An idiotic initiative: Jews inform on Jews

The Jewish Agency and the Israel Prime Minister's Office(!) has unbelievably launched a clumsy campaign to "rescue" Jews from intermarriage. It invites people to "inform" on friends who might, HEAVEN FORFEND, be intending to marry a non-Jew:

A day after mounting a scare-tactic campaign to prevent the assimilation of Diaspora Jews, the Prime Minister's Office and Jewish Agency received some 200 calls, most of them reporting names of Jews living abroad.

However, many callers also blasted the campaign - which describes assimilation as a "strategic national threat."

The campaign, which launched on Wednesday, urges Israelis to report the particulars of acquaintances living abroad so that these people, who are "in danger" of marrying non-Jews, can be persuaded to come to Israel.

The 10-day Hebrew-language campaign has been mounted by MASA, a partnership between the Jewish Agency and the Israeli government that helps finance and market Israel programs for Diaspora Jews.

...

"We wanted to raise a public debate, even if it arouses argument and emotions," MASA's CEO Ayelet Shiloh-Tamir said Thursday.

"More than 50 percent of young Jews assimilate," the TV commercial informs viewers through the voice of Ayala Hasson, a top reporter for Channel 1. "We are losing them," she adds, as soft, melancholy music is played on a flute in the background.

The 33-second clip features images of missing-person posters hanging in locales in Europe and North America. The posters, in English, French and Russian, are of young people with Jewish-sounding names.

The ad then asks anyone who "knows a young Jew living abroad" to call MASA. "Together, we will strengthen his or her bond to Israel, so that we don't lose them," the announcer concludes.

We can hear the phone calls now, "I saw my nephew Sheldon with a blonde girl last week. She didn't look Jewish at all. You need to investigate, " "My niece is dating a Schwartzer! (black person). A Shandeh! (shame), Better come quick before it is too late."

What a way to render the image of Jews and of Israel totally absurd! Ziopedia and Stormfront could not have thought up something this ridiculous. How will they follow up on the leads? Will Zionist morality police bring trained dogs to go sniffing about in people's bedrooms? Are we supposed to report only those who are in danger of marrying non-Jews, or also those who are "in danger" of marrying reform Jews?

There is good news too in this report. Evidently, the Israeli economy is doing fine, our relations with the United States are excellent, the Iranian threat is under control, peace with the Palestinians is just around the corner, and Israel's image in the world has never been better. That is the only explanation for why the Prime Minister's office is worried about who Morris from Waukegan and Rachel from Manchester are dating next Friday.

In the old days, Woody Allen could have made a great movie out of this. He is out with the girl of his dreams (played by the latest version of Annie Hall). He is meeting her parents and their friends in a garden party. Suddenly a helicopter lands on the lawn. A squad of IDF soldiers steps out and sweep him off to Israel. Or, in the fantasy version, a pious devotee of the Kabbalah writes the holy name on his forehead and instantly turns him into a Hassidic Jew with ear locks and fine fur hat. The marriage, obviously, is off.

Ami Isseroff

Continued (Permanent Link)

Swedes stand by blood libel, insist on investigation, condemn envoy apology

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?"

Ami Isseroff

Continued (Permanent Link)

Peruvian Jews of forgotten jungle town leave for Israel

It took so long for them to remember that they are Jews, even though the town has been decaying for a long time. The reason was no doubt the ideal conditions and affluence, which made people to leave this paradise for the wilds of impoverished Tel Aviv and Savyon. The article explains:

The rubber trade collapsed, and fortunes here and downriver in the Brazilian city of Manaus vanished. Some Jewish immigrants perished young, succumbing to diseases like cholera. A few stayed, marrying local women and raising families. Others returned home, leaving behind descendants who clung to a belief that they were Jews...

Iquitos lies four degrees south of the Equator, reachable only by boat or plane. Isolation, intermarriage and assimilation nearly wiped out the vestiges of Judaism here. Storefronts chiseled with Jewish surnames like Foinquinos and Cohen, and a cemetery ravaged by vandals, served as some of the few reminders of the community that once thrived here.

And of course, such a paradise attracts Jews from all over the world:

By the start of this decade, the Jews here were gathering to observe Shabbat each Friday and during the High Holy Days at the home of the patriarch, Mr. Edery. After he died, they met on Próspero Street at the home of Jorge Abramovitz, 60, whose father, a Polish Jew, moved here long after the collapse of the rubber boom.

And the Jews who come to Israel may be unhappy:

Mr. Reátegui Levy, the oil field inspector, moved in 2005 with his wife and six children to Ramla, a dusty city southeast of Tel Aviv. But despite dreaming for decades of such a move, he said he had trouble adjusting to Israeli life.

He said he missed his house with cacao and passion fruit trees, and the status of being a manager at PetroPerú. He murmured something, just audible over the din of this city's thousands of motorcycle rickshaws, about losing the spark of love with his wife.

So, unlike nearly all the Iquiteños who moved to Israel, Mr. Reátegui Levy moved back, alone.

Be it ever so malaria, cholera and snake infested, there's no place like home.

Still, cynicism aside, it is good that some people are remembering they are Jewish. All over the world, there are many communities and families like the people in Iquitos. There are many more who have forgotten, whose ancestors were forcibly converted to Christianity or Islam. Judaism, it seems to me, should extend a welcoming hand to those who wish to return. Hopefully, not only those who are poverty stricken and desperate will remember their roots.

Ami Isseroff

Adopting Forebears' Faith and Leaving Peru for Israel
By SIMON ROMERO

IQUITOS, Peru — If Ronald Reátegui Levy someday finds that he is the last Jew of Iquitos, it may well be of his own doing.

His dream, which he has vigorously pursued, is to persuade the descendants of Sephardic merchants who settled in this remote corner of the Amazon basin more than a century ago to reaffirm their ties to Judaism and emigrate to Israel.

"It is getting very lonely here," said Mr. Reátegui Levy, 52, an inspector at Peru's national oil company, referring to the more than 400 descendants of Jewish pioneers who have formally converted to Judaism this decade, including about 160 members of his immediate and extended family. Nearly all of them now live in Israel.

Until recently, such a rebirth of Judaism here seemed unlikely. The history of Jews in Iquitos, dating from the late-19th-century rubber boom that transformed this far-flung Amazonian outpost into a once thriving city of imported Italian marble and a theater designed by Gustave Eiffel, was almost forgotten.

But Mr. Reátegui Levy and a handful of others began organizing the descendants of dozens of Jews from places as varied as Morocco, Gibraltar, Malta, England and France who had settled here and deeper in the jungle, opening trading houses and following their star in search of riches and adventure.

The rubber trade collapsed, and fortunes here and downriver in the Brazilian city of Manaus vanished. Some Jewish immigrants perished young, succumbing to diseases like cholera. A few stayed, marrying local women and raising families. Others returned home, leaving behind descendants who clung to a belief that they were Jews.

"It was astounding to discover that in Iquitos there existed this group of people who were desperate to reconnect to their roots and re-establish ties to the broader Jewish world," said Lorry Salcedo Mitrani, the director of a new documentary, "The Fire Within," about the Jews of the Peruvian Amazon.

Scholars compare the Jews here with groups like the Hispanic crypto-Jews of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, the Lemba of southern Africa or the Bene Israel of India, who in varying ways have sought to reclaim a Jewish identity that had seemingly been weakened through time.

"We were isolated for so many decades, living on the jungle's edge in a Catholic society without rabbis or a synagogue, in which all we had were some vague notions of what it meant to be Jewish," Mr. Reátegui Levy said.

"But when I was a child, my mother told me something that forever burned into my mind," he said. "She told me, 'You are a Jew, and you are never to forget that.' "

Iquitos lies four degrees south of the Equator, reachable only by boat or plane. Isolation, intermarriage and assimilation nearly wiped out the vestiges of Judaism here. Storefronts chiseled with Jewish surnames like Foinquinos and Cohen, and a cemetery ravaged by vandals, served as some of the few reminders of the community that once thrived here.

But by the end of the 1990s, some of these descendants, including Mr. Reátegui Levy, were brought together by Víctor Edery, a patriarchal figure who organized religious ceremonies in his own home, keeping a few customs alive even if it was done by blending Jewish and Christian beliefs.

Still, the existence of the Jews of Iquitos posed some philosophical challenges to some Jews elsewhere. Since nearly all the Jews who originally settled here were men, their descendants could not attest to having Jewish mothers, ruling them out as being Jewish according to strict interpretations of Jewish law.

Moreover, the Jewish community of about 3,000 people in Lima, the capital, largely preferred to ignore the Jews of Iquitos, some scholars say, in part because of the thorny issues that the Jews here posed about race and origins. This is, after all, a country where a small light-skinned elite still wields considerable economic and political power — and Lima's Jews are often seen as an elite within that elite.

"The notion of a Jew who looks like an Indian and lives in a poor house in a small city in the middle of the jungle is, at best, an exotic footnote to the official history of Peru's Jewry as Lima sees it," said Ariel Segal, a Venezuelan-born Israeli historian whose arrival here in the 1990s to study the community also helped serve as a catalyst for the Iquitos Jews to organize.

By the start of this decade, the Jews here were gathering to observe Shabbat each Friday and during the High Holy Days at the home of the patriarch, Mr. Edery. After he died, they met on Próspero Street at the home of Jorge Abramovitz, 60, whose father, a Polish Jew, moved here long after the collapse of the rubber boom.

While they lacked a rabbi, they conducted services in Hebrew they learned from cassette tapes. They cleaned their cemetery and began burying their dead there again. They persisted in their campaign to be recognized as Jews and to be allowed to emigrate to Israel.

Finally, they persuaded Guillermo Bronstein, the chief rabbi of Lima's largest Ashkenazi synagogue, to oversee two large conversions, easing the way for hundreds to move to Israel. The exodus included nearly the entire Levy clan, descended from Joseph Levy, an adventurer who put down stakes here in the 19th century.

Mr. Reátegui Levy, the oil field inspector, moved in 2005 with his wife and six children to Ramla, a dusty city southeast of Tel Aviv. But despite dreaming for decades of such a move, he said he had trouble adjusting to Israeli life.

He said he missed his house with cacao and passion fruit trees, and the status of being a manager at PetroPerú. He murmured something, just audible over the din of this city's thousands of motorcycle rickshaws, about losing the spark of love with his wife.

So, unlike nearly all the Iquiteños who moved to Israel, Mr. Reátegui Levy moved back, alone.

He still attends Shabbat at Mr. Abramovitz's home each week, along with 40 or so other regulars who dream of formally converting and moving to Israel. While their numbers have dwindled, he encourages them and regales them with tales of fertile land in the Golan Heights and the bravery of his eldest son, Uri, who is in the Israeli Army.

