The Economist on Zionism

In here:

Mr Netanyahu thinks the Zionist mission was to give the Jewish people control over their destiny. No people has control over its destiny when it is at war with its neighbours. But in any case, that is only one way of thinking of the Zionist mission. Another mission frequently cited by early Zionists was to help Jews grow out of the "Ghetto mentality".

That should be the former editor of the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz and author of Peres' book on Ben-Gurion, the "rape Israel", Landau.

If so, he has a problem.

Zionism for everybody is returning Jews to history and control of our destiny to ourselves. Actually, we do have conbtrol even if we are at war. If those waging war against us are trying to control our destiny, fighting them and beating then is conbtrolling our destiny. How dumb is he? And if they are waging war without need, or reason or because of evil intent, well, maybe we are controlling their destiny? And that is exactly what is meant by extracting the Jews from a "Ghetto Mentality".

Those poor Economist readers.

^

They're Only "Activists" (Okay, They're 'Armed', Too)

Who did Israel target yesterday?

Here's a Palestinian source:

According to investigations conducted by PCHR, at approximately 16:15 on Friday, 09 March 2012, and Israeli warplane fired a missile at a blue Opel car that was traveling in the League of Arab States Street in the southwest of Gaza, in which two leaders of the Popular Resistance Committees were traveling. The missile hit the car directly killing the two passengers and seriously wounding a civilian bystander. The victims were identified as Zuhair Mousa Ahmed al-Qaissi, 49, from Rafah, Secretary-General of the Popular Resistance Committees; and Mahmoud Ahmed Hanani, 44, from Nablus, al-Qaissi's son-in-law [how old is his wife if his father-in-law is only five years older than him?], who was released from Israeli prisons and expelled to Gaza in 2006...At approximately 19:20 on the same day, an Israeli warplane fired a missile at a number of activists of al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Islamic Jihad...At approximately 23:30 also on Friday, an Israeli warplane fired a missile at a number of activists of the al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Islamic Jihad in al-Tuffah neighborhood in the east of Gaza City. One of those activists, Shadi Riad al-Saiqali, 27, was killed. At approximately 00:05 on Saturday, 10 March 2012, an Israeli warplane fired a missile at a number of activists of the al-Quds Brigades near the headquarters of the Palestinian Legislative Council in the center of Gaza City. Two activists were instantly killed...At approximately 01:25, an Israeli warplane fired a missile at a number of activists of the al-Quds Brigades who were on a space area in al-Hatabiya Street in the center of Beit Lahia. An activist sustained bruises throughout the body. At approximately 01:45, an Israeli warplane fired a missile at a number of activists of the al-Quds Brigades near Hammouda fuel station in the southeast of Beit Lahia. Two activists were killed: Mohammed Yahia Mohammed al-Mughari, 24; and Mahmoud Ismail Nejem, 22. A third activist was also seriously wounded. At approximately 04:10, an Israeli warplane fired two missiles at a red Kia car that was traveling on Saladin road near the entrance of the central Gaza Strip town of Deir al-Balah. A number of activists of the al-Quds Brigades were traveling in the car. The missile hit the car directly. One of the activists, Mohammed Ibrahim al-Ghamri, 26, from al-Maghazi refugee camp, was killed, and 3 others were wounded.

There were reported "civilian" casualties as well, included a child.

^

On Whom Do We Depend?

We can divide Israelis into several broad-based groups: the religious-oriented, the traditonal, the secular nationalist and the secular humanist.

On what would each group depend for Israel's - and their - security, existence and well-being?

On God? On sanctions? On diplomacy? On goodwill gestures?

On an American President?

America failed the Jews in the mid-to-late-1930s when they were refugees.

America failed the Jews during World War II in not bombing Auschwizt nor letting Jews into the United States.

America failed Israel in March 1948 by seeking to push the trusteeship idea instead of statehood.

America threatened Israel in 1956, forcing Ben-Gurion to withdraw from Sinai.

America couldn't find the Tripartite Agreement which would guarabntee its shipping freedom after the Egyptians closed the the Straits of Tiran and the Suez Canal.

America delayed until the very last moment shipments of arms during the Yom Kipp 1973 war, in order that Israel 'bleed'.

Amerca berated Israel after Menachem Begin bombed the Iraqi reactor in 1981.

America castigated Israel's first Lebanon campaign in 1982.

I could go on but I think you get my point.

And now, consider Charles Krauthammer's point about

...Obama’s campaign-year posturing about Iran’s nukes. Speaking Sunday in front of AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), he warned that “Iran’s leaders should have no doubt about the resolve of the United States.” This just two days after he’d said (to the Atlantic) of possible U.S. military action, “I don’t bluff.” Yet on Tuesday he returned to the very engagement policy that he admits had previously failed.

Who do we depnd on now?

Which of the above choices now sounds the more rational?


P.S. Lenny on the US during the Scuds on Tel Aviv.

____________

UPDATE

And now I found this (k/t=EH):

...Obama's pledges are not worth anything more than were John Foster Dulles' pledges made to get Israel to leave the Sinai after the 1956 war. Lyndon Johnson would not honor those pledges when Egypt -- in violation of the agreement with Israel 00 cut off the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping in 1967. If Egypt now abrogates the peace treaty Henry Kissinger brokered with Israel, America will not enforce the terms on Israel's behalf. George H. W. Bush did not enforce the cease fire of the 1990 Gulf War as it affected either the Kurds or the Shia of southern Iraq. The Vietnam Peace Treaty was worthless except to permit America to save face and withdraw its forces. America induced the Hungarians to revolt and sat by idly as the Russians slaughtered them.

Nations have interests, not commitments or friends. America under Obama and Israel do not have shared interests. Obama does not care about Israel's democracy any more than he cares about Turkey's growing tyranny or Saudi Arabia's monarchy.

^

Is Israel's Media Professional, Ethical and Fair?

Read Dror Eydar:-

...last May during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit and address to Congress. I watched local television newscasts and listened to many radio talk shows during the day. At night, I completed the picture by looking at the Israeli media. The gap in coverage between the two countries was beyond distressing; it was actually entertaining.

Netanyahu’s visit this week didn't lead the media to surpass its previous record, but it was hard to miss the negative tone and attempts to minimize his visit. One veteran journalist used the word “performance” several times in reference to Netanyahu’s speech at the AIPAC conference.

What caught my attention amongst all the reports was one by a young female journalist who was acting as a commentator on Netanyahu’s trip: “Netanyahu went to Washington because he wanted to create more serious and concrete headlines regarding American readiness to attack Iran … Instead, we see an opposite phenomenon. Not only has [President Barack] Obama failed to make stronger declarations, not only did he fail to mention a tangible threat of attack, but he did not talk about his own preparations for a campaign … we saw him get such a tremendous, powerful slap in the face from Obama …This is not the objective that he wanted to achieve. It is just the opposite.”

What profound insight did we receive from this commentary? ... Obama stressed at least two important points in his address: He does not intend to contain Iran; and he does not intend to permit Iran to develop nuclear weapons, and then create a balance of deterrence as in the Cold War with the former Soviet Union...Dr. Emily Landau, a respected researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, also touched upon some of these “insights,” when she spoke on the heels of that same journalist. She said in a clear voice, “I just heard the previous reporter’s account … I think that it is really not true.”

The reporter’s inexperience may actually illustrate how the “right thing to say” is created among Israeli journalists. What does she really know? What can she really tell us? Was she a fly on the wall in the meeting between Obama and Netanyahu?

...Landau and Professor Efraim Inbar (of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University) later said that horrifying “day-after” scenarios circulated by senior American officials, who desperately want to deter Israel from an attack on Iran, and generously sponsored by the Israeli media, were designed to influence Israeli public opinion.

...A densely packed sector of media and politics is responsible for frightening claims that we are about to “eat it” unless we “wise up”; that a “political tsunami” will ensue, and other political grist for the mill disguised as commentary.

Professional media behavior.

Ugh.

^

Continuing to Barrack Barack

I'm refering to the English definition of to barrack or the Australian barrack.

Here:



^

Forget the Copts; It's Now the Beduin

Egypt seems always to be in trouble.

If not Hamas in the Gaza Strip, it's the Copts. And sometimes even Israel.

