Unbowed Bawer

Some excerpts from what Bruce Bawer, who has written this book While Europe Slept about how Europe's establishment kowtows to Islamists who revile the free, tolerant societies in which they live, has been blogging:-

January 26, 2007: Europe's Stockholm Syndrome

...Western Europe's cultural elite has long been suffering from a malady that can’t easily be distinguished from Stockholm syndrome. Just look, after all, at the way that elite deals with Europe’s Muslims – especially the imams, gang members, and sundry “Islamic Councils” and “Muslim Associations.” You can’t help being reminded of an abuse victim who – for some psychological reason that outsiders can't understand – not only fails to flee or to fight back when given the chance but actually defends and praises his abuser.

It’s no exaggeration to use the word “abuse.” A wildly disproportionate percentage of Western Europe’s Muslims are living on state support – and committing brutal crimes against the taxpayers who fund it. “Moderate” imams (as shown on Channel 4's recent “Undercover Mosque” exposé) call regularly for the murder of Jews and gays and for Muslim conquest of Europe. Meanwhile the “councils” and “associations” (also supposedly moderate) repeatedly declare their “understanding” for everybody from Theo van Gogh's murderer to the July 2005 London bombers.

Europe is being held captive. Yet just as Shawn Hornbeck, who had a cell phone and computer, was in theory perfectly free to flee his captor or contact his parents, European officials have a clear route out of this nightmare. They have armies. They have police. They have prisons. They’re in a position to deport planeloads of people every day. They could start rescuing Europe tomorrow. Yet how have they responded to the gangsters who are holding it hostage? In precisely the same way Shawn Hornbeck apparently did: like prisoners under lock and key. They’ve been incredibly docile, compliant, submissive.

Europe’s media, for example, when confronted with events or statements that vividly illuminate the goals of Muslim leaders and agitators, either don't report on them or edit out key facts. (Few media accounts of the fall 2005 Paris riots, for example, mentioned the participants' cries of “Allahu akbar,” which made their religious motive clear.) Though a 2006 Telegraph poll found that 40% of British Muslims want Britain to become a sharia state, politicians still respond to every new riot, rape, honor killing, or foiled terrorist plot by reassuring the public that the overwhelming majority of European Muslims are law-abiding, peace-loving supporters of democracy. No British official so much as commented on “Undercover Mosque” – yet days after it was broadcast, in a colossal denial of the reality it exposed, Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair announced a jaw-dropping plan to share anti-terrorist intelligence with Muslim community leaders.

January 29, 2007: I've just read that when the nominees for the NBCC awards were announced at a party the other night, the author who was selected to recite the names of the criticism finalists took the opportunity to call my book (which is one of the finalists) "racist."

As I and many others have pointed out a few million times, radical Islam is not a race. (Is Ayaan Hirsi Ali a racist? Is Irshad Manji? Is Chahdortt Djavann?) But it's easy – and, in some circles, highly effective – to fling the "R" word instead of trying to respond to irrefutable facts and arguments.

One of the most disgraceful developments of our time is that many Western authors and intellectuals who pride themselves on being liberals have effectively aligned themselves with an outrageously illiberal movement that rejects equal rights for women, that believes gays and Jews should be executed, that supports the coldblooded murder of one's own children in the name of honor, etc., etc. These authors and intellectuals respond to every criticism of that chilling fundamentalist code – however cogent and correct the criticism may be – by hurling the "R" word.

I will not be cowed by such disgraceful, duplicitous rhetoric. Civilized, tolerant, pluralist values are at stake – values that affect freedom-loving individuals of all races.

and

“One of the most disgraceful developments of our time is that many Western authors and intellectuals who pride themselves on being liberals have effectively aligned themselves with an outrageously illiberal movement that rejects equal rights for women, that believes gays and Jews should be executed, that supports the coldblooded murder of one’s own children in the name of honor, etc., etc.,”

Guide for Marital Interpersonal Relations

Sorry, the Islamic Baharaini version.

Water, Water...Down the Drain

Some 15 years ago, I was engaged in a radio interview with Amiram Gloldblum Peace Now spokseperson at the time and when the issue of water came up in that we revenants were blamed for stealing water, etc., I pointed out the facts that we do indeed use more water, no more than any other Israeli and more than the average Pal. as we have washing machines, dish washes and we probably take more showers.

Well, Goldblum tried to hit me with a racism charge but I valiantly fought back and said he probably took more showers than my neighbor in Turmos Aya and that I was simply stating a fact. He, as a scientist (he's a chemist), should know that.

Why do I recall this story?

Read one:-

Security prisoners consume more water

Israel Prison Service reveals security prisoner consumes about 1,000 liters of water a day, while criminal prisoner consumes 500 liters, civilian consumes 250 liters. One possible explanation for phenomenon is that waste is aimed at harming Israel's water economy, IPS suggests

A security prisoner jailed in Israel consumes 1,000 liters (about 264 gallons) of water a day, twice as much as a criminal prisoner and four times more than an Israeli civilian.

The Israel Prison Service (IPS) has decided to put an end to this phenomenon, allowing prisoners to take showers only in public shower stalls where the amount of water used will be supervised.

IPS officials recently decided to check how much water is consumed by prisoners jailed in security prisons and how much is consumed by criminal prisoners, and were amazed by the findings. According to the data, security prisoners consume a large amount of water on a daily basis. They use the shower stalls and lavatories in their cells and wash their clothes.

In light of the findings, the IPS decided to form a plan to reduce the water consumption both among security prisoners and among criminal prisoners. The prisons' economy managers were instructed to carry out a number of moves, including explaining the importance of nit wasting water to the prisoners.

I wonder - would I be called a racist if I pointed out today that Pal. prisoners use up more water than I do when showering?

Forcing Jews to be Jewish

The story on the Arab citizens's call on Israel to Shed Jewish Identity has finally hit the NYTimes.

I mentioned it previously here and here are some excerpts:-

A group of prominent Israeli Arabs has called on Israel to stop defining itself as a Jewish state and become a “consensual democracy for both Arabs and Jews,” prompting consternation and debate across the country. Their contention is part of “The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel,” a report published in December under the auspices of the Committee of Arab Mayors in Israel, which represents the country’s 1.3 million Arab citizens, about a fifth of the population. Some 40 well-known academics and activists took part.

They call on the state to recognize Israeli Arab citizens as an indigenous group with collective rights, saying Israel inherently discriminates against non-Jewish citizens in its symbols of state, some core laws, and budget and land allocations.

Last month, a Muslim Arab legislator from the Labor Party, Ghaleb Majadele, was named a government minister, the first in Israel’s history...in an interview, Mr. Majadele distanced himself from the new document, saying that pragmatic political action would help the Arab sector more than any ideological program. “The fact is that Israel is a Jewish state, a state with a Jewish majority,” he said. “Can we change that reality with words?”

...both Jewish conservatives and liberals have been taken aback by some propositions in the document. Many are angered by its description of Israel as the outcome of a “settlement process initiated by the Zionist Jewish elite” in the West and realized by “colonial countries” in the wake of the Holocaust.

Jewish critics argue that the Future Vision report negates Israel’s legitimacy and raison d’être as the realization of Jewish self-determination; further, they say it undermines the idea of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, since that implies the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish one.

In January, the senior fellows and board of the Israel Democracy Institute...wrote a response expressing “severe anguish” over the document’s contents. Prof. Shimon Shamir...[wrote]...the Future Vision document “evokes a sense of threat.”

Amazing how non-Jews 'force' Jews to be Jewish.

Geula Cohen's Herzliyah Conference Speech

Seems that The Jewish Press has printed Geula Cohen's address at the Herzliyah Conference (but, at present, can't find the link). Ah, here it is.

Here it is anyway:-

The Truth From The Land Of Israel
Former MK Geula Cohen’s Speech From The Recent Herzliya Conference

Good evening:

Given the three options – lamenting together with everyone else, looking for the coin under the street lamp, or fooling myself into thinking that everything is all right – I chose a fourth option: touching briefly on several truths incorporated into my belief system over the course of the 81 years of my life.

These truths, which I learned at my own expense, go back to when I was a young girl in the Betar Movement, demonstrating against “The White Paper.” They go back to when I was a Lehi member sitting in a British prison. They also go back to my years of fighting in the Knesset against the policy of concessions and withdrawals, my grassroots struggle to get the Jews out of Russia and Ethiopia, and my efforts to settle Jews in Judea and Samaria, liberated in the Six-Day War. I have particularly struggled on behalf of Kiryat Arba-Hebron, City of the Patriarchs.

And I experienced all of this amidst a tragic struggle against uprooting Jews from their homes. In its time, this was about Yamit, and more recently about Gush Katif. All of these experiences, and everything in between, occurred in one period to one woman, or perhaps to one country.