But something keeps Mr. Reátegui Levy here in Iquitos, the same decaying jungle city that attracted his great-grandfather from Tangier so many decades ago. "My family, my heart and soul, all that I hold dear are in Israel," he said. "Maybe I am back here for a reason."

Continued (Permanent Link)

Jewish reaction to EU elections

Jews: Far-right gains in Europe alarming

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.

Continued (Permanent Link)

Illegal racist Zionist colonialist settler - Ehav Ever

Here is the sort of Zionist that right thinking (or left thinking) progressive people everywhere will love to exhibit as a racist colonialist western Zionist settler from America intruding on the rights of the oppressed Palestinian people -- the kind of Settler who in media canards is supposed to put on his Kippah and say a blessing before killing an Arab.

As a good right - thinking progressive would see it, Ehav Ever lives in the illegal colonialist Zionist settlement of Maaleh Edumim in the illegally occupied West Bank, next to the illegally occupied Arab city of Arab Jerusalem, which is where Suleiman the Arab Muslim built his temple, right? He is a rich and elitist Electrical Engineering graduate who works for an Israeli hi-tech firm, and he came on Aliya from the United States. The typical Christian Peace Teams stereotype of a male Jew settler. This is clearly the sort of racist colonialist Zionist guy Ken Loach and his friends would love to boycott, especially as Ehav Ever is opposed to a two state solution, which he thinks is besides the point. Go for it!

You can see Ehav Ever's Web log here: Hochma Umusar and you can see his video on Real Zionism too. In the video he explains why Israel belongs to Jewish people.

But in case you are too lazy to check it out (your loss), here's a hint about one fact about Ehav Ever that should be totally irrelevant, but that you might want to know. Here's his picture. When you write your articles and Web logs about the racist Zionist colonialist illegal settlers, be sure to include the picture, so everyone understands your point about racism.

"Zionism is racism" - right?

Ami Isseroff

Continued (Permanent Link)

Progressive anti-Zionist protests against Zionists and the Zionist war

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.

This first fellow has read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so he knows all about us, you see.

---

From: David Briggs gonendunit@sbcglobal.net

To:

Sent: Monday, December 29, 2008 8:55 PM

Subject: Terrorists!!

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.

David Briggs

---

----- Original Message -----

From: stefan60 stefan60@pt.lu

Sent: Monday, December 29, 2008 10:27 PM

Subject: blood and justice

Zionism is a racist murderous ideology.

The times of judgement will come!

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

From: tommy.overkill overkill@yahoo.com

"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.

Ami Isseroff

Continued (Permanent Link)

What Israeli Jews don't get and what American Jews don't get

Another battle in the Jewish wars. See Jewish wars at the GA of United Jewish Communities for the previous one.

Who is right? The one who stops the wars is right, because everyone is hiding something, and everyone is being defensive about something.

Ami Isseroff

Last update - 05:22 28/11/2008
ANALYSIS / What American Jews don't get about Israelis
By Anshel Pfeffer

I am very sorry. I didn't attend last week's General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities, the annual jamboree of North American Jewish federations and organizations. But I have an excuse. My current duties in London meant that I had to cover President Shimon Peres' visit to Britain. No matter, this newspaper was well represented at the GA even without me. Not good enough apparently for many GA delegates. My colleague at the Jerusalem Post, Haviv Rettig, published last Friday an excoriating account of how the leaders of American Jewry were hurt and indignant at the way the Hebrew-speaking media (including the Hebrew edition of Haaretz) appeared to ignore their gathering, which was actually taking place in Jerusalem.

According to Rettig, and I have no reason to disbelieve him, the Americans were so angry that they "lashed out at the Israeli media and society for failing to notice - and learn from [them]." Rettig gathered the responses of the Jewish world reporters on Israel's main newspapers and also called me as an occasional writer on the Israel-Diaspora divide, but I was too busy catching my breath from trying to keep up with Peres' frenetic pace to answer.

Let me therefore use this opportunity to disassociate myself from the disparaging remarks of those reporters who did find the time to answer. Unlike them, I think Israel's media should be extensively covering the affairs of the Jewish world in its many locations and certainly that of the largest Jewish community on earth. (I find the demographers who claim that there are more Jews in the United States more credible than those who say that Israel has more, but that is stuff for another column.)

Let me therefore use this opportunity to disassociate myself from the disparaging remarks of those reporters who did find the time to answer. Unlike them, I think Israel's media should be extensively covering the affairs of the Jewish world in its many locations and certainly that of the largest Jewish community on earth. (I find the demographers who claim that there are more Jews in the United States more credible than those who say that Israel has more, but that is stuff for another column.)

But I would also have said that this is not just the media's fault, but simply a reflection of a much wider gulf existing between Israeli society and the Jews of the world. And though they shoulder a significant portion of the blame, Israelis are not the only ones to have widened this divide. As if to answer the charges, just two days later, Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's most popular tabloid, carried an interview with one of the grandest grandees of the American community, dedicating a full double spread to the fulminations of Edgar Bronfman. Bronfman has just published a book in which he explores the question of Jewish identity in the 21st century and was using the interview to have a go at the religious establishment for their rejection of those who are not halakhically Jewish and who call for the inclusion of anyone calling themselves Jews into the tribe.

Bronfman justified his stance by saying that "Judaism belongs to every Jew. There is no need to belong to any religious stream. No need for belief in God or ceremonies and prayers." All very conventional, but here he had to make this dig: "Many Israelis who describe themselves as secular are effectively cut off from their people's tradition."

I'm not sure Bronfman is the best person to carry this particular torch but I don't want to get in to that right now, nor ask why, in his 30 years as President of the World Jewish Congress, he didn't see fit to address this issue. I am bringing up the interview simply because it illustrates exactly what is it that American Jews don't get about Israelis.

Ironically, Bronfman's complaint against secular Israelis is identical to that made by those very rabbis he so vehemently attacked in his interview; they also believe that the secular Jews are ignorant and have separated themselves from tradition.

A similar view is expressed by some of those interviewed for the report in the Jerusalem Post on indifference to the GA. What is it about secular Israelis that so aggravates these American Jews, many themselves irreligious?

I think deep down it's jealousy. While the Jews in America and other communities have been grappling for decades with the question of how to define a Jewish identity that is not tied down only to religion, secular Israelis simply don't have that problem. Sure, many of them lack a lot of Jewish knowledge and they certainly are not very aware of the Jewish world outside Israel. But they're not very bothered about it, because for them every moment in Israel is passed within a Hebrew speaking Jewish environment.

And that's also why, as some of those interviewed by Rettig said, when secular Israelis go off to the United States, they are not usually very interested in getting to know the local Jewish community. They have lived all their lives among Jews; once they get out of Israel they are looking for something different.

Israel, the Zionist project, was founded exactly for that reason, to serve as a secular Jewish alternative to life in the Diaspora. And while it's far from perfect, for most Israelis, it is still a credible option. They are not blind to its shortcomings, but they are still content with living their Jewish lives here.

And at least on a sub-conscious level, this contentment is galling to many Jews in America and elsewhere, especially those who are struggling to come up with an alternative Jewish life of their own that will be sufficiently attractive to a disinterested young Jewish generation

Continued (Permanent Link)

Christopher Hitchens reviews Denis MacShane on Anti-Semitism

Perhaps this is the highlight:

 

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.

Continued (Permanent Link)

Settler Rabbi Arrested for Incitement

Yeshiva head arrested for 'incitement'

 

Yaakov Katz

The Jerusalem Post

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1226404841467&pagename=JPost%2FJPArti...

Rabbi Yigal Shandrapi, the head of Yeshuat Mordechai Yeshiva, is expected to be brought before the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court on Wednesday for a remand hearing, after police from the Judea and Samaria Division arrested him on Tuesday on suspicion of inciting Jewish youth to riot.

According to the allegations, Shandrapi incited the teenagers two separate cases, the most recent of which occurred two months ago at the Yad Yair outpost, in the West Bank. During that incident, soldiers described being attacked and said that their vehicles were damaged.

Meanwhile, nearly 40 Jewish youth reportedly rampaged through the streets of a Palestinian neighborhood in Hebron overnight Tuesday, puncturing car tires and shattering windows in Arab homes.

The youths were also suspected of spray-painting a Star of David on one of the houses in the area.

While no arrests had been made, police were investigating the incident.

Responding to the latest developments, the chairman of the Knesset Interior Committee, MK Ophir Paz-Pines (Labor), called on Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Public Security Minister Avi Dichter to clamp down on the offenders.

"This is an additional crossing of a red line by organized, dangerous thugs, and it must be responded to with the utmost seriousness and gravity," Paz-Pines said. "The police must immediately initiate a thorough investigation and start a series of arrests in order to put an end to the 'Wild West' in Hebron, and to establish, without hesitation, the rule of law."

Meanwhile, Barak warned on Wednesday that if settlers do not voluntarily evacuate the dispute four-story building in Hebron, known as Beit Hashalom, the defense ministry will evacuate them by force.

Speaking during a tour of the IDF's Hebron brigade, Barak stressed that the evacuation would be carried out by police and that the IDF would provide surrounding support.

Barak also harshly criticized the recent violence and said that any harm inflicted on a soldier or policeman or anyone who represented the state of Israel was a "grave incident which expands the rift which is already harming the gentle fabric of democracy in Israel."

Barak said Israel must "arrest these attackers, punish them with all the severity of the law, since their actions are aimed at undermining the authority of the State."

The defense minister, toured the area with IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi and OC Central Command Maj.-Gen. Gadi Shamni.

Continued (Permanent Link)

Barak: Arab areas in Jerusalem could be Palestinian capital

Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak has said some Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem could become the capital of a future Palestinian state as part of a final peace agreement. This is no different from the formula he offered in 2000. Palestinians continue to insist that Israel has no national rights whatever in East Jerusalem. The late Yasser Arafat amazed American politicians by claiming repeatedly that there had been no Jewish presence in Jerusalem in antiquity. Archeological finds give evidence of the Jewish monarchy as early as King Hezekiah in 700 BC and ancient writers commonly referred to Jerusalem as the former Jewish capital, but Palestinian leaders pretend this evidence does not exist. Arafat's views were frequently seconded by the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Ikremah Sabri.

Prior to 1948, about 5,000 Jews lived in the Jewish quarter of the Old City. The community underwent attrition due to Arab riots in 1929 and 1936. In 1948, the entire community was ethnically cleansed by the Transjordan Legion under the supervision of British officers. East Jerusalem was also the site of the original campus of the Hebrew University, which was reconstituted after 1967. Arab media however, ignore the Jewish connection to East Jerusalem in modern times as well as ancient, and commonly refer to it as "Arab East Jerusalem" on the basis of the 19 year illegal Jordanian occupation.

East Jerusalem is also the site of Masjid Al Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, important Muslim holy places.