And if not the Copts, it's the...Beduin:-

Security forces clashed late on Thursday with Bedouins in the northern Sinai Peninsula, an Egyptian security official said, and one Bedouin was killed in the fighting. The clashes occurred after the police arrested a Bedouin on suspicion of theft. That prompted angry tribesmen to exchange gunfire with police officers while trying to storm a police station. The Bedouins also blocked a highway, burning tires to prevent cars from passing, the security official said. Bedouins have long complained that they face arbitrary arrest because they live close to Israel and the volatile Gaza Strip.

^

Not All West Bank Violence Is Our Fault

There are other "Westbank"s, like this one in Canada:

A Westbank man who killed his girlfriend by strangling her has lost his appeal of his murder conviction.

In June 2010, James Gordon Feil was found guilty of the October 2008 second-degree murder of Tiffany Fedechko, 23, a single mother.

The Crown’s theory was that prior to the slaying, Feil and Fedechko argued with one another because the accused wanted to have sex and she did not.

Feil lost his temper and proceeded to beat and then strangle her to death.

The accused waited 2 1/2 days before turning himself in to police, who then discovered the victim’s body in Feil’s Westbank home.

Police also found a notepad on the floor by the foot of the bed, with the words: “She pushed me too far. I’m an a..hole.”

At trial, Feil admitted he killed her but insisted that he lacked the necessary intent for murder and that he was guilty of the lesser offence of manslaughter.

A B.C. Supreme Court jury in Kelowna, however, found Feil guilty of murder...

Read more.

Can Israel Save The Middle East's Christians?

Ambassador Michael Oren thinks so.

From his Wall Street Journal op-ed which refers to the West Bank's [???]Christian exodus and its causes and a solution:-

...The answer lies in Bethlehem. Under Israeli auspices, the city's Christian population grew by 57%. But under the Palestinian Authority since 1995, those numbers have plummeted. Palestinian gunmen seized Christian homes—compelling Israel to build a protective barrier between them and Jewish neighborhoods—and then occupied the Church of the Nativity, looting it and using it as a latrine. Today, Christians comprise a mere one-fifth of their holy city's population.

The extinction of the Middle East's Christian communities is an injustice of historic magnitude. Yet Israel provides an example of how this trend can not only be prevented but reversed. With the respect and appreciation that they receive in the Jewish state, the Christians of Muslim countries could not only survive but thrive.

Why write "West Bank", Mr. Ambassador, though?

P.S. I left this comment there:-

Mr. Ambassador,

Your repetitive use of "West Bank" is unfortunate. Not only is it incorrect geopolitically, historically and legally; not only does it go against the direction of your superior, Dep't Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who calls the area "disputed"; but it is simply damaging diplomatically.

Use "Judea and Samaria".

Please.

^

Words of Wisdom on Dumb Jews

.

Years ago, someone told me that a Jew is a person too fair-minded to take his own side in a fight. Back then, it was meant as a joke. And back then the fight was not as consequential as the 21st century war against the Jews.

Clifford D. May,
President of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies

On the issue of Jews reinforcing anti-semitism as well as anti-Zionism -

In America, it’s still considered impolite to openly disparage Jews, Israelis or Israel. But speaking in a coded way is not unacceptable. So it’s fine to suggest that perhaps some Jews exercise too much power and insinuate themselves into positions where they place Israel’s interests above America’s. Efforts to delegitimize Israel and even dehumanize Israelis are permissible “free speech” rather than impermissible “hate speech.” It also is increasingly considered bold, even brave, to suggest that Israel may have been a mistake.

Anyone with a grasp of history or a grain of common sense should know where this road leads. Yet too many people—not least, too many American Jews—seem untroubled by such rhetoric. Some even reinforce it.

^

Guttmann Not That Good

Channel One TV's Nathan Guttman, long-time US-resident but Israeli media correspondent, is in Moment Magazine writing on

Is the American Right too Right for Israel?

I had blogged on the positive aspects of the alteration in the political semantics and he continues, although I disagree:

This election cycle has officially ended the decades-long debate over whether Israel should be an American campaign issue. For better or worse, it is...It’s always great to be the center of attention. But in truth, Israel has nothing to gain from this debate. Republican claims and Democratic counter-claims both put Israel and its leaders in awkward positions.

...GOP candidates fighting for the title of most pro-Israel candidate are becoming more pro-Israel than, well, Israel itself...Recently Newt Gingrich has been upping the ante...Rick Santorum has also joined the chorus...Gingrich has stated that the Palestinians are an “invented” people. Santorum likens the West Bank to the states of Texas and New Mexico, suggesting that Israel is not required to return any part of it to the Palestinians, just as the United States did not.

Such statements are not only outside the mainstream of American opinion, they are also far beyond the views of Israel’s right-wing coalition government.

Whether or not they are, and that is a matter of which Ha-Ha-Haaretz is not convinced, a robust and honest agenda talk about Jewish national rights can do Israel no harm.

^

Has J Street Been 'Gambling'?

Spotted at The Daily Caller:

Hong Kong gambler Bill Benter, a controversial supporter of causes many consider anti-Israel, is a funder of Media Matters for America, The Daily Caller has learned. “I have been a contributor to Media Matters for many years and am proud to support the important work that it does fighting for truth in media, working for more honest political discourse and promoting our shared progressive values,” Benter told TheDC in a statement.

...According to tax documents obtained by TheDC, the Media Matters Action Network paid [MJ] Rosenberg $129,568 in 2010, plus $4,505 in other compensation. That organization is one of Media Matters’ political arms. It is tax-exempt under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code.

TheDC wasn’t able to independently confirm the source’s claim that Benter donated to Media Matters with the intent of endowing Rosenberg’s salary, and it appears that Benter contributed directly to the 501(c)(3) — not to its affiliated 501(c)(4) group.

When TheDC asked Benter’s intermediary, Matt Dorf of Rabinowitz/Dorf Communications, whether Benter was in any way involved in bringing Rosenberg on board, and whether Benter possibly solicited funds for Media Matters’ (c)(4) affiliate to help pay Rosenberg’s salary, Dorf said the latter question was “exactly the right question” and that he would ask Benter.

Dorf later replied that Benter would not be providing any further statement.

The question is relevant considering Benter’s involvement supporting J Street, a Washington lobby that bills itself as “pro-Israel, pro-peace” but in practice attracts left-wing supporters and has been called “a unique problem” by Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren. Attendees at J Street’s 2009 conference espoused radically anti-Israel views, including the idea that Israeli leaders should be tried for war crimes and that the Jewish state is largely responsible for its own predicament in the region.

Benter, who made his fortune betting on horse races in Hong Kong, became the center of public inquiry when it was discovered that he solicited an $811,697 donation to J Street from a mysterious Hong Kong donor named Consolacion Esdicul. At the time of Esdicul’s donation, it was J Street’s largest.

Esdicul, who lived in Hong Kong, had no known history donating to causes dealing with the Middle East. When her large contribution was revealed in September 2010, J Street said Esdicul made her donation at Benter’s direction.

...Benter will not say if he solicited funds for the Media Matters Action Network like he did for J Street. He also turned down TheDC’s request for a more in-depth interview about his worldview, only providing a generic statement.

“Much of my philanthropic activity over the past several years has focused on preventing war and creating peace through education, scholarship and advocacy, not only in the Middle East but around the world,” Benter’s statement read, after he confirmed that he was a Media Matters funder.

“I want to make it absolutely clear,” the statement continued, that “I would never support or condone anti-Semitism in any form.”

Rosenberg failed to respond to TheDC’s requests for an interview. Media Matters also did not respond to TheDC’s request for comment.

So, will you also gamble with Israel's future, its security, its Zionist ethos?

Will you go with euphemistic antisemitism?

Will you go with Jewish self-disgust?

Don't gamble.

Don't go down J Street.

^

The Hagana Car Bomb

On February 28, 1948, Yakoba Cohen and Yitzhak Shushan, members of the special intelligence unit of the Palmah, HaShachar, based on evidence collected by the Hagana, entered the garage belonging to Abu-Sha'am on Nazereth Street. The information gathered was that the garage was used by Arab gangs (the bomb expert was jailed by the British in the 1930s, found guilty also of participating in the 1932 murder of Yaccobi and his son) and that specifically, a car bomb was being prepared there for use in the Hadar Carmel Jewish neighborhood.  It was camouflaged, the two discovered, with Red Cross markings, by the way.