The first truth is that since the State’s establishment, we have been living here in Israel as “goyim” – in quotation marks, obviously. Yet if we are killed for our country, we are killed only as Jews, without quotation marks, and not necessarily with any religious connotation. Surely it is a historic truth that the Zionist Movement that established the State was cut off from religion, but not cut off from the unique meaning of the redemption process of the Jewish people. Life within this existential contradiction has a price tag, and we pay it in all walks of our lives.

The second truth is the continuing erosion of the code of life of our people. After our people wrestled with the angel of G-d, their name was changed from Jacob to Israel, and their destiny was determined – to prevail and to struggle. This meant struggling with G-d over His faith, in the sense of “I struggle, therefore I am.” It meant the struggle going back to Abraham to perfect the world. It meant the struggle down through history to discover our identity. It meant the unending struggle throughout the period of Zionist action for our survival here in Israel as a political state.

Every struggle has its price. Jacob emerged from his struggle limping. At one time, we were ready to pay the price of the struggle, but today no longer. Years ago Ahmed Yassin, founder of Hamas, asked Ehud Barak a question when the latter, as Army chief of staff, visited him in an Israeli prison. “Do you know why today’s Israel is weak? It is because you have lost the will to fight.” This erosion in the will to struggle has a price. Our enemies can discern that erosion. We all remember Hanan Nasrallah’s statement that Israel is “weaker than a spider web…”

But not all of us remember that the one who warned us against this erosion was Zeev Binyamin Herzl. True, he did say, “If you will it, it is no dream.” But the second part of what he said was, “If you do not will it, then everything I have said to you will turn into a mere dream.”

The third truth sounds like a Biblical parable, but it is the mathematical formula of our lives – “Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint” (Proverbs 29:18). In a normal country – like Switzerland – normal social motivation is enough to make a person a good taxpaying citizen. Here in Israel, it is not. Our nation needs an out-of-the-ordinary Messianic motivation to achieve that; they need some vision that will provide meaning, reason, purpose and an explanation to our lives.

Otherwise, as our sages said, the people will dance around a Golden Calf and descend down to the dust; and in the larger scheme of things, that is what has happened to us. It didn’t happen overnight, but over the course of many years we became a materialistic, oligarchic society with an opportunistic policy of compromise on top of compromise, until we forgot the ideals from which we started to compromise, and the compromise itself became the ideal.

People with licentious tongues slander our people by calling them corrupt, but that is not so. This people is the same people that has been in this country since 1948, and perhaps today it is even better. It is just our political leadership and intellectual elite, devoid of any vision, who have led the people to knowingly lie to themselves in the face. A leadership that relates to the people (who by nature are out of the ordinary in the positive sense of the word) as if they were normal and average, thereby transforms them into an out-of-the-ordinary people in the negative sense of the word.

The fourth truth is the fact that with our people, only what is historic is also realistic. It is true that our history is full of complexities and complications. In that regard, Dr. Yisrael Eldad once said, “It is true that Isaac was saved from the Akeidah (his sacrifice by Abraham), but he entered the bramble from which emerged the ram that was sacrificed in his place, and from that day on we have been stuck in a bramble.”

Even so, whoever tries to outsmart history by way of shortsighted shortcuts, whoever impatiently tries to save time will pay a heavy price in cash up front – in line, perhaps with the saying, “Time is money…” A leadership that instead of looking at the great historic clock looks only at the watch on its wrist will never know what time it is.

It’s no wonder, then, that all the dozens of peace plans that they’ve tried to force onto the living body of this land have been spat out like foreign growths, one by one, and they lie buried in the Middle East Peace Plan Cemetery. Cause of Death: Attempt to force unreality on reality.

The fifth and last truthis the fact that the real distinguishing factor today is not between Right and Left, nor between those who want a larger Eretz Yisrael and those who want a smaller Eretz Yisrael. Rather, it is between those – either from the Right or the Left – who continue to believe in the justice of the Zionist process, to struggle for it and to pay the price involved, and those who in despair have jumped off the Zionist ladder.

In our younger generation, we have enormous potential for self-sacrifice for the Land and the country. This was revealed in our religious youth who struggled against the uprooting of settlements, as well as in our secular youth, who recently fought in Lebanon.

What we still do not have is a leadership of politicians and intellectuals who believe in this potential, and who are capable of transforming it into a practical force. What we are lacking is a leadership that will have the sense to restore to relevance the vision and meaning of our existence here in Israel, and to restore the meaning of “here” to our existence.

Here's a version from the Conference site:

Out of two options – to lament with everyone else, or to look for something that is right under your nose – I have chosen to the third option:

To touch upon some of the truths that have escaped us in the past two days but affect our daily lives, some of the truths of the “I believe” sort that I have personally experienced since I was a young Beitar member protesting the White Paper and my time as a Lehi prisoner in British jail, my wars in the Knesset against the policies of concession and withdrawal, my fights to bring the Jews from the Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and the settlement of Jews in Judea and Samaria that were liberated in the Six Day War, especially in Kiryat Arba – all this during a tragic battle against uprooting Jews. All of this and everything in between – during one time period, one woman.

The first truth is that since the establishment of the state we are living in our country as non-Jews, in parentheses of course. But to be killed for our country, we are killed here only as Jews, without parentheses, without a religious connotation, but not disconnected from the uniqueness of the redemption process of the Jewish people. To life within this existential contradiction, there is a price that we are paying in all aspects of our lives.

The second truth is the continuing erosion of the code of life of our nation, a nation whose mission has been destined for service and struggle. The struggle that has existed since Abraham Our Father for tikkun olam (healing the world), the struggle for our identity throughout our exile, the struggle of Zionist action for our existence here as a state. Struggle has a price. Once, we were prepared to pay the price of this struggle – today not any more.

“You know,” Ahmad Yassin, the founder of Hamas, asked Ehud Barak, then chief of staff who had visited him in Israeli jail, “You know why the Israel of today is weakening? It’s because you have lost the will to fight.” This erosion of the desire to fight has a price. Our enemies have identified this erosion. We all remember Nasrallah’s “spider webs” … But not all of us remember that the first person who warned us against this erosion was Ze’ev Benjamin Herzl. The second part of his saying “If you will it, it is no dream,” was “If you don’t will it, all of what I have told you, will become a dream.”

The third truth sounds like a biblical saying, but is actually the math formula of our lives: “Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint. “ In a normal country like Switzerland, there is normal societal motivation to be a good, tax-paying citizen. In Israel, there isn’t. Our nation needs abnormal messianic motivation for this … We need some kind of vision that will give meaning, taste, purpose, and meaning to our lives. Otherwise, as our sages said, our nation will dance around a golden calf. And this is what has happened to us - not in one day, but in many days. We have become a materialistic, oligarchic society with an opportunistic policy of compromise, so much so that we have forgotten the ideals with which we started. Compromise itself has become an ideal …

The nation is the same nation that has been here since ’48. Today it is possibly even better. It is only our visionless leadership, policies, elite, and spirituality that cause us to be insincere. The leadership that refers to a nation who is by its very nature an abnormal nation in the good sense of the word as a normal nation turns it into an abnormal nation in the negative sense of the word.

The fourth truth is that for our nation only what is historical is ultimately also realistic. It is true that our history is filled with complications, about which Dr. Israel Eldad once said: “We were saved from the binding (of Isaac), but we entered into the thicket from which the bound ram that took our place left, and until today we are still anointed. However, whoever, out of impatience, outsmarts history with short cuts, whoever wants to save time, pays in cash. For leadership that instead of looking at the hands of the large clock of history, looks at only at the hands of the small clock, whose hands will never really tell the right time, it is no wonder that every ten peace plans they tried to force upon the live body of this country were rejected like a foreign transplant, one by one, and are buried in the peace plan cemetery in the Middle East. The cause of death: an attempt to a non-reality on reality.”

The last truth for tonight is that the true understanding of today is not between right and left, not between those who want a larger Land of Israel and those who want a smaller one, but between those, both on the right and the left, who continue to believe in the just way of the Zionist process, to fight for it and pay the price it entails – and between those who are desperate, who have left Zionism. We have a huge potential for sacrifice for the land and the country, which is evident in our religious youth in the struggle against the uprooting of settlements from the Land of Israel, as well as in our secular youth, who fights today in Lebanon. What we do not have is the leadership of statesmen and intellectuals who believe in this potential and are able to harness it into practical strength on the ground. What we lack is this leadership which will be able to reinstate the vision – the meaning of our existence. Let it be!

I've Been Attacked in The Guardian

See these two letters:-

Yisrael Medad (Letters, Februry 6) asserts that Jews who are critical of Israel know little of the history of Zionism and "ignore Arab sins". As a British Jew I find this insulting. It is possible to condemn the violent stupidities of some Palestinian responses to Israel while sympathising with the plight of Palestinians. As for my knowledge of Zionism, I have long abhorred the right wing in Israeli politics and know well its history, dating back to Vladimir Jabotinsky and his revisionist Zionism, which demanded the establishment of a state after the first world war. Conversely, I have long regretted the earlier defeat of "cultural Zionism", associated with the writer Achad Ha'am, as an alternative to the Zionist triumphalism of both right and left that prevailed.

