addition to the fact that Yassin and Rantisi were not entitled to judicial process, such a process was not an option for Israel without risking many more Israeli and Palestinian lives. The real legal limit in targeting combatants, according to the Geneva Conventions, is the rule of proportionality – the "incidental loss of civilian life" must not be "excessive." This test was satisfied in the case of Israel's actions, civilian casualties having been kept to a minimum. And yet in today's world of human rights, killing antisemitic leaders at the apex of their genocidal campaign, which had successfully terrorized 5.5 million people, was a violation of the human rights of the homicidal antisemites.
There is another sense in which the Geneva Conventions are misread only when applied to Israel. The freedom of movement and associated rights of Palestinians are limited, but the question is: by whom? If an armed robber takes a hostage and in the course of the crime the hostage is killed by police, the law states that the death of the hostage has been caused by the robber, not the police. For if there had been no armed robbery, the hostage would not have been harmed. If there were no terrorism, there would be no need for barriers and checkpoints. The Palestinian civilian population is hostage to the terrorists and killers among them. Israel's actions, like those of the police officer, are taken in fulfillment of its legal responsibilities to protect its citizens from violent and illegal behavior. And the Geneva Conventions specifically refuses to grant immunity to terrorists or military targets using civilians as human shields.
This is the law of self-defense – except in the case of Israel. In 2004 the UN's International Court of Justice decided that Israel's security fence violated international law by a series of contortions written for a party of one. They held that there is no right of self-defense under the U.N. Charter when terrorists are not state actors, when they operate across disputed borders, and when the measures are not forcible such as the building of a wall. The Egyptian judge even affirmed a "right of resistance" on the grounds that "violence breeds violence." In short, the Court emasculated Israel's right of self-defense, notwithstanding that the U.N. Charter was not intended to be a suicide pact.
The Absence of Human Rights
The bottom line is that for all practical purposes Israelis don't have human rights.
On June 16, 2008 the Human Rights Council discussed whether the mandate of the special investigator on Israel should be expanded to permit him to consider violations of the human rights of Israelis. The Jordanian Ambassador objected. He explained:
"there is a false impression here of a kind of symmetry that we are dealing with human rights….but we …[ought] not to fall into this symmetry… of… equating the victim and the victimizer or the oppressed and the oppressors…[or] the root causes and … the symptoms. The violation of human rights by Palestinian groups…is used as a pretext… or to confuse the issue…"
The newly appointed UN investigator Richard Falk is a man who has accused Israel of "genocidal tendencies," "associate[s] the treatment of Palestinians with th[e]…criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity" and is unconvinced that the events of 9/11 were not a Bush Administration plot. Falk therefore reassured the Jordanian Ambassador:
"…we are dealing with the suffering of the Palestinian people and secondarily of the victimizing of…Israelis..."
The absence of symmetry (the notion that Israelis have human rights too) is found across the human rights world.
Through suicide-bombing, kidnapping, rocket attacks, murder, and butchery of all kinds, Palestinian and other terrorists touch the lives of Israelis while praying, studying, working, shopping, eating, driving, sleeping – living. If the human rights of Israeli Jews were part of the equation, the list of rights violated by terrorism and war would be a long one:
* the right to life, * the right not to be subjected to torture, inhuman or degrading treatment, * the right to equality and freedom from persecution, ??security of the person, * the right to health and well-being, * the right to safe working conditions, * the right to work, * freedom from incitement to violence or war, * freedom of religion, * the right to the protection of the family, * the right to the protection of the child, * the right to education, * freedom of movement, * freedom of association, * the right to an adequate standard of living, and * the right to self-determination.
Add to this list: genocide – the commission of "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group," ethnic cleansing – the effort to "render…an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area" and the suicide-bomber's crime against humanity.
And yet, in judging the legality of Israel's security fence the World Court never attempted to balance these individual rights of Israelis against the list produced of Palestinian rights. Their trick – no doubt a common one – was to place a lengthy list of Palestinian rights on one side and Israeli "military exigencies," "national security" and "public order" – all faceless beneficiaries – on the other. Having weighted one half of the scale, the human rights weapon of the 21st century becomes a monstrous swindle.
Over and over again, the human rights of Israeli Jews seem to vanish. UN headquarters hosted an exhibit last November with a contribution depicting Israel's security barrier adorned with flowers and accompanied by the words "the flowers climb and hide its ugliness." The aesthetics of Jewish men, women and children blown apart in the absence of a barrier was nowhere to be found.
The Human Rights Council recently commissioned a report on the limitations placed on Palestinian access to religious sites in the territories, but refused to permit consideration of Israeli access to Jewish holy sites in the same places.
On every November 29th, the anniversary of the day on which the General Assembly voted to adopt the partition of the British Palestine Mandate and celebrated in 1947 by Holocaust survivors everywhere, the UN holds an Annual Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Secretary-General Annan called it "a day of mourning and a day of grief." Just two flags are flown inside UN headquarters in commemoration – the flag of the United Nations and the Palestinian flag.
Denying Antisemitism
Rights which do not exist cannot be violated. So it is, that in its entire history the United Nations General Assembly has never adopted a resolution dedicated to condemning antisemitism or called for the production of a report dedicated to antisemitism in contrast to special reports on discrimination against "Muslim and Arab peoples" and "Islamophobia." On the contrary, in human rights circles the definition of antisemitism is hotly disputed.
The reasons are not subtle. Jew-haters have a vested interest in denying Jewhatred.
On April 22, 2008 the Algerian ambassador told the Durban II preparatory committee: "antisemitism…targets…Arabs who are also Semites, and by extension, the whole Muslim community." Pakistan said "Islamophobia is also a crude form of antisemitism."
After all, if the phenomenon can be appropriated, Jewish victimhood will disappear.
But Muslim states are not the only ones feigning confusion about antisemitism. Human rights authorities are nervous about addressing antisemitism primarily because they want to avoid any connection with Zionism and those troublesome human rights of Israelis.
Driving a wedge between Jews and Israel is now a prime activity for antisemites and their human rights cohorts. 'Some of my best friends are Jews. It's just Jewish self-determination I have a problem with.'
Ironically, the current method of avoiding a connection between demonizing Israelis and antisemitism, is to focus on the Holocaust. The general idea is to manifest concern – half a century too late – for Jews that died 60 years ago and then to deny the antisemitism of murdering Jews in a Jewish state today.
When the European Union refused to support a General Assembly resolution on antisemitism (on the alleged grounds that it wouldn't garner consensus), Israel pushed for a Holocaust resolution. It was adopted in November 2005, minus the word "antisemitism," though it did mention the Jewish people along with "countless members of other minorities."
Since January 2006 there has been a Holocaust Remembrance Day at the UN on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Setting aside the constant struggle to ensure that the Day and related activities commemorate the uniqueness of the war against the Jews – the real battleground is over disassociating Israel from the lessons of the Holocaust.
Today, there is a permanent display on the Holocaust at UN Headquarters which contains a timeline from 1933, and Hitler's ascendancy to power, to May 2007 and the appointment of a UN Special Representative for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities. Nowhere is the creation of the state of Israel mentioned in either the timeline or the exhibit – as if the birth and well-being of Israel is not the central remedial lesson of the Holocaust.
The Destruction of the Jewish State
Rendering asunder Jews and Israel brings this human rights playbook to its inexorable conclusion – the call for the destruction of the Jewish state in the name of human rights.
The argument for demolition is twofold. First, the Jewish state is corrupt. In the words of an invited expert to a public meeting at the UN in New York just two weeks ago:
"Israel demands that the international community recognize Israel as a Jewish state…The implications are…that Palestinian citizens of Israel will never enjoy equal rights because they're not Jews…The imperative of Zionism…is to create a land without a people and replace it with the Jewish people…[We must] recognize the untenable nature of the system of dispossession and discrimination that Zionism has introduced…The days of a Zionist Israel are numbered."
This wasn't just the "expert's" view. The Chairman of the UN Committee hosting the event, the Ambassador of Senegal, thanked the speaker for her "captivating statement" and "valuable knowledge." The end of Israel is allegedly a corrective necessity of the state's inherently corrupt raison d'être.
Second, Israel has a corrupting influence on others. The 2008 annual report of Amnesty International, states:
"The international human rights system has been slow to develop in the Middle East and North Africa…[where] the Universal Declaration of Human Rights' references to non-discrimination…jar…with legal and customary systems…Such concerns, however, might have been overcome were it not for…the creation of the state of Israel and the resulting dispossession of the Palestinian population. The building of a Jewish state in the midst of the Arab Muslim world had a cataclysmic effect, setting off effectively a continuing state of war between Israel and its Arab neighbours."
In other words, the presence of a comparatively tiny number of Jews with control over their own destiny is responsible for the failure of the vast Middle East and North African nations to end their egregious treatments of their own peoples.
This game is obviously impossible for Israelis to win. The mere existence of a Jewish state is the real problem. This is antisemitism masquerading as human rights.
What follows this alleged corruption is a cacophony of players who are provided a UN platform to clamor for the political and economic strangulation of Israel through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions.
Never mind that the real corruption is that of the UN Charter itself – whose very essence is defiled by mounting the destruction of a member state under UN auspices.
Changing the Status Quo
At every step in this story, from discrimination to the clamor for the destruction of the state of Israel, it would have been possible for decent people, non-governmental organizations and democratic states to refuse to turn the page. Instead, a series of fallacies have stood in the way of the necessary confrontation with the human rights gamers.
Fallacy #1: Israel deserves the attention and the criticism, even if other states are wrongly ignored. The discrimination and double-standards are unfortunate but not fatal.
The Response: At the end of March 2007 British soldier and kidnap victim Faye Turney was in Iran - stripped to her underwear, caged in a tiny, freezing cell and led to believe her death was imminent. At exactly the same time, the UN's lead human rights agency – the Human Rights Council – made two moves. It adopted yet another resolution calling for "the dispatching of…urgent fact-finding missions" to Israel. And its President made the following statement: "the Human Rights Council has in closed meetings examined the human rights situation in…Iran…[and] decided to discontinue the consideration of the human rights situation in…Iran…Members of the…Council should make no reference in the public debate to the confidential decisions and material concerning" Iran.
The inequality of Jews cannot be quarantined. It perverts priorities and purposes.
Fairness, equality and human dignity cannot be built on the inequality of the few.
According to the UN Charter, international peace and security are premised on the equality of all nations large and small, while human dignity is inseparable from the equality of all men and women. Equality is an end in itself. The discrimination and demonization of the Jewish state and the Jewish people is not just an extraneous flaw. It subverts the very foundation of the human rights movement.
Fallacy #2: Israel does not deserve the discrimination and the nature and extent of the condemnation, but poor treatment of Israel is a price worth paying for progress on other fronts.
The Response: The Global Advocacy Director for the NGO Human Rights Watch, Peggy Hicks, and I had an online debate sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations after the first two sessions of the Human Rights Council. Hicks wrote (in July 2006 and the middle of the Lebanon war): "There are legitimate concerns at the Council's handling of the situation in Gaza, and its decision to focus on that crisis to the exclusion of other pressing situations. It would be a mistake, however, to judge the Council on the basis of its actions on the occupied Palestinian territories…" In other words, treating the Jewish state differently than all other countries is a problem only for a small proportion of the world's population. For Jews to denounce the whole just because they are given the short end of the stick would be narrow-minded, callous and parochial.
Human Rights Watch's behavior at the Durban I racism conference took this argument to its logical conclusion. As the representative of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists at Durban, I personally beseeched the representative of Human Rights Watch – to support a vote against the NGO Zionism is Racism declaration. They refused – for the alleged greater good then too.
The same approach was never suggested by human rights organizations to South African blacks and the anti-apartheid movement – for good reason. The road to hell is paved with the cries of the insignificant, the marginal and irrelevant.
Fallacy #3: Jewish complaints are an attempt to protect Israel from any criticism. Jews shout antisemitism to avoid legitimate scrutiny.
The Response: Ken Roth, Executive Director, Human Rights Watch told the Jerusalem Post: "there is a cottage industry of people out there who try to accuse of bias those who criticize Israel's human-rights record not because the criticisms are unwarranted but as a way of simply defending Israel from any criticism." Mary Robinson, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has said: "…some regard any criticism of Israel as anti-semitic." But "Israel's supporters" should not "use the charge of antisemitism to stifle legitimate discussion." And the Deputy Director of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Craig Mokhiber recently wrote about my criticism of his racist Israel allegations: "I assume that the picque…comes from her ideological conviction that any discussion of Israel's human rights record is simply unacceptable."
Such gibberish is the proverbial straw man. That Israel can do no wrong and deserves no criticism is a fiction never uttered by anyone, anywhere. There is a difference between legitimate criticism and the application of standards applied nowhere else.
Fallacy #4: Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. There is a constant effort to urge the Jewish diaspora to forsake their brethren in favor of the global brotherhood of man.
The Response: The anti-Zionism in human rights circles is not enigmatic. As we have heard: Judaization is a crime; the Jewishness of a Jewish state is wrong; Zionists stole the land by gratuitously slaughtering pregnant women; murderous Israeli soldiers seek to oppress; Jews want racial domination over Palestinians; Israel is engaged in apartheid; and the ultimate slander, Israelis are analogous to Nazis. Martin Luther King recognized hate when he heard it, and stated in a now famous 1968 appearance at Harvard: "When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism."
Zionism, or Jewish statehood, is the realization of the self-determination of the Jewish people. In their historical homeland. Continually inhabited, in fewer and greater numbers due to circumstances beyond their control. For thousands of years. In today's human rights universe, however, Jewish statehood and self-determination is an inherent evil destined to oppress and harm the well-being of those amongst them, and debilitating to the advancement of the people of other nations. That Jews are a people incapable of self-government compatible with democratic rights and freedoms – the only people on earth suffering from this inescapable affliction – is a lie. It is also antisemitism.
Fallacy #5: The outcomes of UN human rights mechanisms may not be to our liking, but that is international democracy at work. It is not for the West to dictate right answers to the rest of the globe.
The Response: In the course of his failed reform efforts, Secretary-General Kofi Annan complained: "we all have to admit that the [security] council can be more democratic and more representative…There is a democracy deficit in the UN governance that has to be corrected." What he didn't advocate by way of reform was that Council members actually be democratic. On the contrary, what democracy means at the UN is idealizing the General Assembly, where less than half of the 192 members are fully free democracies. The Chinese explained such bogus global democracy in a 2005 paper this way: "the General Assembly is an important body of democratic decision-making" and the "UN [must] observe the following principles…non-interference in internal affairs." In other words, tyranny is as likely to emerge from the UN majority as right answers.
What has in fact surfaced, from the majority of countries who have in common a desire to avoid external scrutiny, is an aversion to universal rights. Self-styled global "democrats" flaunt instead, moral, cultural and religious particularities. The practical implications of such priorities are exemplified by Saudi Arabia, a current member of the UN Human Rights Council. The Saudi Vice-Minister for Human Rights told the Council in March "…human rights principles ensured the respect for peoples identities, peoples who refused to be dictated and who held on to their special cultures." Saudi human rights reports therefore say: "Lawmaking in an Islamic state proceeds from the Islamic Shariah...Islam holds that full likeness between men and women is contrary to the reality of their being..." Accordingly, last year a Saudi court sentenced a 19-year old woman to prison and 200 lashes after she had been gang-raped, for the crime of having been found by the rapists in a car with a male friend who was not her relative. This is "cultural particularities" at work.
On June 16th at the Human Rights Council an NGO pointed to practices in Islamic states, such as honor killings, marriage of very young girls, and the stoning of women, and urged Islamic religious authorities to play a leadership role in ending these practices.
Representatives of Islamic states – Egypt, Iran, Pakistan – immediately objected to the statement as an "attempt to link bad practices" to Islam. The President then ruled that henceforth any "evaluation of a religious creed, law or document" would never be permitted at the Council.
Global democracy in action is the tyranny of non-democracies.
Fallacy #6: Western democracies – including Israel – are the real enemies of human rights.
The Response: The foes of human rights know that the best defense is a good offence – so rather than addressing those who violate human rights in the name of Islam, they allege the real problem is the bigotry of non-Muslims. They are not talking about isolated and certainly wrong incidents of xenophobia – they speak of a deliberate global Western-inspired plot against the whole of Islam. They call it Islamophobia. As Egypt told the Human Rights Council last September, with regards to the Danish cartoons affair:
"…the offensive publication of portraits of the Prophet Mohamed…lead to, not only hurting the religious feelings of more than a billion people, but also their freedom of religion and their right to respect of their religion."
The freedom of religion of a billion people has been gravely harmed by a few cartoons in a remote newspaper? These kinds of remarks – now daily fodder in the human rights world – are nothing short of lethal demagoguery.
The human rights offensive reaches a high-water mark when it comes to Israel. Pakistan articulated the mindset before the Human Rights Council on June 16th:
"Israel's forcible occupation is the root cause of all human rights issues in the Palestinian territories."
Not the terrorists who deliberately operate in the midst of a civilian population, using their family and friends as human shields. Not the bigots who feed their children – in schools, on television, in textbooks – the daily bread of intolerance and hate for their neighbors. Not the Arab nations that have cynically kept Palestinians as refugees for three generations instead of offering them citizenship and its benefits. Not the war launched by Arab states that rejected the UN partition plan and the creation of Israel in 1948. And not all the wars and attempts at annihilation that rejectionist forces have launched ever since.
But then one might expect the killers to blame their victims for their own demise.
Fallacy #7: The glass is half full and not half empty. There is progress in the human rights world. Look how far we've come since the Nuremberg Tribunals and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was first adopted.
The Response: How far indeed. Genocide in Rwanda and Sudan without intervention. Millions of women suffering genital mutilation. Billions without elementary democratic freedoms. And Jews without human rights.
The Nuremberg Tribunals taught us crimes are not committed by abstract entities, but today just naming and shaming abusers is widely criticized as uncooperative and counter-productive.
The stranglehold of cultural relativism ensures that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights could never be adopted today.
Fallacy #8: The UN is a harmless talking shop. At worst it is a place to blow off steam. Dialogue is always good.
The Response: Iranian President Ahmadinejad would agree. In the late 1990's Iran initiated the idea of a "Dialogue among Civilizations." Naturally, Iranian authorities consider their own regime – in which stoning, public hanging, and cross-amputation of feet and hands are legally-sanctioned punishments – as one of those civilizations.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour experienced the idea of a cost-free dialogue with Iran first-hand. Last September she visited Tehran to attend a "Human Rights and Cultural Diversity" conference. She sat in the front row for Ahmadinejad's speech, during which he said:
"…it is a right for the most righteous to be considered as the best humans….[S]ome powers…think of nothing but destroying the traditions and customs of different nations in the world in order to keep them under their illegal sway…The…story of Palestinians has been going on for the last 60 years. The usurper Zionist regime has continued to exist through murder…[B]y the grace of God Almighty…the nuclear issue is closed…[T]he Non-Aligned Movement's struggle against…racism, Zionism…has to be praised and lauded."
The day after she listened attentively and held dialogues with his officials, the regime executed 21 people, stringing up the bodies on cranes in public places. Arbour had lent an enemy of human rights credibility and thereby encouraged his pathological behavior, rather than inhibited it. In other words, talk isn't cheap at all.
Moreover, many international actors evidently cannot talk and walk at the same time. It has been over five years since the International Atomic Energy Agency first reported that Tehran had failed to comply with its obligations under the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty. Since that time there have been a few baby steps by the Security Council, while the jawing continues between European Union representatives and Iran.
In the meantime, the genocidal plans of Ahmadinejad loom ever larger. A civilized dialogue with an anti-civilization regime has brought us closer to a military confrontation, not farther away – as the military option fast becomes the only means to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Fallacy #9: And last, but not least: The corruption of the human rights world may leave Israel the worse off, but the rest of us have been spared.
The Response: The lessons of the Holocaust have in fact never been learnt. The fate of Israel does, and will, affect all freedom-loving people.
When the World Court found the UN Charter's self-defense provisions did not apply to non-state actors, the ability of every democratic society to combat terrorism was diminished.
In 2007 the UN human rights regime put Israel at the top of its list of offenders, but the United States was fourth – tied with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Australia was 20th, criticized more frequently for human rights violations than Syria at 21 and Libya and Zimbabwe at 22.
Because the 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference believe blowing up Israelis and Americans in the name of self-determination is not terrorism, they have successfully blocked the adoption of a comprehensive convention against terrorism and prevented the UN's lead counter terrorism agency – the Counter-Terrorism Committee – to this day from naming a single terrorist, terrorist organization, or state sponsor of terrorism.
When the centerpiece of the UN's anti-racism agenda – the Durban conference – was hijacked to promote a Zionism-is-racism campaign, the credibility of all anti-racism efforts at the UN suffered. Durban II will not only be bad for Jews; it will be an attack on freedom of expression, period.
Pakistan declared this past April at the Durban preparatory conference: "the most serious manifestation of racism is the democratic legitimization of racism and xenophobia." The inversion of human rights has come full circle, having manufactured not only the Israeli Nazi but also the democratic fascist.