Cohen entered the garage at 9 AM on the Saturday after passing through three Arab roadblocks, presented himself as an Arab fighter from Shchem and demanded that his vehicle (the first car expropriated in the Karyot belonged to a diplomat and the 'pencil' detonator was prepared by Yochai Bin-Nun who had to wake up a pharmicist on Friday nite to obtain the necessary chemicals) be attended to but the workers refused, suspecting it was what it actually was, a car bomb. He shouted that he was insulted and he was asked to wait for the manager. His car was already prepared to explode with 300 kgs. of dynamite packed in the trunk and and two additional mines set to explode if the an attempt would have been made to disarm the car.  When after a short while he noticed that no one was paying him any attention, he activated the delay detonation mechanism and exited to join Shushan.

The Hagana car exploded and detonated the Arab car bomb vehicle resulting in 30 (or 5) Arab dead and some 70 wounded.  In the escape, their car was blocked by an English army car that has stopped and blocked the street.  After a search, which discovered nothing, the two were left to continue on their way.

The report from Davar the day after:

By the way, this wasn't the only action of this kind in Haifa.  An incident occured on February 3.  The bombing at Ben-Yehudah Street in Jerusalem by British deserters killed over 50.


By the way, this also happened in Haifa:

27 FEBRUARY 1948


Haifa, 1420 hours. Near the junction of the Qiryat Motzkin and the Haifa/Acre roads, Austin car No. M 118 was stolen by armed Jews when the passenger, a Mr. Thorne of C.R.L., stopped to buy a paper. These Jews surrounded Mr. Thorne and attempted to abduct him. Members of the Haganah then appeared on the scene and, together with Mr. Thome, fired on the would-be abductors who then made off in the car. The Haganah men escorted Thorne to C.R.L. An unconfirmed report states that one Haganah man was shot during this incident.

CO 537/3856

^

Barack's Back Ain't Behind Israel

From the Emergency Committee for Israel:



^

Ha-Ha-Haaretz Example of How To Lead a Story

What caught my eye was the headline in my Google alert:

Palestinian killed after stabbing soldier in West Bank (Ch. 10)

which is from the "Breaking News" box.

And here is the story's lead:

A Palestinian man was shot and thought to have been killed by Israel Defense Forces on Thursday after stabbing a soldier in a West Bank village near Hebron.

The story itself is headlined and sub-headlined so:

IDF soldier moderately hurt after stabbed during West Bank arrest

Soldier returns fire at assailant, killing him; incident takes place in West Bank village south of Hebron while army forces arrested a Palestinian released as part of the Shalit prisoner swap.

Notice how the paper's bias shows through, blatantly?

Now, if I was editor, I would have written:

Arab attempts to kill soldier; shot and killed

or

Arab terrorist stabs soldier; killed by return fire

What would you have written?

---------

UPDATE

Here's Reuters:

Israeli troops kill Palestinian teenager in West Bank

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - An Israeli soldier shot dead a Palestinian and wounded another who stabbed him on Thursday, as troops carried out an arrest in the occupied West Bank, a local medical worker and the Israeli army said.

^

Bible Believers, Christian Zionists in Shiloh

You can read this story (or listen to it)

Christians Provide Free Labor On Jewish Settlements

by Lourdes Garcia-Navarro

It's wet and windy day in Shiloh, a Jewish settlement in the central part of the West Bank that has about 10,000 residents [that is, in the entire Shiloh bloc].  In addition to the settlers, there are a few extra people staying in Shilo on this day. They are Christian volunteers from the U.S. who have spent the morning pruning the grape vines. Now, with a winter storm beating down on the hills, the volunteers are stomping with their mud-splattered boots and North Face rain gear.

"We don't bring people here that are expecting mud baths and skin treatments and things like that," says Tommy Waller, a large 50-year-old man with a big smile and a prophet's long beard, who hails from Franklin, Tenn.

"We're kind of rough guys, nice guys, a lot of us are rednecks from the South," he says, "wanting to do a good thing and to help people."

Waller founded HaYovel, a nonprofit group that brings Christians to what his website calls "the mountains of Israel where prophesy meets reality."

The problem is that the world doesn't recognize this West Bank settlement or any other as part of Israel. The Palestinians and most of the international community view the Jewish settlements in the West Bank as illegal.

Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast War and has established settlements throughout the territory, which the Palestinians are seeking for part of a future state. The settlements are one of the most contentious issues between the Israelis and Palestinians, and have been a major obstacle in attempts to restart peace negotiations.

Paying Their Own Way

The Christian volunteers pay for their tickets and cover their own expenses to come. They work for about six weeks at a time, mostly in the wineries. Hundreds take part every year. It's a kind of a work-stay program with a spiritual purpose.

We take the Bible and we look at those things and we see that one of the exciting things for us is that prophecy of scripture is being fulfilled.

"We take the Bible and we look at those things and we see that one of the exciting things for us is that prophecy of scripture is being fulfilled," Waller says.

Many evangelical Christians believe that the end of days and the coming of the Messiah will center around Israel. And they interpret the foundation of the Jewish state as biblical prophecy becoming reality.

It's a hugely emotional issue for the Christians who come. They believe it is their duty to help Jews expand their control over Judea and Samaria — the biblical names for what is now the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

One of the volunteers, Mike Clayton, a former preacher from Seminole, Okla., reads out of the Bible from Isaiah 61:5: "The son of the foreigner will come and tend your vines."

Then he adds: "Well, a few days ago, myself and my son got off a plane ... and I got to watch as I handed my son ... a pair of pruners, and I took a picture as he walked out there. He fulfilled scripture. ... Is the Bible true? Is all this happening? I saw it with my own eyes."

A Need For Labor

For the settlers, the presence of the Christian workers has more practical applications.

"Today we have more than 200 acres. It's a lot of agriculture and it takes a lot of work," says Veret Ben Sadon, who helps run the Tura Winery. "We saw that we cannot work alone. I can say for sure that without this help, we cannot do what we are doing today."

Essentially she gets free labor for the heavy seasonal work that needs to be done. She says there is a labor shortage in the area and the Christians fill the gap.

When asked why she doesn't hire Palestinians, who account for the vast majority of those living in the West Bank, she says: "We believe that a lot of them are our enemies and we don't want to give them work. We prefer to give work to our friends and our neighbors and that's what we are doing."

The Palestinian Authority discourages Palestinians from working in the Jewish settlements. But jobs in the Palestinian areas are scarce, and Palestinians do work in construction, farming and other manual labor jobs.

Building Support In The U.S.

Christian volunteers also give the settlers a boost when it comes to building support in the United States.

Back in the meeting hall, Yisrael Medad, a spokesman for the Shilo settlement, jokes and sings "Onward Christian Soldiers." He has an unambiguous message for the volunteers.

"I would hope that each one of you would write a personal letter to any or all of your elected officials," he says.

Over the years, that call to activism has paid off, with many Christian groups in the U.S. providing political and financial support for the settlements in the West Bank. When members of the HaYovel group aren't here, they are on the road in the U.S., speaking at churches and community centers.

Medad says that support is vital.

"America is a democracy and a congressman or a senator has to listen to the people who vote for him," he says. "If you can bring pressure, fair pressure, that's the way you go."

And even if you haven't yet volunteered, Christian Zionists are invited to help - financially and politically. If you want to lobby real legislation that is addressing this, go to the website - http://www.israelallies.org/ - where you can lobby, for example, Joe Walsh's HR 394 - supporting Israel's right to annex Judea and Samaria. If you want to come to DC and lobby this issue, we brief groups in our office on talking points for a particular Israel issue and then can take them to the Hill to their Congressional appointment.

^

The Start of a Shiloh Purim (And Continued)

First, say hello to Eliezer Speter,our Holland horserider:

And say hello to our almost-inebriated Professor Ely Merzbach:

and as the day wears on, we have yet another day, Shushan Purim to eat, drink and make merry as our Rabbi is in doubt when the wall at Tel Shiloh existed, we get a bit unable to tell Mordechai from haman:

And my wife's video clip:




^

Terror Affects The Mind

My friend's book is now available.

Battle for Our Minds by Michael Widlanksi:

Terrorism is about brains, not blood. Terrorists win when they capture our minds. Sadly, they have a lot of help: some of our best and brightest intellectuals.