Prof Brian Winston
Lincoln


As he lives in Shiloh, a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, Yisrael Medad should know a lot about fudging historical facts, ignoring the law and "behaving in a street-gang manner". There is no need for settlers to call their philosophy "Jewish nationalism"; the term "colonialism" already fits perfectly.

Cathal Rabbitte
Bombay

Here's my letter to Winston (I managed to find his email address) -

Dear Prof. Winston,

I am sorry my resonse was delayed (I usually try to follow Internet developments more closely but today I was in Tel Aviv participating in a Civic Education seminar sponsored by the American Embassy with one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s associates, Dr. Bernard Lafayette). And I mention that in connection with the rather simplistic view one can have regarding other peoples political, ideological and historical outlooks.

You wrote that you found my statement "insulting" and that "It is possible to condemn the violent stupidities of some Palestinian responses to Israel while sympathising with the plight of Palestinians". Ah, but if only those who are vociferously in opposition to Israel's policies were equally strident in their criticism of Palestinian actions. I have been listening for a very long time, at least as long as since the time I spent two years in London doing Zionist work and just as recently as helping Jacqueline Rose with her review essay of Jabotinsky's novel, "The Five", published a few months ago in The Nation, but I fear my hearing is just not hearing. If you have raised your voice, please point me in its direction.

You are surely free to abhor anything you wish but in singling out Jabotinsky, the one Zionist leader who was visionary enough to attempt to save Jewish lives rather than dilly-dally over cultural Zionism, socialist Zionist and even religious Zionism, you seem to edge towards ignorance. Your regret at the defeat of Ahad Haam-ism I can sympathize with, to turn the tables, but cannot agree with as those who followed his lead were so horribly wrong in analyzing the immediate needs of more than 6 million Jews in the inter-war period and the reality of Arab opposition to Zionism which was total - neither in Jerusalem nor Tel Aviv or Emeq Yizrael.

As for Cathal, couldn't find an address. He's Irish, very pro-Pal., writes oads of letters and seems to be or have been employed by an Arab insurance company and previously based in Cairo.

Another Self-Hating Bunch of Jews

If you go here, you can the opportunity to listen songs from a new musical including Song of the Secular Jews which starts off: I hate the Jews.

It seems some people think it's a delightful, hilarious and razor-sharp theatrical work of genius by Julien Nitzberg (libretto & direction) and Roger Neill (composer & musical direction).

Without getting too much into plot, The Beastly Bombing involves two separate terrorist teams, - two Timothy McVeigh-inspired white supremacists who arrive in New York to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge only to meet two Al Qaeda operatives who have arrived at the same place and time with the same plan. There are waltzes, mayhem, romance and more that follow in this musical skewering of the post 9/11 world. There's a power-mad president, his two drug-addled daughters and hilarity pretty much ensues from the get-go in a mad-cap, Gilbert-and-Sullivan-esque romp that has more smart things to say about 9/11 than a phalanx of self-important political bloggers.

And more detail:-

The musical begins on the Brooklyn Bridge with two white supremacists, molded after Timothy McVeigh, declaring their love for the U.S., but because they love the country oh-so-dearly, they must blow up the bridge to send a message to the Zionist puppet government. Then along come Abdul (Andrew Ableson) and Khalid (Russell Steinberg), two Al-Qaeda operatives who have also planned to blow up the bridge on the same day. I won't spoil who actually gets to the bridge, but you'd never believe it anyway.

Some people think that it's simply awful. Perhaps the idea could have worked if it weren't so poorly executed. The book and lyrics are attrocious and the plot becomes nonsensical beyond satire. The songs are plodding and repetative. A torturous evening.

Notice the tallitot:-



(Kippah tip: Sairy who wears a great hat)

Alleged

Proper and correct English is a always a good thing. However, English can also be used in a number of ways.

Take for example, this excerpt from Jonathan Rosenblum's op-ed, "Knowing our Limits" in the Mishpacha magazine:-

A group of five feminists, including novelist Naomi Ragen, has petitioned BaGaTz against the Mehadrin lines maintained by two publicly-subsidized bus companies: Egged and Dan. Petitioner do not demand the immediate cessation of Mehadrin service, but rather that the Court order the Transport Ministry to conduct a study of the necessity of separate seating bus lines and require Mehadrin buses to be clearly labeled.

At the hearing before BaGaTz, a good deal of attention is likely to focus on an incident that took place on the number 2 bus between Har Nof and the Kotel last November 24. In a widely circulated Email, Mrs. Miriam Shear, an Orthodox grandmother from Toronto described an alleged attack on her that day.

Since there has been no court decision in this matter of the attack, it is, truthfully, alleged.

Nevertheless, I do think it would have been better to have written "what Mrs. Shear alleged to have happened...".

What's the difference you ask?

Well, in my phrasing, it is clear that Mrs. Shear is the one doing the alleging and that there was an incident but perhaps not all the details are clear. In Jonathan's version, it is as if the who incident really didn't occur.

The difference is minor but the conclusions could be major.

All Religions? Including Judaism?

Tzippi Livni was asked also about the Temple Mount:-

Minister Livni, the Arab world is responding to what is happening on the Temple Mount. Do you think there is a basis to the charges that Israel is damaging Islamic shrines, and how do you relate to the attempts of the Islamic movement to stir up emotions?

and replied:-

FM Livni: There is no basis to these charges. The responsibilities and obligations of the State of Israel are based in part on our values as both a Jewish and democratic state. As such, we are obliged to allow every person to express his religious ideas and beliefs, and to preserve places holy to all religions. Needless to say, the Temple Mount is the holiest site of the Jewish faith. It also has religious importance to the Muslim population. The reconstruction does not harm, is not intended to harm and will not harm any holy site. On the contrary, the reconstruction will preserve the ramp after its collapse and other problems in the past.

It is true that there are those whose vision does not match ours, which strives to preserve religious freedom and to allow free access to holy sites for all. There are groups, residing both in and out of Israel, who would seek to prevent those holding beliefs different from theirs from realizing their religious aspirations, from accessing sites holy to them. These groups seize every opportunity to arouse the most extremist points of view. Some make political use of this, and I hope that the responsible Islamic leadership will understand and convey the message that the Israeli government is not attempting to harm or destroy anything but rather to preserve freedom of access to the holy sites of all religions.

But How Can You Tell the Difference?

Foreign Minister Tzippi Livni is asked at today's press conference:-

Could you tell us if you are for or against negotiations with the Palestinians subject to implementation of the phases of the Roadmap?
FM Livni: I believe in creating a very clear distinction between moderate and extremist groups in the Palestinian Authority, and these two issues must run in parallel. On the one hand, it is important and advisable to continue Israeli and international pressure on the Authority. We saw this in the Quartet's recent announcement that the terms demanded by the international community from every Palestinian government must remain intact, and this pressure will continue. On the other hand we have to create a process with the moderate group so as to ascertain what can be achieved, enabling Israel to present its demands. These should include security and other needs which are linked to the progress in any peace process.

I am talking of complete separation between discussion or dialogue on the one hand, and authorization and implementation on the other. The Roadmap speaks of authorization and implementation in phases, the first of which, of course, is the requirement to wage war on terror and the disarmament of the terrorist organizations. This does not prevent us from meeting and attempting to ascertain what each party would like to see in the future. But we must distinguish between discussions, concessions, and actual implementation. That is why I feel it is important to progress with the discussions while ensuring that the implementation on the ground will be in accordance with the principles laid down in the Roadmap, which, in the first phase, express Israel's security requirements.

Stonehenge? Why Not the Temple Mount, Too?

Is Embezzling A Jewish Organizational Problem?

$3.8 million spent without supporting documentation
IAN HAMEL
3 February 2007
Geneva

Auditing company PriceWaterhouseCoopers has discovered an “undocumented” $3.8 million on the WJC’s books. A polite way of saying that the money has vanished into thin air – without supporting documentation

At the beginning of 2004, the World Jewish Congress (WJC), which has its headquarters in New York, closes down its offices in Geneva from one day to the next and dismisses its staff. Utterly shocked, the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, an umbrella organization for Switzerland’s Jewish communities, calls for explanations. After all, the World Jewish Congress was set up in Geneva in 1936, was it not? In addition, lawyer Daniel Lack, the WJC’s representative at the United Nations, has identified some strange monetary operations. In several transfers, 1.2 million dollars left New York and landed in Geneva, before being transferred to Israel, then to London. Eventually, the money reappears in New York, without any obvious reason.