Fatah leaders have been promising a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem since the signing of the Oslo accords, though Israel never undertook to cede all of Jerusalem or any of it as part of a peace setltement.

"We can find a formula under which certain neighborhoods, heavily-populated Arab neighborhoods, could become, in a peace agreement, part of the Palestinian capital that, of course, will include also the neighboring villages around Jerusalem," Barak told Al-Jazeera television.

"I'm not sure whether the gaps are close enough," Barak said when asked if a deal was possible this year.

Officially, Israel is not discussing Jerusalem with the Palestinians at all, since the non-Zionist ultraorthodox Shas party insisted they would leave the coalition if any concessions were offered in Jerusalem. Orthodox and ultraorthodox Jews in the United States and Israel, rather than Zionists, are the chief opposition to Israeli compromise on the issue. As long as the Palestinians remain intent on excluding Israel entirely from East Jerusalem, the issue of Israeli compromise is a moot point.

Ami Isseroff

Continued (Permanent Link)

Israel's 12 tribes, per Bradley Burston

Bradley Burston, the Haaretz columnist, sums up Israel as 12 latter-day tribes comprising "the magnificent muck-up that's now about to hit 60." His piece presupposes some familiarity with Israeli politics. Like much of his work, it is amusing and insightful.

Haaretz / Last update - 09:20 25/04/2008
The new tribes of Israel
By Bradley Burston
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/977943.html

My life partner and I once found ourselves on a remote part of the Hawaiian island of Kauai. We got to talking with a calm, perceptive and unusually grounded woman who told us she lived there. When she then asked us where we called home, and we told her Israel, she responded with what seemed to her to be the logical, natural, next question: "Oh ... what tribe are you?"

While we, taken aback, groped for an answer, she told us in a manner as matter-of-fact as an observation about the weather, that she was of the Tribe of Ephraim. Everyone at her church, she continued, knew which tribe they belonged to.

Perhaps the question is harder for us to answer because we no longer see ourselves, as the first 12 Tribes did, as the children of the children of Jacob. The tribes that make up the latter-day State of Israel are, in fact, the remnants of revolution, of a surfeit of concurrent revolutions, in fact. Together those revolutions have built and battered Israel into the magnificent muck-up that's now about to hit 60.

A field guide:

The Tribe of Beitar
Tribal lore blends Polish-Jewish culture of nursing grievances as a way of life, with multigenerational Mizrahi rage at the ghost of Mapai (see below).

Political orientation: Raucously hawkish, but once in power, tends to give away occupied land (for example, Sinai, Gaza, most of Hebron).

Religious orientation: Beitar-odox, a fundamentalist belief in Beitar Jerusalem and the redemptive power of soccer. Sabbath observance may include participation in Orthodox minyan, followed by a chain-smoking convoy drive - yellow-and-black Beitar scarf flying from car windows - to the match of the week.

The Tribe of Mapai
Once the proudly dominant clan, running everything from the Israel Defense Forces to health care to steel production. Now splintered, anemic, rudderless, vestigial, yuppified - barely an extended dysfunctional family.

Political orientation: Once strongly social-democratic. Once strongly dovish.

Identifying characteristics: Equivocation. Nostalgia.

The Tribe of Maran
Named for tribal elder Maran (Revered Rabbi) Ovadia Yosef.

Aim: To restore pride to Jews of Mediterranean and Mideast origin, who often faced discrimination and humiliation at the hands of Mapai.

Political orientation: Tough on religious issues, hard-line though occasionally flexible on matters of defense and diplomacy.

Identifying characteristics: By far the best dressed (and groomed) among the ultra-Orthodox. Not to be confused with the Ashkenazi Tribe of Mamaloshen, too varied (think pro-Gush Emunim to pro-Ahmadinejad) to be detailed here.

The Tribe of Tech
One of the newer clans. Believes in the redemptive power of long hours, innovative ideas, Nasdaq and eventual sale of the company to a global corporation for mega-millions.

Political orientation: Vaguely centrist. Believes in stability and furtherance of peace talks as good for investment and the economy.

Identifying characteristics: Bluetooth implant, polo shirt, car with company logo on back fender and bumper sticker reading "How's my driving?" - but with phone number too small to read when vehicle is traveling at warp speed.

The Tribe of Yesha
Includes many of the some quarter-million Jewish residents of the West Bank, plus a huge number of settler would-have-beens in Jerusalem, Beit Shemesh, Modi'in, Brooklyn and elsewhere.

Political orientation: Vanguard of the religious right, but drifting. Youth are having second thoughts. The disengagement from Gaza shattered faith in the government, the state, the Yesha Council and national Orthodoxy, giving rise to the hardal - the Haredi Leumi amalgam.

The Tribe of Bil'in
A small, poorly organized but vocal clan, with offshoots in South Tel Aviv lofts and elsewhere. Signature ritual is protest against West Bank fence near village of Bi'lin.

Religious orientation: Personal anarchism. Antipathy to Israeli governmental institutions and policies. Antipathy may extend to Zionism as a philosophy, and/or to bourgeois parents.

The Tribe of Kach
The rightist version of the Bil'inist. Feels compulsion to spend all Jewish holidays in Hebron. Feels compulsion to spray-paint "Kahane was right" on all available bus stops.

Political orientation: Far right. Fervent belief in expelling Arabs from Greater Israel. Often characterized by excessive interest in and carrying of large handguns. Tribe has many fellow travelers, notably Women in Green.

Identifying characteristics: Oversized kippot. Oversized earlocks. Oversized sidearms.

The Tribe of Tibi
Israel's Arab minority, perhaps the most difficult grouping to typify, as it is made up of numerous minorities and clans of diverse religions, cultures, and political and social attitudes.

These include Christians, Muslims and Druze, Negev and Galilee Bedouin, IDF officers and firebrand Islamists. Their position also makes them vulnerable to the simultaneous suspicions of fellow Israelis and neighboring Palestinians.

The Tribes of Sheinkin and Bombamela
Two sides of a similar coin, this group - largely native-born Ashkenazi in origin - may tend toward artistic/New Age/yuppie commercial ventures on the one hand, and patchouli-flavored hippie dropout status on the other.

The Tribe of Vesty
More than a million strong, "the Russians," as immigrants from ex-Soviet lands are collectively known, have created a subculture of their own. In some disciplines, notably music, they have brought a level of formality and seriousness, which may put them at odds with the more offhand approach of the native-born.

P.S. After almost two decades here, I still have little idea which tribe is truly mine. Perhaps a little perspective is in order. Perhaps another visit to Kauai.

Continued (Permanent Link)

Anti-Semitic Event - Did it Happen??

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?

1. Letter from Daphna Ziman

Text of Ziman's email


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.""

---

3. Second try at denial, published here

SCLC of Greater Los Angeles Statement

April 9, 2008

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.

Ami Isseroff

Continued (Permanent Link)

Yad Vashem opens Arabic Web site

Teaching about the Holocaust - in Arabic

 

Last update - 19:35 24/01/2008    

 

 Yad Vashem launches Arabic Web site to combat Holocaust denial 

By The Associated Press 

 

The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem on Thursday launched an Arabic version of its Web site, including vivid photos of Nazi atrocities and video of survivor testimony, to combat Holocaust denial in the Arab and Muslim world.

 

Among those featured on the site is Dina Beitler, a survivor of the Nazi genocide that killed 6 million Jews in World War II. Beitler, who was shot and left for dead in a pit of bodies in 1941, recalls her story on the site, with Arabic subtitles.

 

"Holocaust denial in various countries exists, and so it is important that people see us, the Holocaust survivors, that they'll listen to our testimonies, and learn the legacy of the Holocaust - also in Arabic," Beitler, 73, said at Yad Vashem on Thursday.

 

Last year, Yad Vashem presented a similar version of its Web site in Farsi, aimed at Iran, whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has called the Holocaust a myth and said Israel should be wiped off the map. He has also hosted a conference that questioned whether the Holocaust took place.

 

On the Arab street, many are indeed hostile to Israel, but Ahmadinejad's comments stand out as much harsher than those of any mainstream Mideast leaders.

 

A wide range of sentiments toward the Holocaust exists across the Arab world, from simple ignorance about its details to outright denial, to a more complicated belief - often expressed by many Arabs - that the Holocaust did indeed happen but does not justify what is viewed as Israeli persecution of Palestinians.

 

Nazi literature is accessible in many Arab cities and some of the media engage in anti-Semitic incitement. However, even Iran last year permitted the broadcast of a television miniseries that told the tale of an Iranian diplomat in Paris who helped Jews escape the Holocaust - and viewers were riveted.

 

"Still, Holocaust denial is quite common," said Edward Walker, a former ambassador to Israel and Egypt.

 

"Students often write their Ph.D. theses denying the Holocaust," he said. "Children are taught by elders that the Holocaust was a hoax. It's widespread in big universities in Cairo, so that means it's probably as common in the small ones in the rest of the country as well."

 

The problem also exists in Israel.

 

Last March, a poll showed that 28 percent of Israel's Arab citizens did not believe the Holocaust happened, and that among high school and college graduates the figure was even higher - 33 percent.

 

The poll, conducted by Sami Smooha, a prominent sociologist at the University of Haifa, surveyed 721 Arabs and had a margin of error of 3.7 percentage points.

 

Raleb Majadele, Israel's lone Arab Cabinet minister, said the Yad Vashem site was imperative in battling that trend. The Internet is difficult to block with barriers of censorship and hate. "From now on, also Arabic speakers will be able to learn the truth about the Holocaust," he said.

 

Speaking in Hebrew at the ceremony marking the site's launching, he called the Holocaust a horrific act against the Jewish people, but not just against the Jewish people. "It was against humanity, against all nations, against all religions."

 

Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said Arabic-language Holocaust education was long overdue.

 

"Providing an easily accessible and comprehensive Web site about the Holocaust in Arabic is crucial," he said. "We want to offer an alternative source of information to moderates in these countries, to provide them with reliable information."

 

The site also includes chapters about Albanian and Turkish Muslims who risked their lives to save Jews during World War II, a film that documents a recent joint visit of Jews and Arabs to the Auschwitz death camp and a 25-minute video address by Prince Hassan of Jordan.

 

"All the children of Abraham feel a sense of enormous distress at the Holocaust, which afflicted one of the branches of our interlinked family," he said in Arabic.

 

In 2007, Yad Vashem said nearly 7 million people, from more than 200 countries, visited its Web site.

 

Some 56,000 of those came from Muslim countries, including 32,500 from Arabic-speaking countries. Yad Vashem said it hoped the new Arabic site would increase that number drastically and said it had discovered encouraging findings that indicated there was a large demand.