"Battle for Our Minds" shows how analysts in our intelligence agencies, academics at our universities and journalists in our media have helped our enemies, knowingly and unknowingly.

It is a stinging, detailed indictment of The New York Times and CNN—leaders of print and broadcast journalism who turned trend-setters in awful journalism that caters to terrorists and tyrants. The book also flays politically correct but inaccurate dogmas that captured western universities, the CIA and the State Department.

Among the startling revelations in BATTLE FOR OUR MINDS: Western Elites and the Terror Threat

Edward Said, the professor who redefined Middle East studies for Western universities, used no Arabic sources in his work and knew almost no Arabic;
Said's popular teachings promoted the careers of Said "wannabes" like John Esposito at Georgetown, Fred Halliday at the London School of Economics who spoke of the "myth" of Arab-Islamic terror before 9/11, while focusing, after 9/11, on the supposed persecution of Muslims rather than on growing Islamic terror;
Michael Scheuer, CIA's "hunter" of Osama Bin-Laden, never served as a field agent, knew no Arabic, and misidentified Islamic holy sites.
Scheuer admired Bin-Laden, blamed the U.S. and Israel for vexing him, and called American Jews a dangerous minority that threatened America's interests.
Paul Pillar, a top CIA mid-east analyst showed a colossal off-base percentage for his predictions over a decade: claiming before 9/11 the US was not threatened by terror, then, that Iran was not seeking an atom bomb, and that the US should reach out to Iran and Syria, despite their terror roles and their bloody repressive regimes.
Like Scheuer and Pillar, CIA director George Tenet never was a field agent, and he promoted their writings and their careers even as he censored talented field agents who said the CIA had become "too political" and was unprepared for terror.
CNN's Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Peter Arnett, producer Robert Wiener and news director Eason Jordan played ball with Saddam Hussein's government, ignoring some of his worst atrocities;
CNN's Wiener removed all the Jewish mezuzahs from the doorways of CNN’s rented offices in Jerusalem.
Tom Friedman who got a Pulitzer Prize for directly blaming Israel and its ally, Saad Haddad, for the Sabra-Chatilla massacre of 1982, passed up countervailing evidence, including his own face-to-face interview with Sa'ad Haddad.
The book exposes Friedman's limited knowledge of Arabic and Hebrew, his superficial analysis, and his effort to help Saudi Arabia change its image from the main exporter of fanaticism and 9/11 terror into the "peacemaker" and "moderate."
The book also takes a long view of The New York Times and its owners, the Sulzberger family. It shows how they preferred a fuzzy focus on the actions of tyrants and terrorists from Hitler and Stalin in the 1930's and 1940's, to Yasser Arafat and George Habash in the 1970's and 1980's, and even to Muslim terror attacks in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Fort Hood, Texas before and after September 11, 2001.

^

Finally, Jews & Muslims United - Thank France

Reported:-

France's prime minister urged Muslims and Jews to consider scrapping their halal and kosher slaughter laws on Monday as President Nicolas Sarkozy and his allies stepped up their efforts to woo far-right voters.

"Religions should think about keeping traditions that don't have much in common with today's state of science, technology and health problems," Fillon told Europe 1 radio while discussing the two-round presidential election ending May 6..."We live in a modern society."

"I am astonished by this statement by the prime minister," said Richard Prasquier, head of the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish organisations. "The government has no place giving advice about religious traditions."

Mohammad Moussaoui, head of France's Muslim Council, said ritual slaughter was no more painful than modern methods and labelling meat as being prepared "without stunning" would feed resentment against the two minority religions using it.

"It will stigmatise Muslims and Jews as people who don't respect the interests of animals," he said. "That will raise tensions in society."

Now, if we can only resolve the decibel level from the mosques.

Here. Ooops, that's in India.

Here. Ooops, that's Saudi Arabia.

Ah, here's Israel.

In any case, here are a few suggestions to help you survive the noise:

•It's possible that a 'donation' to the mosque will encourage them to turn the speakers in a different direction - away from your house. This can reduce the noise levels somewhat or significantly.
•Install sound-proofing windows and doors that will help block the noise.
•Get used to using earplugs at night !
•Heavy curtains or a white noise generator may also help to muffle the sound
•Develop selective deafness :)
•Adjust your schedule to rise early to accommodate the call to prayer, especially during the month of Ramadan

Please do NOT go to the mosque in a confrontational mood demanding that they turn down the loudspeakers. The consequences could be severe

^

Conference on Jerusalem - March 14

.

And updated:

Apologies for only learning of Jerusalem in the Qur'an by Imran N. Hosein, 2d ed. abridged (Long Island, New York: Masjid Dar-Al-Qur'an, 2003) nearly a decade after its publication, but it nonetheless bears notice, for two main reasons.

First, how amusing is it to find a 142-page book on a non-existent subject, for Jerusalem is not in the Koran. I even have long-standing offer to pay US$1million to anyone who can locate mention of the city there, with no winner yet...even Hosein acknowledges (on p. 31) that "It is true that the word 'Jerusalem' does not explicitly occur in the Qur'an." Okay, that settles that. Elsewhere, he explains (with slight editorial changes to improve readability) that

The Qur'an referred to Jerusalem, time and again, as a "city" or "town" – but without naming it ... This appears to have been part of the divine cloud that shrouded the subject of the role of Jerusalem in the Last Age.

I leave it to Hosein to interpret divine clouds shrouding subjects; I stick to earthly texts.

Second, Hosein explains that

Jerusalem in the Qur'an was written partly in response to the newspaper article of Daniel Pipes that was published in the Los Angeles Times ("Jerusalem means more to Jews than to Muslims," July 21, 2000). In it he attempted to dismiss any Islamic claim to Jerusalem by declaring of Jerusalem, among other things, that: "It is not once mentioned in the Qur'an or in the liturgy…" Dr. Pipes and his media surrogates, who provoked us to respond, may wish to revise their opinion if they were ever to read this book. … Regardless of whether Dr. Pipes accepts or does not accept Jerusalem in the Qur'an, it is clear that the study of this subject matter is basic for an understanding of the problem of Israel and Islam.

Well, I read Hosein's antisemitic screed and, sorry to say, am not convinced by his laborious argument that Jerusalem really is in the Koran despite its never being named there. I admit to special puzzlement when the good author asserts that Deuteronomy 9:6 is a forgery and that the long Muslim rule of Jerusalem offers "a clear Sign from the heavens of Divine approval of Muslim rule over the Holy Land!" How might these prove that Jerusalem really and truly is the Koran?

Comment: This shoddy rant is sadly typical of the Muslim attempt to construct a counterfeit history of Jerusalem. How can anyone take it seriously?

^

The Nazi Past of Arab Nationalists

From a book called The Attack from Within by Frederick Elwyn Jones.

...It was one of a series that Penguin published called Penguin Specials which were on topics of urgent current interest designed to be published as quickly as possible after the manuscript was completed. In it Elwyn Jones, who at this time was a 30 year old barrister with experience of living in Germany, writes of German expansion and preparations for world domination, and the need for this expansion and the evils of Nazism to be stopped...I imagine the book was published in early June...

He sees many similarities with Nazism and Islam...

...As was reported in the House of Commons in February 16, 1938, in Palestine, “Italian women were disguised as charity workers and nuns and they supplied Arabs with faked pictures of Jewish atrocities and told the Arabs that their poverty was due to British mis-management. Travelling cinema vans showed the Arabs faked pictures of Jews killing Arabs . . . The Italian broadcast from Bari was picked up in Palestine and interspersed in an attractive programme was a series of slogans like ‘Palestine belongs to the Arabs’, 'Kill the Jews’ ‘Let Palestine Arabs re-arm’.”

Similar activity, it was stated, took place in Syria...

...Goebbel’s Propaganda Ministry professes to have discovered a number of points common to the Nazi creed of the sword and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed”. He then mentions the 25,000 coverts which are intended to send in as trade and political missionaries. Two centres have been set up for them in Cairo and Bagdad – using teachers and bank clerks Nazis are penetrating the vernacular press, German classes, and cinema. Their other tool is the Arab Club, el Nadi el Arrabi, a Pan Arab organisation with members in all parts of the Near east and Europe and an HQ on the Kurfuerstendamm.