“Instead of giving us a direct reply, Israel Singer, the president of the Board of the WJC, chose to make a scene in public by distorting the facts, and calling us into question. Nobody was even interested in hearing me,” says Daniel Lack, a foreign lawyer registered at the Geneva bar. Relations between Israel Singer and Switzerland’s Jewish communities have never been particularly cordial. Alfred Donath, president of the FSCI – the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities – leveled harsh criticism at Singer for having called Swiss neutrality during World War II a “crime.” “Unacceptable” accusations, Alfred Donath called these comments.

Serious lapses

As a result of the WJC’s silence, Switzerland’s Jews would insist on an audit being carried out by PriceWaterhouseCoopers. This happened in December 2006 – not an audit but a report, since individuals asked to attend refused to answer questions. The report is damning. The WJC’s financial records and accounts between 1995 and 2004 confirm “the charges that accounts were not kept properly and financial positions were not clear.” Reference can even be made to “serious lapses,” since in addition to the $1.2 million already referred to, an additional $3.8 million are not “documented.” In other words, large amounts have been disbursed in cash for no reason and gone to unknown destinations.

“We want the World Jewish Congress to part company with the leaders who are responsible for this situation, in order to restore the communities’ confidence in the WJC,” Alfred Donath says emphatically, speaking as president of the 18,000 member strong FSCI. He notes that this powerful organization, which has been headed by Edgar Bronfman since 1981, has made a start on re-establishing order in its house. In an editorial which appeared last Friday, Gary Rosenblatt, a journalist with New York’s Jewish Week, expressed the hope that in the future, the World Jewish Congress will spend less time and energy on revenge against fellow Jews who have the audacity to express criticism of it – especially when such criticism is justified.

Try this too -

Demand for Israel Singer’s resignation

Swiss Jews feel that an investigation has confirmed their criticism of the financial conduct of the World Jewish Congress (WJC). Now they’re demanding the resignation of Israel Singer from the WJC’s top leadership

Luzi Bernet

After the conclusion of investigations into financial transactions of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in Geneva, the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (FSCI), Swiss Jewry’s umbrella organization, is demanding that Israel Singer resign from his positions at the head of the WJC. In addition, the FSCI is calling for an apology for the WJC’s “defamation campaign” against Swiss Jews. These two demands are voiced by the FSCI president, Alfred Donath, when asked about the situation. “It is time for those who are responsible in the World Jewish Congress for these shortcomings in their bookkeeping practices to resign from their positions now,” says Donath, “and that also includes Israel Singer.”

The background to these demands are investigations undertaken by the auditing company of PriceWaterhouseCoopers at the Geneva offices of the WJC. The audit was demanded by the FSCI in April 2004, after rumours about irregularities in the WJC’s accounts made the round in Geneva. Among other things, the WJC’s former secretary-general Israel Singer was suspected of having used monies for personal purposes. Finally, the WJC authorized an independent investigation into the disbursement of $1.2 million which in an unclear fashion made the rounds of New York, Geneva, London and Tel Aviv. The experts also examined the Geneva WJC’s bookkeeping from 1995 to 2004.

For FSCI president Alfred Donath, the investigation confirms the suspicions of “unsatisfactory bookkeeping and a non-transparent financial situation” at the WJC, as a communiqué put it. According to Donath, in the report, in addition to the $1.2 million, another $3.8 million surfaced whose use is completely undocumented. In neither case, admittedly, were the experts able to come up with any proof that illegal transactions had taken place, but, as Donath puts it, “in any case the report shows that the bookkeeping in Geneva was extremely faulty.” The same result was also reached a year ago by an investigation of the then Attorney General of New York. Eliot Spitzer. Singer was required to pay back to the WJC more than $300,000 which he had received in “inappropriate disbursements.”

Because of the FCSI’s demand that the Geneva accounts be checked, the Swiss organization had come under great pressure in the Jewish world. “Instead of re-establishing order in its own house, the WJC fought those who drew attention to irregularities,” says Donath. He himself and other Jewish whistleblowers, he said, had become the objects of a vilification campaign. “The WJC should apologize,” observes Donath. However, for the FCSI, he says, the matter is now closed. They did not intend to report the matter to the police because it was now up to the WJC to deal with things. Donath continues to maintain that his intervention in 2004 was justified. “If we had done nothing, the Swiss Jews would have been accomplices. We couldn’t allow this to happen to us.”

At the WJC, nobody is willing to comment on Donath’s statements. In confidence, however, there is astonishment that the Swiss Jews have gone public now of all times. Nothing has changed recently as far as the facts are concerned. It is intimated that the statements might perhaps have a purely political background. The allusion is to things that are going on in the WJC’s head office in New York, where a public fight over the organization’s leadership has broken out. The WJC’s long-time president, Edgar Bronfman, wants to put his oft-stated intention into practice and retire. He has chosen his son Matthew, who is already on the WJC board, as his successor. Ronald Lauder has protested against such a development. Also active in the WJC for many years, the mega-billionaire wants to take over the organization’s reins himself. The WJC is not a monarchy, Lauder comments.

The Bronfmann-Singer leadership duo is also under attack from the Israeli branch, because the New York head office made staff changes in Jerusalem without agreement. At the same time, a libel suit which the WJC brought in Israel against its internal critic, Isi Leibler, ended with a setback: the association will have to pay $55,000 to its former vice-president.

It Just Won't Work

Daryl Temkin, who has a Ph.D., and is the director of the Israel Education Institute which is devoted to teaching history and contemporary issues of Israel to Jews and Non-Jews, sent me his article and I excerpted this bit:-

Attempting to disprove basic laws of physics rarely proves successful. Expecting two enemy states to suddenly harmoniously exist side by side in the same area, when the Arab state refuses to recognize the existence of the Jewish state, yet alone daily affirms its religious dictums to destroy the Jewish state, is not only a serious problem contradicting displacement theory but is also no different than the exploding science laboratory fiasco where the mixture of elements are a known guaranteed disaster.

Forcing a lion and a lamb to lie down together is not a problem for the lion, but it is a big problem for the lamb. No matter how many promises of peaceful behavior the lion should claim to commit, upon its first violation, the world will immediately excuse the lion for acting like a lion. All that the lamb can do is wait to be a victim, and the world will say, “Why should the lion be expected to be so perfect?”

Forcing the creation of a Palestinian state upon Israel is a serious problem which not only is asking a lamb to lay down next to a lion, but under the current conditions, it is tantamount to the attempt to disprove laws of nature, physics, and the historic record of human relations.

When bath water rises and threatens to spill over, it’s true that many people will not notice that there is a lesson to be learned or a law of physics to be discovered. But for those who can see that the law of displacement has a meaning much deeper than just spilt water, the world suddenly looks much different and deserves a response which recognizes the physical realities that will not disappear just because someone has a fantasy dream and says it can be done.

Dem Rimz Keep Spinnin Even After the Centrifuge Stop

Found here.

Soros

From Martin Peretz's "Tyran-a-Soros" in The New Republic following this remark by George Soros at Davos

"America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany. We have to go through a certain deNazification process."

...Soros [...] himself experienced something of Nazism. He was 14 when the Nazis entered Budapest. On December 20, 1998, there appeared this exchange between Soros and Steve Kroft on "60 Minutes":

Kroft: "You're a Hungarian Jew ..."
Soros: "Mm-hmm."

Kroft: "... who escaped the Holocaust ..."
Soros: "Mm-hmm."

Kroft: "... by posing as a Christian."
Soros: "Right."

Kroft: "And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps."
Soros: "Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that's when my character was made."

Kroft: "In what way?"
Soros: "That one should think ahead. One should understand that--and anticipate events and when, when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a-- a very personal threat of evil."

Kroft: "My understanding is that you went ... went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews."
Soros: "Yes, that's right. Yes."

Kroft: "I mean, that's--that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?"

Soros: "Not, not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don't ...
you don't see the connection. But it was--it created no--no problem at all."
Kroft: "No feeling of guilt?"

Soros: "No."
Kroft: "For example, that, 'I'm Jewish, and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be these, I should be there.' None of that?"

Soros: "Well, of course, ... I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that was--well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in the markets--that is I weren't there-- of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would--would- -would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the--whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the--I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt."

So this is the psychodrama that has been visited on American liberalism. We learn Soros never has nightmares. Had he been tried in a de-Nazification process for having been a young cog in the Hitlerite wheel, he would have felt that, since other people would have confiscated the same Jewish property and delivered the same deportation notices to the same doomed Jews, it was as if he hadn't done it himself. He sleeps well, while we sleep in Nazi America.

Soros is ostentatiously indifferent to his own Jewishness. He is not a believer. He has no Jewish communal ties. He certainly isn't a Zionist. He told Connie Bruck in The New Yorker--testily, she recounted--that "I don't deny the Jews their right to a national existence--but I don't want to be part of it." But he has involved himself in the founding of an anti-aipac, more dovish Israel lobby.