 

On the Net:
Yad Vashem: http://www.yadvashem.org

 

Yad Vashem in Arabic

Source

Continued (Permanent Link)

Irena Sendler: A Polish "Schindler" lady

October 15, 2007
Meet Irena Sendler

October 15, 2007 - Irena Sendler. Are you familiar with the name? Most people may not be. However, by the end of this article, you will see that this is a woman who personifies courage, strength, honor, fortitude and love--traits that most of us, including myself, claim to possess, yet rarely exhibit--to an extent that is simply unfathomable. She is a true warrior; an authentic champion.

You see, Ms. Sendler, who celebrated her 97th birthday earlier this year, can lay claim to the primary role in a story that is as compelling as it is astonishing. As a young, Roman Catholic, Polish woman in 1942, Ms. Sendler defied torture and death at the hands of the Nazis in order to save the lives of 2,500 Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto. In so doing, she single-handedly rescued these children from death--a death that would have followed with 100% certainty--in the Nazi concentration camps of Europe.

In actuality, Ms. Sendler, at the time a social worker in Nazi-occupied Poland, began helping Jews prior to the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto. As a member of the Zegota, an underground council facilitated to assist the Jews, Ms. Sendler took it upon herself to rescue children, since children, along with women, were almost certain to be put to death immediately upon entry into the Nazi death camps. Ms. Sendler, who is not Jewish, went as far as to don the "Star of David" whilst in the Warsaw Ghetto, so as to not draw attention to herself.

Faced with the reality of certain death if her mission became compromised, Ms. Sendler organized the smuggling of 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and into the homes of sympathetic Polish families as well as Catholic convents and orphanages such as the Sisters of the Family of Mary and the Little Servant Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of Blessed Mary. In some cases, Ms. Sendler hand-carried children out of the ghetto herself. The children's identities were never lost. Ms. Sendler kept hidden lists in jars that tracked their original identities alongside their new identities.

Continued here: Meet Irena Sendler

Continued (Permanent Link)

Breaking stereotypes: Muslim defends Jews in subway attack

Muslim saves Jews in subway attack

Published: 12/12/2007

A Muslim saved a group of Jews being attacked on a New York subway in an apparent hate crime.

Hassan Askari, a student at Berkeley College in Manhattan, came to the aid of Walter Adler when he and three friends were attacked on the Q train running between Manhattan and Brooklyn on the night of Dec. 7, according to The Associated Press.

Ten men and women, aged 19 and 20, verbally and physically assaulted Adler and his friends after they wished the assailants "Happy Chanukah" in response to their "Merry Christmas" wish.

Askari, 20, tried to fight off the attackers, which gave Adler time to pull an emergency brake on the Brooklyn-bound train. The assailants were arrested at the next stop.

The attack is being investigated as a hate crime. One of the attackers reportedly had been arrested previously for a hate crime.

"That a random Muslim kid helped some Jewish kids, that's what's positive about New York," Adler, 23, told AP. Adler suffered a broken nose.

Source

Continued (Permanent Link)

Why are American Jewish groups almost mum about Annapolis?

It should be noted that this is not exactly so. The JCPA has made a statement, and both Abe Foxman of ADL and Howard Kohr of AIPAC have written op-eds in favor of Annapolis. But large group has give its official blessing, and the JCPA statement stirred opposition from the Orthodox Union.


Jewish organizations should rally behind Annapolis push for peace

Ori Nir

The call for American Jewish organizations to support the current peace efforts came from an unexpected direction: Israel's Chief Rabbi Yonah Metzger. For years closely associated with the right-wing National Religious Party, Metzger recently asked representatives of American Jewish groups in Washington to "influence the American administration" to do their utmost for the success of the Annapolis peace conference.

He even had a specific idea: American Jewish organizations should use their political influence to arrange for Israeli and Palestinian religious leaders to be present in Annapolis, at the time of the conference, to give the conferees spiritual support.

Israel's chief rabbi was accompanied by the head of the Palestinian Muslim courts as well as by other Jewish, Muslim, and Christian leaders. They all made pleas similar to Rabbi Metzger's, which were very moving. So moving, in fact, that their interlocutors -- representatives of American Jewish organizations -- were too embarrassed to tell the distinguished clerics that America's large national Jewish groups are not even expressing public support for Annapolis. Let alone actively working to make it succeed.

Most American Jewish groups are either silent — or worse, are seeking excuses to avoid supporting this peace effort.

Americans for Peace Now and several other dovish groups publicly endorsed the Annapolis process. But except for them, hardly any Jewish organization has lauded the Bush administration's renewed interest in Israeli-Palestinian peace. Hardly any group has commended Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for his bold statements of commitment to seeking a final settlement with the Palestinians.

When asked by reporters to explain the silence, leaders of the largest national Jewish organizations -- people who are normally happy to voice an opinion on almost anything -- say that it's too early, that the current process is too short on specifics.

Well, it's not. The Annapolis conference is around the corner and its goals, as laid out by Prime Minister Olmert and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, are quite simple:

The idea is to turn the two-state solution from a vision into a reality by relaunching bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Unlike past efforts, however, this one will hopefully be supported by Arab countries and other international stakeholders.

It also offers a "political horizon" for Israelis and Palestinians: a joint commitment, in advance, to address all outstanding "core issues" of the conflict, including borders, the future of Jerusalem, and the future of Palestinian refugees. You can either support this initiative or oppose it. But how can American friends of Israel stay indifferent to it?

Some say that the Annapolis process is not likely to succeed. They may be right. A reasonable dose of skepticism is certainly healthy. But skepticism ought not be an excuse to deny support for this effort. Most mainstream Jewish organizations, as a part of their mission statements, claim to support the policies of the democratically elected government of Israel. By failing to support Israel's current peace policy, these Jewish groups are not only being untrue to their principles. They are also taking part in turning justified skepticism into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is not surprising to see the ultranationalist, dogmatic groups rise in opposition to the peace efforts. The American Jewish extreme right always has resisted and always will resist Israel's efforts to rid itself of its occupation of the west bank.

But where are the centrist, non-messianic, mainstream Jewish groups that say they support Israel's quest for peace?

Earlier this month, in a speech that warmly endorsed the Annapolis process, Prime Minister Olmert called on regional and international leaders to "be open to hope and face the genuine and clear risks and difficulties so that the process may move ahead."

Jewish community leaders are well advised to heed the pleas of Israel's political and spiritual leaders.

Ori Nir is the spokesman for Americans for Peace Now.

source

Continued (Permanent Link)

Catholics: Spanish Inquisition was a myth

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,

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law.

He also said,

Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews.

If Jesus Christ had been in Spain, would he not have been burnt at the stake by the "mythical" Inquisition?

Ami Isseroff

Continued (Permanent Link)

Guess who is a Jew, or is he?

Samuel Schidem is a guide in the Berlin Jewish Museum. He is engaged in Jewish studies and specializes in the Holocaust. He served in the IDF.

 

He says:

 

"I feel Jewish, but the question is, what is a Jew? To me, a Jew is a humanist...

 

But Samuel Schidem is a Druze.  Is this a new model for Judaism, dictated by the reality of Israel's existence?

 

A Druze Jew? If you will, it is no legend.

 

Ami Isseroff 

 

Continued (Permanent Link)

A new approach for Zionism?

Headline:
Firing Up The Unaffiliated

Can this be the way to get young Jewish people interested in Israel and Judaism?


What it is about...

How a small Israel advocacy group is having a big impact on secular Jewish twenty-somethings.
Jewish Week

Gary Rosenblatt - Editor And Publisher

Alexa Silverman, a 20-year-old student at Hofstra University, describes herself as a secular Jew who "had a problem with the way Judaism was taught" when she was young.

Benjamin Turk, 27 and working in sales, was raised Reform and was a counselor at a Zionist summer camp, but says that even then he was "skeptical" about Israel and its actions.

Katherina (Katt) Guttman, 28, with a career in fitness management, grew up in Staten Island, where she was "always proud to be Jewish but didn't know why."

For the American Jewish community, the quest to reach people like Silverman, Turk and Guttman — young adults who are unaffiliated or on the margins when it comes to identifying with Israel, Judaism and communal activities — has become the modern-day Impossible Dream. Every synagogue, federation and Jewish organization wants them. But most young people just aren't interested — or worse.

"In sharp contrast to their parents and grandparents, non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders," noted sociologists Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman in a new study called "Beyond Distancing: Young Adult American Jews and Their Alienation From Israel." What's more, the authors conclude that "mounting indifference to Israel" has grown into "genuine alienation" for many young Jews who "profess a near-total absence of any positive feelings about Israel."

More than half of those under 35 surveyed did not agree with the statement that "Israel's destruction would be a personal tragedy."

All the more reason why our community should be paying more attention to a little-known success story, a low-budget, nonprofit group based in New York called Fuel For Truth (www.fuelfortruth.org), which has made impressive strides in making pro-Israel advocates and activists out of primarily secular, disaffected Jews between the ages of 18 and 34.

Among its most fervent volunteers are Silverman and Turk, who spend hours each week recruiting new members or planning events. And Guttman left her job last year to work full time as Fuel For Truth's director of operations.

What's the secret formula? No magic, say the group's leaders, but rather an emphasis on creating a strong social network built on volunteerism, seeking leadership types with good communication and organizational skills, and instilling in them a passion for the Zionist cause.

9/11 Impetus

Fuel For Truth was founded six years ago by Jonathan Loew, now 36, and about a dozen friends, all secular, who were upset at the negative media portrayal of Israel during the second intifada. They had been talking about starting a group to educate their peers about Israel, but the 9/11 attack gave them the sense of urgency to move forward.

"We realized the clear connection between the enemies of the U.S. and of Israel," said Loew, an investment banker with a background in media, "and we accelerated our planning."

Group members started visiting college campuses in the Northeast, looking for students who were popular socially, and asked them to help plan a social event on campus that mixed music and alcohol with small doses of "basic information" about the Mideast conflict, beginning with the notion that Israel is a democracy that has been rebuffed repeatedly in its efforts to make peace with its Arab neighbors.

The organizers were amazed at how little the Jewish students knew about Israel or Judaism.

"We asked them how many Jews there were in the world, where the word Jew comes from, where Israel is on the map," recalled Loew, "and they just didn't know. It was really sad when they would tell us, `I just learned more in 15 minutes about Israel and Judaism than what I've learned in my whole life.'"

Based on the campus response, Fuel For Truth expanded and started holding social events with 500 to 1,000 young people or more in popular Manhattan clubs once or twice a year, in addition to holding events at seven colleges in the Northeast.

Operating with a modest budget ($250,000, mostly from individual donors), the group now has two full-time employees, and its eight volunteer committees handle fundraising, recruitment and information for its 200 active members.

Several years ago Fuel For Truth added a "Boot Camp" program for 20 select volunteers — 10 consecutive Tuesday nights of three-hour educational sessions to train future leaders of the group, many of whose recruits have gone on birthright israel trips.