Then he writes of kites bearing the inscription ‘Long Live Hitler’ and posters with the text in Arabic which translates as ‘The Jew will be using every penny he earns from you to buy your soil’...“An Arabic edition of Mein Kampf” appeared in 1939. It has a picture of Hitler on the cover, under the heading of “The Strongest Man in the World”. Hitler has taken care to remove from this Arabic edition the passage in which he puts the Arabs on an inferior ‘racial grade’.” (pg. 45)...

^

State's Right

Informed of

the Florida Legislature's unanimous passage of Senate Resolution 1396 and House Resolution 1447, commending Israel as "the greatest friend and ally of the United States in the Middle East..."

Senate Resolution 1396, passed on February 1, 2012, was sponsored by Senator Alan Hays and co-sponsored by all 39 other members of the Florida Senate, the highest possible expression of support the Resolution could receive.

House Resolution 1447, passed on February 29, 2012, was sponsored by Representative Scott Plakon, and co-sponsored by a group of 29 other representatives, including 20 Republicans and 9 Democrats. The resolution passed 108-0.

Among its many significant factual recitations the resolution explicitly states:

"...the 650,000 Jews presently residing in the areas of Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem reside there legitimately."

"...the members of [Florida's Legislature] support Israel in its legal, historical, moral and G-d given right of self-governance and self-defense upon the entirety of its own lands, recognizing that Israel is neither an attacking force nor an occupier of the lands of others, and that peace can be afforded the region only through a whole and united Israel governed under one law for all people."

Florida's resolution is an enhanced version of one that also received bi-partisan support in the South Carolina Legislature, where it passed unanimously in June of 2011.

"The strong and honest language used in the resolution recognizes the rights of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, and that Jerusalem and the so-called West Bank must remain united under Israeli sovereignty for the sake of peace and security," according to Joe Sabag, executive director of the Florida region of the ZOA, who lobbied vigorously for passage of the resolution.

"The mention of "one law for all people" is a specific call for the Jews of Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem to be permitted the same rights of land use and development as Jews living elsewhere in Israel," he added.

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, "A concerted campaign is being waged against the Jewish state to deny its legitimacy in virtually every aspect of its historical, legal, political, and cultural life. This effort is aimed at undermining the very foundations of Israel's existence. We strongly praise Senator Alan Hays and Representative Scott Plakon, and the entire Florida Legislature, for their unanimous and forceful assertion of the basic truth that Israel is America's most reliable and essential ally, and for their important support of Israeli sovereignty and self-defense. The passage of this resolution is both revolutionary and historic in its importance. "

"It is imperative to note the particularly important role played by Israel's Christian friends who joined with the Jewish community to urge the passage of this resolution. The Land of Israel is the rightful homeland of the Jewish People, and the enemies who seek Israel's destruction are also self-avowed enemies of America.

From the resolution:

WHEREAS, this resolution affirmed the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in the historical region of the Land of Israel, including areas of Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem, and

WHEREAS, Article 80 of the United Nations charter recognized the continued validity of the rights granted to states or peoples which already existed under international instruments, and, therefore, the 1922 League of Nations resolution remains valid, and the 650,000 Jews currently residing in the areas of Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem reside there legitimately...

^

Last Night's Game: Lions 36 - Rebels 35

The game at Be'er Sheva and the one against the Troopers.

The team finished the season with 10 wins and no, no lossess with an average of 54 points per game, the highest in the league. And they kept the opposing teams to an average of 21 points per game, fourth lowest in the league.

Pics from previous games -

Gani tackling:

Ned almost the only one in the stands:

P.S.

Details:

Despite both teams’ playoff seeding already set, and a severely depleted Lions’ receiving corps, there was no hiding the fact that both teams really wanted to come away triumphant. The Rebels had their sights set on spoiling Big Blue’s perfect record and even their season series, while on the other side, as much as they were understating the notion, the thought of the league’s first-ever unblemished mark definitely was rattling around somewhere in the Jerusalem players’ heads.


The game began a little sloppily, with Lions’ defensive demon Sean Carano pouncing on an early Joe Martisius fumble and taking it to the house for a quick 6-0 Big Blue lead.

However the defending champs would find their rhythm, capitalizing on a Uri Mangisto pick of Chaim Schiff for their first score and went ahead 8-6 on an ultra-odd but correctly called blocked-XP kick but caught mid-air [although it is claimed he had a kneee on the ground] and run in for two points.

Scoring strikes to Elias Metuko and Jaymes Kine saw the Judeans take what seemed like a commanding 21-6 advantage, but Schiff led his troops back, tossing long TDs to Ori Refaleowitz and Matan Lavi to bring the Lions to within a point.

Things were just beginning to get interesting, however.

Lewis Duker recovered a fumble just before the half and Martisius quickly drove his team downfield before hitting Tani Kramer from three yards out on the last play of the half to put the momentum squarely on the side of the Orangemen.

A tightly waged third quarter saw the Rebels once again take a seemingly insurmountable two-score lead, 35-20, on a short TD catch by Zev Aron, but as anyone with any Lions-Rebels experience knows 15 points is well within range, even with time winding down.

Danny Brill energized the Lions attack, surging forward in big chunks of yards and plowing into the endzone just before the start of the fourth, with Tim Cohen’s second two-point convert making it just a seven-point defecit heading into what was a dazzling final frame.

Ultimately, the fourth quarter was marked by three or four specific Rebels’ mistakes that gave away the game.

The first, a bad snap that Carano recovered in the endzone for his second defensive TD of the night, still had Talpion ahead by one upon the failed conversion.

Martisius then took his team into the Lions’ redzone, and had a first-and-goal opportunity that he squandered by throwing an awfully-timed pick straight into the long arms of Rafi Graben. Still, a strong defensive push led by Duker (10 tackles, fumble recovery, interception and break-up), Uria Loberbaum (9 tackles, a sack and a pass deflected) and Avner Blumoff (7 tackles, 2 fumble recoveries and a sack) kept Big Blue at bay and gave the Rebels the ball back with less than two minutes left.

Forced to punt from deep in their own zone, and with Liran Zamir being spelled by Aron, the fateful snap went just over the punter’s head [I thought it actually went under his legs] and rolling out back of the endzone for the crucial two needed points and the night’s final score. The Rebels still had a sliver of a chance even after a botched onside kick, however a fourth-down incompletion roughing-the-passer infraction on Blumoff with under a minute left gave the Lions a new set of downs and the ability to harmlessly kneel out the game and escape with the number in their loss column still perfectly round.

^

Mull Over This Statistic

the Syrian death toll has moved from 2,000 to over 7,000 - about five times more than the Palestinian casualties during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 and early 2009.

 Burak Bekdİl in Turkey's Hurriyet Daily News

And he adds:

“In a 2007 study, Gunnar Heinsohn from the University of Bremen and Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, found that some 11 million Muslims have been violently killed since 1948, of which 35,000, (0.3 percent) died during the six years of Arab war against Israel, or one out of every 315 fatalities. In contrast, over 90 percent who perished were killed by fellow Muslims.”...

...one of the victims [in Syria], a one-legged revolutionary singer undergoing medical treatment in safe Turkish territory. Time magazine quotes the man, one of the 300 who have fled to Turkey in the most recent wave of refugees, as saying: “We’d rather accept Israel than Bashar […] The Israelis didn’t do to the Palestinians what Bashar has done to Syria.”
Who, really, knows better how to kill?

Dear Arabs and their liberal/progressive anti-Israel supporters, think about that.


^

Can Israel Trust Obama? Not Really

Obama Flip-flops on Israel writes Jennifer Rubin -

Less than 48 hours after trotting out new, tougher language on Iran, President Obama revealed in his press conference how little substance lies behind his words. He struck a partisan note, claiming Republicans were “beating the drums of war” with Iran. So much for not making Iran a “political football,” as so many Democrats pleaded at AIPAC. Even worse, when pressed by ABC News’s Jake Tapper on what he meant by his comment that we “have Israel’s back,” the president answered that it was “not a military doctrine that we were laying out for any particular military action. . . . It was a restatement of our consistent position that the security of Israel is something I deeply care about . . . [and] confirms how deeply we care about it.” In other words, he was not pledging anything in particular to the Jewish state.This seemed to bolster conservatives’ view that Obama’s AIPAC rhetoric was meaningless. Bill Kristol, the co-founder of the Emergency Committee for Israel, blasted the president: “Barack Obama’s statements before AIPAC have a remarkably short shelf life. In 2008 he told AIPAC that Jerusalem must not be divided, and then retracted it the next day. Now, in 2012, he tells AIPAC that he’s got Israel’s back, and then retracts that two days later. For Obama, being pro-Israel seems to be a campaign strategy, not a foreign policy.”

