Retired General Sameh Saif Al-Yazal, Director of Egyptian Institute for Strategic Studies: It Is a Disgrace for Al-Qaeda to Target Honorable Egyptian Citizens But to Refrain from Attacking Israelis
Following is an interview with retired General Sameh Saif Al-Yazal, director of the Egyptian Institute for Strategic Studies. The interview aired on Egyptian TV on January 1, 2011.
Combatants for Peace co-founder and IDF refuser Yonatan Shapira sprayed the messages "Free Gaza and Free Palestine" and "Liberate all ghettos" on the remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto wall
As someone who spent part of his childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto, I wish to address a comment to Yonatan Shapira who sprayed grafitti on the remains of the ghetto that draws a line of comparison between the Warsaw Ghetto and the Gaza Blockade.
If he had been "lucky" and spent but one day, and perhaps but a few hours in the Warsaw Ghetto, he would already understand that there is no room for such a similarity and would have refrained from doing so.
It pains me that spokespersons of the anti-Israeli pseudo-left within us and aborad are dragged into making such hallucinatory comparisons between the repression and murder of the Nazis and the troubles, dilemas and injustices of the national and religous conflict in our country.
...recalls waking up to reports of a deadly clash between Israeli Navy commandos and those aboard a Gaza-bound Turkish aid flotilla.
Though she already had attended many protests against the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Henochowicz said the circumstances surrounding the flotilla gathering felt different. She expected the protest to be relatively calm, given that nine Turkish passengers died in the early-morning raid [???].
Events, however, took a violent turn when border police responded to several Palestinian youths who had begun throwing rocks. [isn't that backwards? events took a violent turn when Arabs began acting violently, no?] Authorities have said that Henochowicz was not intentionally targeted, according to news reports, but she questions that claim.
Witnesses at the protest have reported that the canister was shot directly at Henochowicz, who was holding a Turkish flag aloft at the time and was not standing near the rock throwers. [and other witnesses say differently]
...“Tear gas shot from those guns does not even closely equal throwing stones,” she said. [so, the police should throw stones back?] “I know maybe this is apologetic or something, but I think that usually when people throw stones it is more of a symbolic thing because [stones] are highly inaccurate” [as are gas canisters?] and usually are cast in frustration [so, if they are thrown with malice aforethought, we can then defend ourselves?].
Even before Henochowicz arrived in Jerusalem, she says she had already begun to question the Jewish state’s policies regarding the Palestinians, as well as use of military force...American Jewish youths are taught that “Israel is surrounded by hostile Arabs who are just closing in on it,” but after arriving in the country, Henochowicz says she now believes that Israel is the true aggressor.
“The thing that scared me the most about going to the West Bank was the Israeli military,” she said. “I wasn’t going to get hurt by Palestinians there.” [no, because she identified with them and supported them. silly.]
...Henochowicz says she was motivated to act after witnessing a confrontation in Sheikh Jarrah, an Eastern Jerusalem neighborhood. A group of Chasidim had begun screaming prayers at Palestinian children, she recalled.
“For me it was really strange because ... these prayers are a part of me, and it’s really hurtful” to see religion utilized as a weapon of hate, she said. [talk about being strange]
Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer deny that they are anti-Semitic, and that is certainly good news. But where they are apparently content with foreign oil money being used to advance a pro-Arab position on the Middle East, but devote themselves to criticizing American Jews for lobbying their public officials in support of the Jewish state, one may legitimately wonder what phrase would apply. Surely, one's denial that he is anti-Semitic, while welcome, is hardly dispositive; after all, the marked increase in anti-Semitism around the world is well-documented, and yet one rarely hears anyone actually announce that they are anti-Semitic, or that their views are anti-Semitic.
But if anti-Semitism is too harsh a term, and if the word "bigoted" is also taken off the table, perhaps one can be forgiven for concluding that "anti-Jewish bias" fits the bill here. After all, where there is nothing wrong with foreign money from Arab countries advancing a pro-Arab agenda in Messrs. Walt's and Mearsheimer's world -- but there is something very wrong with American citizens who are Jewish exercising their civic right to speak out on behalf of Israel and taking issue with the pro-Arab agenda -- even the most vehement disclaimers of any bias against Jews lack a certain credibility.
The potency of the Middle East-funded anti-Israel lobby around the world and in the U.S. is difficult to ignore. Yet, Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer and others who adhere to an anti-Israel line ignore it. In and of itself, this is not surprising. When at the same time they portray American Jews' efforts to make the case for Israel as morally suspect, however, they open themselves up to reasonable charges of something far more troublesome than mere hypocrisy, and that is anti-Jewish bias, by whatever name.
Too many writers and pundits today are obsessed, almost pathologically, by the conviction that Israel is the most evil country that ever has existed, and that its removal from the family of nations is a precondition of world peace.
Such lethally utopian dreams are not strictly the playground of anti-Semites, but also the common coin of much liberal Jewish writing and speechifying about Israel.
...Of course the hoary cliché about equating "criticism of Israel" with anti-Semitism has been invoked ad nauseam...To my knowledge, no one has ever been identified who really made this equation. On the other hand, countless liberal-left Jews have applied the euphemism "criticism of Israel" to all the following: demonization of that country as the center of the world's evil; calls for its destruction; economic and academic boycotts of its citizens.
...When the BBC's Tom Paulin recommended that Jews living in the West Bank "should be shot dead," his Jewish defenders at Harvard and Columbia called his remarks "criticism of Israel" and "not over the line."
Vassar professor Andrew Bush called the second Palestinian intifada, during which Arab suicide bombers and lynch mobs killed 1,000 people and wounded 10,000 more, "a critique of Zionism."
...When people like NYU's Tony Judt, the most vociferous and self-righteous of Rosenfeld's critics, issue their monthly calls for politicide in Israel, which they demonize as the sole "anachronistic" state in an otherwise progressive multicultural world, don't they sense, even subconsciously, a potential kinship with the genocidally inclined (and not-at-all progressive) president of Iran? In law, such kinship is called "accessory to murder."
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