Remember When Turkey Got Hungry?

It's an old joke but, nevermind, here's Steve Plaut reflecting on the Turkish Prime Minister's anti-Israel bashing:

I would venture to respond to Erdogan by offering the following summary of the conflict:

The occupation is entirely illegal and is not recognized as legitimate by a single country on earth other than the occupying power. The occupier carried out acts of mass expulsion and ethnic cleansing when the illegal occupation was imposed on its victims. It transferred thousands of its own citizens illegally as settlers into the territories it continues to occupy. Its human rights record in the occupied territories has been atrocious. It continues to defy all world opinion, while imposing military control and suppression on the hapless residents of the illegally occupied territories. Moreover, its human rights record at home is almost as atrocious. It is an apartheid regime in which minorities are discriminated against and openly harassed. It is a militarist entity that came into existence through perpetration of a set of massive crimes against humanity, including ethnic cleansing and mass murder. Indeed, it has often been accused of having perpetrated genocide at the very moment of its creation. There are serious doubts as to whether it even has any moral right to exist as an independent state. Certainly its capital, a city considered holy by many religions, may not rightfully even belong to it at all. That city was seized from its rightful owners using military force, and its religious shrines were looted and transformed to serve the regime.

The above paragraph of course refers to Turkey.

The occupied territories in which ethnic cleansing was perpetrated by the Turkish occupying power refer to northern Cyprus. Turkey illegally invaded Cyprus, an independent state (now part of NATO and the EU), in 1974, and militarily seized about a third of the island. It then expelled the entire Greek population from those occupied territories. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Greek Cypriots were made homeless refugees due to the military aggression of Turkey. Not a single country on earth recognizes the puppet "republic" Turkey still operates there. To maintain its hold on northern Cyprus, Turkey transferred many thousands of its own citizens to northern Cyprus as illegal settlers.

Northern Cyprus is not even the only set of occupied territories seized and held by modern Turkey. In the year 1939, Turkey simply marched into the Alexandretta area of Syria, then a French protectorate, and annexed it. The ethnic Turks in the area were a minority of the population. The Turkish conquest was based on nothing more than Turkey's desire to take charge of the excellent port facilities there. Syria still considers this area as its own (of course, it also considers Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Cyprus also to be its own). Turkey has shown no interest in removing its settlers from Alexandretta. Its control of other areas, such as the area around Kars near the Armenian border or swaths of Thrace, is also based on dubious legitimacy and questionable claims.

Plaut's Purim Spoof

Steve wrote me:

Life in Israel is often stranger than parody. As you know, I often post sarcastic spoof pieces to make fun of the Far Left and of the Israeli government. I usually assume that everyone will understand that the piece is a spoof. Sometimes though people take the sarcastic piece literally (it happened when I wrote that Israel had arrested Salman Rushdie for offending Islam, and in a few other instances).

Well, there are two far-leftist faculty members at my school, the University of Haifa, who fill up the professors' chat board with their anti-Israel spam postings. They are also very abusive. One, let us call him ML, demanded that I be forced to resign for insulting Neve Gordon and called me a bowel movement in two distinct languages on the list. The other, let us call him YY, denounced me for being a fascist, a mad dog, and (gulp) homophobic. Both regularly participate in pro-terror anti-Israel protests (mainly with the Arab students) on the campus.

Saturday night I posted the following posting:

To: segel-plus@list.haifa.ac.il
Sent: Saturday, March 08, 2008 9:17 PM
Subject: [Segel-plus] Big Protest Planned Monday


You are all invited to join ML and YY, together with the campus chapter of HADASH and Taayoush-North, to attend the University of Haifa campus protest planned for Monday that will mourn the untimely tragic death of the East Jerusalem Palestinian protester Alaa Abu Dhein, who was gunned down for no reason after entering the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva this past Thursday, without so much as a Miranda warning. The Palestinian was protesting occupation and Israel's homophobic clericalist bigotry when he was set upon by a group of religious settlers for no reason at all and murdered in cold blood in the library of the yeshiva, which sits in Kiryat Moshe on occupied Palestinian land. ML and YY have asked campus officials to lower flags to half mast in honor of the martyred Palestinian protester.

So all lovers of peace should attend the Monday protest with Hadash and Taayoush.