Suddenly, he wants to influence the character of a Jewish state about which he loudly cares nothing. Once again, he bears no responsibility. Perhaps his sense of his own purity also underwrites his heartlessness in business. As a big currency player in the world markets, Soros was at least partially responsible for the decline in the British pound.

Forget my differences with Soros's Jewishness. Call it shul politics.

But the characterization of the United States under Bush as Nazi is much bigger, and more grave, than shul politics. It casts a shadow over U.S. politics. In the same conversation at Davos, Soros announced that he is supporting Senator Barack Obama, though he would also support Senator Hillary Clinton. So my question to both of those progressives is this: How, without any explanation or apology from him, will you take this man's money?

Just Who Does the West Support in the ME?

Mai Yamani, author of Cradle of Islam, and Changed Identities: The Challenge of the New Generation in Saudi Arabia (e mail: myamani@btinternet.com) thinks that the "moderate" Arab states supported by the West are in fact fanatics, torturers and killers and that the longer the US and Britain back dictatorial regimes in the Middle East the more explosive the region will become.

Excerpts:-

Western leaders have simply chosen a few Arab rulers they believe are still saleable to western audiences. And, as the word moderate has been repeated by western leaders and echoed in the international media, these rulers have begun to believe their own billing. But who are they, and are they moderate? Their selection has been fluid at the periphery but solid at the core. Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt clearly qualify, whereas Syria, an ally during the 1990-91 Gulf war, was once at the periphery but fell out of step with US interests after 9/11. Likewise, after the death of Arafat and the victory of Hamas, Fatah became moderate, while Iran, moderate under the shah, became "radical" after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

...The Saudi Wahhabis are, after all, fanatics; Egypt's Hosni Mubarak is intolerant of dissent; and Jordan, the state closest to the western ideal, is a marginal player. These countries' appalling human rights records, lack of transparency and repression rank them among the world's least moderate. Is there such a thing as a "moderate public beheading"? For the US and UK governments there clearly is, because all departures from the ideals of liberal democracy and social justice are rooted in "tradition". Hence bribes, beheadings and the oppression of women and minorities are traditional, and because whatever is traditional is not radical, it must be moderate.

...The moderates are not democrats, but they are politically useful because of what else they are not: they are not Persian and not Shia, not defiant and not able to act independently of the US. They are moderate only because they do not need to be more radical to achieve absolute power. Mubarak already exercises it, and the al-Sauds are satisfied with the current level of fanaticism in the kingdom. Some are armchair jihadis, but their Islamism serves only to prop up their domestic legitimacy.

...The Saudis invest billions in the US, buy weapons they don't need or cannot use, and provide a thriving market for western goods. But, like Mubarak, the Saudi rulers are old and on the defensive against their own people. The more the US shelters them, the more their legitimacy erodes. And the longer Washington and London prolong the state of denial with the help of pithy and amorphous buzzwords, the more explosive the Middle East will become.

The Guardian Letter is Published

Mine is the first to appear:-

Brian Klug bemoans an "oppressive atmosphere" that limits, he asserts, his and his comrades' freedom of expression within the Jewish community in the UK (No one has the right to speak for British Jews on Is rael and Zionism, February 5).

As Klug is well aware, it is not the principle that is in dispute but the details. When critics of Israel's policies in the territories or in Lebanon, or in Israel itself, adopt a standard of moral inequivalency, ignore Arab sins, glide over major societal and cultural differences, fudge historical facts, forget legal rights and, in general, act in a street-gang manner, they should know that it is fair and just to question their Jewish identity, or, at the very least, cast doubt whether they are interpreting to the non-Jewish public what Jewish identity is and what is Jewish nationalism.

Yisrael Medad
Shiloh, Israel

My original text, the letter was edited, is here.

And while we are on the subject of letters, I found there this interesting one on another, but related, subject:-

Maleiha Malik (Comment, February 2) says "Churchill wrote that Jews were part of a 'worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation'." This is a masterpiece of selection. Churchill at that time, 1920, was obsessed with the prospect of revolutions around the world directed from Moscow by the Bolsheviks, many of whose first leaders were indeed Jewish; they were the "bad" Jews he had in view, and that was the conspiracy. Because he regarded them as unrepresentative of the Jewish people as a whole, he took the trouble to distinguish them from "good" Jews whom he looked to for the economic development of Palestine (he was unusual among his class and kind in being a pro-Zionist) and whom he numbered among his friends. He was the least anti-semitic of all the Conservative grandees. If his views had really been what your quotation suggests, they would have been identical with Hitler's.

Geoffrey Best
Oxford

This Isn't Antisemitic; Its Antisettlerism

Haaretz, Febraury 5, 2007, page B1

This a stereotyping at its worse.

Two 'settler' types, singing a Tu B'shvat (Arbor Day) children's song, are going off to cut down Arab olive trees.

A. I can't recall any 'settler' being indicted and for sure, not found guilty, of cutting down trees.

B. It just so happened that Arabs cut down Jewish saplings on Tu B'shvat at a place called Sdeh Boaz where "settlers" - we know them as Jewish revenants - live.

C. Remember this item:-

4 PA Arabs Caught Cutting Down Olive Trees
Nov 21, 2006

Four Palestinian Authority Arabs were caught by Samaria district police Tuesday evening as they were trying to cut down olive trees.

The four claimed they were working for the owner of the property, who sent them to cut down the trees. Police launched an investigation to question the owner and determine whether the four have been involved in similar incidents in the past. They were held for questioning.

So, we have, thanks to Haaretz, a new word: antisettlerism.

Tongue Tried

Phot by Motti Kimchi, The Marker, Haaretz, February 4, 2007

Miscellaneous

Elbaz is so-o-o-o fashionable:

Alber Elbaz, the Israeli-born [nope. Moroccan-born], American-trained designer at Lanvin, received the Légion d’Honneur today in a small ceremony at the Ministry of Culture. After the red ribbon was pinned on Elbaz’s chest, he said he no longer knew where he belonged — not in Israel, not in America, and, he admitted with a smile, he had doubts about France. He then offered that he belonged to the world of women. Yet, wherever Elbaz has gone in his career he has had the support of two men: Ralph Toledano, the Chloé chief executive, who hired him years ago at Guy Laroche; and Pierre Bergé, who put him at Yves Saint Laurent. They attend his Lanvin shows, and they were in the crowd today.

Here.

Another Unpublished Letter

In response to an op-ed last month. I waited - but in vain.

Michael Oren writes that while a peace settlement between Syria and Israel may yet be attained, the possibility exists that a clash between Israel and Washington may be ignited ("What if Israel and Syria Find Common Ground?", Jan. 24).

Another possibility needs be considered and that is with the Golan Heights back in Syrian control, a major strategic loss for Israel, how long is that "settlement" to last?

Klug is Sluggish

Brian Klug, senior research fellow in philosophy at St Benet's Hall, Oxford, and associate editor of Patterns of Prejudice, has a problem. And being a good Jew, he takes that problem to The Guardian where he published an op-ed entitled, "No one has the right to speak for British Jews on Israel and Zionism".

He announced there that "We will not accept the vilification of those who protest at injustices carried out in the name of the Jewish people". Notice the "we"? The Royal "we", or the Papal "we".

And he goes on:-

today an oppressive and unhealthy atmosphere is leading many Jews to feel uncertain about speaking out on Israel and Zionism. People are anxious about contravening an unwritten law on what you can and cannot discuss, may or may not assert. It is a climate that raises fundamental questions: about freedom of expression, Jewish identity, representation...Anguish turns to outrage when the human rights of a population under occupation are repeatedly violated in the name of the Jewish people.

No one has the authority to speak for the Jewish people...

...Faced with this state of affairs, a group of Jews in Britain has come together to launch Independent Jewish Voices (IJV). We come from a variety of backgrounds and walks of life. we are united by certain fundamental commitments...They include: putting human rights first; giving equal priority to Palestinians and Israelis in their quest for a peaceful and secure future; and repudiating all forms of racism aimed at Jews, Arabs, Muslims or whomever.

We believe that these commitments - not ethnic or group loyalties - define the limits of legitimate debate. We invite like-minded Jews in Britain to add their names to the list of IJV signatories...

...when we speak out against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, or the bombing of Lebanon, or discrimination against Palestinians within Israel itself, we are not turning against our Jewish identity; we are turning to it. Some of us, recalling that nearly 40 years have passed since Israel's occupation began, hear a resonance. This was the length of time the Israelites wandered in the wilderness, near the end of which Moses gave them a directive: "Justice, justice shall you pursue" (Deuteronomy 16:20). It is a compass bearing for all humanity, especially when we are trying to find our way - or help others to find theirs - to a better future.