At a recent Boot Camp session, held on the second floor of a hip East Side restaurant, the participants heard from a young Mideast scholar at Harvard, who offered a 20-minute "crash course" on Israel's wars since 1948. Then a non-Jewish Green Beret veteran of recent combat in Iraq spoke passionately about the need for Israel and the U.S. to respond to their militant Islamic enemies pre-emptively.

"Stop sleeping," he warned. "The war is on, and they're out to get us."

The mood of the evening was a curious mix of relaxed informality, a macho emphasis on Jewish strength and Zionist indoctrination, with tips given by group leaders on how to organize fundraising events to support Fuel For Truth (a requirement) and how to make Israel advocacy points in conversations with peers while avoiding unpleasant confrontations or arguments. After the sessions, many of the participants go out for a beer together.

Zionism Lite?

"We teach them social advocacy first," says Joe Richards, 34, a former actor and friend of Loew's who is now the full-time executive director of Fuel For Truth. "You need to establish social relations with people before you can introduce political advocacy." His advice is part communications skills, part educational techniques — like smiling, making eye contact, being a good listener and avoiding confrontations.

"Always have a message triangle of three solid facts you want to get across," he told the Boot Campers. For example, Israel is a democracy, Arabs living in Israel have more rights than those living in Arab countries and the PLO was founded to "liberate Palestine" three years before Israel captured any Arab land in the 1967 war.

Richards also advised the group to spend five minutes in social settings presenting five facts about Israel to five people, and then change the subject. "Don't overdo it," he said.

Some critics point to the social aspects of Fuel For Truth and its bite-sized educational approach and dismiss it as Zionism Lite. But research analyst Frank Luntz, in a report for the group on its impact, found that "you are filling a void that no other Jewish organization has filled," most notably in attracting young people with little previous knowledge of or interest in Israel.

"You have engaged new people in new ways," he wrote, noting that most members don't attend synagogue. "You are clearly reconnecting disconnected Jews with Israel, and that may well be the first step to reconnecting them on other levels as well."

Such praise makes founder Loew all the more frustrated with the relative lack of financial support his group has received from major foundations. He wonders why those who are spending millions of dollars to verify that young Jews are feeling alienated toward Israel aren't recognizing Fuel For Truth's unique approach to dealing with the problem.

"We make them [young Jews] confront their own ignorance and their own self-doubts. We lead them in a direction, but they choose their own paths," he said, adding that unlike most Jewish groups, Fuel For Truth plays hard to get.

"When young people are begged to join a group, they won't do it. But if it's exclusive, they want to be in. We turn it around and say, `We have a great organization and we'd like to know what you'll bring to it.'"

Volunteers must work their way up the ranks through attending Boot Camp or showing other leadership skills. Loew is critical of organizations that "tell inexperienced 22-year-olds to join as Young Leaders."

"The volunteer aspect is key for us," said Guttman, who said she came to work for Fuel For Truth because she felt she could have a significant impact on people. "If we don't reach our members, then we're nothing."

While there is no one silver bullet for inspiring uninvolved Jewish young people, it's clear that Fuel For Truth is onto something. American Jewish organizations and foundations would do well to sit up and take notice.

© 2000 - 2002 The Jewish Week, Inc.

Continued (Permanent Link)

An open letter to Christiane Amanpour

 

An open letter  to Christiane Amanpour From Maurice Ostroff

August 26, 2007

Dear Christiane Amanpour

God's Warriors

Your mammoth three-part documentary "God's Warriors" is certainly a magnum opus. And while I admire the sheer professionalism of your presentation, I do hope you will accept the following comments in the constructive manner intended.

Please correct me if I err, but the program creates the impression that you do not see Islamic fundamentalist violence as more serious a threat than enthusiastic, or even zealous devotion to Judaism or Christianity.

This impression is confirmed by your responses to comments posted on CNN web site. For example in response to Regina Bowling of Charleston, who said she believes we are watching the gathering up of energy worldwide in the form of religious intolerance for the "perfect storm" of global holy war, you replied that you don't see right now the potential for global holy war. This despite 9/11, the London bombings and attempted bombings and other glaring incidents including the world-wide violence that erupted in the Danish Cartoon episode

The program also creates the impression that you believe there is no difference between God's Jewish, Muslim and Christian Warriors and that the Moral Majority and Evangelists are as dangerous as Islamic Fundamentalists. This was confirmed when you replied to Ms. Bowling that as long as people believe that only their holy book [Koran, Torah or Bible] or only their holy word matters and is relevant, then there will be no solution. (Words in parenthesis are mine).

It was disappointing to find in a purportedly objective program that you injected your own views, demonstrating occasional lack of knowledge. For example when an Israeli settler said God says Jews must live in Hebron, you interjected that the West Bank was designated by the UN to be the largest part of an Arab state.  Not only is this statement factually incorrect, it is out of context. May I ask whether you are aware that all Arab states rejected UN partition resolution 181 and that the West Bank was included in the area designated for encouragement of Jewish settlement by the Balfour Declaration and even endorsed in article 6 of the British mandate.

In retrospect I hope you will agree that the use of the very few isolated incidents of Jewish terror attempts over the past 15 years, created the erroneous impression that a religious Jewish terror movement exists on a par with the violent worldwide jihadist phenomenon of indiscriminate death and destruction.  Objectivity would require that you draw attention to the enormous difference between Islamic states which encourage terror and Israel which acts vigorously against attempts to engage in terror and where those very few Jews who did make attempts have been severely punished.

The relevance of God's Warriors to the so-called Jewish lobby in the USA is flimsy indeed.  It is difficult to accept your objectivity when you allow Jimmy Carter and Professor Mearsheimer to promote their controversial books that have been criticized by experts for blatant inaccuracies, without offering a balanced viewpoint from someone like Alan Dershowitz.

Surely you, of all people know that the Jewish Lobby is but one of dozens of diverse influential lobbies, including the ACLU and the very powerful, well-funded Arab lobbies that are part of the Washington scene.

Your repeated references to settlements as illegal are open to valid criticism. Obviously the most reliable sources from whom to seek clarification are the persons who played key roles in drafting the relevant resolution 242, namely British Ambassador to the UN, Lord Caradon, American Ambassador, Arthur Goldberg and US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, Eugene Rostow. All have agreed that settlements are legal. In an interview in the Beirut Daily Star on June 12, 1974, Lord Caradon stated:  "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967 because these positions were undesirable and artificial".

Professor Julius Stone, one of the twentieth century's leading authorities on the Law of Nations concurred that the Jewish right of settlement in the territories is equivalent in every way to the right of the existing Palestinian population to live there.

What must deeply concern everyone interested in maintaining Western democracy is the danger that this widely advertised documentary diverts attention from the real threat of Jihad, by equating it with non-violent religious movements.

Sorely missing from the entire series is any mention of the basic motivator of Islamic violence, the incitement to hatred emanating from state media as well as openly from mosques, not only in Arab countries but under the noses of European and British governments. As human beings, can we be unperturbed by the indoctrination of infants to become suicidal Warriors as shown in an interview with a three-and-a-half year old girl broadcast on Iqra? See video clip at http://tinyurl.com/kz5of

It is sad that in your documentary which could serve to create a genuine better understanding of the violence generated by religious zealotry, the authoritative voices of many experts in the field were omitted.

Among the many who would have added authoritative insight into the subject are Brigitte Gabriel, who lectures nationally and internationally about terrorism and who has issued an Urgent Warning to the West, Professor Salim Mansur the Muslim writer and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario, Steven Emerson the internationally recognized expert on militant Islamic terrorism and national security and Dr. Khaleel Mohammed, the Islamic law specialist and professor of Religion at San Diego State University.

....

Your considered response would be appreciated.

Maurice Ostroff

Continued (Permanent Link)

Pakistani Minister: Jews behind 9/11;Muslims, Jews and Christians cannot be friends

Pakistan's Federal Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, Dr Sher Afgan Niazi, (no that's not a misprint, there is an "i" in the name) claims he knows who is at fault for the 9/11 attacks:

The minister said that events which followed the 9/11 incident proved that it was the brainchild of Jews. He said that according to holy Quran, Jews and Christians could never be friends of Muslims.

Them Jews will do it every time, right? Of course, if a Christian or a Jew had said they could never be friends of Muslims, there would be hell to pay, and churches and synagogues would be burnt to the ground.

Remember, after Musharraf, the Niazis will probably take over in Pakistan.

Ami Isseroff

Continued (Permanent Link)

Ethnic cleansing of Jews in pre-state Israel

Seth Frantzman, a doctoral student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has compiled a survey showing that Arabs killed 1,256 Palestinian Jews between the United Nations Palestine partition vote Nov. 29, 1947, and the outbreak of war May 15, 1948.

Frantzman presents the data, drawn from newspaper archives, in an article disputing anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappe's contention that Jews committed ethnic cleansing against Arabs during the birth of Israel.

Frantzman writes: "Sixty-two Jews were murdered by Arabs in the first week after the UN partition plan was passed, and by May 15, 1948, a total of 1,256 Jews had been killed, most of them civilians. These deaths were caused by Arab militias, gangs, terrorists and army units which attacked every place of Jewish inhabitation in Palestine."

"Even before the first Arab villages were captured in April, 924 Jews had already been killed," he adds.

Franzman suggests that the eventual Jewish victory might have been less sweeping if the Arabs had not carried out across-the-board attacks throughout the Yishuv in 1947-48.

"As it was," he writes, "the ceaseless attacks against all isolated Jewish settlements only gave Zionist commanders every reason to see neighboring Arab villages as threatening and to act accordingly."

He concludes: "Scholarship - including that of the 'new historians' - on the 1948 war will remain incomplete until methodical studies are carried out about widespread and often well-planned Arab assaults on the Yishuv."

Frantzman's article is titled "Ethnic cleansing in Palestine?" It appeared in The Jerusalem Post on Aug. 17. The text follows.

---

The Jerusalem Post, Aug. 17, 2007
Guest Columnist: Ethnic cleansing in Palestine?
by Seth Frantzman
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1186557466176&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

As negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority aimed at creating a Palestinian state willing to live side-by-side with Israel in peace resume, one of the major sticking points continues to be the Arab refugee issue. Bitter arguments among politicians and scholars continue to surround the creation of the refugee problem during Israel's War of Independence in 1948.

It has become fashionable in recent decades to frame the 1948 war as one in which the Arabs were victims of Zionist aggression. Anti-Zionist scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Rashid Khalidi and Ilan Pappe have presented the war as if the only important events were Deir Yassin and the flight or expulsion of Arabs from Haifa, Acre, Tiberias, west Jerusalem, Jaffa and numerous villages.