UN investigator Dugard made the Orwellian nature of the human rights world particularly plain when he said in a 2007 report:
"For years the occupation of Palestine and apartheid in South Africa vied for attention…In 1994 apartheid came to an end…the OPT has become a test for the West, a test by which its commitment to human rights is to be judged. If the West fails this test, it can hardly expect the developing world to address human rights violations seriously in its own countries…"
In other words, why should Sudan stop genocide? Why should Zimbabwe stop murdering its own people? Why should China grant anybody freedom of speech? According to the human rights intelligensia, unless and until the Jewish state is rendered defenseless or defeated, the protection of the human rights of the 6 billion people in the developing world is on hold.
Israel – as Jewish scapegoats have been over the centuries – is the ultimate diversionary tactic.
Conclusion
Antisemitism has become the bread and butter of the human rights movement – as much to the detriment of the movement as to Jews. The enemies of human rights have taken control of the global mechanisms created to oppose them. The global institution intended to lead and inspire has been morally neutered. And solutions for vast numbers of victims of human rights abuse are in abeyance until a Jewish state disappears.
Jews, however, cannot change the ending of this saga alone. Democracies must be convinced to reject moral relativism; name, shame, and sanction the real villains; deny global platforms to the opponents of equality and dignity; use the label antisemitism every time it fits; and stand with Israel against the antisemitism that masquerades as human rights.
Human rights are the most powerful ideological currency of our time. Unless the free people of this earth take back the nomenclature, the institutions and the implementation tools of human rights, I fear we will witness the destruction of Israel, if not by lethal force, then by lethal politics.
Notes:
* Ann BAYEFSKY is Director, Touro Center for Human; Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute; Professor, York University. Rights and the Holocaust. * ADC is the Anti-Defamation Commission of B'nai B'rith in Australia.
In his UN speech, the Iranian dictator Ahmadinejad blamed "Zionism" for the world monetary crisis and the Georgia crisis, as well as "Palestine." He predicted the demise of the United States and of Israel. "Zionists," he claims, are "acquisitive and invasive." Excerpts:
In Palestine, 60 years of carnage and invasion is still ongoing at the hands of some criminal and occupying Zionists. They have forged a regime through collecting people from various parts of the world and bringing them to other people's land by displacing, detaining, and killing the true owners of that land. With advance notice, they invade, assassinate, and maintain food and medicine blockades, while some hegemonic and bullying powers support them. The Security Council cannot do anything and sometimes, under pressure from a few bullying powers, even paves the way for supporting these Zionist murderers. It is natural that some UN resolutions that have addressed the plight of the Palestinian people have been relegated to the archives unnoticed.
The lives, properties and rights of the people of Georgia and Ossetia and Abkhazia are victims of the tendencies and provocations of NATO and certain western powers, and the underhanded actions of the Zionists.
The dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists. Although they are a miniscule minority, they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the US in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner. It is deeply disastrous to witness that some presidential or premiere nominees in some big countries have to visit these people, take part in their gatherings, swear their allegiance and commitment to their interests in order to attain financial or media support.
This means that the great people of America and various nations of Europe need to obey the demands and wishes of a small number of acquisitive and invasive people. These nations are spending their dignity and resources on the crimes and occupations and the threats of the Zionist network against their will.
Today, the Zionist regime is on a definite slope to collapse, and there is no way for it to get out of the cesspool created by itself and its supporters. The Islamic Republic of Iran, while fully respecting the resistance of the oppressed people of Palestine and expressing its all-out support for it, submits its humane solution based on a free referendum in Palestine for determining and establishing the type of state in the entire Palestinian lands to the distinguished Secretary General of the UN.
American empire in the world is reaching the end of its road, and its next rulers must limit their interference to their own borders. Today, the thought of hegemony quickly becomes a demerit.
President Ahmadinejad`s Speech Addressing the U.N. General Assembly (Full Text) Posted: 2008/09/24 From: Mathaba
The full text of Iran`s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad`s speech to the U.N. General Assembly on September 23, 2008.
mathaba.net/news/?x=607091 In the Name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful
"All praise be to Allah, the Lord of the universe, and peace and blessing be upon our Master and Prophet, Mohammad, and his pure household, and his noble companions."
"Oh God, hasten the arrival of Imam Al-Mahdi and grant him good health and victory and make us his followers and those who attest to his rightfulness."
Mr. President, Excellencies,
I am grateful to the Almighty for granting me another opportunity to be present in this world Assembly.
In the last three years, I have talked to you about great hopes in the bright future of human society, and some solutions for achieving sustainable peace and expanding love, compassion, and cooperation. I have also talked about unjust systems governing the world; pressures exerted by some powers seeking to trample the rights of other nations, oppression imposed on the majority of the global community, especially on the people of Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Africa, Latin America, and Asia; about challenges we are faced with, such as efforts to shatter the sanctity of families, destroy cultures, humiliate lofty values, neglect commitments, expand the shadow of threats, as well as about the arms race and the unfairness and inability of the systems governing world affairs in reforming the status quo.
With the occurrence of various new developments, the debility of existing mechanisms has been revealed even more. However, at the same time, an encouraging trend, which has originated in the thoughts and beliefs of peoples, has blossomed and become stronger. Posed against the despairs caused by the new developments, this trend has ignited the ray of hope for a brilliant, desirable and beautiful future in the hearts of men.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Colleagues, Today I would like to talk to you about the main reasons behind the conditions ruling the world and the means to tackle them. Of course, you are already aware of what I am talking about, but I think it is necessary to remind ourselves.
It seems that the roots of problems lie in the way one views and perceives the world and humankind, as well as in the important issues of freedom, obeisance to God, and justice. The world, humankind, freedom and obeisance to God, and justice, have been of utmost importance to humans throughout history.
1. The World: God Almighty purposefully created the world. This world is the bedrock for the evolution and growth of a creature called man, and the laws governing the world and all other creatures are at the service of man's quest for loftiness. The world should provide the needed opportunities for the fulfillment of the purpose behind man's creation. No phenomenon, creature, or indeed anything has been created in vain. Together they all pave the ground for the flourishing of mankind in a complex and purposeful system, and they are, each, one of the signs of God Almighty. All are His creations and He is the sole creator and ruler of the world. All existence including power, knowledge and wealth come from Him.
2. Humankind: God created the world for humans and humans for Himself. He created humans from mud and in the soil, but He did not want them to remain in the soil and with animal instincts. He kindled the light of guidance in their souls and asked them to rise from the soil to the heavens and to Him with the help of wisdom, prophets and perfect men.
The world will ultimately disappear, but God has created man for eternity and has made them a manifestation of Himself. Creativity, mercifulness, kindness, knowledge, wisdom, zeal, concealment of sins, splendor, justice, bounteousness, generosity, greatness, love, glory, dignity, forgiveness, insight, kingship and all other goodness and beauty are attributes of God.
God has not created humans for aggression, bloodshed, rancor, selfishness and destruction. He made humans His vicegerents on earth and has asked them to, on the one hand, make earth prosper by using their God-given potentials and to prepare the ground for the growth of divine attributes in all humans, and to provide all with a life full of beauty, amity, freedom, justice and goodness; and on the other hand in pursuance of this path, to prepare for a prosperous, everlasting life endowed by God's mercy.
God has obligated humans to live divinely and socially, for it is only through social life and interactions with others that divine attributes may emerge.
3. Obeisance to God: God Almighty has tied their perfection and true freedom of humans to their devotion and obedience to Himself. True freedom and obedience to God are in balance and in fact are two sides of the same coin.
Obeisance to God means confessing to monotheism and obeying His commands, and to be free from ungodly worship.
Obeisance to God means the acceptance of the absolute truth, the absolute light, and the absolute beauty.
Obeisance to God means abandoning selfishness and animal instincts, power-seeking and aggression, surrendering to righteousness, justice, love, and perfection.
And in this way, humans can achieve their true freedom and flourish, they can grow and manifest divine attributes, have affection for others, stand up for justice, and fear no power or threat, and defend the oppressed. In such an environment, one's freedom will not impinge on any others'. Contention and conflict are characteristic of materialistic freedom and animal instinct. The essence of all divine religions and obeisance to God and true freedom is disassociating from oppressors and instead obeying and worshiping God, for:
- God is omniscient and knows all that is revealed or kept secret, and He is kind and merciful. - All creatures are humble before Him and resign to His will. - God is alive and is the Creator of the universe and all life. - God loves His creatures and desires nothing but goodness, blessings, and perfection for them, and is against bullying, injustice, selfishness and domination.
4. Justice: Justice is the foundation of the creation of humankind and the whole universe. Justice is tantamount to placing every phenomenon in its own place, and providing humans with opportunities to actualize all their divine capabilities. Without it, the order of the universe will collapse and the opportunity for perfection will fade away. Without justice, it would be impossible for human society to taste real peace, beauty, joy and happiness. Justice is the main pillar of social life and without it, social life cannot continue or grow.
Humans need to know God in order to realize a prosperous society in this world as well as to strive for a beautiful eternal life, and to this end they first have to know themselves and strive for loftiness in themselves and their societies. However:
- as long as the world is construed as closed, limited and aimless, - as long as eternal life is considered imaginary and illusory and afterlife and the Judgment Day as well as reward and punishment are thought of as fictional and unreal, - as long as morals and commitment to them are called backwardness, and immorality, lies, deceit and selfishness are considered desirable, and humans are limited to a materialistic life in this world, - as long as attempts are made to replace obedience to God and following His prophets and true freedom with servitude to materialistic tendencies and animal instincts and servitude to oppressing human beings, and contention reaches its pinnacle, - as long as the aggressors, because of their financial, political and propaganda powers, not only escape punishment but even claim righteousness, - and as long wars are started and nations are enslaved in order to win votes in elections, not only will the problems of the global community remain unsolved, but they will be increasingly exacerbated.
Friends and Colleagues, Let's look at the situation of the world today:
Iraq was attacked under the false pretext of uncovering weapons of mass destruction and overthrowing a dictator. The dictator is toppled and WMDs are not uncovered. A democratic government is established by the votes of the people but, after 6 years, the occupiers are still there. They insist on imposing colonial agreements on the people of Iraq by keeping them under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. Millions of people have been killed or displaced, and the occupiers, without a sense of shame, are still seeking to solidify their position in the political geography of the region and to dominate oil resources.
They have no respect for the people of Iraq and disregard any dignity, rights or status for them. The UN is not capable enough to solve the problems and to remove aggression, occupation and imposition.
In Palestine, 60 years of carnage and invasion is still ongoing at the hands of some criminal and occupying Zionists. They have forged a regime through collecting people from various parts of the world and bringing them to other people's land by displacing, detaining, and killing the true owners of that land. With advance notice, they invade, assassinate, and maintain food and medicine blockades, while some hegemonic and bullying powers support them. The Security Council cannot do anything and sometimes, under pressure from a few bullying powers, even paves the way for supporting these Zionist murderers. It is natural that some UN resolutions that have addressed the plight of the Palestinian people have been relegated to the archives unnoticed.
In Afghanistan, production of narcotics has multiplied since the presence of NATO forces. Domestic conflicts continue. Terrorism is spreading. And innocent people are bombarded on a daily basis in streets, markets, schools and wedding ceremonies. The people of Afghanistan are the victims of the willingness of NATO member states to dominate the regions surrounding India, China, and South Asia. The Security Council cannot do anything about it because some of these NATO members also happen to be the major decision makers in the Security Council.
In Africa, efforts are made to reestablish the relationships of the colonial era. By starting civil wars in large countries including Sudan, disintegration of those countries is planned in order to serve the interests of some corrupt powers. In case there is a national resistance, the leaders of the resistance are put under pressure by legal mechanisms created by the very same powers.
In Latin America, people find their security, national interests and cultures to be seriously endangered by the menacing shadow of alien domineering governments, and even by the embassies of some empires.
The lives, properties and rights of the people of Georgia and Ossetia and Abkhazia are victims of the tendencies and provocations of NATO and certain western powers, and the underhanded actions of the Zionists.
The never-ending arms race and the proliferation and stockpiling of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction and the threats to use them, and the establishment of missile defense systems, have made the situation unstable.
With regard to Iran's peaceful nuclear program, despite the inalienable right of all nations including the Iranian nation, in producing nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes, and despite such facts as the transparency of all Iranian activities and our country's full cooperation with the inspectors of the IAEA and the Agency's repeated confirmation of the fact that Iran's activities are peaceful, a few bullying powers have sought to put hurdles in the way of the peaceful nuclear activities of the Iranian nation by exerting political and economic pressures against Iran, and also through threatening and pressuring the IAEA. These are the same powers that produce new generations of lethal nuclear arms and possess stockpiles of nuclear weapons that no international organization is monitoring; and, the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were perpetrated by one of them.
Indeed, they are not against weapons, but they oppose other nations' progress, and tend to monopolize technologies and to use those monopolies in order to impose their will on other nations. But it is very natural that the great Iranian people, with their trust in God, and with determination and steadfastness and with the support of its friends, will resist the bullying and has defended and will continue to defend its rights. The Iranian nation is for dialogue. But it has not accepted and will not accept illegal demands. The time has come for the IAEA to present a clear report to the international community on its monitoring of the disarmament of these nuclear powers and their nuclear activities, and for a disarmament committee to be established by independent states to monitor the disarmament of these nuclear powers.
The theories of development that are in line with the hegemonic system and not in accordance with the true needs of humankind and human societies, have turned into repetitive and bland tools for assimilation of economies, expanding hegemonic domination, destroying the environment and destroying the social solidarity of nations. There is no end in sight to this. Poverty, hunger and deprivation are hurting more than one billion of the world's population and have dashed their hopes for a decent life.
The dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists. Although they are a miniscule minority, they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the US in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner. It is deeply disastrous to witness that some presidential or premiere nominees in some big countries have to visit these people, take part in their gatherings, swear their allegiance and commitment to their interests in order to attain financial or media support.
This means that the great people of America and various nations of Europe need to obey the demands and wishes of a small number of acquisitive and invasive people. These nations are spending their dignity and resources on the crimes and occupations and the threats of the Zionist network against their will.
Friends and Colleagues, All these are due to the manner in which the immoral and the powerful view the world, humankind, freedom, obeisance to God, and justice.
The thoughts and deeds of those who think they are superior to others and consider others as second-class and inferior; who intend to remain out of the divine circle, to be the absolute slaves of their materialistic and selfish desires, who intend to expand their aggressive and domineering natures, constitute the roots of today's problems in human societies. They are the great hindrances to the actualization of material and spiritual prosperity and to security, peace and brotherhood among nations. I explicitly state that the Iranian people and the overwhelming majority of peoples and governments are against those deeds and perspectives of the world- domineering powers. Establishment of justice requires people who have achieved moderation and justice inside themselves, and have restrained their domineering attitudes and actualized their attributes of self-sacrifice and are at the service of humanity. The complete and full-scale manifestation of such characteristics can happen only under the rule of the righteous and perfect human being who is obedient to God and who is promised by the divine Prophets.
Dear Colleagues, Of course with the grace of God Almighty a hopeful trend is flourishing in the heart and soul of human societies. The universal eagerness for justice, purity, and love for others, monotheism and the quest for perfection is clearly and increasingly on the rise. A universal resistance against the acquisitiveness, aggression and selfishness of the bullying powers is being formed. Today, the bullying powers' thoughts, practices and strategies are rejected by nations and governments, and all are seeking to establish new human relations based on justice with a view to attain prosperity, perfection, security, and sustainable welfare. This is the very auspicious phenomenon that all the traditions of creation and the ruling laws of the universe emphasize and support.
Today, the Zionist regime is on a definite slope to collapse, and there is no way for it to get out of the cesspool created by itself and its supporters. The Islamic Republic of Iran, while fully respecting the resistance of the oppressed people of Palestine and expressing its all-out support for it, submits its humane solution based on a free referendum in Palestine for determining and establishing the type of state in the entire Palestinian lands to the distinguished Secretary General of the UN.
American empire in the world is reaching the end of its road, and its next rulers must limit their interference to their own borders. Today, the thought of hegemony quickly becomes a demerit.
And now a few words with the expansionist governments ruling global relations:
Be aware that living with obedience to God and carrying out His orders, compassion for people and striving for the fulfillment of justice is to your advantage too. I invite you to return to the path of God, the Prophets and to the path of the people of the world and to the truth and justice.
The only route to salvation is a divine straight path. Otherwise, God's hand of power will emerge from the sleeve of oppressed nations and will make your life difficult, and will put an end to your hegemony. Let's love the people of the world and respect their rights. Rectify past behavior. This will benefit you and the human community. The Iranian people are prepared, along with other nations, to help you be rescued from your current situation and to establish peace and prosperity.
My Friends, Fortuitously, opportunities are accessible. With the grace of God Almighty, the existing pillars of the oppressive system are crumbling. Great developments in favor of humankind as well as its true and real rights are on the way. A golden and brilliant future is awaiting mankind.
A global community filled with justice, friendship, brotherhood and welfare is at hand, as I have elaborated. A community which will tread the path of beauty and love under the rule of the righteous and perfect human being, the One promised by all divine prophets and the One who is the true lover of humanity. A community that will be devoid of any fear, despair and privation. Such a community will soon be ours. The community promised by the great divine Prophets Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus Christ and Mohammad (PBUH) is about to materialize.
Let us, hand in hand, expand the thought of resistance against evil and the minority of those who are ill-wishers. Let's support goodness and the majority of people who are good and the embodiment of absolute good that is the Imam of Time, The Promised One who will come accompanied by Jesus Christ, and accordingly design and implement the just and humanistic mechanisms for regulating the constructive relationships between nations and governments.
Oh great Almighty, deliver the savior of nations and put an end to the sufferings of mankind and bring forth justice, beauty, and love.
Friends; Let's have a proper share in the establishment of that illuminated and promised divine age.
Roi Ben Yehuda is an Israeli, or ex-Israeli, who lives in Spain and writes frequently for Ha'aretz. He previously (see 'Epiphany in a Spanish neo-Nazi bookstore,' Haaretz June 15, 2008) alleged that a Neo-Nazi Book shop is selling anti-Semitic materials in Barcelona. He further alleged that "just about everywhere he looked" he saw swastikas and anti-Nazi graffit. These claims were made by no-one else to my knowledge. They made Barcelona sound like a description of Berlin in 1932. This assertion could not be verified by a friend living in Spain. She notes that the sale of such materials is forbidden by Spanish law and that she did not see much graffiti in or posters of the type described in Barcelona. Perhaps others can enlighten us. Roi's story about Nazi bookstores and graffiti in Spain is therefore dubious, to say the least.
Roi's latest article tells us that many people, including apparently himself, believe that you can be an Israeli living in Spain or the United States or some other country. (See "Why Jews can have more than one home," Haaretz August 26, 2008). As Roi notes, there are as many as 600,000 such "Israelis" living in the United States.
This concept of "Israeli Lite" is shared by many Israelis living abroad. But the truth is that most people can have only one home and are not happy with split identities. You can be an Israeli with Spanish or American citizenship or an American with ties to Israel, but you cannot really be both an American and an Israeli at the same time.
If you live and work in the United States or Spain, your children will learn Spanish or English, and not Hebrew, and they will be Spanish or American. It is not likely they will be Israeli. Sooner or later, they or their children or their grandchildren are going to decide they are not Israelis. Roi is going to find himself less and less Israeli the longer he lives in Spain.
Everyone must make their own choices, but I am fascinated by the phenomenon of Jews who insist on living in various European countries: Spain, Poland, Germany, and also insist on complaining about anti-Semitism in those countries. All those countries have a history of anti-Semitism of course. If you live in France, expect good wine. If you live in Spain or Poland, expect the characteristic specialties of those countries.
In my view, living in Spain and complaining about anti-Semitism is like eating ripe Camembert and complaining about the taste. Often, these claims are clearly exaggerated, as happened in a hoax letter circulated about French anti-Semitism. Is anti-Semitic persecution a part of the "Jewishness" of these folks?
Roi is entitled to his opinion. The question is, why Ha'aretz wants to publish it.
More interesting is the question of why Sara Miller of Ha'aretz, as well as Roi Ben Yehuda himself sent me letters trying to tell me what I can and cannot write about Roi Ben Yehuda and claiming that what I wrote was 'libelous.' Of course, Ha'aretz would be justifiably upset if someone tried to censor them. What I wrote can scarcely be libelous unless there is indeed a major Nazi revival in Barcelona, which no other journalist has reported. Nor did anyone else report that everywhere they looked in Barcelona there are Swastikas. And if it is "libelous," what are we to make of the writings of Gideon Levi, Amira Hass and Yitzhak Laor about Israelis and Zionists? Is Ha'aretz prepared to guarantee that every accusation they make is absolutely grounded in fact and provable in a court of law?
As I have no desire for legal problems with Ha'aretz, the article is duly altered, but the message is the same. Ami Isseroff
Dr. Eugene J. Fisher Responds to America Magazine Editorial, "Israel at 60"
While I can sympathize with much of the America editorial, which quite rightly reminds readers of the needs, plight, and rights of Palestinians, I can only say that the statement that Israel is not a democracy in the Western sense is ill conceived and very misleading. It seems to presume that all Western democracies have never had any problems with minorities, unlike Israel. Say again? The USA has not, ever (according to this editorial) ever in any sense mistreated its native American or Black American or, currently its Hispanic American citizens? And the French and British and Germans are not, right now, having problems dealing with their Arab/Muslim minorities, and none have ever, ever persecuted their minorities?