So, here's my letter-to-the-editor:-

Brian Klug bemoans an "oppressive atmosphere" that limits, he asserts, his and his comrades' freedom of expression within the Jewish community in the UK ("No one has the right to speak for British Jews on Israel and Zionism", Feb. 5). Well, thank God for The Guardian then.

As Klug is well aware, it is not the principle that is in dispute but the details. When critics of Israel's policies in the disputed territories or in Lebanon or in Israel itself adopt a standard of moral inequivalency, ignore Arab sins, glide over major societal and cultural differences, fudge historical facts, forget legal rights and in general, act in a street gang manner, they should know that it is fair and just to question their Jewish identity, or, at the very least, cast doubt whether they are interpreting to the non-Jewish public what Jewish identity is and what is Jewish nationalism.

The Biblical verse he quotes from Deuteronomy, "Justice, justice shall you pursue", is interpreted by the Rabbis as meaning that justice shall be pursued with justice. Klug , in his injudicious claims, is violating that instruction.

Intramural Pal. Activities

The news from Gaza is that the latest deaths raised to 27 the number of Palestinians killed in factional clashes in the last four days. More than 80 Palestinians have been killed in the fighting since December, when unity government talks between the ruling Hamas movement and Abbas's Fatah faction broke down and the moderate president called for new elections.

Which reminds me of an earlier period:

...political fragmentation became a very serious problem in the Arab World
...unfortunately, the Palestinian Arabs could not escape their traditional rivalries. The Palestinian national movement fell victim to internal divisions and political fragmenta-tions. At times, Arabs fought Arabs while their Zionist enemy confronted them with unusual stubbornness and determination to succeed in their ultimate goal of creating a Jewish state in Palestine.

It should be remembered that the divisions and rivalries which characterized
relations among big families of Palestine were in part a by-product of a rigid social
structure. According to J.C. Hurewitz, "the Muslim community was atomized by clannish separatism."(31) The clan was the social class' basic unit. Headed by a
shaykh, the clan in the small village aligned itself with a particular clan in the
larger village and also with a clan in the town or city where the powerful
landowning families always resided as absentee landlords.

As mentioned earlier, rivalries among the big families were old going back to the Qaysi and Yamani rivalries of pre-Islamic time.(32) The latter divisions had a
geographic dimension involving north Arabia, where Qaysi's power rested, and south Arabia where Yamani's influence extended. Yet Palestinian factionalism carried with it no ideological connotations, for the simple reason that big families competed for the control of existing resources and did not aim at changing the social structure.(33) In Jerusalem, as elsewhere in Palestine, ideology and politics rarely went together. In fact, the Palestinian national movement never manifested genuine ideolo-gical inclination. At any rate, prior to 1948, family feuds and factional politics were responsible for the failure of Palestinians to successfully challenge the Zionist movement in its attempt to create a Jewish state.(34)

It got worse between 1938-1939.

But let's not forget their main goal:-

Historian [Benny] Morris writes: "On the morning of April 4 [1920] a procession of six hundred pilgrims from Hebron, a town known for its Muslim orthodoxy, entered the city. There were cheers for 'King' Faisal and Arab independence; Jerusalem mayor Musa Kazim al-Husseini swore the gathered crowd to spill their blood for Palestine…The crowd chanted: "We will drink the blood of the Jews…As the demonstration drew to a close, the head of the Hebronite pilgrims shouted, 'Itbah al-Yahud' [Kill the Jew]—and violence erupted. The crowd went on a rampage, moving toward West Jerusalem: Jews on Jaffa Street were stoned and Jewish shops looted." (3)

Christian Arab Palestinian eye-witness Khalil al-Sakakini (1878-1953), who was head of the Jerusalem Teachers' College at the time of the Nebi Musa Riots, described the scene:
"[A] riot broke out, the people began to run about and stones were thrown at the Jews. The shops were closed and there were screams…I saw a Zionist soldier covered in dust and blood…Afterwards, I saw one Hebronite approach a Jewish shoeshine boy, who hid behind a sack in one of the wall's comers next to Jaffa Gate, and take his box and beat him over the head. He screamed and began to run, his head bleeding and the Hebronite left him and returned to the [Nebi Musa] procession…The riot reached its zenith. All shouted, "Muhammad's religion was born with the sword"…I immediately walked to the municipal garden...my soul is nauseated and depressed by the madness of humankind." (3)

The carnage included 5 Jews killed and 216 wounded, 4 Arabs killed and 23 wounded, and 7 British soldiers wounded. The Nebi Musa procession during Ottoman rule in Palestine had required deployment of thousands of soldiers to keep order in the narrow streets of Jerusalem. The military head of Jerusalem in April 1920, Ronald Storrs, had at his disposal only 180 Palestinian policemen and 8 British police officers! Many of the Arab policemen joined the Arab rioters, rendering the civil police force impotent. The situation—called a "pogrom" by Zionist Jews—had been predicted by Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann who tried to warn Storrs, to no avail. (4)

3. Benny Morris: "Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001". Vintage, 2001, p. 95.

4. A.J. Sherman: "Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine 1918-1948." Johns Hopkins Press, 1997, p. 54

Those Suicidal Pals.

Here.

Worried About the Demographics of Israel?

Go here.

Kaletsky's Crap

Anatole Kaletsky is a London Times columnist, its Principal Economic Commentator and an associate editor, too.

You'd expect that he would be intelligent, moderate and circumspect.

Well, consider this bit of crap:-

This brings us finally to the most intractable challenge: Middle East peace. The most encouraging message from Davos was that political exhaustion among Israeli and Palestinian politicians has combined with the dread of an Iraq-style bloodbath in other countries to produce a greater readiness to settle the Israeli problem once and for all, through the exchange of land for peace. If Israel would give back the territories seized in 1967 from the Palestinians, the entire Arab world may be ready to accept this as a final solution and agree to a permanent peace.

The question is how to catalyse such a “grand bargain”, which might also involve Iran. With the Bush Administration completely discredited and distrusted, Europe, and even Britain, could take a lead in several ways.

First, by making it absolutely explicit that they would oppose a military attack on Iran in any shape or form — if necessary by imposing economic sanctions in the event of a military strike by Israel without an explicit UN mandate. That Europe is a far bigger trade partner than America for all Middle Eastern countries points to a more constructive strand of diplomacy: the application of economic carrots and sticks. Iran is rightly being sanctioned for its defiance on the nuclear issue. But Israel has never faced any serious sanctions when it has refused to comply with the UN.

While 70 per cent of the Israeli population back a land-for-peace deal, extremist minorities are overrepresented in the Israeli political system, just as they are in Iran. One way to try to break their power is to reinforce the carrot of future peace with a stick that makes preservation of the status quo unattractive.

A threat to suspend the very generous trade privileges now enjoyed by Israel in the EU should only be a last resort in the event of unreasonable Israeli intransigence in a land-for-peace deal. By raising the possibility of trade sanctions Britain could send a powerful message to Israeli business and politicians that simply maintaining the post-1967 status quo is no longer an option.

Politicians often boast of thinking the unthinkable. Sometimes they should just do the obvious instead.

Does he not conceive of the possibility that his unthinkable thinking is just so obviously idiotic?

Temple Mount Fanatics - Muslims This Time

Funny thing is that they aren't planning to destroy the gate.

Try go telling a fanatic Muslim something about Jews.

The Jerusalem police will raise the alert level at the Temple Mount Sunday morning in response to calls made by Muslim leaders on Israel's Muslim population to stage a demonstration at the site in protest of planned construction work on one of the main entrances to the Temple Mount.

The leader of the Islamic Movement's northern branch, Ra'ad Salah, and the head of Jerusalem Supreme Muslim Council, Sheikh Ikrama Sabri called on the Muslim residents of Jerusalem, and Israel, to arrive at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and protest Israel's plan, according to them, to destroy the Mugrabi Gate, one of the gates in the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, in order to build a bridge.

The Police issued an announcement Saturday that the entrance to the Temple Mount will be limited to Muslim men over 45 years of age. The site will be closed to tourists and visitors. In addition, the police announced that it would patrol the Old City and at the Temple Mount in particular.

Salah maintained that the construction is slated to begin on Sunday. A Saudi-based body of Islamic scholars condemned Israel's construction plans on Saturday, saying it was a "blatant violation" of the shrine's sanctity.

Salah's northern branch of the Islamic Movement published an announcement saying the construction would damage the western part of the fence surrounding the mosque, and would facilitate future attacks on the mosque.

Sabri described the plans as "a crime and attack on the Muslim Waqf and on the Al-Aqsa Mosque." He called on all Arab nations to intervene and prevent the damaging of the mosque.

The Islamic Movement explained that the construction plan was meant to be carried out several years ago, but Israel waited for the right moment to begin work due to, among other considerations, the tensions in the Palestinian Authority.

And You Thought You Knew?

The fight against Islamic terrorism can get really dirty.