IN THIS context, Ilan Pappe's work deserves special attention. He was born to a German Jewish family in Haifa in 1954. The former senior lecturer in the University of Haifa's Department of Political Science recently announced he was moving to the UK because it had become "increasingly difficult to live in Israel" with his "unwelcome views and convictions."

These views are those of the "new historians" - leftist scholars who in the 1980s began to reinterpret Israeli and Palestinian history. He is the author of six works on the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict and the Middle East. In his recently released book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappe claims that Israel prepared a special plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine's Arab population known as Plan D for dalet. Pappe's "evidence" is derived from his interpretations of files found in the Hagana and Israel state archives.

One of his most damning pieces of evidence is the village surveys carried out by the Hagana's intelligence units. These surveys go into minute detail about many Arab villages, including the number of armed men, the mukhtar and any anti-Jewish activity in the village. Pappe lends further evidence to his thesis by showing that Jewish forces, whether Hagana, Irgun or Lehi, attacked Arab villages even before the declaration of the state on May 15, 1948.

But Pappe makes one egregious mistake. He never bothers to ask the same question of the Arabs he does of the Jews: What about their lists, their intelligence reports and their ethnic-cleansing plans? What were Arab intentions in the five months between the passage of the UN partition plan on November 29, 1947, and the birth of Israel?

THE ARCHIVES of The Palestine Post, now The Jerusalem Post and then the newspaper of record of Mandatory Palestine, provide some of the answers and tell a very different story from the one presented by Pappe.

Sixty-two Jews were murdered by Arabs in the first week after the UN partition plan was passed, and by May 15, 1948, a total of 1,256 Jews had been killed, most of them civilians. These deaths were caused by Arab militias, gangs, terrorists and army units which attacked every place of Jewish inhabitation in Palestine.

The attacks succeeded in placing Jerusalem under siege and eventually cutting off its water supply. All Jewish villages in the Negev were attacked, and Jews had to go about the country in convoys. In every major city where Jews and Arabs lived in mixed neighborhoods the Jewish areas came under attack. This was true in Haifa's Hadar Hacarmel as well as Jerusalem's Old City.

Massacres were not uncommon.

THIRTY-NINE Jews were killed by Arab rioters at Haifa's oil refinery on December 30, 1947. On January 16, 1948, 35 Jews were killed trying to reach Gush Etzion. On February 22, 44 Jews were murdered in a bombing on Jerusalem's Rehov Ben-Yehuda. And on February 29, 23 Jews were killed all across Palestine, eight of them at the Hayotzek iron foundry.

Thirty-five Jews were murdered during the Mount Scopus convoy massacre on April 13. And 127 Jews were massacred at Kfar Etzion on May 15, 1948, after 30 others had died defending the Etzion Bloc.

IN ARAB countries more than 100 Jews were also massacred and synagogues were burned in Aleppo and Aden, driving thousands of Jews from their homes.

Back in Palestine many small kibbutzim were subjected to attacks, including Gvulot, Ben-Shemen, Holon, Safed, Bat Yam and Kfar Yavetz - all in December. In January and February, it was the turn of Rishon Lezion, Yehiam, Mishmar Hayarden, Tirat Zvi, Sde Eliahu, Ein Hanatziv, Magdiel, Mitzpe Hagalil and Ma'anit.

In March and April these attacks culminated with an assault on Hartuv by 400 Arabs based in the village of Ishwa and an attack on Kfar Darom by members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Arab attackers also bombed The Palestine Post in February. In March, the Jewish Agency, the Solel Boneh building in Haifa and an Egged bus were also bombed.

SOME OF today's scholars prefer to present every massacre of Jews as a "response" to some Jewish deed, and to portray as a "myth" the very idea that Israel struggled desperately for existence in 1948.

But it was no myth.

The fact is 1,256 Jews were killed in five months. Even before the first Arab villages were captured in April, 924 Jews had already been killed. Ilan Pappe should have pondered what might have been if those Jews had not been slaughtered.

What if attacks and riots had not been the first Arab reaction to the partition plan?

Plan Dalet was a plan, it was one of many plans. The lists compiled by the Hagana had been cobbled together for a decade before 1948, but they were not blueprints - merely intelligence assessments. The British also kept lists of everything; they knew about weapons in various kibbutzim, about the Hagana and illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine. Those lists weren't blueprints for ethnic cleansing anymore than were the Hagana files on Arab villages.

When a Jewish area was overrun - and some were - the homes were looted or destroyed and any survivors were killed, as at Kfar Etzion (only three of the defenders survived the massacre).

The potential for the ethnic cleansing of Jewish Palestine was never realized because of the discipline, determination and sheer luck of the Yishuv.

If the Arabs had not carried out across the board attacks throughout the Yishuv between 1947 and 1948, perhaps the nature of the subsequent Jewish victory would have been different. As it was, the ceaseless attacks against all isolated Jewish settlements only gave Zionist commanders every reason to see neighboring Arab villages as threatening and to act accordingly.

Scholarship - including that of the "new historians" - on the 1948 war will remain incomplete until methodical studies are carried out about widespread and often well-planned Arab assaults on the Yishuv.
---
The writer is in the doctoral program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His master's thesis was on the 1948 war.

Continued (Permanent Link)

Avram Burg: always interesting, not always right

A Chinese curse: "May you lead an interesting life." Avram Burg is always interesting, because he makes sure to be interesting. Let's face it, unless you make noisy and atrocious statements, you cannot attract much publicity for matters related to Judaism, Zionism, etc. B*O*R*I*N*G.

 

Therefore Burg tries not to bore us. Avram Burg is the P.T. Barnum of Jewish affairs, or he is trying to be. If he is not comparing Zionists to Nazis, he is comparing Ahmed Yassin to orthodox rabbis. In Time to attack he calls for war against fanatics essentially. "Death to all fanatics," quoth Burg, in particular orthodox fanatics of all different religions. He is willing to take a gratuitous swipe at evangelical Christians (or his idea of evangelical beliefs) as well as orthodox Jewish fanatics. The essence of his argument:

 

There is no theological difference between certain rabbis from Hebron, the former Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and the evangelical preacher hoping for Armageddon at the site of our Megiddo. Those who say that "God's law is first" are no different from one another, whether they wear a rabbi's skullcap, Hezbollah's turban or the cloak of a North American spiritual leader. They are all engaged in a cruel battle against me. They are the enemies of freedom and democracy, and are hostile to liberty, equality and the status of women.

It is remarkably like what I wrote in Soldiers who refuse orders. But Burg is also wrong. There are two or three differences between Ahmed Yassin and the hypothetical evangelical preacher hoping for Armageddon:

 

1- Ahmed Yassin was willing to use, and did use, violent methods to secure his goals. Thus far, only one or two deranged people tried to use violent methods to bring about the Christian Armageddon.

 

2- Yassin wanted to kill me. People like John Hagee want to defend me. From my subjective point of view, that is a very different goal.

 

2- Like many orthodox Jews, Burg has a stereotyped view of Christian supporters of Israel. He thinks, apparently, that all evangelicals are supporters of Israel, and he thinks that all people who believe in Armageddon want to bring it on actively by committing violent acts. These are all misconceptions about Christian Zionism.

 

Burg starts out to answer the same question that I answered in Soldiers who refuse orders:

 

The latest equation bridges between draft-dodgers and the soldiers who refuse to evacuate homes in Hebron. On the face of it, we have draft-dodgers - the left-wing bleeding hearts from greater Tel Aviv - and evacuation refuseniks - nationalistic and idealistic, but "a little" too extreme, too patriotic and too religious. And we are in the middle: We live outside Tel Aviv, but not in Hebron; we want peace but are not prepared to pay the Arabs the price. Instead of being flooded with concern over the fanatics and rabbis who have penetrated the fabric of Israeli statehood like cancerous cells, we have created an equation. We were furious for two days, we condemned them - and we went on our merry way. Everything is balanced, thank God.

But Burg has a different answer. He gives a free, blanket pass to all draft evaders, it seems, but a blanket condemnation of all right wing protest:

 

After the waves of demagoguery, spin and media opportunism have passed, it will become clear that this equation is extremely dangerous, because it releases us from dealing with this country's unruly elements. The more we ignore the cancer of rabbinical nationalism, the closer and more concrete the mortal danger is. The real equation is between the refuseniks of Hebron and their foundation in Torah - and Hamas, Hezbollah, Christian fundamentalists and their fanatic brethren.

And after that, he never mentions the leftist refuseniks again. I agree that protest that is not anchored in democracy is dangerous. But  protest that aims to destroy the state is equally dangerous, even if it claims to be "democratic." The Bilin protestors and the refuseniks (those who refuse to be drafted) are not against this or that policy of the Israeli government. They are against Israel as a state of the Jewish people. They are against the Zionist idea. They don't get a free pass under the rubric of "democratic protest." They should not pass Go. They don't collect $200 either.

 

On the other hand, the equally dangerous rabbis and refuseniks of the right do not get a free pass either. And neither do the anti-Zionist Haredi draft evaders. They should not pass "Go." But somehow, they manage to collect a great deal more than $200 from our tax money to finance activities that are subversive to democracy and to Zionism, and undermine the state as surely as the anti-Zionists of the left. Nobody should get a free pass just because we like their stand on a particular issue. That includes Burg and his immoral use of pensions and drivers granted him as ex-head of the Jewish Agency.

 

Ami Isseroff

 

 

Continued (Permanent Link)

Barak versus the ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers

The article states:

11% received exemptions this year on grounds of being ultra-Orthodox, an increase of 1% over last year.

As it is Jerusalem Post, we can assume that they mean that last year there were 10% ultra-Orthodox exemptions, and this year there were 11%. That is an increase of about 10%, not 1%.

 

For our mathematicians: assume that the number of ultraorthodox increases at the rate of 10% of current ultra-orthodox draft dodgers each year. In what year will all draftees be exempt because they are all ultra-orthodox, unfit or abroad? Now assume that there is a non-induction induction effect. By that I mean that for each ten ultra-orthodox draft dodgers, there will be 3 or 4 non-ultra-orthodox who decide they aren't going to be suckers: if the ultra-orthodox don't go to the army, why should they serve? Can you imagine the absurdity of the fact that Druze youth volunteer to serve in the army of the Jewish state, while ultra-orthodox Jews do not? Can someone explain how and why this is justified? Can you explain why a kibbutznik who belongs to peace now should be guarding settlements, while an ultra-orthodox Shas or United Torah Judaism voter who insists that Israel must never give up a millimeter of the occupation is busy making believe he is studying the Talmud?

 

There is a solution however.  "Medically unfit" includes those who died before age 18 - we can start drafting the dead as well as the quick.