I'm sorry. Israel may not be a better Western democracy than the USA, England, France, Germany, Denmark, etc., but to say it is not one of us is to entirely miss the point of what defines Western democracies, which for all our faults I will defend and, therefore, perforce, defend our friend Israel.
Dr. Eugene J. Fisher Great Falls, VA. 22066
(Dr. Fisher is the Former Associate Director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB))
Here's an account of an alleged anti-Semitic event and some rebuttals and denials. There must've been witnesses. What really happened? Before everyone gets excited about this, perhaps someone should establish what precisely was said, and what the link might be between the alleged anti-Semitic remarks and Barack Obama. If a white person makes anti-Semitic remarks, it is not automatically blamed on Hillary Clinton or John McCain, is it?
I have to tell you of an experience I had last night that was so anti semitic and frightening:
Last night I was honored by Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, for my work with Children Uniting nations with African American children who are living out of home care.
I have dedicated my life to saving these children from abuse, neglect and a life of crime. We created 'adoption day' and "Day of the child" determined to recruit caring adults to be mentors and life savers for our at risk children in the inner cities. The mayor was present and City council member Bernard Parks, assemblyman Mike Davis Senator Mark Ridely Thomas etc.
I was introduced as a children advocate and a leader in the Jewish community. I began my speech by talking about how I woke up in the morning and listened to Hillary Clinton's speech, in the spirit of Dr. King from Memphis, that moved me so deeply. I expressed to the crowd how grateful I was to listen to Sen. McCain apologize to the community for mistakes he has made in the past. I acknowledged Sen. Obama's speech from the campaign trail about Dr. King's mentorship.
After I spoke and thanked the fraternity and their members, Rev. Eric Lee, pres. and CEO of Southern Christian Leadership Conference of greater Los Angeles, was introduced as the key note speaker.
He began his speech by thanking Jesus for Obama, who is going to be the leader of the world. He continued by referring to other leaders Like Dr. King,being that this was the moment of celebrating Dr. King's spirit on the anniversary of his assasination, and Malcolm X.
It was right after the mention of Malcolm X that he looked right at me and started talking about the African American children who are suffering because of the JEWS that have featured them as rapists and murderers.
He spoke of a Jewish Rabbi, and then corrected himself to say "What other kind of Rabbis are there, but JEWS". He told how this Rabbi came to him to say that he would like to bring the AA community and the Jewish community together. " NO, NO, NO,!!!!" he shouted into the crowd, we are not going to come together. "The Jews have made money on us in the music business and we are the entertainers, and they are economically enslaving us"
He continued as to how now the salvation has come and the gates have open for African Americans to come together behind Barack Obama, because now is the time to show them.(meaning thejews). He continued to speak about ' White supremecy' vs the talents and visionaries in the core of African Americans. He demeaned being given freedom, by saying "To what?" to a country that kills women and children.
I could no longer be polite and sit in front of the crowd, so I walked out.
Members of the fraternity ran after me as did my staff, I was not able to contain my tears and I cried.
I cried for me and my family, who have tried so hard to help the African American community, because we adopted children from the same realities and wanted to give back to other children and people. We have been completely color blind, for us it was only helping those children in need.
I cried for our beloved country and the division that Barack Obama has caused with his Rev. Wright opening the gates to 'hate' against the Jews and whites. I grew up so looking at America as the land of Freedom.
I was honored to receive my citizenship accompanied by members of the Kennedy family. Now, I'm afraid for Israel because Barack sat there for 20 years listening and not standing up for what's right, why would he standup for Israel?
I cried for the Jewish community who are so blind that they can't see that there's a movement here that will destroy us.I cried because for the first time in my life I was afraid of the future.
I cried for our world that is moving backwards and not forward. Everyday, I see children so lost, and so deserving of hope and love. I look into their eyes, knowing that it is their lives that are in our hands. I'm crying now, so I'm going to stop writing because it is so painful.
I just had to share this experience with you,
thank you, Daphna
****
2. Denial (same source):
" In an interview, Lee emphatically denied Ziman's account.
"None of those words are what I said. Not a single word. My goodness," Lee said. "I look at the Jewish community as allies in our quest for advancement. For me, it doesn't do any good to indict anybody. I just need help in changing the characterization of African Americans through the entertainment industry, and whoever can help me is fine. And without question there are a lot of influential members of the Jewish community that may be able to help us with that.""
On the 40th Anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I gave a speech at a public meeting of a predominately African American fraternity on the theme of "Leaving an Inheritance to Our Kids and Our Communities".
Let me first state that at no time did I intend to offend, insult, indict or condemn any person or group of persons during any portion of my presentation. Furthermore, I did not make any statement that was offensive regarding the Jewish community and I completely deny and refute any accusation that I have done so. The accusations do not truly characterize the statements made during the presentation, nor do they accurately characterize my life or my position as President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles.
Additionally, I have an existing and ongoing collaborative relationships with the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Anti Defamation League (ADL) in which we are committed to the cause of justice for our respective communities.
In a very small part of my presentation, I referenced a meeting I had with Rabbi's [SIC] and other community leaders. A Rabbi stated in that meeting that the close relationship between the African American and Jewish communities had been disconnected after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. I further referenced in my speech that my response to the Rabbi was that the Black Power Movement emerged after the assassination of Dr. King and it was a direct response to the negative characterizations of African Americans through the silver screen, TV and the music industry, industries that are perceived to be influenced by many in the Jewish community. I then stated to the Rabbis that the Black Power Movement was our effort to define for ourselves our own identity rather than be defined by anyone else. I then indicated in my presentation that I told the Rabbis' [SIC] that before a genuine coalition could be rebuilt between our communities, there would have to be dialogue and efforts made to deal with the negative characterizations of African Americans.
The focus of my presentation was that African Americans should embrace our historical legacy as an "Inheritance of Measurable Value", and that we use our legacy to define ourselves. This message is no different than what Daphne Ziman wrote in the March issue of the Jewish Journal when she stated, "Please tell us who you are, Sen. Obama; don't let your enemies, or your friends, define you."
The Mission of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization founded by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is to redeem the soul of America. SCLC of Greater Los Angeles continues the legacy of our founder, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, by promoting the philosophy of non-violent progressive social change. Our roots extend deeply into the African American religious experience with its biblical vision of liberation of all humankind. Our goal is to realize the dream of freedom, justice, peace and equality for all by recognizing the inalienable dignity and worth of every human being.
The SCLC of Greater Los Angeles has as its mandate to organize and mobilize the strength of America's moral consciousness against the weakness of its social order. We accomplish this through the continued advocacy of justice for all people, regardless of social status, religious belief, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. We affirm nonviolence as the only reasonable basis for social change and interpersonal living. These two principles are reflected in our work.
Was it one "Rabbi" or many "Rabbi's"?? The above stilted and semi-literate masterpiece sounds like a parody from an old non-PC joke about African Americans pretending to be lawyers, but apparently it is genuine. The circumlocutions used in the SCLC denial are not very satisfying:
I further referenced in my speech that my response to the Rabbi was that the Black Power Movement emerged after the assassination of Dr. King and it was a direct response to the negative characterizations of African Americans through the silver screen, TV and the music industry, industries that are perceived to be influenced by many in the Jewish community. I then stated to the Rabbis that the Black Power Movement was our effort to define for ourselves our own identity rather than be defined by anyone else.
Tell us what what you said. not what you referenced in your speech. This sounds like a man saying, "I further referenced the divine attitude to the canine ancestors of the complainant and the legitimacy of his Hebraic ancestry," when what he really said was "You're a god damned son of a bitch Jew Bastard."
In a very small part of my presentation, I referenced a meeting...
"I only made reference to his canine ancestry one time. In the rest of our communication I was very friendly."
Still, there is no point starting a crusade about this issue unless the facts can be proven, and it doesn't seem to have much to do with Barack Obama.
I suspect that many Catholics will be put off by what I am about to write. I assure you that I mean no disrespect to your religious beliefs. But those beliefs should not require falsification of history. Imagine your own consternation, if the British government were to decree that Henry VIII did not persecute Catholics?
Accordingly, you can imagine my dismay and amazement when I found that, according to a Catholic Web site, the Spanish Inquisition never took place. It was a myth. We are led to believe that Baruch de Espinoza and his friends were never forced to either convert to Catholicism or flee first Spain and then Portugal. The entire civilization of Iberian Jews, as well as that of Iberian Muslims was not destroyed. The Inquisition is a myth.
Denial of genocide and similar misdeeds is all the vogue. By rewriting history, various institutions and governments can clear their names. After all, what is important in history is what people believe happened, right? Nazi supporters and the Iranian government deny the Holocaust, the Turks are trying to wipe out the Armenian genocide. Each inconvenient or unpleasant episode in its turn is due to be effaced.
Along with the Holocaust Myth, we now have the Myth of the Spanish Inquisition. In an article that hypes the upcoming rerun of a BBC/A&E documentary about the Inquisition, Catholic Net Web site announces:
Source: catholic.net/RCC/Periodicals/Dossier/1112-96/article4.html ***QUOTE*** The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition
by Ellen Rice
The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition," a 1994 BBC/A&E production, will re-air on the History Channel this December 3 at 10 p.m. It is a definite must-see for anyone who wishes to know how historians now evaluate the Spanish Inquisition since the opening of an investigation into the Inquisition's archives. The special includes commentary from historians whose studies verify that the tale of the darkest hour of the Church was greatly fabricated.
In its brief sixty-minute presentation, "The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition" provides only an overview of the origins and debunking of the myths of torture and genocide. The documentary definitely succeeds in leaving the viewer hungry to know more. The long-held beliefs of the audience are sufficiently weakened by the testimony of experts and the expose of the making of the myth. ...
The Inquisition had a secular character, although the crime was heresy. Inquisitors did not have to be clerics, but they did have to be lawyers. The investigation was rule-based and carefully kept in check. And most significantly, historians have declared fraudulent a supposed Inquisition document claiming the genocide of millions of heretics.
What is documented is that 3000 to 5000 people died during the Inquisition's 350 year history.
*** END QUOTE ***
Who might these experts be, who give "testimony" (as if they were eye-witnesses) that erases the history of Spanish Jewry in 60 minutes? There was no genocide! The tortures of the inquisition were a myth!
The words "Jew" or "Muslim" are hardly mentioned anywhere in the entire article. Marranos are a myth invented by wicked Jews. In the article, there is a brief allusion to the "problem" that sparked the Inquisition, in the Catholic version of history:
Afraid that laws commanding the exile or conversion of Jews were thwarted by conversos, i.e. synagogue-going "Catholics," Ferdinand and Isabella commissioned an investigation or Inquisition.
Ostensibly because of this fear of "synagogue-going Catholics," we are told that they killed 5,000 people. What hurts perhaps more than anything else is that we are informed that: "The investigation was rule-based and carefully kept in check."
This is how the rules were applied: "We caught you eating Matzot and not eating pork, Don Diego, so we have to burn you at the stake unless you promise not to do so again." Unfortunately, it is not a joke by any means. People were murdered for those reasons. It was not synagogue - going Catholics whom the Church executed, so much as Jews who refrained from eating pork or from eating leavened bread on Passover.
The Church also punished other "infringements." The rule-based justice of the church was not so infallible, for the Holy Inquisitors and their informants invented many "facts," and the mythical tortures of the inquisition extracted all-too-real confessions from the victims, as they were literally torn to pieces alive by the ingenious inventions of medieval mechanics.
For example, in the year 1491, the Inquisition prosecuted a number of Jews for the supposed murder of one Christopher of Toledo, a Christian child whose blood was supposedly used to bake Matzoth. Jews "confessed" to this non-existent crime. We can imagine what turtures were used to extract these confessions. Nobody could ever find this Christopher of Toledo, because of course, he never existed. Nonetheless, he became a Saint of the Catholic Church. Along with Christopher, a number of inquisitors, who did exist, were also awarded sainthood for their role in the "mythical" inquisition.
Nor can it truthfully be claimed that the Spanish Inquisition acted independently of the Catholic Church. Ferdinand and Isabella commissioned the Inquisition, but they had the blessing of the Pope. For on November 1, 1478, Pope Sixtus IV issued the Bull Exigit sincere devotionis. This authorized the Catholic kings to appoint inquisitors in Castile in order to expunge heresy. Specifically, it pointed out that Jews who had been baptized had secretly reverted to the Jewish "superstition." For mere trifles like murdering people, Catholics could confess and be absolved, no matter how many times they "reverted." Eating Matzot on Passover or keeping the Sabbath was a different matter. It could not be tolerated. A second offence and a third offence would would the perpetrator in the gravest peril.
As for how "historians" evaluate the Inquisition, that must depend on which historians are doing the evaluation. There are certainly fashions in historical interpretation, but they must not obscure the truth. A popular history of the Inquisition was written after the documentary in question was produced. It is "Dogs of God," by James Reston Jr. It takes a much less sympathetic view of the Spanish Inquisition than does Ms. Rice or the documentary in question and its supposedly expert historians, as reported by Ms. Rice.
But regardless of fashions in historical interpretation, the horrors of the Inquisition were not a "myth," but a fact.
If there is a heaven and a hell and a last judgement, what will the Catholic Church say for itself on that day?
"We only killed 5,000 people."
"We killed them in justice, based on rule-based judgement. They had reverted to the superstition of Judaism."
Surely, if there is a last judgement, this argument will go over well in that court, which would also have rule - based judgement. Remember, Ellen Rice, that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew. He kept the Passover. He said,
Hamas speaks. What part is a lie and what part is true? Consider this:
No, there were no Palestinian Jews. When the British Mandate began in 1917, there was only one settlement on Palestinian land, which included several dozen Jews, who were living there in violation of the law at the time. I would like to mention that under the Ottoman state – regardless of the many reservations we have about it – there was a law that prohibited the Jews from staying in Palestine for over a month. Their passports and personal documents were taken away from them, and they were given an Ottoman permit at the border, which allowed them to stay for a month on Palestinian land. The only group that can be called Jewish was the one in Nablus. They still live there to this day.
This guy has to be kidding. There are no Jews in Nablus, though there once were. But about four decades before the Balfour declaration, my grandmothers were born in Jerusalem. Five years before the Balfour declaration, my mother was born in Hebron. As for my aunt, her family had lived in Tiberias for over 300 years by the time of Lord Balfour and his declaration. One of my grandfathers was a soldier in the Ottoman army, not a transient with an Ottoman permit. The other grandfather was excused from service because he sold charcoal to the Ottoman army to run their trains.
The rest of what he has to say is equally fictitious. He has been smoking too much Lebanese blond, or too many Lebanese blondes.
There is one part I believe though:
...the final goal of the resistance is to wipe this entity off the face of the earth. This goal necessitates the development of the capabilities of the resistance, until this entity is wiped out.
So much for peace deals with the Hamas.
Ami Isseroff
Special Dispatch-Hamas/Jihad & Terrorism Studies Project August 16, 2007 No. 1682
The following are excerpts from an interview with Hamas representative in Lebanon Osama Hamdan, which aired on Al-Kawthar TV on August 6, 2007.
August 06, 2007
Hamas representative in Lebanon Osama Hamdan Justifies Suicide Bombings in Buses: Israeli Soldiers Ride Those Buses
Following are excerpts from an interview with Hamas representative in Lebanon Osama Hamdan, which aired on Al-Kawthar TV on August 6, 2007:
Interviewer: Islamic law has forbidden aggression during Jihad – by forbidding the killing of women, children, the elderly, clerics who devote themselves to the worship of God, and other non-combatant civilians who do not serve in the enemy's army. Do you consider all the Jews in Palestine to be combatants who have plundered the land? We've witnessed martyrdom operations that targeted buses and restaurants.
Osama Hamdan: First of all, let me clarify something very important. What is the ruling regarding those who live in Palestine, in the co-called Israel, and who are aggressors and plunderers of the land? The way we see it, they all came to Palestine from abroad, whether before the declaration of the Zionist entity or after it. If you were to conduct statistics within the Zionist entity, you would find that all these people have their origins in other countries – they came from Europe, Eastern Europe, from American, South America, or other places.
Interviewer: In other words, there were no Palestinian Jews?
Osama Hamdan: No, there were no Palestinian Jews. When the British Mandate began in 1917, there was only one settlement on Palestinian land, which included several dozen Jews, who were living there in violation of the law at the time. I would like to mention that under the Ottoman state – regardless of the many reservations we have about it – there was a law that prohibited the Jews from staying in Palestine for over a month. Their passports and personal documents were taken away from them, and they were given an Ottoman permit at the border, which allowed them to stay for a month on Palestinian land. The only group that can be called Jewish was the one in Nablus. They still live there to this day. The Palestinians regard them as part of the makeup of Palestinian society, and they number no more than several hundred. As for those who immigrated from various countries – they are not Jews. Anyone who comes to live in a war zone is a combatant, regardless of whether he wears a uniform. That's one thing. Secondly, neither Hamas nor the Palestinian resistance force intentionally killed civilians. You mentioned the buses. What's an easier target – a bus, which is protected by various security measures, or a school, a theater, or a stadium, for example? These civilian targets – in which the killing of women and children is intentional – were not targeted by the resistance. Why were buses targeted? Because they are the means of transport used by the soldiers as well. The Zionist soldiers, who go from their homes to their bases and back, use public transport, because it is free or almost free. In my opinion, the occupation soldiers also have a security motive in using public transport: They shield themselves behind the so-called "civilians" within the Zionist entity. Therefore, the way I see it, they need to stop using public transport, or else society should prevent them from using it, because it is the soldiers who are targeted. Just to prove it, in the dozens of operations that were carried out, the Zionists never announced, for example, that 20 children were killed, or that 50 women were killed. On the contrary, if you were to examine who was killed in martyrdom operations that targeted buses, you would find that 70% were occupation soldiers, and they may even have been in uniform at the time of the operation.
[...]
We are making the preparations for a confrontation. This is not because we need to be prepared for an Israeli act of aggression – after all, aggression is intrinsic to this entity – but because the final goal of the resistance is to wipe this entity off the face of the earth. This goal necessitates the development of the capabilities of the resistance, until this entity is wiped out.
Interviewer: Do you think that Mahmoud Abbas, who has found himself in the crisis of the confrontation with Hamas, plays the role of a policeman, who thwarts the Intifada, the resistance, and the Jihad against the Zionist occupation in the Palestinian lands?
Osama Hamdan: He plays a role that is even worse than that. Mahmoud Abbas is doing this out of ideological conviction. He has been calling for a settlement ever since 1973. It was Mahmoud Abbas who created the Oslo Accords, and who was brought in by the Americans to serve as prime minister in order to confront Arafat. In my opinion, he plays this role willingly and out of conviction, which is worse than if he were doing so due to commitments to the occupation.
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In Ha'aretz, Shmuel Rosner published a very interesting reaction of an anonymous American Jew to the proposition that Israel is the center of Jewish life. To my silly mind, this proposition must be self evident to every person who studies Jewish religion and Jewish culture, and it has been true for 3,000 years. In the farthest reaches of China and Africa, wherever they were, orthodox Jews prayed toward Jerusalem, and vowed, "Next Year in Jerusalem." A millennium ago, a Jewish poet wrote, "My heart is in the East and I am at the ends of the West." The common language of all the Jewish people, East and West, was always Hebrew, the holidays celebrated by Jews were mostly related to the land, and the shared history of the Jewish people always began with the land and ended with return to the land. "The land" has always been only one place for Jews - it is here, in Israel, not in beautiful California, or fabulous Florida or Florence Italy nor even in majestic London or cosmopolitan New York. Jews means "people of Israel." And when, in the 19th century, many Jews stopped being religious, they nonetheless came to realize that they could not be French or Russian or German precisely like their neighbors, but rather that they had something in common with religious Jews: Israel.
This innocent, straightforward proposition meets the fiercest sort of opposition from some Jews. Here is author Aaron Hamburger: "Israel is not a pillar of our religious belief." I wonder what that religious belief could possibly be. If Hamburger is a Hindu or a Muslim, Israel and the relation of the Jews to Israel might not be part of his religious belief. If he is a religious Jew, or belongs to any one of many Protestant denominations, then Israel is necessarily central to his religious belief, even if he is an anti-Zionist who believes that Israel can only be established when the Messiah comes, or a Christian of the replacement theology persuasion who believes that the Church replaced the Jews in God's promises.
A former American Jewish functionary, Steve Hoffman, asserted apparently, that he is still not prepared to view Israel as the center of the Jewish people. There are two centers, Israel and the U.S. he claims. Indeed. When Hoffman goes to synagogue, no doubt they pray, "For from America will come forth the Torah, and the word of the LORD from Washington D.C."