Read what the Egyptians had done:-

In 1995, in Sudan, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri put two teenage boys on trial for treason, sodomy and attempted murder, in a Sharia court of his own devising. Of the two boys, one, Ahmed, was only 13. Zawahiri, the partner in terror of Osama bin Laden, had them stripped naked; he showed that they had reached puberty, and therefore counted as adults. The court found the boys guilty. Zawahiri had them shot, filmed their confessions and executions, and put video copies out to warn other potential traitors. His Sudanese hosts were so outraged that they expelled Zawahiri and his group immediately.

It does not exonerate Zawahiri that the boys really had, as Lawrence Wright explains, tried to kill him: Ahmed by telling Egyptian spies exactly when Zawahiri was going to come to treat him for malaria; the other boy, Musab, by twice trying to plant a bomb. The assassination attempts were part of the Egyptian government’s ruthless efforts to destroy Zawahiri and his organisation, al-Jihad, after al-Jihad came close to killing the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak. ‘Ruthless’, in this instance, is a merited adjective. The way Egyptian intelligence recruited the boys – both were sons of senior al-Jihad members, and Musab’s father was the al-Qaida treasurer – was to drug them, anally rape them, then show them photos of the abuse and blackmail them. The boys were trapped; the photos could have led to their execution by al-Jihad as surely as their subsequent betrayal.

The story does more than illuminate the sheer vileness of the conflict that has been underway for decades between the death-loving hardcore of Islamic revolutionaries and the allies of European and American governments in the Islamic world. It underlines the centrality of Egypt to the origins and perpetuation of the conflict.

Applause for Pearce

Edward Pearce of Thormanby, North Yorkshire has a letter in the London Review of Books, that bastion of left-wing progressive thought (excuse the lack of exactitude),
deploring an attempt to clear TS Eliot of antisemitism.

Here it is:-

Denis Donoghue handles the desperate writhings of Craig Raine over the primitive anti-semitism of T.S. Eliot with gentle dubiety (LRB, 25 January). Neither Raine nor Eliot deserves it. Dramatic monologues which carry the unchallenged malevolence of ‘Burbank/Bleistein’ and ‘Gerontion’ are no less malevolently anti-semitic for being dramatic monologues.

‘The jew is underneath the lot’ (*) is beyond exculpation, pure Julius Streicher. Sir Ferdinand Klein, clipper of the lion’s rump, entertained by Princess Volupine, is clearly a Jew, hatefully about to enjoy a Christian woman. In part, this is the voice of the Old South, from whose borders Eliot derived. It speaks even more clearly of the anti-Dreyfusards, specifically of the intellectualised poison which flourished in France in the 1890s and had a long, vicious after-life. Will Raine please come to terms with the defiantly acknowledged influence on Eliot of Charles Maurras. The founder of Action Française is the source for all the organic community rubbish with which Eliot embarrassed his admirers. In 1945, Maurras, in his seventies, was saved from a firing squad for collaboration with the Nazis. His organic society was to be free from métèques, unorganic outsiders; it was his way of saying: ‘Keep France white.’ The famous passage in ‘After Strange Gods’ – not too many free-thinking Jews and all that – is carbon-copy Maurras.

It is very odd, at a time when any critic of the crimes committed by the Israeli government risks being called ‘anti-semitic’, to find Craig Raine blind to the words on the page and the hatred behind them. There is a larger case to be made about other twists in Eliot’s hyper-refined head: the fear of sex, the scorn for women, the loathing for persons of inferior station, the typist and apeneck Sweeney. Yet here, on the Jewish issue, Raine, like a literary first footman, is to be found polishing the family silver and denying the dirty secrets.

(*) See Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar

But this or such was Bleistein's way:
A saggy bending of the knees
And elbows, with the palms turned out,
Chicago Semite Viennese.

A lustreless protrusive eye
Stares from the protozoic slime
At a perspective of Canaletto.
The smoky candle end of time

Declines. On the Rialto once.
The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs. The boatman smiles,

Princess Volupine extends
A meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand
To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights,
She entertains Sir Ferdinand

Klein. Who clipped the lion's wings
And flea'd his rump and pared his claws?
Thought Burbank, meditating on
Time's ruins, and the seven laws.

What's Missing?

What's missing in this story?

Activists block T.A. road with materials from W. Bank separation fence

Activists in a left wing group that calls itself the "Anarchists Against the Fence" blocked a main Tel Aviv road Saturday using barbed wire taken from the West Bank separation fence. The activists placed the barbed wire, taken from the section of the fence near the village of Bil'in, at the corner of Rothschild and Bar Ilan streets in central Tel Aviv.

On the barbed wire, the activists hung signs also taken from the fence, warning trespassers in Hebrew, English and Arabic that the fenced area is a closed military compound and anyone who tries to cross the fence or vandalize it in any way is putting his or her life at risk.

According to the activists, blocking the traffic on a central road was designed to symbolize the limiting of motion the fence imposes on the Palestinian people every day. "The disruption that our roadblock created is nothing compared to the disruptions caused by the army's checkpoints, the apartheid roads, the settlements and the separation fence," they said. The Anarchists blocked a different Tel Aviv street in a similar way some four weeks ago.

That's right - no arrests, no police beatings.

Just over a year ago, similar activity by the camp protesting the "disengagement" policy of Sharon and Co. would surely have prompted a harsh police reaction.

Think? Who, Me?

You would think that a member of the education system would consider the faculty of thinking as the primary characteristic of education.

I know that the above might appear redundant to some but consider this:

A supply teacher has been sacked from a secondary school following complaints from Muslim pupils. Andrew McLuskey was sacked from Bayliss Court Secondary School in Slough after a Religious Education lesson discussing the pros and cons of religion.

Pupils at the predominantly Muslim school claimed Mr McLuskey said most suicide bombers were Muslim.

"I think I should've been given the chance to respond to the allegations and not in effect be ejected from a job without the chance to defend myself."

The school authorities denied they were being heavy-handed and said their first priority was pupils' welfare.

"I don't think it's important what I think," said the school's deputy head teacher Ray Hinds.

"It's what the pupils think that were in the classroom at the time. And they were very upset."

Hmmm. Now, who was really doing the thinking, what were they thinking (if they were indeed thinking), who should really be upset, and...what do you think?

(Hat tip: Melanie Phillips)

What Have Yair Naveh, Ira Rennart and Aaron Binah Have in Common?

Well, the story starts (*) with this ad that appeared in papers last week:-



The ad, in support of Major-General Yair Naveh (who has been problematic [in Hebrew] in the past), a graduate of Rabbi Aaron Binah's father's Yeshiva, the late Aryeh Binah, made waves (in Hebrew). The Jerusalem Post today provides some background (here).

The ad prompted these wall posters to go up and I photographed this outside Shiloh's Ramat Shmuel synagogue.



It appears that the funder for the first adulatory ad is Ira Rennert who is a major contributer to the religious needs of the Yesha residents. This month, an Aron Kodesh was installed in the Cave of the Patriarchs. Even Shiloh's Mikveh is his donation.

Here he is with is wife:-



Rennert also manufatures Humvees. Humvees are purchased by the IDF. Some people don't like him. Others, too.

Now, think this way: if Naveh eventually has to leave his position (one way of the other), wouldn't it be nice for him to know that his friend, Rabbi Binah, has a friend, Ira Rennert, who would possibly be able to provide him with future employment as a military expert and advisor? He would most probably make a lot of money acting as a go-between to the IDF and other armed forces whose officers have been trained by the IDF and even maybe by Naveh himself.

Everyone would like that. I would.

But the point is, if you knew that future employment was assured for yourself, and you were being pressured by the government of Israel to crack down on "extremists", even using questionable methods, and knowing that because of this future employment possibility you really didn't need to give a damn about criticism, demonstrations in front of your house and even legal actions, would you be infuenced to ignore any moral or ethical qualms you might have? I mean, after all, why care? Even a "Sanhedrin" threat wouldn't bother you. The government told you what to do, you don't like the "hilltop youth" in any case, you are praised by the media as standing up to "fanatics" and you still have a prutah in your pocket at the end of the day.

Is this a possible "conflict-of-interest" case?

Is this a model of public ethics?

Is Rabbi Binah properly weighing Naveh's contributions to the defense of the country against the possible human rights' violations he is involved in?

Is Ira Rennert fully aware of the high controversy level of this matter? Was he informed as to the depth of the situation?

Are legal authorities in the IDF and the Attorney-General's office looking into this matter?

Are the media? (here's a start - in Hebrew)

To be continued, I presume.

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(*) Credit to getting me started goes to Esser Agaroth.

Others Monitor the Media, Too

Israel Harel of Ofra, a weekly columnist in Haaretz, used his column this week to take up cudgels with the media.