Bring your own Hamas flags

***

That would have been the end of it, except that someone from the list leaked it to the outside. I have been getting hysterical phone calls and emails all morning from University officials. It seems that many irate phone calls are coming in to express outrage at the planned pro-terror protest. Zionist student leaders were mobilizing to confront the pro-terror protesters. Some politicians called the university in outrage. Even the Chief Rabbi called in to protest.

Strangely no one noticed it is Adar Bet and close to Purim.

So to set the record straight, the posting was a spoof. But it is a sad commentary on the nature of Israel's Far Left that so many people actually believed the posting was for real. The gap between parody and reality keeps narrowing!

Plaut Ploughs Phishy Gordon

Israeli Appeals Court: You Can Denounce the Radical Left

Read it all here.

Excerpts:-

An appeals court in the Israeli town of Nazareth overturned an earlier lower-court ruling that had awarded a legal victory to Neve Gordon, a far-Left Israeli lecturer in political scientist at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. Gordon had filed a SLAPP suit in that court against Prof. Steven Plaut, a prominent columnist and academic economist, based on articles Plaut had published denouncing Gordon’s political opinions and public political activities.

In particular, Plaut had censured Gordon for repeatedly endorsing the views and writings of Prof. Norman Finkelstein, recently fired by DePaul University in Chicago, and even comparing him to the biblical Prophets.

Gordon had won the first round in June 2006 when an Arab woman judge in the lower court, Reem Naddaf, found in his favor. The appeals panel, however, states that Naddaf’s judgment was replete with errors. Moreover, Naddaf made no attempt in her verdict to hide her own radical anti-Israeli political opinions, which happen to coincide largely with those of Gordon. She inserted outright political declarations in her ruling, including upholding the legitimacy of Holocaust revisionism and declaring that all of Israel is land “stolen from another people.”

Naddaf’s ruling was strongly criticized as biased and antidemocratic in articles all over the world. Plaut’s lawyer, Dr. Haim Misgav, suggested that Gordon had filed his SLAPP suit in Nazareth court solely because he knew many Arab judges sat on the bench there and was hoping to get a radical anti-Israeli Arab to hear the case. Naddaf awarded Gordon nearly 100,000 shekels (currently almost $30,000) in compensation and costs for what she considered “libelous” in Plaut’s criticisms of him.



Plaut filed an appeal against the ruling, which under Israeli law must be filed in the same district court as the first legal round (Nazareth).

The court ruled that Gordon had lied when he claimed Plaut had called him a “Jew for Hitler” and a “Holocaust denier,” and the appeals judges repeatedly reproved Naddaf for erroneously ignoring the fact that Gordon lied in those statements. It ruled that Plaut’s descriptions of Gordon’s academic record as consisting largely of anti-Israeli hate propaganda misrepresented as scholarship were entirely legitimate.

The court also ruled that sarcastic and harsh criticism of leftist anti-Israeli radicals is protected speech, thus defeating the entire rationale for Gordon’s SLAPP suit. It ordered Gordon to return 90% of the “damages” the lower court had awarded him, but allowed him to retain 10,000 shekels as compensation because two of the three appeals judges thought this would deter the use of Holocaust-era imagery in public political debate in Israel.

Regarding the small residual payment the court declined to refund to him, Plaut quipped, “Henceforth Neve Gordon will be intimately linked in Israel’s legal system with far-rightist Ben Gvir as the two comrades who legally snipped the margins of free speech in Israel. In the Procaccia-Ben Gvir ruling the Supreme Court ordered Dankner to pay a single shekel in compensation when calling someone a ‘little Nazi.’ We may be appealing to Israel’s Supreme Court to overturn the undemocratic 10,000-shekel residual.”

“Another loser in all this is Ben-Gurion University,” adds Plaut. “It is now clear to all that parts of Ben-Gurion University have followed a policy of hiring and promoting anti-Israeli radicals on the basis of turning out hate propaganda and misrepresenting it as scholarship. Academic standards have been trashed in some departments of that university. My near-complete court victory will only produce escalated exposure and criticism of Israel’s academic fifth column and of the failure of Israeli universities to enforce academic standards when it comes to anti-Israeli extremists.”

Have You Read Steve Plaut's Q & A?

No?