Places like Vilna, Lodz and Satu-Mare were also once "centers" of some of the Jewish people. Most of the Jews of those places, if they didn't leave, became ashes. In ancient times, there were centers in Iraq too. Some of your sons may be fighting Jihadists in those places now. There are no Jews there, and few Jews remember or know where those places were. Nobody but fools thought that they could compete in Jewish cultural centrality with Zion and Israel, even when there was nothing here but barchash flies and malaria. No Jews prayed to be "Next Year in Vilna," though perhaps many Israelis wish for next year in Cupertino or Miami.
One of Rosner's readers, a great philosopher named Jack, who would not give his last name, wrote:
If Israel, god forbid, disappears (and we all know, deep down, that this is not some distant unimaginable possibility) suddenly American Jews will find themselves wandering in empty space. On the other hand, if the center is here, we have nothing to worry about. America is strong and so are we.
"America is strong and so are we," quoth he. Jews are two percent of the population of the United States. In every generation, anti-Zionists repeat the same shibboleths as though they were original "wisdom." Here is another quote, which that reader should consider:
We are not immigrants -- we were born here -- and so we cannot claim any other home: either we are Americans or we have no homeland. Whoever disputes my claim to this my American fatherland disputes my right to my own thoughts, my feelings, my language -- the very air I breathe. Therefore, I must defend myself against him as I would against a murderer.
I am sure that reader, Jack, would agree with the above. However, I cheated. I changed the quote a bit. Here is the real quote:
We are not immigrants -- we were born here -- and so we cannot claim any other home: either we are Germans or we have no homeland. Whoever disputes my claim to this my German fatherland disputes my right to my own thoughts, my feelings, my language -- the very air I breathe. Therefore, I must defend myself against him as I would against a murderer. (Gabriel Riesser, German Revolutionary National Assembly, 1849, Quoted in Amos Elon, The Pity of it All)
Jack is so sure of himself. He will no doubt insist that the comparison is absurd. After all, nothing could happen to American Jews. They are strong, as he says. I am sure that all American Jews agree, and I too would not be so brash as to predict a bad end for the Jews of America. After all, the Holocaust happened only once in Germany, and the expulsion from Spain, well that happened only once too. And the pogroms in Russia, they happened a few times. Of course, history does not repeat itself, necessarily. But I would not be so brash as to predict a good end either. We all know that every Jewish Diaspora in history has been threatened at one time or another, and the most brilliant Jewish Diaspora communities, in Spain, in Germany and in Poland, all met with disaster. It is possible that history has suddenly changed its course, and that what was true for 2,000 years is no longer true. The Sun might also fail to rise tomorrow. It is possible. But it is impossible to be certain that the Sun will not rise, and it is tempting fate to believe that Jews are absolutely safe in any Diaspora. Now you are all angry at me, a doctrinaire Zionist and crazy Israeli, for saying these things, I know.
But actually, Mr. Jack is not so sure of himself after all. Perhaps the tiniest sliver of a doubt exists in his mind, for he wrote:
"...Any connection to Israel only weakens us, and causes trouble. "
Really Mr. Jack! What sort of trouble could be caused by a connection to Israel? Don't the Irish march proudly each year in their St. Patrick's day parade? Would Americans have it any other way? Would America be the same America without St Patrick's day? Aren't you as proud to be Jewish as Kennedy is to be Irish? Aren't all Americans supposed to be proud of their roots? Is there, perhaps, something different about Jews? It is impossible? Here's what Mr. Jack says:
Supporting Israel weakens our position in America and opens the door to accusations regarding loyalty etc. So both from our own selfish psychological point of view AND from the point of view of the society around us, it's much better for us to be on our own, without any special connection to Israel.
Such an original thesis! This man's mother must think he is a genius. But I'll tell you what Jack - Ireland was neutral in World War II. I doubt if it entered anyone's mind that Americans of Irish descent were Nazi spies. Irish were fighting Britain, an ally of the United States at one time, and yet the issue of double loyalty never really came up. And don't forget that America fought Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, but there were no pogroms of Italians and Germans - only Japanese. But you don't look Japanese, I bet, so there is no problem.
So why are you worried? Jews are no different from other Americans, isn't that so Jack? Or maybe you don't really believe that.
Jack probably never heard of the anti-Zionist Jew, Edwin Montagu, a member of the British cabinet in 1917, who opposed the Balfour declaration for precisely those reasons. He was certain that the creation of a national home for the Jews would be an impetus to European anti-Semitism. There was plenty of European anti-Semitism to be sure, but it was not caused by the Balfour declaration.
Jack, nobody is forcing you to be Jewish. If you want to repudiate your heritage, it is your business. It is America after all. But I know that Jack is a Jew. He will remain a Jew. A Jew of the old kind, not the kind we want to create in Israel. This is how I know. He wrote:
Imagine: all the money and hours wasted on Israel by Jewish Americans is suddenly available for Jewish schools, Jewish community centers, Jewish outreach, Jewish renewal, and all the other great project that will make us ? not just Jews but rather Jewish Americans ? stronger and more vital. What a wonderful dream."
Ah, Now we understand what is bothering you Jack. It is a typical Jewish complaint. As the anti-Semites say:
"Money. All you people ever think about is money."
That is what is bothering you Yankel, your pocket. In the end, all you are thinking about is money. Keep your money, Mister. You cannot buy your part in what we are building here with your money, if your heart does not go with your money. Keep your money and be damned.
I wonder what American Jews could teach in such schools, devoid of Israel, and what they would do in such community centers, and how it would be related to Judaism. They could not teach the Tanach (Old Testament) , which is mostly about God's promise of Israel to the Jewish people, and about the fulfillment of that promise, and the history of the Jews in the land of Israel. The whole book is set in the Middle East. America is not mentioned even once as far as anyone knows.
They could not teach the prayers, which vow, "Next Year in Jerusalem." They could not teach Hebrew, the language of the ancient Israelites. They could not teach about Passover, a holiday not only of release from bondage, but of return to Israel. They could not teach the children to celebrate Hannukah, the holiday that celebrates liberation of Jerusalem. They could not teach about Tu Bishvat, the holiday of Israeli trees and fruits. Forget Tish'a Be'av too - it mourns the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. They would be left with Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah and Purim. Perhaps they could teach Yiddish and help kids develop a taste for bagels and lox. Would they then be accused of double loyalty to Germany? How would that education be "vital?" Of what would their Judaism consist?
(Due to the nature of YouTube, these links may be taken down in the coming days. If you intend to watch it I would advise watching it as soon as possible.)
The BBC shelved this program when they heard it would focus on British anti-Semitism, and it was instead shown on Channel 4.
While some mainstream reviewers in the British media welcomed Littlejohn's program, some on the left were extremely nasty about it. No doubt they felt uncomfortable having their anti-Semitism pointed out to them and tried to change the subject. One reviewer in the Guardian, for example, started talking about "Israel's war crimes against the Palestinians" -- an interesting remark given the fact he was meant to be writing about British anti-Semitism -- and called the subject of anti-Semitism "tedious".
On British radio, George Galloway, MP dismissed the program by saying: "Richard Littlejohn is a driveling guttersnipe who long ago fell out of the gutter into the sewer. This man is a moron."
As Littlejohn, a leading British journalist, is finding out, when non-Jews condemn anti-Semitism, they can themselves become the target of anti-Semites.
One of the problems is that the mainstream media just don't report many anti-Semitic attacks in the UK, which are only mentioned in the Jewish media. For example, a British ultra-orthodox Jew was thrown into a river in north London by a gang making anti-Semitic remarks two weeks ago. They smashed his glasses on the ground before doing so, so that he wouldn't be able to see clearly once in the water. He was rescued by a couple that walked past shortly after.
Still, anti-Semitism in Britain remains below that of other countries. For example, in Ukraine yesterday, there were three anti-Semitic attacks in a single day. No serious injuries were sustained.
In related developments:
* The latest prominent international personalities to sign a petition condemning the proposed British academic boycott of Israel are the Dalai Lama and Mikhail Gorbachev.
* The U.S. House of Representatives yesterday passed a resolution criticizing the proposed British academic boycott of Israel. Rep. Patrick Murphy (D- Pennsylvania) is the resolution's prime sponsor.
For some reason, this cartoon controversy doesn't get a great deal of media attention. This time, the cartoons are offensive to Jews, but they don't riot in the streets and burn embassies. Their leaders don't set them against the newspapers that published them or against Quebec which has a history of antisemitism.
There's a new cartoon controversy -- this time in Canada. And the controversy is that there hasn't been one. Some three weeks ago, in close succession, anti-Semitic cartoons-- at least two of which appeared to have been borrowed from Der Sturmer -- were published on the editorial pages of three mainstream newspapers in the Canadian province of Quebec. The cartoons concerned the meeting between Mario Dumont the leader of Quebec's opposition party, the Action Democratique du Quebec , with fundraisers who had traditionally supported Quebec's Liberal Party -- the party currently in power. Some of the fundraisers were Jewish businessmen.
The report states, "Vatican officials stressed that the current text, which formerly called Jews "perfidious," contains no derogatory reference to Jews. "
But it goes on to say,"Let us pray for the Jews, that the face of the Lord our God may shine on them so that they too recognize the redeemer of all, Jesus Christ, our Lord."
Let us pray for the Catholics, that they may repent the error of their ways.
The text of a "Motu Proprio" (papal decision) regarding the revival of a controversial Latin mass will be made public this week, The Jerusalem Post has learned. Vatican officials stressed that the current text, which formerly called Jews "perfidious," contains no derogatory reference to Jews.
The text is based on the Tridentine Mass promulgated by the Council of Trent in the 16th century. Originally this mass contained a Good Friday prayer for the conversion of "the perfidious Jews."
But in the 1960s, after his historic meeting with the historian and Holocaust survivor Jules Isaac, Pope John XXIII ordered this terminology removed, and the version that will be used dates back to 1962, when this phrase had already been eliminated.
Yet controversy continues over Benedict XVIth's decision to "facilitate and clarify" the possibility of performing mass in this Latin version. After the Second Vatican Council, the Latin mass was abolished in favor of using local languages, for the sake of improved communication. Only 2,000 to 3,000 people, following Cardinal Lefebvre in France and in Italy's Piedmont region continued using the Latin version. They ordained their own bishops, who were subsequently excommunicated by John Paul II. Benedict is apparently attempting to reintegrate this group into the church.
Now, any parish with at least 30 members will be able to request permission from their bishop to perform the Latin mass.
Some Catholic circles, particularly those most open to interfaith dialogue, are concerned this change will divide Catholics and undo some of the good work of the Second Vatican Council.
Jewish groups are upset that the mass contain a prayer for the conversion of the Jews.
While the Tridentine Mass contained a Good Friday prayer asking that God "lift the veil covering the hearts of Jews so that they may recognize Jesus Christ our Lord," the 1965 version states: "Let us pray for the Jews, that the face of the Lord our God may shine on them so that they too recognize the redeemer of all, Jesus Christ, our Lord."
The prayer continues: "Listen to your church so that those who were once your chosen people may reach the fulfillment of redemption."
Contemporary Good Friday prayers no longer ask for the conversion of Jews, and in contrast to the old version, the Jewish covenant with God is presented as eternally valid.
During Easter celebrations one can hear these words in the modern version: "Lord our God, who chose the Jews before all other men, to receive his word, help them to continue progressing in the love of your name and faithfulness to your covenant." The prayer continues with wishes that Jews may reach "the fulfillment of redemption."
A plan by the Pope to authorise the widespread return of the controversial Latin Mass, despite concerns that parts of it are anti-Semitic, has provoked a backlash among senior clergy in Britain and threatens to divide the Catholic Church worldwide. The 16th-century Tridentine Mass - which includes references to "perfidious" Jews - was abandoned in 1969 and replaced with liturgy in local languages, to make worship more accessible to the bulk of churchgoers. But the Pope announced on Thursday that a long-awaited document liberalising the use of the Mass, which some clergy fear will also limit the Church's dialogue with Jews and Muslims, will be released next week.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, has written to the Pope to say that no changes are needed. Concerns about the prospect of the introduction of the Mass were also underlined on Thursday at an unusual meeting to underline resistance to it. But the Pope subsequently issued a statement revealing that he had illustrated "the content and the spirit" of next week's document, which will be sent to all bishops, accompanied by a personal letter from him.
There have been months of debate about the impending statement within the higher echelons of the Church. Cardinals, bishops and Jewish leaders are concerned by the text of the "old" Mass, which has passages, recited every Good Friday, which say Jews live in "blindness" and "darkness", and pray "the Lord our God may take the veil from their hearts and that they also may acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ".
There are also fears that a reintroduction may be the precursor of further changes to the reforms approved by the Second Vatican Council, which sat between 1962 and 1965 and which called for the Mass to be said in local languages, for the priest to face the congregation, and for the use of lay readers. Latin could still be used to recite the Mass, but the "new" Mass will be used, not the "old" Mass.
To celebrate the old Latin Mass now, a priest must obtain permission from the local bishop and the Roman Catholic Church in Britain. "It is standard practice to follow Rome, but we don't know yet what the [statement] will say," a spokesman for the Church in Britain said yesterday. "When we have the document, bishops and cardinals will consider it."
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, said bishops would still have a "central role" - but hinted at the Vatican's new enthusiasm for the old Mass by calling it a "great treasure" of the Church.
Pope Benedict's move is widely seen as an attempt to reach out to an ultra- traditionalist and schismatic group, the Society of St Pius X, and bring it back into the Vatican fold. The late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre founded the society in 1969 in Switzerland, in opposition to the Second Vatican Council's reforms.
The Rev Keith Pecklers, a Jesuit liturgical expert, said: "The real issue here is not limited to liturgy but has wider implications for church life." He added that proponents of the old Mass "tend to oppose the laity's increased role in parish life... collaboration with other Christians and its dialogue with Jews and Muslims".
"Christian Zionism" has been the subject of much controversy. Opponents of Christian support for Israel apparently invented this name. They claim that all Christian Zionists are dispensationalists and that the movement was originated by J.N. Darby. At the same time, they mayclaim, paradoxically, that any Christian who supports Israel is a Christian Zionist. Supposedly, all such people are extremist fanatics who believe in imminent rapture, and try to hasten the apocalyptic battle of Armageddon. Supposedly, they are also all seeking to convert the Jews, and they all oppose territorial concessions by Israel on theological grounds. The Reverend Stephen Sizer in particular, has been active in propagating these views. His motives are transparently political beneath a theological veneer, as are the motives of most such critics.
Though some Christian Zionists do hold the above views in various forms, that is far from a veridical picture of Christian Zionism and Christian support for Israel. Among the most active and visible Christian Zionists, many are not dispensationalists and do not believe in rapture or hastening the battle of Armageddon, nor do they seek to convert Jews. Christian supporters of Israel include Christians of many Protestant denominations and beliefs, as well as some Catholics.
Historically, Christian support for restoration of Israel preceded J.N. Darby by over two hundred years. It originated in the doctrines of the Puritans, which were transmitted from England to the United States. Support for restoration of Israel became much more than an article of faith. Just as previously anti-Semitism had taken hold and become an integral part of European culture, so in the United States, support for restoration of Israel became embedded in American culture. Christian support for restoration of Israel has a long and impressive history in practical as well as political Zionism and theology, that began long before the arrival of dispensationalism in the United States. We have prepared an extensive resource that discusses the theological issues, the critiques and the history of Christian support for Israel at http://www.zionism-israel.com/dic/christian_zionism.htmChristian Zionism .
We hope you will find this resource of use in understanding the nature of Christian Zionism, and we will appreciate constructive comments, links and support. The work, large as it is, is a work in progress.
Invest in Caterpillar, General Electric, Blockbuster, General Dynamics - firms that do business with Israel and are targetted for it.
"I argue that those who single out Israel for unique criticism not directed against countries with far worse human rights records are themselves guilty of international bigotry. So long as criticism is comparative, contextual, and fair, it should be encouraged, not disparaged. But when the Jewish nation is the only one criticized for faults that are far worse among other nations, such criticism crosses the line from fair to foul, from acceptable to anti-Semitic."
A leading Jewish group said the United Methodist Church's call to divest from 20 companies that do business with Israel "borders on anti-Semitism," upping the pressure on President Bush and Senator Clinton both Methodists to distance themselves from the church's statement.
The report, which drew criticism from the Anti-Defamation League yesterday, was written by the Divestment Task Force of the church's New England Conference and targeted such companies as Blockbuster, General Dynamics, and General Electric.
"The urgency of the humanitarian crisis in the occupied Palestinian territories cannot be overstated," the report stated. "Palestinians face soaring unemployment, malnutrition, restrictions on movement, denial of medical care, denial of access to their agricultural lands, humiliation at checkpoints and extended lockdowns called curfews."
The national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, said in a statement that the report "borders on anti-Semitism."
He added: "The authors of the report must be living in a bubble to ignore ongoing attacks on Israel and Hamas's violent takeover of Gaza to issue such an outrageous, biased report that focuses only on Israel."
Representatives for President Bush and Senator Clinton did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment on the Methodist divestment action.
The deputy director of the Jewish Community Relations Council in Boston, Alan Ronkin, said his group would be meeting with local Methodists on the issue. "We are going to try to educate and let them know where we're coming from," Mr. Ronkin said. Efforts such as the divestment push, "delegitimize Israel, damage any chance to make progress in the Middle East, and are morally offensive," he added.
The report also drew criticism from within the United Methodist Church. A senior minister at First United Methodist Church of Palo Alto, the Reverend Archer Summers, said he would work to get the next General Conference to reject a divestment move and to push the body to pass a resolution similar to the United Church of Christ's recent measure calling for "a balanced study" of the Middle East conflict.
"They're flat-out wrong. They went off the deep end this time," Rev. Summers said of the New England Conference. "The powers that be in the New England Methodist Church are clueless about how to bring about a just peace. The report would make it appear that there's some sort of animus on the part of the United Methodist Church toward the state of Israel, which undermines our credibility as an institution which preaches the good news of peace."
The Methodists' action comes as the United Church of Christ, another Protestant denomination, moved forward a resolution moderating its stance toward Israel. The UCC's "balanced study " measure is now being seen as a counter to the 2005 passage of both a "divestment" motion and a "tear down the wall" resolution, which urged the dismantling of Israel's security barrier.
Senator Obama who is a member of the UCC and who addressed the church's national gathering in Hartford last Saturday issued a statement saying he "strongly disagrees with the portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict presented by individual members of the church."
The Methodist report cited the following companies as targets for divestment: Alliant Tech Systems, Blockbuster, Boeing, Caterpillar, Cement Roadstone Holdings, General Dynamics, General Electric, Globecomm Systems Inc, ITT Corporation, Lockheed Martin, Magal Security Systems, Motorola, Northrop Grumman, Oshkosh Truck Corporation, Raytheon, Silicon Graphics, Terex, United Technologies, Veolia Environnement, and Volvo.
The Methodists' New England Conference is seen as a precursor to the church's General Conference in Fort Worth, Texas, in April.
Though some academics are outraged by the UCU boycott resolution, we must admit that the anti-Israel boycotters did a clever thing. Like a virus (or aliens from extra-galactic space) they have taken over the leadership of the UCU, and their resolution states essentially that they can use union funding and facilities to push the cause of Israel hate and McCarthyism. It is a brilliant implementation of a classic Bolshevik strategy.
The resolution states that UCU will "circulate a motion to all its branches to discuss calls from Palestinian trade unions for a "comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli academic institutions". The motion is going to branches for "their information and discussion." The resolution is one sided of course, as it will not discuss calls for boycotting trade unions controlled by terror groups, Arab Palestinian trade unions that support terrorism or anyone else. Only Israel is on the agenda, and only one course of action is on the agenda.
Boycotts of Israel, called "anti-normalization," have been endemic to Arab world trade unions for many years, in particular, Jordanian and Egyptian trade unions have used these boycotts to sabotage their country's peace agreements with Israel, and to terrorize journalists and academicians into breaking off any contact with Israelis. This activity began long before the current Intifada and has nothing to do with the occupation. Aided by British anti-Zionist activists, these trade unions, supported by the most extreme elements in Palestinian society, in Egypt and Jordan, have now succeeded in exporting their racist campaign to other countries. Through the UCU, they have found a way to spread their poisonous approach.
It is better for them than a boycott resolution, because it will be a chance for boycott leaders to use union facilities to brainwash membership, and it will give them a way to keep the Israeli-Palestinian issue alive and gather support, even if they can never get enough votes for an actual boycott. The discussion is going to be much more harmful than the boycott.
A Strategy
Opponents of academic boycotts must make themselves heard at all such union meetings, and must ensure that meetings are not engineered to only allow a one-sided message. They should bring a proactive program to those meetings, of the type that was used to successfully blunt a similar one-sided divestment resolution of the Presbyterian Church (see Presbyterian Church USA reverses divestment - proactive for peace ) and should probably consult the organizers of that campaign. The basic question that UCU members should be asking themselves is whether they are for dialogue and reconciliation in the Middle East, and whether or not boycotts and anti-normalization campaigns will supoort these goals.
Some key points of the anti-boycott campaign should be:
Explain the roots of the boycott request by Palestinian trade unions in the context of the Arab-world anti-normalization campaign.