William Kristol writes When Israel Acts, Will the U.S. Have Israel's Back? -

...President Obama['s]...timetable for acting against Iran would precisely undermine Israel's ability to determine her fate. President Obama wants to wait to act until Iran is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. And by that point Iran will have entered what Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak calls a "zone of immunity"—when Israel, with lesser capabilities than the U.S., might well no longer be able to act to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Daniel Halper writes Obama: Having Israel’s Back ‘Not a Military Doctrine . . . for Any Particular Military Action’

President Obama clarified his statement from a speech Sunday Morning at AIPAC that he has Israel’s at press conference at the White House this afternoon.“What it means is that historically, we have always cooperated with Israel, with respect to the defense of Israel,” the president said in response to a question today from ABC's Jake Tapper. But then Obama expanded the statement to say the relationship is not unique to Israel, but it’s similar to America’s relationship with its allies altogether.

Bret Stephens provides background -

...if you're looking for evidence of Mr. Obama's disingenuousness when it comes to Israel, it's worth referring to what his supporters say about him.


Consider Peter Beinart, the one-time Iraq War advocate who has reinvented himself as a liberal scourge of present-day Israel and mainstream Zionism. Mr. Beinart has a book coming out next month called “The Crisis of Zionism.” Chapter five, on “The Jewish President,” fully justifies the cover price.

Mr. Beinart's case is that Mr. Obama came to his views about Israel not so much from people like his friend Rashid Khalidi or his pastor Jeremiah Wright. Instead, says Mr. Beinart, Mr. Obama got his education about Israel from a coterie of far-left Chicago Jews who “bred in Obama a specific, and subversive, vision of American Jewish identity and of the Jewish state.”

At the center of this coterie, Mr. Beinart explains, was a Chicago rabbi named Arnold Jacob Wolf. In 1969, Wolf staged a synagogue protest in favor of Black Panther Bobby Seale. In the early 1970s, he founded an organization that met with Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization—this being some 20 years before Arafat officially renounced terrorism. In the early 1990s, Wolf denounced the construction of the Holocaust Museum in Washington.

And, in 1996, the rabbi “was one of [Mr. Obama's] earliest and most prominent supporters” when he ran for the Illinois state Senate. Wolf later described Mr. Obama's views on Israel as “on the line of Peace Now”—an organization with a long history of blaming Israel for the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Mr. Obama had other Jewish mentors, too, according to Mr. Beinart. One was Bettylu Saltzman, whose father, developer Philip Klutznick, had joined Wolf in “his break with the Israeli government in the 1970s.” Ms. Saltzman, writes Mr. Beinart, “still seethes with hostility toward the mainstream Jewish groups” and later became active in left-wing Jewish political groups like J Street. Among other things, it was she who “organized the rally against the Iraq War where Obama proclaimed his opposition to an American invasion.”

Ms. Saltzman also introduced Mr. Obama to David Axelrod, himself a longtime donor to a group called the New Israel Fund. For a flavor of the NIF's world view, a WikiLeaks cable from 2010 noted that an NIF associate director told U.S. embassy officials in Tel Aviv that “the disappearance of a Jewish state would not be the tragedy that Israelis fear since it would become more democratic.”

Other things that we learn about Mr. Obama's intellectual pedigree from Mr. Beinart: As a student at Columbia, he honed his interests in colonialism by studying with the late pro-Palestinian agit-Prof. Edward Said. In 2004, Mr. Obama “criticized the barrier built to separate Israel and its major settlements from the rest of the West Bank”—the “barrier” meaning the security fence that all-but eliminated the wave of suicide bombings that took 1,000 lives in Israel.

Remember what I wrote yesterday?
^

Bird Lovers, Come to the Western Wall

On Monday, March 12, there'll be a welcoming ceremony for the Common Swift returning to Jerusalem.

The Common Swift spends most of the time living in South Africa and at the beginning of spring starts migrating north to its breeding sites. During mid-February it arrives in Israel, which is known to be one of its first breeding sites, and migrates back to Africa at the beginning of June, immediately after its nestlings have fledged.

The Common Swift has found Jerusalem perfect for nesting sites including ancient holy sites such as churches, synagogues, mosques and temples, and has become dependent on us. The Western Wall in Jerusalem serves as one of the oldest Common Swift nesting sites in the world where 88 nests were noted. However, the future of the Common Swift is not secure at all and their future is at risk.
The FRIENDS OF THE SWIFTS Association, the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, and Tel
Aviv University are asking for us to join this unique and special day, which also symbolizes the arrival of spring.

Program:

17:00 –17:15: GATHERING
17:15 –17:35: GREETINGS, Mr. Nir Barkat, Mayor of Jerusalem
Mrs. Naomi Tsur, Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem
Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitz, Rabbi of the Western Wall and the Holy Sites
Dr. Yossi Leshem, Tel-Aviv University and Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel
CEREMONY GUIDE: Amnonn Hahn GM “FRIENDS OF THE SWIFTS” Association
18:00 –17:35: Guided Observation of Swifts Returning to the Western Wall
Guides: Amnonn Hahn, Dr. Yossi Leshem

^

Remnick Razes Israel

From his latest New Yorker piece

...a profoundly anti-democratic, even racist, political culture has become endemic among much of the Jewish population in the West Bank, and jeopardizes Israel proper. The explosion of settlements, encouraged and subsidized by both Labor and Likud governments, has led to a large and established ethnocracy that thinks of itself as a permanent frontier. In 1980, twelve thousand Jews lived in the West Bank, “east of democracy,” Beinart writes; now they number more than three hundred thousand, and include Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s wildly xenophobic Foreign Minister. Lieberman has advocated the execution of Arab members of parliament who dare to meet with leaders of Hamas. His McCarthyite allies call for citizens to swear loyalty oaths to the Jewish state; for restrictions on human-rights organizations, like the New Israel Fund; and for laws constricting freedom of expression...A visitor to Tel Aviv and other freethinking precincts might overlook the reactionary currents in the country, but poll after poll reveals that many younger Israelis are losing touch with the liberal, democratic principles of the state...

...Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] clearly feels that the fervor of the few offers him more than the disillusion and drift of the many.  “The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation,” Obama has said. Netanyahu and many of his supporters believe otherwise; too often, they consider the tenets of liberal democracy to be negotiable in a game of coalition politics. Such short-term expedience cannot but exact a long-term price: this dream—and the process of democratic becoming—may be painfully, even fatally, deferred.

He maligns, and misrepresents, like here:

the President is a philo-Semite, whose earliest political supporters were Chicago Jews: Abner Mikva, Newton and Martha Minow, Bettylu Saltzman, David Axelrod. He was close to a rabbi on the South Side, the late Arnold Jacob Wolf. But to Netanyahu these men and women are the wrong kind of Jew. Wolf, for example, had worked for Abraham Joshua Heschel, the rabbi most closely associated with the civil-rights movement and other social-justice causes.

Besides the fact that the actual bona fides of some of those names as regards devotion to Israel could be questioned, if Wolf was a 'baddie', it is because, as Resnick does mention, he was a Breira activist, a member of a vile organization that serves as the begetter of J Street in its attempts to undermine American support for Israel.

Peter Beinart is quoted.

Resnick has no sense of proportion - or truth:

Reactionary elements lurk in many democracies. Ask the Dutch, the British, the Austrians, the French. The Republican Party has flirted with several in this election cycle. But in Israel the threat is especially acute.

This is the writing of no philo-Israelite.  It is that of an ideological perverter, one committed to a vision of extreme liberal progressivm that seeks to subvert Judaism and then its national expression into the framework of non-identity - in a not very democratic method: maligning it in the high profile periodicals of self-elected intellectual elites.

That, I will admit, though, is very Jewish.

Just ask Karl Marx, and Noam Chomsky and followers.

^

Does David Grossman Employ Anti-semitic Argumentation?