 

For the rest of us, an easy question: If it costs NIS 40,000 (currently - soon to be increased) to pay university tuition for one future Israeli engineer, how much does it cost to pay tuition for 100 ultraorthodox draft dodgers? Answer NIS 0. Yeshiva tuition is paid for.

 

The Israeli government can hardly complain, since they promulgated the Tal law. It is impossible that the majority of Israelis support this unfair, suicidal law, and yet periodically it is renewed, the monstrous offspring of incestuous coalitions.

 

Ami Isseroff

 

Barak: Draft dodging a security threat

Yaakov Katz, THE JERUSALEM POST Jul. 30, 2007

Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned Monday that the growing number of youth who dodge the IDF draft will eventually harm national security and turn the IDF from a "people's army" into an "army of half the people."

"When a soldier who goes out to the battlefield feels like a sucker, this harms national security," Barak said during a conference at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security in memory of Ha'aretz military commentator Ze'ev Schiff who passed away last month.

Barak said that Israel needed to return to the days when military service was something to be proud of and draft dodgers carried the mark of Cain. Barak added that Israel's true heroes were those who served in the IDF.

Burning Issues: The Tal Law and IDF non-enlistment

"A society under an existential threat will only know how to survive if it respects those who defend it," he said.

Ahead of the August draft, the IDF reported damning statistics showing a sharp rise in the number of teenagers dodging military service. The total reaches 25 percent of youth born in 1989 and scheduled to enlist in the IDF this summer.

Of the 25%, some 11% received exemptions this year on grounds of being ultra-Orthodox, an increase of 1% over last year. Seven percent did not enlist for medical reasons, including physical and mental conditions. Four percent did not enlist because of criminal records, and 3% live abroad.

Barak further blasted university lecturers and employers who do not accommodate students or workers who are called up for reserve duty.

"I wonder what Schiff would have said about the delegitimization that military service has been granted by elements in Israeli society starting with university lecturers who don't find solutions for students who miss exams due to reserve duty," Barak said.   

Continued (Permanent Link)

American Jews: Impaled on the horns of a dilemma?

Yair Sheleg writes that the dilemma of American Jews is a conflict between liberal values and Jewish identity. Jews cannot oppose mixed marriages for example, because this would conflict with liberal values. Jews cannot accept US government support for Jewish education, because it would threaten separation of Church and state.

 

But the reality is that opposition to mixed marriages would not do any good, because people who have decided on a mixed marriage have often already declared their choice. They have put themselves outside the voluntary coercive framework of "institutional" Judaism and they will not be influenced by the institutional version of the irate old country patriarch, any more than the daughter of Tevye the Milkman was deterred from marrying a Russian. Sometimes, if their mate becomes Jewish, there is no conflict with Jewish identity, but that is a personal decision that is beyond the scope of Jewish instiutions and beyond their control. Sheleg's proposal is like saying that Jewish institutions are conflicted about whether or not to control the weather or stop aging. They can't do much about either, so there is no real dilemma.

 

The real dilemmas of American Jews are elsewhere. In the first place, they each have to decide if they want to remain Jews or not and balance all the advantages and disadvantages of the decision to accept their cultural, national and religious heritage as they see fit. 

 

No community can make that decision. In America this is a matter of conscience that is up to the individual. If an individual decides that remaining Jewish is important, then they will find a way to include this in their personal choices. But if being Jewish only consists of eating bagels and lox and making bad jokes in corrupted Yiddish, there is no chance that many will give up the complete American dream or the mate of their dreams in order to be Jewish. Likewise, if being Jewish consists of wearing a fur hat in summer and poring over ancient law books in Aramaic, that isn't going to attract many American Jews. Are any of these attributes essential for Judaism? Did Moses wear a shtraymel? Did King David know the Talmud and the Sulkhan Aruch?  Did Jacob eat bagels and speak Yiddish? The essentials of Judaism are social ethics, monotheism in religion, and attachment to Israel. Bagels, kippot and all the other trappings were added at a later date, or are added to remind Jews of the important issues,  and they are incidental.  

 

The second dilemma is that of the Jewish community. They have to decide whether they are going to continue traditions and approaches that failed to stop assimilation in 19th century Europe and are totally anachronistic in the twenty-first century, or whether they are going to adapt to a new reality and provide individuals with an attractive vision of Jewish life and ethics, and an attractive path to Judaism. The former policy will ensure that more and more individuals will choose assimilation. "Stay Jewish or else!" is not going to work. The latter policy will help ensure the continuation of Jewish life in the United States and Canada.  It is between control, hypocrisy and obscurantism on the one hand, and positive adaptation on the other, and it is a no - brainer, not a real dilemma.

 

The Book of Ruth  tells the story of how Ruth the Moabite became part of Israel and the Jewish people. The book of Ezra and Nehemiah on the other hand, declares that Moab and Amalek cannot be part of Israel and enjoin the Jews to divorce their foreign wives. So there are at least two traditions in Judaism about intermarriage - going back over two thousand years, and not one "hallowed" tradition, as some would have you believe.

 

The real dilemma of American Jewish leadership is between the book of Ruth and the book of Ezra and Nehemiah. There can't be a conflict between liberal values and Jewish identity, because "Jewish identity" is meaningless if it is not a free personal choice, and if it is not liberal, it is not Judaism.

 

Ami Isseroff

Continued (Permanent Link)

American Jews: The Pity of it all

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?

 

Ami Isseroff

 

Continued (Permanent Link)

Hezbollah: Dissent over the party of God

"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.

Ami Isseroff


The London Review of Hezbollah
By Eugene Goodheart
Dissent Magazine
Winter 2007
(excerpted)

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 Party—for 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).

Continued (Permanent Link)

Holocaust Education in UK: Clarifying rumors and hoaxes

(January 2008 update - the UK Holocaust Education Hoax lives on in a "new improved" version - http://zionism-israel.com/israel_news/2008/01/pernicious-uk-holocaust-education.html)

Here is further, and authoritative, information about the UK Holocaust education rumors. I wrote about the UK stops Holocaust Education hoax here:

http://zionism-israel.com/israel_news/2007/04/politically-correct-in-uk-avoid.html

The hoax doesn't seem to be going away however. I have gotten three of these letters thus far since I wrote about it last.

The letter below attempts to clarify the rumors that UK schools have stopped teaching about the Holocaust. These rumors are being deliberately encouraged by a hoax email that claims that "recently this week" it was announced that UK schools will stop teaching about the Holocaust, for fear of offending Muslims.

This is a pointless and vicious hoax. Please do not forward such letters. If you get a UK Holocaust education hoax letter, please send the originator this message with the information below, and ask them to send this message back to the people who sent it to them.

Thank you.

Ami Isseroff

16th April 2007

Dear Friend,

Over the past weeks there have been a number of rumours circulating via email regarding Holocaust education here in the UK. The emails suggest that the UK Government are removing Holocaust education from the National Curriculum and that in general British schools steer away from teaching what they might consider, a 'controversial' subject. We want to make it clear that our understanding is the Holocaust is and will continue to be on the National Curriculum and therefore continue to be taught in all UK schools.

Background

These rumours stemmed from a piece that featured in a number of newspapers including the Daily Mail, Guardian and The Telegraph at the beginning of April. See the following links:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=445979&in_page_id=1770&ito=newsnow;

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/04/02/nschools02.xml;

http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2048161,00.html

The news stories came about as a result of a report commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and undertaken by the Historical Association. The report, 'Challenges and Opportunities for Teaching Emotive and Controversial History 13-19 (TEACH)', addresses both the challenges teachers face, as well as the good practise that is occurring when teaching all emotive and controversial historical issues such as: Slavery, the Crusades and the Holocaust. The full TEACH report is available on the HA website: http://www.haevents.org.uk/PastEvents/Others/Teach%20report.pdf

In light of this story the Holocaust Educational Trust would like to clarify what to our knowledge is the situation in the UK.

Holocaust Education in the UK:

1. * The Holocaust became part of the National Curriculum for History in 1991. It is statutory for all students in England and Wales to learn about the Holocaust at Key Stage 3 usually in Year 9 History (aged 13 -14).
2. * Many students will study the Holocaust in Religious Studies, English and Citizenship lessons.
3. * The UK holds a national Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27th (marking the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau), and this is marked widely in primary and secondary schools across the country.
4. * The UK has a permanent Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London, visited by 1000s of people each year.
5. * The British Government sponsors two students (16 – 18 year olds) per secondary school/ further education college to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau through the Holocaust Educational

   Trusts Lessons from Auschwitz Programme (This is due to a £1.5 million grant from the Government every year from 2006-2008)

6. * School groups and private individuals visit the permanent Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, the Jewish Museum, London, and The Holocaust Centre, Beth Shalom in Newark and educational establishments work with resources and educational programmes provided by other important organisations such as the Anne Frank Trust (UK), London Jewish Cultural Centre, and the Wiener Library.
7. * Teacher training ensures that 100s of newly qualified teachers are provided with skills and materials to ensure effective Holocaust education for their students.
8. * Existing teachers participate in training around the UK, and specialist programmes run by

   Holocaust education organisations including the Holocaust Educational Trust, Imperial War

   Museum and Beth Shalom.

   Within the TEACH report from the Historical Association, there is one particular line relating to Holocaust education which has been the focus of the press and various alarmed emails. It features in the section addressing why teachers avoid teaching certain subjects and states:

   '.. a history department in a northern city recently avoided selecting the Holocaust as a topic for GCSE coursework for fear of confronting anti-Semitic (sic) sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils'. (p 15)

   The key points regarding this statement are:

9. * This does not refer to Holocaust education on the National Curriculum - it is a post- 14 History GCSE course (publicly examined course)
10. * History at GCSE is not compulsory (only a 1/3 of pupils opt for history post-14)
11. * This is an anecdotal response from one teacher in one school out of 4500 secondary schools in the UK. While we cannot say what happens in every single school, our understanding is that this is highly unusual and not general practise of teachers around the country.
12. * All schools can choose which history topics they wish to study for coursework at GCSE level.
13. * There is no suggestion that this or any other school is failing to cover the National Curriculum in teaching about the Holocaust at Key Stage 3, Year 9 (age 13 – 14).

At no point does the report from the Historical Association suggest that the Holocaust be removed from the National Curriculum for England and Wales.

Obviously we and all Holocaust related organisations in the UK take this very seriously, however on this occasion we want to allay all fears and impress upon everyone that the Holocaust is not being removed from the National Curriculum. This particular incident does of course merit further investigation but in no way represents all the good work in our schools across the country.

Please do circulate this far and wide to all who have shown an interest in this particular issue and Holocaust education in general here in the UK.