Expose the hidden agenda of groups like the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel , which tells youth that dialogue groups like "Seeds of Peace" are dangerous, and explains that there is no point in dialogue, since Israel is a foreign implant in the Middle East and must be eradicated.
Urge UCU members to support dialog between the sides and academic cooperation between Israeli unversities and others.
Urge UCU members to adopt a resolution favoring a two-state solution, and deploring terror and racist incitement as well.
Urge UCU members to adopt a resolution boycotting "anti-normalization" groups, as well as urging academic freedom for Palestinian Arabs.
Academics and students today hit back at the decision by university lecturers to support calls for a boycott of Israeli institutions.
Yesterday the University and College Union decided by 158 votes to 99 to circulate a motion to all its branches to discuss calls from Palestinian trade unions for a "comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli academic institutions". The motion is going to branches for "their information and discussion".
But the decision taken at the inaugural UCU national conference in Bournemouth was condemned by the Russell group of research-led universities, the National Union of Students and organisations with an interest in Israel and academic free speech.
In a hard-hitting statement, the Russell group "rejected outright" the boycott call.
Its chairman, Prof Malcolm Grant, who is also president and provost of University College London, said: "It is a contradiction in terms and in direct conflict with the mission of a university.
"It betrays a misunderstanding of the academic mission, which is founded squarely on freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech.
"Any institution worthy of the title of university has the responsibility to protect these values, and it is particularly disturbing to find an academic union attacking academic freedom in this way."
Prof Grant promised that its universities "will uphold academic freedom by standing firm against any boycott that threatens it".
Meanwhile, the executive director of the International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom (IAB), Ofir Frankel, accused the union of allowing itself "to act as a one-sided player in Middle Eastern politics".
He said: "The IAB is amazed that the extremists that led their union to such an initiative decided not to discuss the option to pass this initiative to a vote of all 120,000 members, a decision that could have allowed the majority to rescue their union from this discriminatory action by reharnessing the values of academic freedom, discourse and debate, as their own general secretary suggested."
The chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council, Jeremy Newmark, described the union's decision as "an assault on academic freedom" that "damages the credibility of British academia as a whole". He called for the union to organise a full membership ballot before introducing any boycott.
The decision by the UCU was also condemned by the Academic Friends of Israel, which accused the union of having "failed to support the wishes of its membership".
Criticism of the UCU decision also came from student organisations.
The president of the National Union of Students, Gemma Tumelty, said it did not support the principles behind an academic boycott of Israel because it "undermines the Israeli academics who support Palestinian rights".
It also "hinders the building of bridges between Israelis and Palestinians".
She added: "Retaining dialogue on all sides will be crucial in obtaining a lasting peace in the Middle East. International academics have a lot to offer higher education students in the UK and a boycott of this specific country is extremely worrying.
"We will express our concerns to UCU and we are awaiting clarification from them on the exact nature of this policy and its potential impact on students and the academic community."
There were also reservations about the UCU decision from the World Union of Jewish Students.
Its chairwoman, Tamar Shchory, a student at Ben Gurion University in south Israel, said: "In campuses abroad the climate of hostility towards the state of Israel and Jewish students is getting stronger.
"It seems like the UCU has chosen a one-sided, not constructive, position in a very complex and sensitive matter instead of promoting the basic value of academic freedom and constructive initiatives."
"Let's have a party" - Party of God that is. Intentional blindness about the declared genocidal intent of both Hezbollah and Hamas is amazing. They say "genocide" "right on the label, in their charter documents.
Goodheart takes London Review of Books to task for refusing to acknowledge anti-Semitic statements by Hassan Nasrallah. But Hezbollah program, like the Hamas Charter, openly proclaims their intent:
Our primary assumption in our fight against Israel states that the Zionist entity is aggressive from its inception, and built on lands wrested from their owners, at the expense of the rights of the Muslim people. Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.
Allah hu Akbar!
Don't forget that Al Andalus (Spain) is also built on lands wrested from their Muslim owners -- with far less justice, and much more brutally. Anyhow, one doesn't need to scrutinize the sayings of Nasrallah to understand that Hezbollah is a genocidal organization, and it was so from its inception.
Critics, mostly though not exclusively European, who hammer away at Israeli misbehavior often show no concern about the dangers that beset Israel. Their one-sided animus verges on scandal. Criticism of Israeli behavior may be justified, but it loses credit when it is not balanced by an unequivocal repudiation of the rhetoric and actions of Islamic fundamentalists: Holocaust denial, fantasies of genocidal anti-Semitism, the elimination of the state of Israel, suicide bombings, and indiscriminate killing of civilians.
The London Review of Books is an egregious instance of this one-sidedness. Almost every issue contains several articles devoted to attacks on Israel, and the target is not simply the governing party, but the whole spectrum of Israeli political life. Absent from the columns of the Review are the injustices and cruelties of political Islam. In an article by Charles Glass, Lebanon's Hezbollah is eulogized for its capacity to learn from mistakes, its decency in treating prisoners, "its refusal to murder collaborators," its intelligent use of "car bombs, ambushes, small rockets and suicide bombers." Glass speaks of Hezbollah's uncompromising political program, of which he apparently approves, without mentioning that at its core is the destruction of Israel...In a letter to LRB printed in the September 7, 2006, issue, I pointed out that Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, is not simply a resistance fighter, he is also an anti-Semite with genocidal fantasies. I cited the following statements attributed to him: "If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide." "They [the Jews] are a cancer which is liable to spread at any moment." I also noted that the name "Party of God," should worry anyone of enlightened, democratic persuasion, but does not seem to bother Glass. (Would he be equally indulgent of the religious fanatics in Israel who assert their divine right to Greater Israel?) Parties of God, wherever they are to be found, mean tyranny should they ever acquire power. In the article, Glass mentions the fact that he had been kidnapped by Hezbollah at a Syrian checkpoint. Wanting to prove that the movement was independent of Syrian control, he writes that when "Syria insisted that I be released to show that Syrian control of Lebanon could not be flouted [1] Hezbollah, unfortunately, ignored the request." What virtue! In my letter, I wondered whether he had not succumbed to Stockholm syndrome.
His response, printed in the October 5, 2006, issue, focused on the anti-Semitic statements attributed to Nasrallah, which he dismissed as fabrications, "circulated widely on neo-conservative web sites." ... I wrote back to the LRB, first noting that in invoking the nefarious neocons as the vehicles of fabrication, Glass reminded me of the apologists for the Soviet Union who denied the existence of anti-Semitism in their beloved country, because the reports of its existence came from the bourgeois press. I challenged the LRB to make a disinterested effort to determine whether these statements were fabrications. Its animus against Israel was clear and bad enough; a willingness to indulge anti-Semitism, a much more serious matter. If they are not fabrications, the journal has a moral obligation to say so and to repudiate the kind of article that Glass has written.
While waiting for a reply, I decided to look into the literature on Hezbollah, and what I found left no doubt about its view of the Jews. Here is Nasrallah in one of his diatribes against Israel: "If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do not say the Israeli." [1] Quoted in Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbu'llah: Politics and Religion, University of Michigan Press, 2001, p. 170. Original source, televised interview, Muhammad Fnayash. Wuhhat Nazar Future Television (FTV, July 2, 1997).
Naim Qassem, the deputy secretary general of Hezbollah, author of Inside Hezbollah, which Charles Glass cites for its humane view of how collaborators with Israel should be treated, has this to say: "The history of the Jews has proven that, regardless of the Zionist proposal, they are a people who are evil in their ideas" (Quoted in Saad-Ghorayeb, p. 174; original source, Abbas al-Mussawi, Amiru'l-Zakira, Dhu al-Hujja 1406). Hezbollah's denial of the existence of the Holocaust takes many forms. "The Jews have never been able to prove the existence of the infamous gas chambers." Only "160,000 civilians died [and this was] as a result of US bombing of Germany." Jews collaborated with the Nazis in killing their brethren: "From what we know about the Jews, their tricks and their deception, we do not think it unlikely that they partook in the planning of the Holocaust." Saad-Ghorayeb, the source of these quotes, is a Briton of Muslim Lebanese extraction, who is sympathetic to Hezbollah. "As a Lebanese, I was appalled by the apparent ease with which this movement was accused of sundry terrorist activities by Western journalists and policy-makers, and on their insistence on referring to its guerrilla fighters, who were practicing their legitimate right to resist a foreign occupation, as terrorists." She writes favorably of Hezbollah's political evolution in Lebanese society, so there is no reason to doubt the scholarly accuracy of her representation of the movement's unreconstructed view of Israel and the Jews. (As I write this, I am pleased to see a letter to the LRB from the distinguished lawyer and literary scholar Anthony Julius, citing Saad-Ghorayeb as evidence for Hezbollah's anti-Judaism. Julius invited Glass to confirm the implication of his response to my letter that I am wrong in attributing anti-Semitism to Hezbollah and to comment on the "material assembled by Saad-Ghorayeb." So far there has been no reply from Glass, nor any statement from the editors on the matter.)
Unlike Bernard Lewis, Saad-Ghorayeb characterizes Hezbollah's view of the Jews as anti-Judaism rather than anti-Semitism. She contends that unlike Christian anti-Semitism, the radical Islamic animus against Jews, which has its source in the Koran, is not racialist. And yet she speaks of the "scriptural basis" of Hezbollah's depiction of the Jews as a people "whose blood [a racialist trope] is full of enmity towards mankind." In any event, it is not clear to me that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism makes any practical difference. What is interesting is that Saad-Ghorayeb sees Hezbollah's animus against Jewry as not deriving from its anti-Zionism (Lewis's view), but from a deeper source: its inveterate hostility to Judaism. The enemies of the movement are Jews who adhere to Judaism and to Zionism, which, Hezbollah believes, has its source in Judaism, despite the existence of secular Zionists. Because they believe that Jews who have no commitment either to Judaism or Zionism are a negligible constituency, they have no inhibitions about demonizing Jewry as a whole. Saad-Ghorayeb cites passage after passage demonstrating Hezbollah's hatred of Judaism and its desire for its disappearance. The movement arose as a reaction to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, but its hostility is not confined to Israel and its supporters. Can we then take seriously Glass's benign view that the movement, in becoming "a sophisticated and successful political party . . . [has] jettisoned its early rhetoric about making Lebanon an Islamic Republic," and now speaks "of Christians, Muslims and Druze living in harmony"? Apparently the Jews, having no place in this harmony, will simply disappear.
Alas, Charles Glass appears to be either ignorant about his subject or writing in bad faith. He is an example of moral obtuseness or callousness (it is hard to find the right word for it) in what has become an influential view among a group of American and European intellectuals. The moral logic of this view goes something like this. Israel is militarily powerful, supported by the United States, the most powerful nation in the world. Its adversaries in the Islamic world are weak, and when one measures the relative devastations caused by confrontations between the powerful and the weak, the burden of guilt falls on the most powerful. Whatever violence or cruelties issue from the weak are then morally justified by weakness. Here is Glass again: "Like Israel's previous enemies, Hezbollah relies on the weapons of the weak: car bombs, ambushes, occasional flurries or small rockets and suicide bombers. The difference is that it uses them intelligently, in conjunction with an uncompromising programme." Glass says nothing about the devastation caused by weapons of the weak. He ignores the fact that the strength of "the weak" lies in elusiveness, in the capacity to hide behind the civilian population, and in the code of martyrdom. In placing a lower valuation on human life than does the adversary, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups have a distinct strategic advantage. How do you deter a person willing to die for his cause from committing an act of violence?
What, one might ask, is accomplished by the glib and unthinking support of the use of "the weapons of the weak"? Sympathy for terrorist groups only encourages war-perpetuating intransigence on both sides. Has Israel been guilty of the use of disproportionate use of military power? I believe it has and should be held to account. Israeli power has been a response to the provocations of "the weapons of the weak," and the response has too often been destructive and self-destructive in its excesses. In its recent incursion in Lebanon, it has achieved a result similar to our misadventure in Iraq: a large number of civilian casualties, widespread devastation of the land, burgeoning resentment from a large portion of the Lebanese population that had been angered by Hezbollah's provocations. Israel failed to achieve its aims at great cost to Lebanon and to itself.
But then the question arises, "What should be the appropriate response to suicide bombings and Katyusha rockets?" There is no easy answer to this. But it is a mark of callous indifference to the fate of a country, indeed of one's own country, when another contributor to the London Review of Books, Yitzhak Laor, chastises two of Israel's most prominent critics of their own government, Amos Oz and David Grossman, for asserting the right of Israel to respond to violence against it. Grossman, for example, writes, "There is no justification for the large-scale violence that Hezbollah unleashed this week, from Lebanese territory, on dozens of peaceful Israeli villages, towns and cities. No country in the world could remain silent and abandon its citizens when its neighbor strikes without provocation." To which Laor replies irrelevantly, "We can bomb, but if they respond they are responsible for both their suffering and ours" ( LRB, August 17, 2006, p. 11). What would Laor advise as a response to such an attack? He does not say. Apparently, all that is required is for Israel to flagellate itself for what it has inflicted on others.
Let us say that Israel did not respond to provocations. Would that change Hezbollah's behavior toward Israel? Not if, as Glass tells us, its program is uncompromising. Nothing that Israel can offer the Palestinians short of its self-eradication will satisfy Hezbollah. Indeed, it has even expressed a preference for a hard-line, Likud-led government to that of the Labor Partyfor that would justify its intransigence. The movement has a long view. "Even if hundreds of years pass by, Israel's existence will continue to be an illegal existence" (Saad-Ghorayeb, p. 135). It is hard to fathom what sympathy for Hezbollah by critics of Israel like Glass and Laor can accomplish in the way of achieving a peaceful solution to the conflict. On the contrary, they would seem only to foster a hardening of attitudes on all sides. In all the talk about the asymmetry between powerful Israel and its weak adversaries, what is overlooked is the asymmetry that strongly favors its adversaries. Israel has only one war to lose for its existence to come to an end. Its adversaries, miserable as their condition is, can survive war after war. In its one-sided obsession with Israeli transgressions, the London Review of Books, offering no constructive advice for ending the conflict, contributes to its perpetuation by supporting one side of the intransigence. Its indulgence of a virulently anti-Semitic movement is simply shameful.
Eugene Goodheart is Edythe Macy Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Brandeis University. He is the author of many books of literary and cultural criticism as well as a memoir, Confessions of a Secular Jew .
Footnotes:
1.) Quoted in Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbu'llah: Politics and Religion, University of Michigan Press, 2001, p. 170. Original source, televised interview, Muhammad Fnayash. Wuhhat Nazar Future Television (FTV, July 2, 1997).
The Grand Mufti of Egypt in the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion a "fictitious book" that "has no truth to it"; in his article he categorically denies having written the foreword to the 2003 edition of The Protocols , which was attributed to him
Dr. Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, denies having written the foreword to The Protocols, which is a "fictitious book" that "has no truth to it" (Al-Ahram, January 1, 2007 )
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and their Biblical and Talmudic Roots (an edition published in Egypt in 2003). The book's anti-Semitic foreword was thought to have been written by Dr. Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt
1. In 2003, a new edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and their Biblical and Talmudic Roots, was published in Arabic in Egypt . That edition was published jointly by Dr. Ahmad Hijazi al-Saqa (Professor of Comparative Theology in Al-Azhar University ), and Hisham Khadr (a journalist working for Qatari newspaper Al-Sharq). That edition of The Protocols wasand, in our opinion, still isdistributed among Arab/Muslim communities in Britain and, in all likelihood, in other countries outside of Egypt.
2. The 2003 edition of The Protocols features a detailed foreword attributed to Dr. Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt and Lecturer of Islamic Jurisprudence Sources in Al-Azhar University . The foreword contains blatant incitement against the Jewish people and rules that it was the Jews who wrote The Protocols. Such a foreword provided that edition with an air of Islamic religious dignity and authority.
3. On January 1, 2007 , more than three years after that edition of The Protocols made its appearance, a clarification on behalf of the Grand Mufti was published in Egypt 's popular daily Al-Ahram, in the section titled "Religious Thought" (p. 13). In that article, the Grand Mufti categorically denies having written the foreword to "that fictitious book [ The Protocols ], which has no truth to it". Therefore, the Grand Mufti says that he sent a legal warning to the Egyptian publishing house of The Protocols, demanding it to remove the foreword from the copies of the books that it has and not publish it again without his permission.
4. To the best of our knowledge, such an article is highly unusual both in terms of its contents and in terms of its wording. It is highly significant, being a public renouncement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in a popular Arabic-language newspaper by a senior Muslim-Arab religious personality, commanding extensive religious authority in Egypt and in the Sunni Muslim world. See Appendices for the article and its full translation.
Appendix A
Translation of the article in which the Grand Mufti of Egypt denies having written the foreword to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion 1
A Binding Warning
By Dr. Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of the Republic [i.e., Egypt ]
[Unfortunately,] I was forced to stop [writing] a series of articles [about] the sources of Islamic legislation; the reason is that I am very saddened by the [grave situation] of several publications, which in no way represent what is happening in the [field of Arabic-language] publishing-not in Egypt and not in the Arab world. [For these publications contain] lies, fabrications, and false attribution.
[This time] I am talking from personal experience, for I was surprised to find a book titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion . I was likewise surprised [to discover] my name on it, with my original titlea lecturer in the esteemed university of Al-Azhar. Seeing my name [in the book] made me wonder; [so] I lifted my eyes [to read] what it said above [my name], and came across the word "foreword". I was even more surprised when I saw the year of publication, the year 2003, and [the name of] a publishing house called Maktabat al-Nafidha. Furthermore, the [book's main] title included, in addition [to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the sub-heading:] "and their Biblical and Talmudic Roots".
[Furthermore,] the first page [of the book] states [that the authors are] Dr. Ahmad Hijazi al-Saqa and Hisham Khadr. Well, I do not remember writing a foreword to that fictitious book, which has no truth to it. 2 Likewise, I recalled the meetings I had with the lecturer Dr. Abd al-Wahab al-Masiri, 3 who specializes in Jewish studies and pertaining subjects, and the long, extensive evidence [he presented to me] to prove that the document, or the book, has no truth to itas we have believed 4 for a long time. Then I asked myself: "do you [suddenly] have amnesia? Did you write such a foreword to this book and forgot [about it]? And what did you say in it [i.e., in the foreword]did you criticize it [the book] and ruled it out?" as it is etched in my memory.
Well, I started reading the foreword, and was surprised at how poorly-written it was, surprised by the [weak] arguments and citations, which cannot be attributed to me. What is more, it is inconceivable that I should use such statements, for I am no expert on the Torah to be quoting such things [i.e., verses] from it, and it is not my custom to seek the aid of the residents of the world, as written on page 13 by [the author of] the foreword, who spreads falsehoods: "O residents of the world, these are the Jews, be sure to notice: they are a people cursed by Allah, their Maker. They help the corruptors corrupt the land and the wicked spread wickedness in the world. But we Muslims want nothing from them except for them to convert to Islam, for 'If anyone desires a religion other than Islam (submission to Allah), never will it be accepted of him; and in the Hereafter He will be in the ranks of those who have lost' [in the afterlife, i.e., those who go to hell][the Quran, Surat] Aal 'Imran [3], [verse] 85.
At that point, I became aware that these were not my words and that the name Ali Gomaa, which appeared on the cover of the book, could not be mine but was probably somebody else's name [with the same name and title]. [That is what I believed,] until I saw [my own full name and titles] at the end of these falsehoods, on page 14: Dr. Ali Gomaa Muhammad Abd al-Wahab, Lecturer of the Sources of Islamic Law in the University of Al-Azhar.
I [immediately] contacted the University of Al-Azhar, which I know well, to look for my "double", the possibility of whose existence is a billion to oneimpossible odds, in light of my acquaintance with all those well versed in Islamic law in the entire world, not just in the University of Al-Azhar. [After my investigation,] I realized that I was being the victim of a criminal act since the year 2003, that criminal act being the illicit use of my name on those fabrications, of which I did not know up until now. Well, what could those [responsible for that criminal act] be preparing for us? Why are they doing this? They only do damage; they do no good. [Therefore, all] I can say on this occasion is: Allah is enough for us; He is the best protector [a quote from the Quran, Surat Aal 'Imran, verse 173], for the protection of Allah and His Messenger [Prophet Muhammad] is enough for me.
[In light of the above,] I sent a legal warning to the publishing house, demanding it to immediately remove the foreword from the books [i.e., copies] it has, and not publish it [the foreword] again in that book or in any other book which includes the foreword attributed to me, without my knowledge. [In this context,] I would also like to note that each foreword that I write bears my signature and stamp and is written on documents bearing my name, in Arabic and in English. [Furthermore,] after entering the office of the Grand Mufti [of Egypt ], I also added the emblem of Dar al-Ifta' [the official institution responsible for issuing binding Muslim religious rulings] and its official seal. Therefore, that foreword, of which I knew nothing until now, and into which I am trying to inquire, is a false one--unless it fulfills the criteria I have mentioned [above].