Ben-Dror Yemini at Maariv takes on David Grossman whose front page sob piece at Haaretz seems to have bothered him:

Grossman and anti-Semitic method


...[we] need to look at the story of Omar Abu - G'riban as presented by author David Grossman. A sad story deserves to be condemned. The problem is that Grossman, like many others, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes deliberately, switch the correct order. When examining the number of Palestinians killed over more than forty years of occupation, it turns out that Israel is cautious, by any international standard. But Grossman upends the plate. It is like when a Jewish thief is discovered, the claim is that all Jews thieves. Anti-Semites specialized in this method. Grossman, alas, adopts it.

Factually, the Palestinians are far from being discarded by the wayside. In 1967, there was one institution of higher education. Today there are dozens. Education is the highest among Palestinians in the Arab world. And Abu - Mazen himself testified in an interview with the Washington Post in 2009, to the good reality in which they live ("in the West Bank we have a good reality . . . the people are living a normal life.") Since then, by the way, life there has improved.  We are already accustomed to the fact that there are Grosmans who are trying, by force, to counter any claim of Israel. After all, they are enlightened. You can rely on Grossman that he will make every effort to refute the claim of Abu-Mazan. He has already started.

^

Al-Yafai Tells It As It Is

Faisal Al Yafai (whoever he is) writes

There were two words notably absent from President Barack Obama's speech to a prominent pro-Israel lobby group on Sunday, two words without which it is impossible to understand the discussion about Iran's nuclear programme. Those words are "settlements" and "Iraq".  Not once in his address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the largest pro-Israel lobby in the United States, did Mr Obama mention either the Israeli occupation or the Iraq war, although he mentioned Iran 40 times.

...Mr Obama talked of pursuing peace in Palestine, but did not mention the illegal settlements that crowd the West Bank. These settlements are the core of Israel's occupation; their endless expansion, in the face of international and even US condemnation, are the reason for the continued hostilities and for Israel's isolation.

Mr Obama's failure to mention settlements demonstrates how skewed the debate is about Israel and Palestine in the United States, where Palestinians lack the influence that Aipac and other advocates of Israel have with Washington. Without addressing the settlement issue, there is no chance of a lasting peace between Israel and its neighbours...

He displays the Arab disconnect with political reality as well as misrepresenting the issue of Jewish residency rights in their national homeland.  He ignores the overwhelming American people's support for Israel.  He ignores the inherent errors of the Arabs and the ideology of the Arabs of the former territory of the Palestine Mandate who foremost wanted not a state but to deny the Jews one and secondly, simply sought to kill Jews, using terror not as a weapon of tactics but adopting murder as an expression of the false nationalist aspirations.

Comforting to know our enemies, who espouse a "Palestinianism", that invented model of nationalism, so misunderstand the issues.

^

Apartheid? You Gotta Be Kidding?

From Efraim Karsh's piece:

...If apartheid is indeed a crime against humanity, Israel actually is the only apartheid-free state in the Middle East – a state whose Arab population enjoys full equality before the law and more prerogatives than most ethnic minorities in the free world, from the designation of Arabic as an official language to the recognition of non-Jewish religious holidays as legal days of rest.

By contrast, apartheid has been an integral part of the Middle East for over a millennium, and its Arab and Muslim nations continue to legally, politically and socially enforce this discriminatory practice against their hapless minorities...Arab/Muslim apartheid comes in many forms, and some victims have been subjected to more than one.

• Religious intolerance:

Muslims historically viewed themselves as distinct from, and superior to, all others living under Muslim rule, known as “dhimmis.”...
• Ethnic inequality:

...Arabs, Turks and Iranians continue to treat long-converted populations, notably Kurds and Berbers, that retained their language, culture and social customs, as inferior.

• Racism:

The Middle East has become the foremost purveyor of anti-Semitic incitement in the world...Africans of sub-Saharan descent are held in deep contempt...

• Gender discrimination:

Legal and social discrimination against women is pervasive throughout the Arab-Islamic world...
• Denial of citizenship:

The withholding of citizenship and attendant rights from a large segment of the native-born population is common. Palestinian communities in the Arab states offer the starkest example of this discrimination...
• Labor inequality:

Mistreatment of foreign workers (especially household servants), ranging from sexual abuse to virtual imprisonment and outright murder, is widely tolerated...
• Slavery:

The Arabic-speaking countries remain the world’s foremost refuge of slavery, from child and sex trafficking...
• Political Oppression:

Many Middle Eastern regimes are little more than elaborate repressive systems aimed at perpetuating apartheid-style domination by a small minority: Alawites in Syria; Tikritis in Saddam’s Iraq; the Saudi royal family; the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan...

So, dear liberal, progressive, get on the right side of the divide.  Support Israel.

^

More of Nahal Shiloh Overflowing

We need all the rainwater the heavens bless us.

Found here:

^

The New Solution: Triangularization

I have mentioned Dr. Mordechai Nisan previously, regarding his new book as well as an op-ed of his on Islam. He has taught Middle East Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and I consider him a close friend.

His new op-ed, "The 3-state solution", has just been published at Ynet and he asserts that a "Two-state solution shoves Israel, Palestine into never-ending claustrophobic embrace" and that a "new political paradigm" is required.

Extracts:

The Palestinian question has over the decades dominated political discourse...The Jewish national character of Israel and her basic national interests have been gravely challenged...With no Palestinian acceptance of the right of Israel as a Jewish nation-state, any further step beyond the steps that have been launched since 1993 in the direction of a future Palestinian state must be avoided at all costs.

...Judea and Samaria cannot be abandoned. Multiple security benefits accrue to Israel from controlling the terrain. A Palestinian state there would exacerbate rather than resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute...

Lebanon as a Christian homeland and a religiously pluralistic state became confounded with the Palestinian question...The up-to-date demographic tally estimates the Palestinian population in Lebanon as numbering approximately 400,000 people...A sweeping solution that would offer permanent resettlement arrangements for Palestinian refugees out of Lebanon would satisfy all the communities of the country, Christian and Muslim alike, neither of whom favor the naturalization of the Palestinian community...The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is home to a Palestinian majority population, now long ensconced in the country, of refugees, intellectuals, and businessmen, whose opportunities for advance are limited by the monarchy and the Transjordan East Bank elites.

...we have seen the virtual Palestinization of Jordan...As a consequence, the transformation of Jordan into a Palestinian state would be a just resolution of the innate incompatibility between regime and society; and the hoisting of a Palestinian national flag in Amman would be a beacon of hope and a political magnet for other Palestinian groups – especially those in Israel and Lebanon...we are proposing the consolidation of three national entities – Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan – with the Palestinian question given a solution in a broad regional shift of power, populations and identities.

...Herein is the conceptual attraction of the proposal, its moral axis and political reasonableness; and this while politicians, diplomats, pundits and assorted trouble-makers and cynics persist in pushing for a two-state solution west of the Jordan River, shoving Israel and Palestine into a never-ending claustrophobic embrace whose dreadful consequences will be borne by the peoples on the ground...

...The alternative approach proposes a triangular solution for three peoples in three countries, separating and disengaging communities and encouraging in particular Palestinian migration...a truly New Middle East.

...The small interloper Hashemite family in Jordan would be left without a kingdom. And this would be the beginning of a major step toward justice and democracy, as the “Arab Spring” blows flurries of freedom for the Palestinians in a country that might be (re)named “The Republic of Palestine.” Rhodesia after all became Zimbabwe and Cambodia became Kampuchea - so Jordan is Palestine.

^

Peter Beinart Asks; I Reply

Here's Peter Beinart's tweet:

Peter Beinart ‏ @PeterBeinart

how is the AIPAC conf like Purim?

7:44 PM - 5 Mar 12 via web

and my reply:

ymedad ‏ @ymedad
@PeterBeinart

people like you make unnecessary loud noise everytime Israel gets promoted? or interfere with the proper script

And he replied:

3m Peter Beinart ‏ @PeterBeinart

@ymedad

touche!

What's yours?

^

Warning

This Website contains adult content which may include images, sounds, and videos of a politically explicit nature. It is also may reveal errors, foibles, crimes, idiosyncracies and other non-normal form of human behavior in the fields of administration, management, economics, military and intellectual activity.

If you are under 18, you should be advised to please leave the site now.

If you are over 18, you might also want to leave.

^

US Trying to Catch Up to Israel

On the issue of "targeted killings".

Here:

U.S. to offer legal backing for "targeted killing": source

The Obama administration on Monday plans to outline how U.S. laws empower the government to kill Americans overseas who engage in terrorism against their home country, a source familiar with the matter said, months after a drone strike killed a U.S.-born cleric who plotted attacks from Yemen.