Yes, I've gone nuts

This week, a resident of Kochav Yaakov made racist comments to a security official.(*) I was asked to respond to the incident right after it was reported on the radio. Agitated acquaintances, who say "we respect you even though we don't agree with your political opinions," also turned to me. It's terrible, they said; you have to condemn it. Silence is also a statement. You weren't heard responding to the female settler's curses in Hebron either. Have you gone nuts, too?

On Tuesday, in the studio of the Politika television show, they whispered to me: "Slip something in about that racist." (The show's discussion was on a bill that would prevent the Supreme Court from overturning Knesset laws.) Then, too, I didn't agree to discuss it.

The cursing woman and the racist man do, of course, anger me no less than they anger those who spoke to me about it. But something in my sense of justice - yes, justice -revolts against the prominence given to two negative and regretful, yet unfortunately routine and commonplace, incidents, just because they took place in Hebron and Kochav Yaakov.

The incidents took on the dimensions of a national rift, and those responsible were regarded as damaging the foundation of Jewish and Israeli ethics. All the women of the settlements seemed to become the cursing woman from Hebron. Otherwise, what public interest - as indicated by the incident's place as the leading news story on several television broadcasts - was there in the cursing, which is a routine matter among many other people in many other places?

The fact that the media came out against these two people specifically - and is not demanding similar treatment in hundreds and thousands of similar or worse instances that take place all the time - is a vicious phenomenon. That's why I refused to take part in this distorted attack.

No one is asking others to denounce people from their "camp" who carry out acts of murder, rape, or sexual or physical assault; who traffic in drugs or women; or who are involved in disputes with their neighbors that end in violence, not just curses. It is only with the settlers that the entire camp - more than a quarter of a million people - is responsible for the actions of all its individuals.

This week, for instance, three youths from the center of the country cruelly abused an elderly woman for three hours. They then robbed her and stole her jewelry. Of course, no one is considered an authority figure in the "social and ideological environment" of these sadists, who have since been caught. Although others have thus explained that I have a responsibility and obligation to apologize and acknowledge a moral deterioration among the settlers, and of course to condemn it, no one is regarded as having such authority over these youths. Only the cursing woman from Hebron, the racist from Kochav Yaakov and the children who throw stones at Arabs have a clear and defined geographic, religious, social, political and leadership
"address."

A year has passed since the traumatic events at Amona. The day of the evacuation, I was at Jerusalem's Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem. The radio stations incessantly reported the harsh violence of the settlers, who seriously wounded dozens of police officers, some of whom were taken by helicopter to Hadassah Ein Karem. The message was clear: The settlers are acting violently toward the police officers. After all, only the seriously wounded are taken to hospital by helicopter. Upon hearing the news, I left the patient I was visiting and rushed to the emergency room. All the wounded who had arrived there, some of whom I knew, were good kids from Ofra and other communities. I didn't find any police officers there. I moved on to the trauma ward, thinking that maybe they were there, but found not a single
police officer. Perhaps in intensive care? Only a youth with a smashed cranium was lying there.

That time, I initiated the call to the media. Although Army Radio was able to identify me, they refused to accept the information. We'll check and get back to you, they said. When they didn't get back to me, I contacted them again, saying: "You're broadcasting mistaken information. Please fix it." To no avail. The same thing happened with Israel Radio's Reshet Bet. As for the television stations, whose presenters read from texts describing police officers whose skulls had been shattered, even as the images showed mounted police cruelly using batons on young men and women, I gave up from the outset.

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(*)
The Yesha Council made a libel complaint to the police against the reporter and the newscaster as reported in today's Makor Rishon.

Muslims and Science: Excelling in Camel Production

One never knows where information, even of the most interesting but exoctic, will pop up. Like camel reproduction.

In a letter to the editor at the TLS, Steven Weinberg, of the Department of Physics, University of Texas at Austin, disputed the assertion of one F. Jamil Ragep, of the McGill Institute for Islamic Studies, who had disagreed with his earlier statement that after the death of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali in 1111, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries.

He then goes on and declares:-

In support, Ragep mentioned the development of trigonometry, but this was primarily the work of al-Battani (858–918) and al-Biruni (973–1048), long before al-Ghazali. He also mentioned the conception of a moving earth, and referred to mathematical and conceptual tools that were essential to the Copernican revolution. But Copernicus credited the idea of a moving earth to Pythagoras and (in a passage he subsequently deleted) to Aristarchus of Samos. The Muslim astronomer on whom Copernicus chiefly relied was alBattani, who died 200 years before al-Ghazali.

There were talented Muslim scientists after al-Ghazali, but their work found no place in Islamic society. For instance, Ragep mentioned the discovery of the pulmonary circulation of the blood. I presume that he was referring to Ibn al-Nafis (d. 1288). Al-Nafis did propose the pulmonary circulation of the blood, but his theory had no effect in the Islamic world, perhaps because for religious reasons he did not demonstrate its truth by the dissection of animals. Ragep also pointed to “the first large-scale astronomical observatories”. There were great observatories in the Islamic world, used largely for predicting prayer times and the Muslim lunar months. In 1577, Taqi al-Din built an observatory in Istanbul comparable to Tycho Brahe’s famous observatory in Denmark. But on the instigation of the Chief Mufti, al-Din’s observatory was destroyed by a squad of janissaries, and had no impact on astronomy, while Brahe’s observatory provided the data that made possible the work of Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton. It is too strong to say that there was no science at all in the Islamic world after al-Ghazali, but such science as there was led to nothing important.

Certainly the great period of Islamic science came to an end around the twelfth century. Nor has it been revived. A 2002 survey by Nature identified just three areas of science in which Islamic countries excel: desalination, falconry and camel reproduction.

UnParliamentary Language

Seems things are getting out of hand (or mouth) in the U.S.

Read one:-

Rep. Loretta Sanchez has quit the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, accusing the chairman, Rep. Joe Baca, of telling people she's a "whore."

Baca denied the charge.

In an interview with The Politico Wednesday, Sanchez, a California Democrat as is Baca, also cited concerns about whether Baca was properly elected Hispanic Caucus chairman in November and about his general attitude toward female lawmakers. The caucus represents 21 Hispanic Democrats in Congress.

"I'm not going to be a part of the CHC as long as Mr. Baca illegally holds the chair … I told them no. There's a big rift here," Sanchez said. "You treat the women like shit. I have no use for him."

For us in Israel, this is old stuff.

For example:-

MK Azmi Bishara (Balad) was removed from a Knesset Legislative Committee session on Tuesday for his use of profane language during an official meeting.

A heated argument broke out between Bishara and MK Gilad Erdan (Likud) at the hearing of a proposed law submitted by MK Zevulun Orlev (National Religious Party) that would allow the Knesset to expel elected members from its ranks.

According to Orlev's proposal, MKs deemed as inciting racial hatred, denouncing Israel's right to exist as a Jewish and democratic country or expressing support of violence against the state or in a terror organization could be voted out of the parliamentary assembly.

Erdan, who was in favor of the proposed law, remarked that "Hitler's government was also democratically elected," and called on the Israeli Arab Bishara to "go preside in a Palestinian or Syrian parliament."

Bishara, who apparently misheard Erdan's remark and confused the Hebrew verb for to preside with the similar sounding Hebrew verb for to procreate, replied by using the f-word and called the Likud member a "dog."

In response, a commotion erupted and the chairman of the committee, MK Menahem Ben-Sasson (Kadima), removed Bishara from the hearing.

Media Chassid Joke

A chassid goes into an electronics store and asks how much a certain televison set costs.

"I'm sorry," says the salesman, "we don't sell TVs to chassidim."

The next day he goes back, dressed in a homburg and a short jacket, payos hidden, and goes over to the same television set.

"How much is this?," he says, "I want to buy it."

"I'm sorry, says the salesman, we don't sell televisions to chassidim."

He returns to the store on the third day. This time he has cut off his payos, shaved off his beard and is dressed in jeans and a T-shirt.

"How much is this television? I want to buy it," he says.

"I'm sorry, we don't sell televisions to chassidim."

"How did you know I'm a chassid?" he yells.

"Well, sir, from my experience, only chassidim think that microwaves are televisions."

Anti-Beilin Letter in The Forward

Carter’s Israeli Chorus

Yossi Beilin assures the Forward’s readers that the rhetoric in Jimmy Carter’s book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” “is entirely harmonious with the kind of criticism that Israelis themselves voice about their own country. There is nothing in the criticism that Carter has for Israel that has not been said by Israelis themselves” (“Carter Is No More Critical of Israel Than Israelis Themselves,” January 19). Beilin is being more than a bit duplicitous.

The Israelis who do bandy about terms like “apartheid,” “imperialism” and worse are extreme radicals from the fringes of the left. These borderline post-Zionists are not your average Israelis. Indeed, they are just as wrong, malicious and immoral as Carter.

Diatribes do not contribute to a rational debate in Israel, even when they are loud enough for a peanut farmer in Georgia to hear.

Yisrael Medad
Shiloh, West Bank