[While writing,] I remembered Abd al-Wahab al-Sha'arani's old complaint about the falsification of some of his books by some ill-wishers. I also remembered what Imam Al-Suyuti had to say about that, particularly in his book Al-Tahadduth bi-Ni'mat Allah [Glorifying Allah's Virtues]. I also remembered the words of [other Islamic] religious scholars about attributing words to a person who did not say them, likening it to attributing a child to another father. It seems that these [Muslim] religious scholars imply that such [phenomenon] can be described as "a criminal act of intellectual prostitution", for "we belong to Allah and it is to Allah that we return" [a quote from the Quran--Surat al-Baqara (2), verse 156usually said on the occasion of a person's death, meaning acceptance of God's judgment. In this case, the author means to say that a disaster has befallen him (see below), but that, ultimately, everything is in God's hands].
Perhaps the words of [Allah], may He be glorified, [in the Quran]"And those who do not give false testimony, [even] when they pass by idle talk, [they] pass by with dignity"--[ Surat ] Al-Furqan [25], [verse] 72can be of some consolation in light of our disaster [today]. Indeed, Prophet [Muhammad], may Allah's blessings and peace be upon him, attributed considerable importance to this criminal act [false testimony], by saying: "Do you want me to tell you what are the three greatest wrongs?" They answered: "Indeed, O Prophet of Allah." Then [Prophet Muhammad] answered: "Polytheism, disobeying one's parents"--he said that while leaning [against something], and then he sat up straight [before mentioning the third wrong, to emphasize its gravity by changing the position of his body]--and telling fabrications." [The storyteller of that tradition] said: He [Prophet Muhammad] said those things [about the third wrong] over and over again, until we said: "We wish he would be silent." [That tradition] appears in Al-Bukhari's [authorized collection of Muslim traditions]. [In addition,] Prophet [Muhammad], may Allah's blessings and peace be upon him, considered lying in public to be one of the future signs of corruption which herald the Day of Judgment. It was [also] said [regarding the above] on behalf of Prophet [Muhammad], who said that among the signs of the Day of Judgment are the breaking up of family relations and perjury in public. [That tradition] is told by Al-Hakem, in [his book] Al-Mustadrak . 5
[In this context,] the poet says:
So many wretched people spread lies
[For] they do not fear God nor are they concerned with their disgrace
So eager were they to kill innocent lives
So that [in the end] nothing but sin and evil will they embrace
Appendix B
The original article (Al-Ahram, January 1, 2007, p. 13, in the section titled "Religious Thought")
1 The text in bold was highlighted by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center .
2 It should be noted that the Grand Mufti uses a strong word--"fictitious"--to describe his most negative opinion of the book, that is, to say that the book is ridiculous, erroneous, and unimaginably nonsensical.
3 Dr. Abd al-Wahab al-Masiri is an Egyptian intellectual who "specializes" in writing about Jewish and Zionist religion. He has published many books of anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist character. In one of his books, The Protocols, Judaism and Zionism (2003), he states that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a fake, prejudiced document, which causes damage to the Arabs since it imbues the Jews with great ability which does not actually exist. For details see our Information Bulletin dated October 29, 2006: "The Arab hate industry: Egypt continues as a center for the publication of crude anti-Semitic literature encouraging hatred for Israel, the Jewish people and the West, and in effect justifying the use of violence against them".
4The verb "believed" appears in plural in the Arabic original. The author could be referring to himself or to other similar-minded thinkers, but the verb does not refer only to him and to Dr. Al-Masiri.
5 "The completion", that is, a book containing hadiths (traditions) that complete those found in the known collections of hadiths.
The Hilton hotel in Garden Grove California has agreed to host a displaced Al-Awda conference. Al-Awda means "the Return." The group became active in 2000, helping in the successful effort to sabotage Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. They made it clear that any Palestinian who surrendered the "right" of return would be considered a traitor. Their demonstrations feature posters with the democratic and liberal slogan "Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dogs." That is the liberal, public face of Al-Awda. This conference is to be closed to media and outsiders however, and presumably delegates will be more frank...
Perhaps what is really needed to dissuade them from doing it is an announcement of picketing and boycott of the Hilton chain. It should not be needed in a better world.
Not everything that Lee Kaplan writes is true. Be cautious about Lee Kaplan's assertions. For example, the contention that Sami Al Arian was convicted seems not be borne out by factual evidence. He was acquitted on many charges and eventually copped a plea. It is not so relevant, because Al-Awda is a thoroughly bad group with or without Al-Arian. It is also probably hard to make a case that ISM and Al-Awda are related, though they MIGHT be.
In any case, after reading what is below, please write to these addresses:
GOOD GUYS
Write Vice chancellor James Sandoval ( james.sandoval@ucr.edu ) and Chancellor France Cordova ( france.cordova@ucr.edu ) and praise UC Riverside for doing the right thing once the truth emerged.
PEOPLE TO PRESSURE: (Phone, mail, pickets)
The corporate offices of Hilton Hotel Corporation and the Mayor of Garden Grove:
Stephen F. Bollenbach, CEO Hilton Hotels Corporation World Headquarters 9336 Civic Center Drive Beverly Hills, CA 90210 310-278-4321 phone
Mayor of Garden Grove William Dalton 11222 Acacia Pkwy Garden Grove, CA 92840 (714) 741-5100 pamha@garden-grove.org ---
Please be calm and respectful, and do not make accusations you cannot prove.
Maybe Paris Hilton should get involved :-)
Perhaps the Hilton chain is anxious for the publicity they could get. They could be as famous as the Munich Beer Hall where Hitler began his putsch.
Ami Isseroff
How Stop the ISM Stopped Al Awda at UC Riverside By Lee Kaplan and the Stop the ISM Team
Well, it finally happened: UC Riverside, an American taxpayer-supported public university that was to be the venue for the next international conference of Al Awda, a.k.a. the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, informed Stop the ISM last Sunday morning that the Fifth Annual International Al Awda Conference that was scheduled there for the weekend of May 24-26th has been canceled.
This marks only the second time an American university took enough responsibility to not allow itself to be duped into hosting unconditionally an anti-Semitic hate fest that masquerades itself as an educational event about the Middle East, the other campus being Rutgers in 2003. Al Awda's conference was set to be a training and strategy session for boycotting American and Israeli Jewish businesses and even some American Jews, and to work toward the goals of Hamas to destroy Israel. Al Awda's motto has always been "From the river to the sea," meaning the organization was not in favor of a peaceful two state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but in the ultimate destruction of Israel and its Jewish and Christian population. Al Awda's founder once called Jews who live in Israel "a disease."
According to Assistant Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs James Sandoval at UC Riverside, the student organizers advised him "without explanation" that the event was being canceled. While Sandoval maintained the cancellation of the event was the decision of the student organizers that included the Students for Justice in Palestine and Muslim Students Union at UC Riverside, both International Solidarity Movement-affiliated groups, the UC Riverside administration deserves praise for setting up ground rules that obviously made the event too risky for the organizers to conduct on campus. The UC Riverside Muslim Students Union, like others across the US, has enjoyed an affinity for Hassan al Banna, the inspirational precursor to al Qaeda. Accordingly, anti-Semitism, and hatred for America and Israel were all on the Al Awda menu.
After considerable prodding by Stop the ISM, Assistant Vice Chancellor Sandoval set up three restrictions on the event that Al Awda obviously could not abide by. First, was an objection to a disclaimer posted on the Al Awda website that "the convention host committee reserves the right to decline any reservation at its sole discretion for any reason." A similar disclaimer on the Al Awda website last year for the same conference at San Francisco State University was removed after Stop the ISM called attention to it with the SFSU administration. Public taxpayer-supported universities are not places where people can be barred because of their ethnicity or point of view as long as they behave in a lawful manner. At SFSU some Jews who support the existence of a Jewish state found their reservation requests ignored by the organizers. When notified the same thing was happening at UC Riverside, Sandoval intervened and insisted that the conference be open to anyone who could pay the entrance fee and attend in the spirit of an open university. He made Al Awda remove the restriction from their website.
Next came the issue of security. At the previous SFSU Al Awda Conference, the organizers had goons from their organization follow anyone around who they deemed as reporting what was really going on inside the event. The press was intimidated. This reporter was accosted more than once and even followed into the men's room. Sandoval agreed such conduct should not be allowable at a public university and assured Stop the ISM that only UC police officers, some brought in from other campuses, would have sole authority for security. At the previous SFSU event some people were harassed even for taking notes or asking questions.
Of most importance was a decision made by Sandoval that cameras and recorders would not be banned at the UC Riverside event. In all other Al Awda and ISM events, cameras and recorders are banned to prevent outsiders from seeing the anti-Semitism and outright support for terrorist groups overseas that goes on. Sandoval advised the organizers that UC Riverside was not to be used for secret meetings that the public could not scrutinize for legitimacy.
Apparently, the above three requirements were more than the Al Awda organizers could handle. Al Awda released this message today:
VENUE CHANGE- UNITING FOR THE RETURN - FIFTH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL AL-AWDA CONVENTION NEW VENUE: Embassy Suites Hotel - Anaheim South, 11767 Harbor Boulevard, Garden Grove, CA 92840
DATE: May 25-27, 2007
The host committee of the Fifth Annual International Al-Awda Convention announces a change in venue. The convention will now be held at Embassy Suites Hotel - Anaheim South, 11767 Harbor Boulevard, Garden Grove, CA 92840. The convention will take place on the May 25-27 memorial day week-end.
The date of the convention commemorates the Nakba, the 59th year since the "State of Israel" was declared on stolen Palestinian land, and which led to the Zionist occupation of all of Palestine.
The community-based local host committee currently includes the Southern California chapters of Al-Awda (Al-Awda Riverside, Los Angeles and San Diego), Students for Justice in Palestine at UCR, The Palestinian American Women's Association, The Free Palestine Alliance, The National Council of Arab Americans, The Middle East Cultural and Information Center, The Muslim Students Association at Palomar College, The Muslim Students Association at UCSD, Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA, The Muslim Students Union at UCR, The Arab Community Center of the Inland Empire, Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid - Southern California, Students for International Knowledge at CSUSB, and The Muslim Students Association at CSUSB.
THE PROGRAM
The Fifth Annual International Al-Awda Convention promises to be an amazing three-day event from speakers and workshops, film showings, to a Palestine Cultural Dinner Event. The opening will be held on the evening of Friday 25 May and include a moving event at which survivors of the Nakba, the great catastrophe, share their recollections of their first-hand experience in 1948.
On Saturday May 26, the convention will devote itself to political assessments, and to developing the ongoing work of organizing right to return campaigns such as refugee support, media work, student, art/culture, etc., in addition to our recruitment and outreach projects.
On Sunday May 27, the convention will arrive at its resolutions based on the concrete recommendations of the various workshops.
The Saturday evening Palestinian Cultural Dinner Event will include keynote addresses as well as music by world-renowned maestro Dr. Nabil Azzam, poetry readings and more. A Naji el-Ali exhibition will also be on display in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of his assassination. The cartoons for this exhibit were kindly provided by Khalid el-Ali, his son.
Among the confirmed convention speakers are: Dr. Jamal Zahalka, new leader of Balad (National Democratic Assembly, al-Tajamu' al-Watani al-Dimuqrati) who will discuss the current situation of Palestinians living in the areas of their country occupied in 1948 and in the context of the persecution of Dr. Azmi Bishara, former leader of Balad.
Leila Al-Arian, journalist, daughter of political prisoner Sami Al-Arian.
Dr. Naseer Aruri, former member of The Palestine National Council.
Elias Rashmawi, National Coordinator National Council of Arab Americans.
WHY VENUE CHANGE
The host committee decided to move the convention from the University of California at Riverside to the Embassy Suites Hotel - Anaheim South when new unacceptable conditions were demanded by certain UCR administrators well after they had approved the venue. For example, the administrators levied new administrative, security and other fees in the thousands of dollars which the hosts of the convention at UCR viz. the Students for Justice in Palestine would be expected to pay. Such prohibitive fees are highly unusual and have almost certainly never before been levied at UCR on any other student group. Additionally, the university administrators insisted that Zionists be allowed to attend the convention, and that they film the convention and its participants, a remarkable attempt at intimidation.
All these new conditions and unreasonable demands were considered by the host committee as an attempt to shut down the Fifth Annual International Al-Awda Convention. Hence, the committee decided to move the convention to the Embassy Suites Hotel - Anaheim South, 11767 Harbor Boulevard, Garden Grove, CA 92840 - The committee felt that this private venue would provide a safer and more secure environment for our community and convention attendees.
All of the guests listed above call for Israel's destruction, and are supporters of Hamas and the terrorists who kill US soldiers in Iraq. Al-Arian was convicted of being the US head of Islamic Jihad [Not true apparantly - A.I.] and involved in killing over 100 people in terrorist attacks [As far as is known, Al-Arian did not kill anyone, only Islamic Jihad did], including some Americans. The Boycott being promoted also wants US businesses such as Coca Cola, Starbucks, Blockbuster Video and Home Depot boycotted because they have Jewish executives or do business with Israel.
Stop the ISM earlier provided the UCR administration with ample photographic evidence and proof over the last thirty days that Al Awda is linked with American Nazi Party organizations such as the Aryan Nations due to their commonality in Jew-hatred, that it engages in blatant anti-Semitism on its affiliated websites and violates US law regarding promoting a boycott of Israeli businesses that was set up by the Arab League. Secondary boycotts of American businesses that do business with Israel are also considered illegal and Al Awda clearly stated on their website their goal was also to boycott American Jews by boycotting certain American firms. Photographs of Al Awda organizers in San Francisco waving Palestinian flags with red fists dripping with blood on them and exhortations in Arabic that "Palestine is ours and the Jews are our dogs!" sent to the UC Riverside authorities over the last month were not enough to sway the administration to take action at first, allegedly, because the University counsel found "nothing illegal" about it, however, campus restrictions on secretive or abusive behavior apparently were enough to make the event be canceled.
Other evidence over the succeeding weeks since the announcement of the event that Stop the ISM provided to the UCR administration included specific examples of Al Awda's blatant anti-Semitism by exhortations to murder Jews. Such evidence included poetry on the Web by an international Al Awda leader exhorting murder and suicide bombings. Since the UCR event was billed as an "International Al Awda event," calls for suicide bombings and killings were hardly appropriate for a California state campus.
Vice Chancellor James Sandoval deserves some credit for not playing the complete fool to Al Awda, by at least setting some ground rules for the event that the organizers no doubt felt they could not adhere to. One was the removal of a disclaimer on the Al Awda website saying the organizers had the right to bar anyone from attending the conference for any reason. That disclaimer was posted on the Al Awda website. San Francisco State University, that hosted last year's national conference, also required the organizers to remove such a restriction from the event that did take place on that taxpayer-supported campus after Stop the ISM pointed the disclaimer out. Despite that, some who support Israel's right to exist found their reservations ignored or missing at SFSU when that conference took place. Sandoval intervened after being notified of the restriction on the Al Awda website and advised the organizers that since UCR is a public university, nobody could be barred from the event.
The Arab irredentist group Al Awda has always managed to get by on plausible deniability whenever it came to its outright support for anti-Semitism and the annihilation of Israel, but when the organization came under potential open scrutiny this time, it canceled its own event. In the past, Al Awda has not allowed cameras or video recorders at their events, an ISM tactic, because these events are really terrorist-support strategy festivals, not peace or educational events. The fact is the US Civil Rights Commission just came out condemning anti-Semitism on US colleges that is masked as Middle East "discussion" or only criticism of Israel must have also played at least some role in the UCR administration's requirements for this Al Awda conference that the organizers found unacceptable. Al Awda has now moved this conference to private property where they can bar people from seeing what goes on inside. The universities have provided a low cost or free venue in the past and fostering the image of an academic event for conferences like these that belong in despotic totalitarian-state Middle Eastern universities, not on an American campus. Al Awda attendees, although mostly Palestinian Arabs, also voice their unwavering international support for the Ba'ath Party that supplies terrorists who kill American soldiers in Iraq. Whatever the reasons for the cancellation of this event, UC Riverside deserves praise for conducting itself like a professional institution of learning, not an indoctrination center for Jew-haters. Whether this had something to do with the new finding by the US Civil Rights Commission about campuses being disabused by anti-Semitism masking as political discussion of the Middle East is not the issue; for once, a major American university conducted itself in an intelligent manner that treated veiled anti-Semitism as being every bit as objectionable as attacks on any other ethnicity. Meanwhile, the Al Awda show will still go in Garden Grove, California, but not on a college campus partially subsidized at taxpayer expense. write Vice chancellor James Sandoval (james.sandoval@ucr.edu ) and Chancellor France Cordova (france.cordova@ucr.edu) and praise UC Riverside for doing the right thing once the truth emerged. Perhaps other universities will now finally catch on to the ISM and its affiliates like Al Awda. At the same time, get on the phone to the corporate offices of Hilton Hotel Corporation and the Mayor of Garden Grove: Stephen F. Bollenbach, CEO Hilton Hotels Corporation World Headquarters 9336 Civic Center Drive Beverly Hills, CA 90210 310-278-4321 phone kathy_shepard@hilton.com , VP Communications
Mayor of Garden Grove William Dalton 11222 Acacia Pkwy Garden Grove, CA 92840 (714) 741-5100 pamha@garden_grove.org
Who's the little rodent, who's gonna blow up you and me? Mickey Militant, Mickey Militant, Forever may we hold your banners high high Hi Hi! As Mickey says: ""You and I are laying the foundation for a world led by Islamists,"" M*i*c - See you in Hell, Zionist Dog K*e*y - Why? 'Cause we hate you. "Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dogs." Well you won't have Militant Mouse to kick around for a while. --- Update and PS: The Hamas TV drops militant Mickey Mouse
By ASSOCIATED PRESS A program using a Mickey Mouse-like character to urge Palestinian children to fight Israel and the West and work for world Islamic domination has been pulled off Hamas's television station for "review," Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti said Wednesday. Barghouti said the use of the cartoon character in such a role represented a "mistaken approach" to the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation.
Opinion: Fine-tuning Arab television
Barghouti wrote that following a request from his ministry, the program was pulled from the Hamas-affiliated Al Aksa TV and "placed under review."
In the statement, Barghouti said his ministry "would continue to ensure freedom of expression and freedom of the press, but that media outlets breaking the law would be penalized."
Barghouti complained that the Mickey Mouse story continued to receive attention by "some American television stations" after it was resolved, and that media did not broadcast video of Israeli human rights violations supplied by his ministry in recent weeks.
Israel has long complained that the Palestinian airwaves are filled with incitement.
"You and I are laying the foundation for a world led by Islamists," the cartoon character squeaked on a recent episode of the show, which is titled "Tomorrow's Pioneers."
"We will return the Islamic community to its former greatness, and liberate Jerusalem, God willing, liberate Iraq, God willing, and liberate all the countries of the Muslims invaded by the murderers."
Children call in to the show, many singing Hamas anthems about fighting Israel.
An Anti-Israel ad campaign for Washington DC subways is being dismissed as ineffective by pro-Israel groups, but any propaganda is effective to some extent. It reaches someone. It helps to popularize a slogan and an attitude. It builds sentiment and a support group incrementally. It would be wrong to try to quash the campaign, but it would surely be right to spend some resources in presenting the case for Israel in the same way. Unfortunately, in the 1950s and 1960s nobody launched a campaign to end the illegal Jordanian occupation of Jerusalem, and in 1914, nobody thought of launching a campaign to end the longest occupation in history, the foreign occupation of the land of Israel. And today, nobody is thinking of effective advertising campaigns to present the truth about Israeli Palestinian conflict.
The ACLU insisted that this unfair advertising campaign had to be allowed in order to provide "freedom of speech." The ACLU is incorrect. The Washington DC subways are a public utility, and the municipality and the directors of the subways have an obligation to keep unseemly racist and political propaganda out of the subways. Advertisements in support of the racial inferiority of black people would not be allowed in the subways under the rubric of "freedom of speech." Moreover, ACLU does not champion "freedom of speech" for causes it does not like. The film Obsession, which documents anti-American and anti-Israel incitement by radical Muslims and Palestinian Arabs, was banned from mainstream American movie theaters and blocked on campuses. The ACLU did not not take up their cause. "Freedom of expression" is guaranteed only for messages that certain people like, and not for others, but nobody seems to mind.
As Snoopy the Goon points out, boycott campaigns and ad campaigns have a cumulative effect, even if they are really representative of a tiny minority at first. Giving them publicity by protesting or blocking them will back-fire, but pro-active publicity and initiatives to counter them are essential.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - area commuters will be inundated with a controversial poster-ad campaign when they take the city's subway system next month.
Starting May 13 for four weeks, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) has ordered 20 of its subway stations to place posters advertising a June 10 rally to end "Israel's illegal military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem."
Initiated by a charity called the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, the 46-by-60-inch posters depict an imposing tank pointing its main firing turret at a child with a schoolbag walking along a dirt road.
"Imagine if this were your child's path to school. Palestinians don't have to imagine," the poster states, before continuing to call for an end to U.S. aid for "Israel's brutal military occupation. paid for by U.S. taxpayers like you."
CBS Outdoor, the New York-based firm that places in-station advertising for WMATA, at first refused to consider the poster, but eventually relented to pressure from WMATA and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
According to an April 4 report in the Washington Jewish Week online, the U.S. Campaign contacted the ACLU, which then advised WMATA to order CBS Outdoor to place the posters, citing freedom of speech rights.