Should you require further information please do contact us at the Holocaust Educational Trust by emailing info@het.org.uk

With best wishes

Karen Pollock

Chief Executive

Holocaust Educational Trust

BCM Box 7892

London WC1N 3XX

www.het.org.uk

Tel: 020 7222 6822

Fax: 020 7233 0161

Continued (Permanent Link)

The "Muzzle" Watch

The "Muzzle" Watch

One of the current "big lies" circulating across the blogosphere is the alleged "muzzling" of those who differ with Israeli policies. The usual formulation goes something like this: "Those who don't follow AIPAC's line of unquestioning support of the Israeli government's repressive, racist and apartheid policies are prevented from airing their courageous dissent because of the Jewish lobby, led by Alan Dershowitz, Abe Foxman, and the American Jewish Congress". Of course, this completely ignores the fact that viewpoints critical of the Israeli government get wide exposure in the US, Europe, and, of course, Israel. We wrote in detail about this in a previous post.

The folks over at Jewish Voice for Peace have now developed this big lie into a sadly repetitive formula:

More here

Continued (Permanent Link)

Scott Shay: Saving US Jewry - Education and births

This man has hit on some good ideas. Unfortunately, telling people to have more babies is not going to have much effect unless the social and economic rewards are arranged to make it attractive to do so. Jewish education is probably the number one concern for Zionism as well as for the Jewish people. Israel should have an active part in this. All this costs money. Educating more kids costs more money and having kids instead of a career costs money. We would hope that Scott Shay, a money person, has some ideas on how to fund it.

---

Shmuel Rosner, Chief U.S. Correspondent
February 26, 2007 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/rosnerGuest.jhtml?itemNo=830462

Rosner's Guest: Scott Shay

Scott Shay is a banker. He is the Chairman of the Board of Signature Bank of New York and is active in private equity investments through Shay Ventures LLC. Shay was previously a partner and a co-founder of Hyperion Partners, and served for eight years as a member of the board of Bank Hapoalim.

But Shay is also heavily involved in Jewish causes: He serves as a board member of the UJA - Jewish Federation of New York, the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education and the Jewish Agency for Israel. He is immediate past chair of the Commission on Jewish Identity and Renewal of UJA-Jewish Federation. He is also a member of the Birthright Israel Steering Committee and is chair of The Fund for Jewish Education.

With Shay, we will discuss his recently published book: Getting our Groove Back: How To Energize American Jewry in which he "examines the current state and future prospects of American Jewry and finds a Jewish community that is dangerously adrift and on an overall downward trajectory, due to a community-wide lack of shared purpose, focus, and mutual concern."

Readers can send questions to rosnersdomain@haaretz.co.il.

Dear Scott
Your "to do list" will probably anger some members of the community. You ask parents to "encourage man to marry earlier," to "start families earlier, and to" discuss with daughters the risk of pregnancy after 35." You also ask rabbis to "promote early marriage and larger families". Can such advice be practical with the younger Jewish generation? Aren't you going to alienate them by making them feel that your policy invades their privacy?

Best, Rosner

Dear Shmuel,
You are quite right that some of the planks in the book are controversial. Interestingly, after have spoken to a fair number of audiences this position surprisingly is less so. I think almost everyone intuitively understands that there are just too many Jewish young adults remaining single for too long. About 15 percent of Jewish women do not marry until they are at the end of their child bearing years. The median age that Jewish men marry has passed 35. If you net out the children of intermarried couples who are specifically not being raised as Jewish, you get a net fertility rate of 1.2. At that rate a typical population halves in about 45-50 years. Because we American Jews are so much older on average than Americans as a whole, our population will fall by 50 percent in less time.

I think that people basically understand these facts even if they do not know the precise figures or the pace. The fundamental problem is that Judaism is not important enough for many to change their behaviors. If it is important to Jewish parents to see their children marry Jews then they need to make sure that they have Jewish experiences such as camp, youth movements and Israel trips. If it is important for Jewish parents to see their children marry Jews then they need to be models for why being Jewish is important to the world and personally meaningful. We need to explain why it is important for us to be fruitful and multiply. In modernity, bearing children is the ultimate unselfish expression of our peoplehood. None of this happens by accident, yet many in the American Jewish community expect it to be so.

In my plank on child bearing, I do not call on American Jews to suddenly begin having 6-10 children families. Rather I ask couples to think about having one more child. Those who have 2 children should think about having 3 and those who want to have 3 might think about bringing a 4th child into the world. These kitchen table decisions are more crucial to the future of American Jewry than all of weighty decisions brought down by the rarified councils of the organized Jewish community.

Probably the most satisfying part of having written the book is from hearing from some readers that they have seriously considered having another child even though they had previously thought they were done. If that happens than all of the time writing the book was well worth it.

All the best, Scott


Dear Scott,

I'll start with a more general question in order to let the readers know what we're talking about. The subtitle to your book is "how to energize American Jewry" and your answer is 300 pages long, but for this dialog we need the shorter version. So let me ask just these two quick questions:

1. Why energize American Jewry?
2. Your three-most-important-steps for revitalizing Jewish America.

Best

Rosner


Dear Shmuel,

I passionately believe that American Jewry has been and is a force for tremendous good for world Jewry, for America, for Israel and the world. When American Jewry galvanizes itself there are few limits to what it can accomplish. The success of the Save Soviet Jewry movement which directly contributed to the demise of the communist monopoly on power in the former Soviet Union is but one example. This was followed by a massive financial effort by American Jewry to pay for a large chunk of the cost if the exodus and resettlement.

The same impulse leads American Jews to be at the forefront of social justice causes, medical research, cultural contributions and political involvement. The current Congress has 40 Jewish members.

By the same token, when American Jews were divided and, partially justifiably confused and subject to anti-Semitism themselves, they did not adequately galvanize themselves to publicize and protest the unfolding Holocaust in Europe. That is not to say American ''Jewry could have stopped the Holocaust but it is possible to imagine that they could have lobbied for the bombing of the concentration camps and the like.

I also passionately believe that American Jewry still possesses the strength to revitalize its purpose, passion and numbers. But in 25 years the shape of American Jewry could be quite different and its ability to be a force for good in the world could be quite diminished. So we need to act now.

In terms of what 3 items I would place first, I would initially plead we need all ten outlined in the book. I think a good place to start is with the first three planks. They are reinventing Hebrew schools, changing the financing of day schools so that 50 per cent of American Jewish children can attend day schools and unifying Birthright Israel, summer trips to Israel and Masa in a way that insures that every American teen and young adult visits Israel on a quality experience trip.

These three steps along with the others would revolutionize the shape of American Jewry.

All the best, Scott

Continued (Permanent Link)

Blood Libel on Lebanese TV

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

To view this Special Dispatch in HTML, visit:
http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD145307

The following are excerpts from an interview with Lebanese poet Marwan Chamoun, which aired on TeleLiban TV on January 30, 2007.

To view this clip visit: http://www.memritv.org/search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=1374 .


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

Continued (Permanent Link)

Who is a Jew?

You probably will want to read all of this article by Vic Rosenthal , and we can all agree with some of it. Vic wrote:

For example, there may not be a single set of facial characteristics common to me and the rest of my family, but in some sense we look alike: a nose here, eyebrows there, etc. A family resemblance may be more or less intense, and the decision to include or exclude a person becomes harder to make as the resemblance weakens.

For example, which of the following photos exemplifies the famous Jewish physiognomy, and which does not?

Doesn't the gentleman at left look like he should be Gabbai of your synagogue? Which of these fine fellows would you cast for the role of American tough guy? Jewish intellectual? Concentration camp victim? I promise a reply to those questions in the future.

Vic wrote:

In other words, if an Ashkenazi Jew has certain 'Jewish' characteristics and a Sephardic Jew has other, different, ones, then the result of mixing them -- both in terms of children and of culture -- will tend to have more of the overall set of 'Jewish' characteristics than we'd get from all Ashkenazim or Sephardim.

Well I don't know about. My aunt is Sephardic, my uncle is Ashkenazi. They live in Tel-Aviv. Their son ought to be much more "Jewish" than they are according to Vic's theory, but he lives in New York and has an African-American girl-friend, goes hitch-hiking in India, and doesn't eat either gefilte fish or couscous when he can help it. And nonetheless he is Jewish of course, and identifies himself as "Jewish."

What is my point?

Identity has two aspects: how others see you, and how you see yourself. It is not a collection of "characteristics." The important part of identity is how you see yourself. It should be the factor in deciding if someone is Jewish, or Greek or anything else.

Ami Isseroff

---

Jewish Identity - what is it?

http://fresnozionism.org/archives/85

By Vic Rosenthal

One of the most persistent issues among Jews today, especially non-observant Jews living in the Diaspora, is that of Jewish identity: what is it, do I have it, are we losing it, is that bad?...

So exactly how are the Jewish people a people or a nation? Is it the same sense in which, for example, the Dutch or the French see themselves as a people?

No, it's not the same. The Dutch or French have lived in the same place for hundreds of years. They speak the same language (or dialects thereof). They do share, more or less, a culture. Maybe if modern Israel can survive Ahmadinijad etc. for a few generations there will begin to be this kind of national culture – in Israel. But it still won't explain the Jewishness of those in the far-flung Diaspora.

...human language is a tool for doing practical things in the world, not a formal structure like mathematics. So the way that we make definitions of practical concepts, like Jew, is not necessarily as neat and closed as the way that we define complicated mathematical concepts in terms of simpler ones. Wittgenstein found it explanatory to talk about family resemblances.

For example, there may not be a single set of facial characteristics common to me and the rest of my family, but in some sense we look alike: a nose here, eyebrows there, etc. A family resemblance may be more or less intense, and the decision to include or exclude a person becomes harder to make as the resemblance weakens. But that doesn't mean the idea of the family resemblance is meaningless -- language is meaningful insofar as it is useful, and a degree of uncertainty is part of life. Wittgenstein thought that concepts like 'game', for example, which are notoriously hard to define, are best understood as applying to things having a sort of family resemblance.

So I think it's not unreasonable -- and also quite appealing – to think of the Jewish people as a large family, with family resemblances. Some of the features that we find among Jews are Judaism, certain values (e.g., a respect for learning), certain languages (especially Hebrew, which unites observant and Israeli Jews), certain customs, foods, even a preponderance of certain DNA sequences...

... the overall pool of diverse Jewish characteristics is amplified when the group includes a more diverse mix of Jews. In other words, if an Ashkenazi Jew has certain 'Jewish' characteristics and a Sephardic Jew has other, different, ones, then the result of mixing them — both in terms of children and of culture-- will tend to have more of the overall set of 'Jewish' characteristics than we'd get from all Ashkenazim or Sephardim.

Of course, the place in the world where there is the most diverse mix of Jewish people and cultures is Israel. So in another sense, added to the religious and political ones, we see the importance of Israel to the Jewish people. Perhaps A. B. Yehoshua was not entirely wrong when he said that it's necessary to live in Israel to live a fully Jewish life.

Continued (Permanent Link)