Questions And Answers About Israel, Annapolis, And 'Peace'

Q: Should Israel attend the upcoming Annapolis peace conference?

A: No. Nothing positive can come out of it. For fifteen years Israel has been attending “talks” with the Palestinians and these have achieved absolutely nothing other than Israeli capitulation. In each round of talks Israel has given away more and more assets and made an ever-growing number of concessions, getting nothing in return.

Q: Why give up hope that the Palestinians will agree at Annapolis to some sort of deal?

A: Because they have yet to comply with a single punctuation mark in any of the agreements they have already signed.

Q: So what should Israel offer the Palestinians?

A: Nothing at all.

Q: Nothing?

A: Israel should make demands instead of making offers of concessions. It should make no new offers of anything until long lists of its own demands are fully met.

Q: But how then can Israel achieve peace with the Palestinians?

A: It can’t. Making endless concessions has no more chance of achieving peace than offering nothing. In other words, since the Palestinians are uninterested in peace, no offer of any sort will produce peace, and therefore they should be offered nothing at all.

Q: What is the best way to pursue a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict?

A: By abandoning all attempts to pursue a solution. The pursuit of “solutions” has been the root of all evil in the Middle East these past two decades. Israel should stop looking for solutions and instead pursue military victory.

Q: Do you seriously want Israel to send troops back into Gaza after the redeployment by Sharon and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza?

A: Yes, of course. It was obvious at the time of the Israeli unilateral withdrawal that military reoccupation of Gaza was only a matter of time, inevitable and necessary. The sooner it is done, the better.

Q: Doesn’t Israeli occupation cause terrorism?

A: No, removal of Israeli occupation causes terrorism.

Q: What should Israel offer Syria?

A: The right to retain Damascus and other Syrian territory east of the Golan Heights in exchange for Syria’s abandoning its demands for the “return” of the Golan Heights.

Q: Do you seriously expect Syria to agree to that?

A: No.
Q: How should Israel deal with terrorism?

A: First and foremost, by recognizing that there is no non-military solution to the problems of terrorism.

Q: What should Israel do with terrorists?

A: Summarily execute them without trial whenever they are captured while engaged in violence. Capital punishment should be instituted for all other terrorists.

Q: How should Israel deal with the Hamas and Islamic Jihad?

A: By killing as many of their members as it can.

Q: How should Israel deal with the PLO?

A: By killing as many of its members as possible.

Q: What is the best strategy Israel can adopt with regard to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank?

A: R&D, or Reoccupation and Denazification.

Q: How should Israel deal with the Kassam rockets?

A: By R&D, or Reoccupation and Denazification. There is no way the Kassams will be halted through “talks.” They can only be halted by Israel’s reestablishment of complete military control over the Gaza Strip.

Q: Should Israel return Jewish settlers to Gush Katif?

A: Yes, of course.

Q: What should Israel do about settlements on the West Bank?

A: Build more of them. It’s the best way to take Palestinian statehood off the table once and for all. In any future deal based on “limited autonomy” – which was of course the original concept Israel accepted at Camp David – “settlements” will represent no impediment at all to implementation.

Q: How should Israel deal with Hizbullah?

A: By helping to resolve the parking congestion problems in the towns and villages of southern Lebanon that are strongholds of Hizbullah and loyal to it. That is, by constructing large new parking lots there.

Q: How should Israel deal with domestic Arab radicals?

A: Israeli Arabs openly identifying with the enemies of Israel or endorsing terrorism should be stripped of their Israeli citizenship and deported. All Arabs sitting in the parliament, working as senior civil servants or as judges must be required to take an oath of allegiance, on a sacred book of their religion, to Israel as a Zionist state. The extended families of any Arabs involved in terrorism or anti-Jewish violence should be deported and their property seized.

Q: What about the Temple Mount?

A: The PLO and Hamas must be completely stripped of control over it. Israel might negotiate with Turkey or Jordan to exercise administrative control over it for the near future, allowing them to control the Muslim holy places.

Q: What can Israelis expect in the next election?

A: The usual. A choice between the post-Zionism and capitulationism of the Israeli Left and the incompetence and cowardice of the Israeli Right.

Oh, How Right

The "New Israel" that

the New Israel Fund

seeks to fund is in fact

"Palestine".