Joanne Ferreira, a WMATA spokesperson, said, "We didn't have any problem with the ad. It was a First Amendment issue."
In the same report, Oren Segal, a spokesperson for the Anti-Defamation League said, "If past events by this organization are any indication, it will make no attempt to present a balanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and this ad is a pure reflection of that."
Jodi Senese, CBS Outdoor's executive vice-president in charge of marketing, explained to The CJN last week why she first turned away the poster.
"I initially rejected it on grounds that I thought it was too inflammatory to children," she said over the phone from her Manhattan office.
Senese recalled that she told U.S. Campaign staff that if they wanted to raise awareness for their campaign, she was fine with it based on First Amendment rights, "but not like this," she said.
The U.S. Campaign claims 250 member organizations in the United States. Its website features a prominent logo with the slogan, "Apartheid: Wrong for South Africans. Wrong for Palestinians."
Senese, who is Jewish, indicated that though she was uneasy with the ad, her personal feelings were not a part of her initial decision to dismiss the ad.
"I'm very proud [of being a Jew]," Senese said. "I thought the image was inflammatory, but I also believe in our First Amendment rights. As Jews [in America], we thrive on that right as well."
Senese indicated at the time of the interview, that to her knowledge no other group had yet come forward with a counter-campaign for CBS Outdoor to run.
Arthur Spitzer, who is Jewish and the legal director for the ACLU in the National Capital Area, told the Washington Jewish Week it wasn't "a case about Judaism or Israel. but about establishing someone's right to freedom of speech, which I agree with regardless of whether I agree with their particular political position."
Jewish organizations in the D.C. area downplayed the seriousness of the upcoming campaign.
Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, president of Washington-based pro-Israel think-tank, the Israel Project, said her organization didn't consider the ad campaign worth wasting resources to counter in the media and expected the ads to have a "minimum impact."
She said when the Israel Project and other prominent Jewish organizations in the area first learned about the ad, they worried about its "ominous" potential.
They discussed the matter at length and then conducted several focus group studies on the ad with dozens of "highly educated people" before concluding the ad wasn't worth combating actively.
In fact, Laszlo Mizrahi claimed that of the dozens who analyzed the ad in the focus groups, upon first glance most thought the tank was an American one surrounded by Iraqi children. And even when they read the poster's words, participants had little sympathy for the cause, she said.
"It's a poorly run... poorly executed campaign and the American people are onto [the U.S. Campaign's] game," Laszlo Mizrahi said. "There are real, legitimate threats to the U.S.-Israel relationship - this is just not one of them.
"If these guys want to build support for their cause, they need to have something to sell that doesn't encourage children to blow themselves up."
Unfortunately, Laszlo Mizrahi is wrong. Our biggest enemy is complacency, based on the premise that "nobody will believe that crazy rubbish." People believe the darndest things, for reasons that have little to do with logic. The Hamas movement and Al-Qaeda have built their political empires based on the premise that one can encourage children and adults to blow themselves up. It seems crazy to the rest of us, but it works for them. And their "philosophy" is supported by political scientists who excuse terrorism and suicide bombing in different ways. Messages manage to make their way into people's minds in ways that defy logical analysis. If, for example, people at first mistake the tank for an American tank, they will link the Israeli occupation with the US war in Iraq, which most Americans now oppose. Rest assured, that if this campaign makes mistakes, the next ad campaign will learn from those mistakes. Where are our posters, showing the results of suicide bombings and the Muslim demonstrators carrying signs, "Europe is the Cancer, Islam is the answer?"
Manfred Gerstenfeld has written an excellent article about the demonic demonization of Zionists as Nazis. Georges Sarfaty noted the same phenomenon in his article about the linguistics of hate. The theme is repeated over and over in many ways, and with no foundation in truth whatever.
Contrary to the charges of anti-Zionist extremists. Israel is not herding Palestinian Arabs into death camps. There is no genocide going on the West Bank or Gaza strip and none was ever planned. There are more Palestinian Arabs today than there ever were. There is no Palestinian "Holocaust." In all the years of its existence, Israel has not killed as many Arabs or Muslims as were killed by Muslims in Darfur or in the Iran-Iraq war. It is particularly fitting to raise the problem of Zionists as Nazis in this season, which approaches the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, staged by an alliance of Jews led by Zionist MordechaiAnielewitz, and also the anniversary of the mythical Jenin "massacre" of 2002. In the Warsaw Ghetto, Jews were herded together for the purpose of rounding them up and transporting them to death camps. 350,000 Jews were crowded into the ghetto. All but a few were ultimately sent to death camps, and the rest were murdered when the ghetto uprising was crushed. When a few remaining survivors revolted in desperation, the SS and the Wehrmacht moved in with massive force to kill off the remnant of Jews in the Ghetto who had not yet been sent to their deaths elsewhere. The Jews of the Warsaw ghetto had done nothing at all to deserve their fate. They had harmed no German citizens, had attacked no German soldiers prior to being herded into the ghetto.
In 2002, a spate of Palestinian suicide attacks in ever-rising crescendo had reached a peak in March of 2002, when about 100 people were murdered, including diners at a seder celebration. The victims were not soldiers, they had done nothing to any Palestinians and they were leading peaceful lives in Israel. The Palestinians had been granted autonomous rule of Nablus, Jenin and other cities as part of the Oslo peace accords. Instead of negotiating peace, their leaders had started a campaign of terror and suicide bombings. The attacks in March were organized by cells of Palestinian "resistance" people in Jenin and Nablus, financed by the Palestinian authority with the approval of Chairman Yasser Arafat. All through 2001 and 2002 the attacks had continued. The international community and the Palestinian authority had done nothing to stop them. Chairman Yasser Arafat condemned violence publicly while privately signing the pay chits of terrorists. There was a debate in Israel about what to do. The final spate of attacks on eve of Passover 2002 made it irresponsible and politically impossible for the Israeli government to remain idle. Israeli forces entered the West Bank to remove the sources of the terror attacks in operation Defensive Shield. Civilian residents were warned repeatedly to leave the combat area. Most did. A few stayed out of "solidarity" with the terrorists or because no means could be found to transport them. In Jenin, IDF was greeted by gunfire of armed snipers in an ambush that killed about a dozen soldiers. It was decided that the only way to eliminate the terrorists, who would not surrender, was to destroy small area in the center of town. Civilians were once again asked to leave. In the operation, 56 Palestinians were killed, as a report by HRW subsequently found. Most of them were armed terrorists. Even one civilian death is too many, but the accidental death of about 20 civilians in a clearly defensive action cannot be compared with the intentional murder of 350,000 people. However, Palestinians and their supporters, aided by irresponsible and unprofessional international journalists, spread the myth that Israel had "massacred" 500 Palestinian Arabs in Jenin. Had it been true, it still would not have compared with the murder of 350,000 people. But it was a lie. The lie still exists and is perpetuated at numerous Web sites, in books and in movies. Because operation Defensive Shield occurred close to the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which occurred n Passover of 1943, Jewish and other anti-Zionists built the obscene comparison between the IDF and the Wehrmacht.
A particularly skillful and odious lie that is circulated, is that the IDF studied the tactics of the Wehrmacht and the SS in the Warsaw Ghetto and applied them in Jenin. There is no actual evidence that this occurred, but it is repeated in dozens of places. In the usual fashion of apocryphal "Zionist quotes." the lie quotes or paraphrases, out of context, an article that was written by Amir Oren in Haaretzin January of 2002. Oren was speculating regarding various options that Israel had to deal with the rising wave of terror, and the dreaded possibility of urban warfare. He wrote, among many other things:
In order to prepare properly for the next campaign, one of the Israeli officers in the territories said not long ago, it's justified and in fact essential to learn from every possible source. If the mission will be to seize a densely populated refugee camp, or take over the casbah in Nablus, and if the commander's obligation is to try to execute the mission without casualties on either side, then he must first analyze and internalize the lessons of earlier battles - even, however shocking it may sound, even how the German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto.
The officer indeed succeeded in shocking others, not least because he is not alone in taking this approach. Many of his comrades agree that in order to save Israelis now, it is right to make use of knowledge that originated in that terrible war, whose victims were their kin. The Warsaw ghetto serves them only as an extreme example, not linked to the strategic dialogue that the defense establishments of Israel and Germany will hold next month.
The Warsaw ghetto was an example. Nobody in the IDF said that they were actually studying the tactics of Nazis, or that they would use the tactics of the Nazis. Amir Oren did not write that either. Every army studies the tactics of every other army in every battle. The IDF did NOT use the tactics of the Nazis, who used tanks and air support and artillery to blast the ghetto out of existence, and who did not give civilians a chance to escape to safety. If it were a sane world, I would not have to explain the obvious, but it is not a sane world, as the false and demented accusations of mendacious degenerates in dozens of places will attest.
As it was the New York Times that equated liberalism with anti-Semitism, it is they who will need to undo the damage. Alvin Rosenfeld replies to critics. Rosenfeld himself got the ball rolling by lumping various critics of Israel together with racist extremists. Let he who is without guilt...
Post date: 02.27.07 In December, 2006, I published an essay with the American Jewish Committee (AJC) titled "'Progressive' Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism." It slumbered for a while and then suddenly provoked the interests and passions of more people than I could ever have imagined. More about these reactions soon. For now, the facts: With assaults against Jews and Jewish institutions annually numbering in the hundreds, anti-Semitism has once again become a serious threat, made all the worse by the rhetorical violence that helps to fuel it. Much of this rhetoric is directed aggressively against the Jewish state and those deemed "guilty" of supporting it. Often hardly distinguishable from verbal anti-Semitism at its ugliest, it issues not only from jihadist preachers and neo-Nazi hate-mongers, but increasingly from otherwise respectable intellectuals, scholars, artists, and journalists. Some of these people are themselves Jews. In the spirit of George Orwell's seminal insight--"[I]f thought corrupts language, language also corrupts thought"-- I set out to examine their words and the degree to which they might be consonant with today's anti-Semitism, especially in its more virulent anti-Zionist forms.
I am not the first writer to take a hard look at Jewish authors whose statements go well beyond what most reasonable people would see as legitimate criticism of Israel and who call into question the very essence of the Jewish state and its right to continued existence. Writing in the pages of TNR about Tony Judt--who professes that "Israel today is bad for the Jews"--Literary Editor Leon Wieseltier pointed out that, to confuse the object of anti-Jewish hostility with its cause, as Judt does, is not to understand anti-Semitism but to reproduce it. Others have also analyzed the contributions of Jewish thinkers to today's anti-Zionist discourse. (See, for example, Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor's collection, The Jewish Divide Over Israel, Emanuele Ottolenghi's Autodafé, and the current issue of Shmuel Trigano's French journal Controverses.) So my essay was by no means a pioneer effort.
The New York Times evidently thought otherwise: On January 31, 2007, it ran a prominent story about my work with the headline "Essay Linking Liberal Jews to Anti-Semitism Sparks a Furor." Prior to the Times' article, there really hadn't been much of a furor. In an age of instant Internet communication, though, a major story in America's leading newspaper about an alleged attack on "liberal Jews" raced around the globe and, in no time at all, unleashed a huge and bitter debate.
In part, the debate was triggered by the Times' erroneous reference to "liberal Jews" (a term I never used) and to the AJC as a "conservative advocacy group" (it is not). Owing to these mischaracterizations, some readers were prepared to see my essay as just the latest salvo in the already overheated culture wars between right-wing and left-wing opinion in this country. Before reading what I actually wrote, for instance, Gershom Gorenberg, commenting in The American Prospect, groaned: "Here we go again, I thought: Another right-wing American Jew ... is trashing liberal Jews for voicing criticisms milder than what an Israeli ex-paratroop officer might express over lunch with old army friends." On closer look, though, he found something quite different: a critical review of the words of "those Jews who reject the very existence of a Jewish state and who express their opposition in shrieks that rise to equating Israel with the Nazis."
These "shrieks" were my subject; and I had no trouble locating them in the work of certain Jewish authors, many of whom identify as "progressives" and are prominently represented in Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon's Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Adopting their own self-chosen moniker, I took "progressive," not "liberal," as my term of choice.
No commonly agreed-upon taxonomy of terms--"liberal," "leftist," "radical"--exists to define "progressive" today with any precision, but the word generally is taken to designate a political position to the left of "liberal," the latter term becoming a casualty of the culture wars and no longer enjoying the currency it once had. The slide from "liberal" to "progressive," however, involves more than just a semantic switch. As the political scientist Andrei Markovits explains in Uncouth Nation, "an uncompromising anti-Zionism, which occasionally borders on the anti-Semitic," has become requisite for membership in good standing in the progressive left. Together with anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism "has become a kind of litmus test for progressive thinking and identity. ... Just as any self-respecting progressive and leftist in Europe or America, regardless of which political shade, simply had to be on the side of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism have become the requisite proof of possessing a progressive conviction today."
There are people within the progressive left who strongly oppose these tendencies--the British-based authors of the Euston Manifesto and writers featured in Dissent and Democratiya come immediately to mind. They make clear their concern with growing anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, noting (I quote from the Euston Manifesto website) their stand against "organizations of the left that are willing to entertain openly anti-Semitic speakers and to form alliances with anti-Semitic groups."
Among others on the left, though, an often strident anti-Zionism is part of the ideological package that gives them their political identity. Their inclination to liken Israel to Nazi Germany and white-ruled South Africa--and their frequent excoriations of the Jewish state as guilty of "racism," "apartheid," "ethnic cleansing," "war crimes," and "genocide" draw from a common lexicon of hyperbolically corrosive speech and have helped to fashion an intellectual and political climate that encourages the demonization of Israel and its supporters. Jacqueline Rose's reduction of Zionism to a form of collective lunacy and her attempt to link Theodor Herzl with Adolph Hitler; Joel Kovel's call for "true Jews" to "annihilate their particularism," "annihilate or transcend Zionism," and "annihilate the Jewish state"; Norman Finkelstein's claim that Israeli Jews are a "parasitic class" and that their "apologists" are comparable to the Gestapo; and Michael Neumann's equation of "Jewish complicity" in Israel's policies with German complicity in the Holocaust illustrate the extremity of such views. Citing innumerable examples of such tendentious thinking, I closed my essay by noting that, "at a time when the delegitimization and, ultimately, the eradication of Israel is a goal being voiced with mounting fervor by the enemies of the Jewish state, it is more than disheartening to see Jews themselves adding to the vilification."
Many readers agreed with these conclusions. But some were clearly discombobulated. "I am almost in a state of shock," Alan Wolfe, a political scientist at Boston College and TNR contributing editor, told The New York Times. Confronting me on NPR's "On Point," Wolfe dropped the "almost"; he also accused me of employing "Stalinist tactics" to stifle free speech and suppress open debate. Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun, told the International Herald Tribune's Roger Cohen, "The atmosphere is hysterical, verging on McCarthyism. You can't raise questions about Israel without being told you're an anti-Semite or a self-hating and disloyal Jew." The Boston Globe ran a story by Stanley Kutler under the absurd heading, "All Critics of Israel Aren't Anti-Semites," which carried the fantastic charge that my "real targets" are "Democrats and opponents of George W. Bush's dubious adventure into Iraq." And the Forward lost its editorial wits altogether with a piece called "Infamy," claiming that my intent was to "turn Jews against liberalism and silence critics" and, for these alleged sins, placing me in their secular version of cherem.
Since I never once referred to "liberalism," called no one a "Jewish anti-Semite" or "self-hating Jew," said nothing about Democrats or the Iraq war, and made no attempt to "silence" anyone, this Kakfaesque bill of indictment makes me wonder what is at play here--illiteracy, dishonesty, or worse? As Bret Stephens recently put it, "How does joining a debate become an effort to suppress it?"
Vigorous discussion of Israeli policies and actions is not in question here. Such discussion proceeds across all of the media in this country and within Israel itself. It's disingenuous, therefore, to say that "you can't raise questions about Israel." Such questions are raised continually by a broad range of commentators. Read Yossi Klein Halevi, Michael B. Oren, Dennis Ross, Hillel Halkin, and Michael Walzer, to name only a few of the best informed commentators, and you will find such discussion taking place in thoughtful and clarifying ways.
The ubiquitous rubric "criticism of Israel," however, has also come to designate another kind of discourse--one that has almost become a politico-rhetorical genre unto itself, with its own identifiable vocabulary, narrative conventions, and predictable outcomes. At its ideational core is what the British scholar Bernard Harrison calls a "dialectical scam." It goes something like this: (1) Spot an Israeli action that can serve as the ground of "criticism of Israel" (e.g., Israel's military incursion into the area near Jenin in April 2002 in response to Palestinian terrorist massacres); (2) Then "dissent" in the strongest possible terms, for instance by likening the "razing of Jenin" to the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, while anticipating that "powerful" and "repressive" Jewish institutions will try to "silence" the critics by calling them anti-Semites; (3) When taken to task by more sober-minded critics who find that, contrary to your charge, there was no such thing as "the razing of Jenin" and that the IDF has nothing in common with the SS, cry "foul" and claim their censure perfectly illustrates the point that there really is a Jewish organizational conspiracy to silence "criticism of Israel" by branding the authors of such criticism "anti-Semites."
For some, this dialectical scam works nicely and validates their sense of themselves as intellectual martyrs suffering for a higher ideological cause. Once one is on to it, however, the scam readily dissolves into what it actually is: political bias, compounded by a touch of hysteria, masquerading as victimization. Thus, when a tiny political group calling itself "Jewish Voice for Peace" sets out to track "a growing epidemic of intimidation and harassment from fellow Jews seeking to stifle open debate over America's policy toward Israel," it can hardly be expected to be taken seriously.
What is at stake in the present debate, though, is serious and calls for thoughtful minds to move beyond the regnant clichés and recognize that Jews and the Jewish state are once again embattled. The most violent enemies--Iran and Syria, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda--are undisguised. On another level, but causing its own damaging effects, is the hostility embedded in language. One libel after the other, today's anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic rhetoric erodes Israel's moral standing and marginalizes those who are devoted to the Jewish state and speak out on its behalf. In Europe, slanted media coverage has already reduced Israel and its supporters to something close to pariah status while creating a sense of unease within the local Jewish communities that has not been felt for decades. Some Jews fear that it is now open hunting season on them and their children and are giving thought to leaving. Many have, in fact, already left.
This is not the situation of American Jews at the moment, but, with words like "apartheid" and "dual loyalty" in the air and intimations of powerful "Jewish lobbies" controlling the national press and exerting undue influence over foreign policy, a quiver of nervousness is now detectable among Jews in this country, too. Language matters, and its contamination by thoughtless or malicious people can be invidious. That was the thrust of my reflections on anti-Zionist ideas and anti-Semitic utterances in my AJC essay. Some of the responses to it prove my point.
Alvin H. Rosenfeld is professor of English and Jewish studies and director of the Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts at Indiana University. He is the editor of The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature (Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
Last week I returned from a series of lectures in Switzerland where I spoke of the odyssey of the illegal immigrant ship Exodus in 1947. During my stay I was interviewed by several newspapers, including one of Europe's leading publications Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
The interviewee, a well known newspaper veteran, obviously asked me about Israel today and the conflict in the Middle East. He presented several articles (translated into English) that I had published in recent months, and asked me whether I was not exaggerating in declaring that anti-Semitism is on the rise worldwide.
"Perhaps you are mistaken?" he said. "Perhaps it's not anti-Semitism, but rather, anti-Zionism and opposition to the Israeli leadership's conduct towards the Palestinians."
And this is the root of the problem. For years anti-Semites have been hiding behind the argument of their opposition to Zionism and Israel's policies in regard to the Palestinian issue. "We have nothing against the Jews," they reiterate repeatedly," yet we do not agree with Israel's policies."
This is a blatant lie. Are the attacks on synagogues and community institutions, desecration of cemeteries and assault of orthodox Jews an expression of "anti-Zionism"?
Was the murder of a young Jew wearing a skullcap and the attempted "lynch" of another (both in France) carried out in "opposition to Israel's policies"? Last month, half of Ukraine's population announced that there are "too many Jews in their country" and that "their numbers should be minimized." Is this also anti-Zionism?
A few days ago a reputable German institute publicized a comprehensive survey pertaining to the Germans' attitude towards Israel. The results of the survey are worrying: It appears that 44 percent of the population has a negative opinion regarding Israel and that a sweeping majority of Germans (78 percent) believes that Germany should treat Israel as it does any other nation.
As if the grandparents or the parents of the respondents did not partake in the murder of six million Jews. As if there are no Jews still living, who miraculously survived the German style "final solution."
'No to the Jewish State' That very same outspoken apathy by 78 percent of the new German population towards the Jewish State, which was founded on the ruins of European Jewry, is nothing but an expression of latent anti-Semitism.
Otherwise they would have responded by saying that although Germany is committed to the survivors and the inheritors of those who perished, they would express reservation towards the State of Israel's policies. But they simply said: "No" to Israel. "No" to the Jewish State.
When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeatedly says outright that Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth, he is not saying that "the Zionists should be wiped out." He is demanding that the entire Jewish State be wiped out.