...U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder plans to address the issue and the underpinning legal principles for using lethal force during remarks at Northwestern University School of Law on Monday afternoon in Chicago, the source said Sunday on condition of anonymity.

...U.S. officials have refused to talk much publicly about the program...The speech will be the latest attempt by the administration to address the issue, an unusual break from past precedent of eschewing virtually any discussion about the top-secret program.

Defense Department lawyer Jeh Johnson last month referred to the so-called "targeted kill" program, saying that it pursued legitimate military targets overseas and rejected suggestions that the United States was engaged in assassination.

Finally, some support for all the specuious attacks on Israeli "illegality".

^

Schematic Map of Shiloh Bloc

To help you familiarize yourselves with my neighborhood, I borrowed from a map provided by the Tel Shiloh management and entered the English for your convenience.

Remember it is a schematic map:

^

Hillary Clinton: Don't Believe...Obama?

Is that she was intimating in this answer at a press conference (Secretary Clinton at Town Hall in Tunis with Tunisian Youth. Palais du Baron d'Erlanger, February 25, 2012)?

QUESTION:

My name is Ivan. After the electoral campaign starts in the United States – it started some time ago – we noticed here in Tunisia that most of the candidates from the both sides run towards the Zionist lobbies to get their support in the States. And afterwards, once they are elected, they come to show their support for countries like Tunisia and Egypt for a common Tunisian or a common Arab citizen. How would you reassure and gain his trust again once given the fact that you are supporting his enemy as well at the same time?

SECRETARY CLINTON:

Well, first, let me say you will learn as your democracy develops that a lot of things are said in political campaigns that should not bear a lot of attention. There are comments made that certainly don’t reflect the United States, don’t reflect our foreign policy, don’t reflect who we are as a people. I mean, if you go to the United States, you see mosques everywhere, you see Muslim Americans everywhere. That’s the fact. So I would not pay attention to the rhetoric.

Secondly, I would say watch what President Obama says and does. He’s our President. He represents all of the United States, and he will be reelected President, so I think that that will be a very clear signal to the entire world as to what our values are and what our President believes. So I think it’s a fair question because I know that – I sometimes am a little surprised that people around the world pay more attention to what is said in our political campaigns than most Americans, say, are paying attention. So I think you have to shut out some of the rhetoric and just focus on what we’re doing and what we stand for, and particularly what our President represents.

Well, since President Obama hasn't really managed to do much on the Iran issue of any effectiveness, what do you think Clinton was intimating?

(k/t=ChallahHuAkbar)

Disappointed: Non-kosher food

When asked if she was enjoying her pregnancy, the star told New! magazine: 'Not at all. The novelty wears off after a few months. I can’t wait to be a normal size again – and eat prawns.

Stacy Solomon

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Finally, Addressing the Water Issue

The water issue between Israel and the Palestinians


Israel fulfills its obligations according to the Water Agreement (1995) and beyond. The Palestinians constantly breach the agreement.

The Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement of September 28, 1995, signed in Washington, including the "Water Agreement" (Annex 3, Appendix 1, Article 40), clearly stipulates the manner in which the parties must act in the field of water in the West Bank.

This is an international agreement which was not only signed by Israel and the Palestinians but also witnessed by the United States, Russia, the European Union, Norway, Jordan and Egypt.
Both parties are bound by the principles set forth in this agreement.

Main points of the Water Agreement

Palestinian Water Rights in the West Bank are recognized and shall be negotiated in the permanent status agreement.

Both sides recognize the necessity to develop additional water sources for various uses.

Maintaining the existing quantities of water utilization, while taking into consideration the quantities of additional water for the Palestinians from the Eastern Aquifer.

Future additional needs of the Palestinians in the West Bank are estimated to be between 70-80 MCM/year. Within this framework, both sides recognize the necessity to make available to the Palestinian (WB) during the interim period, a total quantity of 23.6 MCM/year (out of which 5 MCM for the Gaza Strip).

Each side shall take all necessary measures to prevent any harm, pollution, or deterioration of water quality of all water resources.

Both sides shall establish Joint Supervision and Enforcement Teams which shall operate, in the field, to monitor, supervise, and enforce the implementation of Article 40.

In order to implement their undertakings, the two sides will establish a permanent Joint Water Committee (JWC)

Implementation of the Agreement

Israel fulfills its obligations according to the Water Agreement and beyond, as shown in the following:

Israel has made available approximately 70 MCM/year of water to the Palestinians in the West Bank during the interim period, even though the Water Agreement allocates a much smaller quantity of only 23.6 MCM/year (for the West Bank).

Israel supplies the Palestinians with 52 MCM of water which is far beyond its obligation in the Water Agreement (31 MCM).

The Palestinians constantly breach the agreement, as shown in the following:

The Palestinians continuously drill many unauthorized wells in the West Bank, in contradiction to the Water Agreement. Currently there are over 300 unauthorized Palestinian wells in this area, producing additional water on the account of Israel.

The Palestinians do not treat their sewage which flows freely in the streams and into Israel, contaminating the environment and the aquifer en route.

The Palestinians are not developing any new water sources, either through sewage treatment, or desalination.

Download powerpoint presentation


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Tinging Tonge

Found:

...she...repeats that weary mantra that you can labour for the obliteration of Israel and not be an anti-Semite. To which the weary answer is, yes, but you can equally labour for the obliteration of Israel and be an anti-Semite. Hating Israel is not a get-out-of-jail-free card; it doesn't grant automatic immunity from the charge of loathing Jews.

The "she" is Baroness Tonge, resigned, who claimed:

"The comments I made were in protest at the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and the treatment of Israeli Arabs.  "I am disappointed the leadership of my party did not consult me before issuing a press release and seems always to abet the request of the pro-Israel lobby. Israel is acting against international law, the Geneva conventions and human rights.

By the way,

the term 'Tonge', since 1987, became a way of calling someone an ass or a fool, but in a warm and friendly way...

(And tinging: To affect slightly, as with a contrasting quality.)


The above selection was penned by Howard Jacobson.

More from him:

...she is all context, a walking chronicle of odious imputation and malignity...of the medieval mischief she's been stirring for years...her equally medieval libel that supporters of Israel have "a financial grip" on the Western world.  Tell me, reader, what else you have to do, short of murdering Jews with your bare hands, before you can be called an anti-Semite...her imagining, were she Palestinian, how she too would strap explosives to her belt and go out and murder without discrimination.

...there is a further context in which the Tonge phenomenon is to be understood. And that is the continuing imputation that Jews bring trouble on themselves*. Of which other people is it required that they ponder their responsibility for any hatred of which they are the object?...Baroness Tonge has been allowed to roam and rant at will because her sympathy for the Palestinian cause – and I don't take issue with that – is considered to cancel out the sin of antipathy towards anybody else, and because the smoky zone of anti-Zionism she inhabits allows old prejudices to resurface in another name. We rightly pride ourselves on our tolerance; we are not 19th-century France. But in universities and unions, in the meetings of some pro-Palestinian campaigners, in countless tweets and threads and blogs, our own little orgy of hate goes on.

*

Piers Paul Read, the writer of a new book about the 1894 Dreyfus Affair, was criticised this week after saying that the French soldier's treatment could be linked to Jews being a "very powerful influence in finance, in business", and that Jews should ask why people were antisemitic.

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After Invasion and Occupation: Annexation or Two-State Solution Next?

No. Not Israel.

Turkey.

Reported (k/t=IMRA):-

Turkey threatens to annex northern Cyprus

If reunification talks between Greek and Turkish Cypriots fail, official says Ankara will consider annexation...Turkey's European Affairs Minister Egemen Bagis told a Turkish
Cypriot newspaper..."Reunification under a deal that (the two) leaders could reach, creation of two independent states after an agreement between the two leaders if they
are unable to reach a deal for reunification, or annexation of the KKTC (Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus) to Turkey," Bagis told Kibris during an interview in London.

...Turkey has stationed troops in the north since invading in 1974, after a coup in Cyprus orchestrated by a military junta in Athens.  Northern Cyprus is only recognized only by Ankara and its only air link is with Turkey. It is also excluded from international sport, finance and trade, and it has been heavily subsidized by Ankara.

Well, well.

^