The fact that not a single state has demanded that Iran be ousted from the United Nations due to its wild incitement against another state - which is also a member of the organization - is the best indication of the world's attitude and stance towards the Jews. The absence of protest testifies that the madman from Teheran is not alone.
No, there is no anti-Zionism and there is no anti-Israel, there is only anti-Semitism, even if it is presented in a different guise.
Palestinian unity is not so good if it is directed against you know who.
Palestinian Media Watch Bulletin - Feb. 14, 2007
Jews are "evil souls" in new PA TV video clip
"The [Jews are] evil souls, a thousand evil ones [Jews] are in my home!"
by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook
The lyrics in a new video clip broadcast on official Palestinian Authority Television refer to Jews as "evil souls, a thousand evil ones. . . in my home." The lyrics are sung to images of a religious Jew walking in Jerusalem and Jews praying at the Western Wall of the Temple.
This overtly anti-Semitic message not only defines Jews as "evil souls," but likewise tells Palestinians to see Jews as outsiders in Jerusalem. Even Jews at the Western Wall are portrayed as intruders.
"I am Palestinian, and my home is my home. The evil souls [Visual: Jew walking in Jerusalem], A thousand evil ones are in my home!" [Visual: Jew walking in Jerusalem] But I am Palestinian and my home is my home, The evil souls [Visual: Jews praying at Western Wall], A thousand evil ones are in my home!" [Visual: Jews praying at Western Wall] [PA TV, February 13, 2007]
The rest of the video, named "Palestinian Unity," features a teenage boy singing about Palestinian unity, over background images of dead bodies, funerals and military parades of the rival Palestinian terror groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, the Popular Front and the Democratic Front. The background images also include scenes of violence against Israel, including Israeli tanks and jeeps being hit by stones and Molotov cocktails.
The lyrics include:
"We are all Palestinians in blood and identity, Fatah, Hamas, and the Jihad, the Popular [Front] and the Democratic [Front] We want to liberate the land through the national unity..."
The words, "We are a sword which is not drawn, except towards the occupier," are sung to the images of a gun firing, followed by that of falling Israeli soldier.
Please feel free to forward this bulletin, crediting Palestinian Media Watch
The quiz below is (jokingly) supposed to determine if you are a liberal anti-Semite. I confess to scoring 10 - All the #1 answers fit my views better than the others. The writer does not take in the full range of possibilities, I have added some (d) answers which rate -1 and help to qualify you as a not so liberal anti-Semite. I believe in giving everyone their free choice. The answers here clearly do not reflect the opinions of the fellow who is bombarding the Web with letters insisting that Iran should be given thermonuclear weapons to use against Israel. Unfortunately, that is no joke. Likewise, they do not reflect the opinions of the Neturei Karteh and other "Liberals" mentioned in the AJC article. Ami Isseroff
Are You a Liberal Anti-Semite? Take this quiz and find out. By Joe Lanzmann Posted Friday, Feb. 2, 2007, at 1:13 PM ET
After years of rising concern about left-wing anti-Semitism, the New York Times reported this week about a study for the American Jewish Committee. Written by professor Alvin Rosenfeld of Indiana University, the study describes the spread of a virulent anti-Zionism in many quarters on the left that has helped legitimate anti-Semitism. Some people have seized on the study to argue that these extreme anti-Zionists are really anti-Jewish bigots. Critics reply that criticizing Israel, even harshly, doesn't prove animus toward the Hebrew people.
So, how can you tell if you're a good liberal who simply thinks the West Bank settlements are bad policyor a closet Judeophobe whose progressive views mask a serious attitude problem? Take this quiz and see./p>
1. Who deserves the most blame for the Iraq war?
a) George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld b) Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Bill Kristol c) Blame? Don't you support the troops?
d) The Jewish conspiracy
2. Which group exerts too much influence on America's Mideast policy?
a) Conservative jingoes b) Not the Jews per se but a "pro-Israel lobby" composed mainly of wealthy New York financiers (who may well all attend the same shul) c) Arabists at the State Department
d) The Jewish conspiracy
3. How would you characterize debate about America's Mideast policy?
a) Robust, with a full range of opinions available in various publications b) Nonexistent, since all criticism of Israel is "taboo" c) Biased, because the Sulzberger family of the New York Times is afraid to seem "too Jewish"
d) Nonexistent, since all criticism of Jews is "taboo"
4. Which state's offenses against humanity bother you most?
a) Sudan b) Israel c) Massachusetts
d) - Answer b
5. Criticism of Israel is:
a) Sometimes warranted, but needs to be kept in context and perspective. b) The civic duty of every truly patriotic citizen who cares about America's self-interest. c) Why are you always criticizing Israel?
d) The duty of every Christian who wants to expose the Jewish conspiracy
6. What do you think of Joe Lieberman?
a) I liked him OK when he ran with Gore, but he lost me on Iraq, school vouchers, and Social Security. b) The most dangerous man in the Senate c) At least there's one Democrat who isn't soft on terrorism!
d) Conservative Jew-Liberal
7. On what basis is Iran a threat to world peace?
a) I'm concerned that its unchecked nuclear-arms program will destabilize the region. b) I'm afraid Israel will use its saber-rattling as a pretext to start World War III. c) I pray Ehud Olmert will have the chutzpah to pull another Osirak.
d) Iran ought to nuke the Jews.
8. Jimmy Carter's use of the term "apartheid" in his new book is:
a) intended to provoke debate but clearly ill-considered b) a gutsy, rare example of someone "speaking truth to power" c) more of the same from the putz who put Andy Young at the UN
d) intend to appease the Jew-liberals
9. Which describes your view of the Holocaust?
a) The most horrific crime in recorded history b) A tragedy that, incidentally, gets far more hype than the Turks' slaughter of the Armenians or the white man's annihilation of the Indians c) Child's play compared with what Iran's Ahmadinejad has planned
d)Holocaust, what Holocaust?
e) Hitler's work is not finished (-2 for this answer)
10. The term neoconservative suggests:
a) Erstwhile leftie radicals who grew disenchanted with the welfare state. b) A cabal of pro-Israel intellectuals who have hijacked our foreign policy. c) A code word for "Jews" used by the people who answered (b).
d) Dupes of the Jewish conspiracy, Jews and crypto-Jews.
Your Results
Give yourself 1 point for each (a) answer, 2 points for each (b) answer, and 0 points for each (c) answer.
0-3: OK, you're not an anti-Semite. But you're not a liberal either. You win a lifetime subscription to Commentary and this sheaf of old AIPAC newsletters.
4-7: You display trace elements of atavistic fears. Your prize: a copy of The Plot Against America.
8-12: Phew! You're an unbigoted liberalpainfully capable of striking a middle ground and excruciatingly tolerant of all points of view. Please enjoy this complete set of Barack Obama's speeches.
13-16: You're clearly not nuts about Zion, but Abe Foxman won't be calling you just yet. To be safe, steer clear of any petitions emanating from British universities. Meanwhile, please claim your dinner with Tony Judt and two tickets to My Name Is Rachel Corrie!
17-20: You're an anti-Semite! You win a tour of synagogues in Italy, Argentina, and Turkey bombed by militants who are merely anti-Israel and not anti-Jewish. Also, an extended director's cut DVD of The Passion of the Christ.
Joe Lanzmann is the pseudonym of a liberal Jew who fears retributionthough precisely from whom he's not sure.
A reminder of the progressive and liberal forces lined up against Israel. Special Dispatch-Lebanon/ Antisemitism Documentation Project February 6, 2007 No. 1453
Lebanese Poet Marwan Chamoun: Jews Slaughtered Christian Priest in Damascus in 1840 and Used His Blood for Matzos
Marwan Chamoun: "How many of us Lebanese, or even Arabs, know anything about the Talmud? Or about the book, Exposing the Talmud? Or about the book, Pawns on the Chessboard? Or about another book, The Secret World Government? Or about Exposing the Talmud? Or about Blood for the Matzah of Zion, [which deals with] the slaughter of the priest Tomaso de Camangiano, who was a Sicilian with French citizenship, in the days of Muhammad Ali Pasha, in 1840..."
[...]
"[Former Syrian] Minister Mustafa Tlass wrote a voluminous book about this, in which he included all the documents written by the French diplomats and consul in Lebanon."
[...]
"The world loves the Jews. The 'ruler' is Christianity - the Christian West. Arabs, Muslims – why don't you take advantage of something like this? A priest was slaughtered in the presence of two rabbis in the heart of Damascus, in the home of a close friend of this priest, Daud Al-Harari, the head of the Jewish community of Damascus. After he was slaughtered, his blood was collected, and the two rabbis took it. Why? So they could worship their god, because by drinking human blood, they can get closer to God. Where are our diplomats and politicians? Why don't we profit from these historical matters, which are presented to us on a simple, eternal, golden platter?
"As I've said, these books can be found on the streets of Beirut. There are approximately 20 to 30 such books. I must have bought about 2,000 copies since they were published, maybe more. I'd like to say 20,000 copies, but I don't know. When somebody gets married, instead of chocolates, I give him one of these books. Whoever reads this for the first time feels a chill of horror and disbelief. He cannot believe it."
********************* The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) is an independent, non-profit organization that translates and analyzes the media of the Middle East. Copies of articles and documents cited, as well as background information, are available on request.
MEMRI holds copyrights on all translations. Materials may only be used with proper attribution.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) P.O. Box 27837, Washington, DC 20038-7837 Phone: (202) 955-9070 Fax: (202) 955-9077 E-Mail: memri@memri.org Search previous MEMRI publications at www.memri.org
The Arab Lobby at work - documented for all to see. Jimmy Carter might be the best ex-President money can buy. There are more parts of this series promised, but what is there is sufficiently devastating.
1. Israel's right to exist within recognized borders-and to live in peace-must be accepted by Palestinians and all other neighbors;
2. The killing of noncombatants in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon by bombs, missile attacks, assassinations, or other acts of violence cannot be condoned; and
3. Palestinians must live in peace and dignity in their own land as specified by international law unless modified by good-faith negotiations with Israel.
....
The Arabs must recognize the reality that is Israel, just as the Israelis must accept a Palestinian state in the small remaining portion of territorial homeland allotted to the Palestinians by the United Nations and previous peace agreements.
Oops - the territory allotted to the Palestinians by the United Nations was outlined in UN Security Council Resolution 181. It is 45% of the land area West of the Jordan. No peace agreements allotted any territory to the Palestinians, nor did the Palestinians agree to a peace treaty with Israel.
It now turns out that Jimmy Carter--who is accusing the Jews of buying the silence of the media and politicians regarding criticism of Israel--has been bought and paid for by Arab money. In his recent book tour to promote Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Carter has been peddling a particularly nasty bit of bigotry. The canard is that Jews own and control the media, and prevent newspapers and the broadcast media from presenting an objective assessment of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that Jews have bought and paid for every single member of Congress so as to prevent any of them from espousing a balanced position. > How else can anyone understand Carter's claims that it is impossible for the media and politicians to speak freely about Israel and the Middle East?The only explanation and one that Carter tap dances around, but won't come out and say directly is that Jews control the media and buy politicians.Carter then presents himself as the sole heroic figure in American public life who is free of financial constraints to discuss Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Israelis.
Listen carefully to what Carter says about the media: the plight of the Palestinians is "not something that has been acknowledged or even discussed in this country... You never hear anything about what is happening to the Palestinians by the Israelis." He claims to have personally "witnessed and experienced the severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts."He implies that the Jews impose these "severe restraints."He then goes on to say that the only reason his book--which has been universally savaged by reviewers--is receiving such negative reviews is because they are all being written by "representatives of Jewish organizations" (demonstrably false!).So much for the media.
Now here is what he says about politicians:
"It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine, to suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defense of justice or human rights for Palestinians. Very few would ever deign to visit the Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, Gaza City or even Bethlehem and talk to the beleaguered residents."
Each of these claims is demonstrably false, as I have shown in detail elsewhere. The plight of the Palestinians has been covered more extensively, per capita, than the plight of any other group in the world, certainly more than the Tibetans and the victims of genocides in Darfur and Rwanda.Moreover, Carter totally ignores the impact of Arab oil money and the influence of the Saudi lobby.In numerous instances where the Arab lobbies have been pitted against the Israeli lobby, the former has prevailed.
Even beyond these nasty canards, the big story that the media and political figures in America have missed is how grievously they, themselves have been insulted and disrespected by our self-righteous former president.Carter is lecturing The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and the major networks about how they are incapable of reporting the news objectively because they are beholden to some Jewish cabal.He is telling Pulitzer Prize winning writers such as Tom Friedman and Samatha Power that they did not deserve their prizes.He is telling George Will that his reporting is controlled by his Jewish bosses (sound a little bit like Judith Regan?).And he is denying that Anderson Cooper is capable of filing an honest report from the West Bank.
As far as our legislators are concerned, he is accusing Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Patrick Leahy of being bought and paid for by the Israeli lobby.On Planet Carter, even congressmen with no Jewish constituents would be committing political suicide by taking a balanced position on the Middle East.What an outrageous insult to some of the best journalists and most independent political figures in the world.
At the bottom, Carter is saying that no objective journalist or politician could actually believe that America's support for Israel is based on moral and strategic considerations and not on their own financial self-interest.Such a charge is so insulting to every honest legislator and journalist in this country that I am amazed that Carter has been let off the hook so easily.Only the self-righteous Jimmy Carter is capable of telling the truth, because only he is free of financial pressures that might influence his positions.
It now turns out that the shoe is precisely on the other foot.Recent disclosures prove that it is Carter who has been bought and paid for by anti-Israel Arab and Islamic money.
Journalist Jacob Laksin has documented the tens of millions of dollars that the Carter Center has accepted from Saudi Arabian royalty and assorted other Middle Eastern sultans, who, in return, Carter dutifully praised as peaceful and tolerant (no matter how despotic the regime). And these are only the confirmed, public donations.
Carter has also accepted half a million dollars and an award from Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, saying in 2001: "This award has special significance for me because it is named for my personal friend, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan." This is the same Zayed, the long-time ruler of the United Arab Emirates, whose $2.5 million gift to the Harvard Divinity School was returned in 2004 due to Zayed's rampant Jew-hatred. Zayed's personal foundation, the Zayed Center, claims that it was Zionists, rather than Nazis, who "were the people who killed the Jews in Europe" during the Holocaust. It has held lectures on the blood libel and conspiracy theories about Jews and America perpetrating Sept. 11.
Another journalist, Rachel Ehrenfeld, in a thorough and devastating article on "Carter's Arab Financiers," meticulously catalogues Carter's ties to Arab moneymen, from a Saudi bailout of his peanut farm in 1976, to funding for Carter's presidential library, to continued support for all manner of Carter's post-presidential activities.For instance, it was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), founded in Pakistan and fronted by a Saudi billionaire, Gaith Pharaon, that helped Carter start up his beloved Carter Center.According to Ehrenfeld:
"BCCI's origins were primarily ideological. [Agha Hasan] Abedi wanted the bank to reflect the supra-national Muslim credo and 'the best bridge to help the world of Islam, and the best way to fight the evil influence of the Zionists.'
As Ehrenfeld concluded:
"[I]t seems that AIPAC's real fault was its failure to outdo the Saudi's purchases of the former president's loyalty. There has not been any nation in the world that has been more cooperative than Saudi Arabia," The New York Times quoted Mr. Carter June 1977, thus making the Saudis a major factor in U. S. foreign policy.
"Evidently, the millions in Arab petrodollars feeding Mr. Carter's global endeavors, often in conflict with U.S. government policies, also ensure his loyalty."
It is particularly disturbing that a former president who has accepted dirty blood-money from dictators, anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, and supporters of terrorism should try to deflect attention from his own conflicts of interest by raising the oldest canard in the sordid history of anti-Semitism: namely, that Jews have dual loyalty and use their money improperly to influence the country they live in, in favor of the country to which they owe their real allegiance.Abraham Foxman responded to Carter's canard as follows:
As disturbing as Carter's simplistic approach is, however, even more disturbing is his picking up on the Mearsheimer -Walt theme of Jewish control of American policy, though in much more abbreviated form and not being the focus of his work. Referring to U.S. policy and the "condoning" of Israel's actions, Carter says: "There are constant and vehement political and media debates in Israel concerning its policies in the West Bank but because of powerful political, economic, and religious forces in the U.S., Israeli government decisions are rarely questioned or condemned, voices from Jerusalem dominate our media, and most American citizens are unaware of circumstances in the occupied territories." In other words, the old canard and conspiracy theory of Jewish control of the media, Congress, and the U.S. government is rearing its ugly head in the person of a former President.
As noted above, the most perverse aspect of Carter's foray into bigotry is that as he pours this old wine into new bottles he is himself awash in Arab money.When a politician levels these kinds of cynical accusations against others, it would seem incumbent on him to show that his own hands are clean and his own pockets empty.
Accordingly I now call upon Carter to make full public disclosure of all of his and the Carter Center's ties to Arab money.If he fails to do so, I challenge the media to probe deeply into his, his family's, and his Center's Arab ties so that the public can see precisely the sources and amounts of money he has received and judge whether it has corrupted the process of objective reportage and politics by Carter and others who have received such funds. Finally, I ask the appropriate government agencies to conduct an investigation into whether Carter should be required to register as a lobbyist for foreign interests.
Let's stop invoking discredited ethnic stereotypes, look at the hard facts, and actually see who's being bought and sold.
I have known Jimmy Carter for more than thirty years. I first met him in the spring of 1976 when, as a relatively unknown candidate for president, he sent me a handwritten letter asking for my help in his campaign on issues of crime and justice. I had just published an article in The New York Times Magazine on sentencing reform, and he expressed interest in my ideas and asked me to come up with additional ones for his campaign. Shortly thereafter, my former student Stuart Eisenstadt, brought Carter to Harvard to meet with some faculty members, me among them. I immediately liked Jimmy Carter and saw him as a man of integrity and principle. I signed on to his campaign and worked very hard for his election. When Newsweek magazine asked his campaign for the names of people on whom Carter relied for advice, my name was among those given out. I continued to work for Carter over the years, most recently I met him in Jerusalem a year ago, and we briefly discussed the Mid-East. Though I disagreed with some of his points, I continued to believe that he was making them out of a deep commitment to principle and to human rights.
Recent disclosures of Carter's extensive financial connections to Arab oil money, particularly from Saudi Arabia, had deeply shaken my belief in his integrity. When I was first told that he received a monetary reward in the name of Shiekh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, and kept the money, even after Harvard returned money from the same source because of its anti-Semitic history, I simply did not believe it. How could a man of such apparent integrity enrich himself with dirty money from so dirty a source? And let there be no mistake about how dirty the Zayed Foundation is. I know because I was involved, in a small way, in helping to persuade Harvard University to return more than $2 million that the financially strapped Divinity School received from this source. Initially I was reluctant to put pressure on Harvard to turn back money for the Divinity School, but then a student at the Divinity SchoolRachael Lea Fishshowed me the facts. They were staggering. I was amazed that in the twenty-first century there were still foundations that espoused these views. The Zayed Centre for Coordination and Follow-upa think-tank funded by the Shiekh and run by his sonhosted speakers who called Jews "the enemies of all nations," attributed the assassination of John Kennedy to Israel and the Mossad and the 9/11 attacks to the United States' own military, and stated that the Holocaust was a "fable." (They also hosted a speech by Jimmy Carter.) To its credit, Harvard turned the money back. To his discredit, Carter did not.
Jimmy Carter was, of course, aware of Harvard's decision, since it was highly publicized. Yet he kept the money. Indeed, this is what he said in accepting the funds: "This award has special significance for me because it is named for my personal friend, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan." Carter's personal friend, it turns out, was an unredeemable anti-Semite and all-around bigot.
In reading Carter's statements, I was reminded of the bad old Harvard of the nineteen thirties, which continued to honor Nazi academics after the anti-Semitic policies of Hitler's government became clear. Harvard of the nineteen thirties was complicit in evil. I sadly concluded that Jimmy Carter of the twenty-first century has become complicit in evil.
The extent of Carter's financial support from, and even dependence on, dirty money is still not fully known. What we do know is deeply troubling. Carter and his Center have accepted millions of dollars from suspect sources, beginning with the bail-out of the Carter family peanut business in the late 1970s by BCCI, a now-defunct and virulently anti-Israeli bank indirectly controlled by the Saudi Royal family, and among whose principal investors is Carter's friend, Sheikh Zayed. Agha Hasan Abedi, the founder of the bank, gave Carter "$500,000 to help the former president establish his center [and] more than $10 million to Mr. Carter's different projects." Carter gladly accepted the money, though Abedi had called his bankostensibly the source of his funding"the best way to fight the evil influence of the Zionists." BCCI isn't the only source: Saudi King Fahd contributed millions to the Carter Center"in 1993 alone $7.6 million"as have other members of the Saudi Royal Family. Carter also received a million dollar pledge from the Saudi-based bin Laden family, as well as a personal $500,000 environmental award named for Sheikh Zayed, and paid for by the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates.
It's worth noting that, despite the influx of Saudi money funding the Carter Center, and despite the Saudi Ar
