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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Kenneth Levin</title>
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		<title>The Al Aqsa Libel: A Brief History</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-levin/the-al-aqsa-libel-a-brief-history/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-al-aqsa-libel-a-brief-history</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2014 05:08:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[libel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246027</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The dark background to Abbas’s incitement of murderous violence.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/al.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246072" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/al-450x287.jpg" alt="al" width="298" height="190" /></a>Repeated claims in recent weeks by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas that Israel was attacking or otherwise threatening the Al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount, and Abbas’s calls for Palestinians and other Muslims to take action to defend Al Aqsa and &#8220;purify&#8221; the Temple Mount, have been a key factor in the latest spate of deadly Arab assaults on Israelis.</p>
<p>Other PA officials have echoed and elaborated on Abbas’s message, with some calling explicitly for murdering Jews in response to supposed provocations against Al Aqsa. Palestinian Authority media have conveyed the same message, punctuated by cartoons depicting Jews attacking Al Aqsa and Palestinians defending it.</p>
<p>A number of those involved in the assaults against Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere have asserted that they were acting in response to the calls of their leaders to protect Al-Aqsa.</p>
<p>The false claims of Jewish threats against or damage to Al Aqsa have a long pedigree. They have been made by Abbas many times in the past and were a staple of Yasser Arafat’s screeds against Israel and against Jews more generally. Arafat labeled the terror war he launched in 2000 the &#8220;Al Aqsa Intifada.&#8221; He did so to cast the onslaught not as an aggressive campaign of mass murder of Israelis but as a struggle in defense of the Islamic holy site and to render the war not simply one of Palestinian pursuit of Israel’s destruction but as an Islamic fight against hostile, Al Aqsa-defiling non-believers.</p>
<p>But such anti-Jewish libels have a still older history, pre-dating Arafat, pre-dating Israel’s gaining control over the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, even pre-dating Israel’s creation.</p>
<p>In 1929, during the British Mandate, the rabidly anti-Jewish, British appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, claimed that Jews were threatening Al-Aqsa and sought to end Jewish prayer at the Western Wall (a Temple Mount retaining wall, which had become a place of Jewish prayer in the context of Jews being barred from ascending to the Temple Mount itself &#8211; the site of the First and Second Temples &#8211; for much of the preceding 2,000 years). According to the Mufti, the Western Wall was an Islamic holy place and Jewish prayer there was both an affront to Islam and a step towards Jewish attacks against Al-Aqsa. The Mufti is also reported to have distributed doctored photographs showing a damaged Al-Aqsa, with claims that the Jews were responsible.</p>
<p>The Mufti’s incitement was accompanied by calls for the murder of Jews as revenge. Ensuing attacks by Arab mobs in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Mandate territory resulted in the death of 133 Jews and major injury to over 200 others. The most severely affected community was that of Hebron, where 64 Jews were slaughtered and another 85 injured.</p>
<p>British authorities did virtually nothing to stop the attacks. They did evacuate the surviving Jews from Hebron. They also exonerated the Mufti from any responsibility for the murders and took almost no steps against those who actually carried out the carnage.</p>
<p>(Only in 1937,when The Mufti began to instigate attacks against British forces, did the authorities seek to arrest him. El-Husseini, however, escaped and fled the Mandate, eventually making his way to Berlin, where he spent much of World War II as Hitler’s guest. Among his activities while in Europe were recruiting Balkan Muslims and Muslims in Nazi-occupied Soviet territory to Nazi SS units and broadcasting in Arabic to the Middle East and north Africa calling on Arabs to support the Nazis and to destroy the Jews in their midst.)</p>
<p>Abbas has praised the Mufti as an inspiring hero of the Palestinian cause worthy of emulation.</p>
<p>In reality, far from threatening Al Aqsa, Israel has repeatedly bowed to Arab claims of exclusive rights on the Temple Mount. In the wake of Israel’s gaining control of the Old City and the Temple Mount in 1967, the Israelis, with then defense minister Moshe Dayan delineating the policy, granted the Muslim religious authority, the Waqf, control over the Temple Mount. Jews would be allowed access to the Mount but forbidden to pray there. Christians and other non-Muslims would also be allowed access. The Israel Antiquities Authority was to oversee any construction or other physical changes on the Mount that would have an impact on this most sensitive of archaeological sites.</p>
<p>The prohibition of Jewish prayer on the Mount has been strictly enforced by Israeli governments. While there is increasing support among Israelis for a small area of the Mount &#8211; far from Al Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock &#8211; to be set aside for Jewish prayer, no such arrangement has won government backing. Furthermore, Jewish and other non-Muslim visitors to the Temple Mount have commonly been harassed by Waqf guards and other Muslims, and Israeli officials have responded typically not by countering such harassment but by restricting non-Muslim access.</p>
<p>Also, particularly between 1999 and 2001, the Waqf, in the context of establishing and expanding additional places of Muslim worship on the Mount and seeking to destroy evidence of historic Jewish (and Christian) connection to the Mount, brought heavy earth-moving equipment onto the Mount and dug up and hauled away thousands of tons of material. This material contained the remains of structures and other relics from pre-Muslim epochs, most notably from the First and Second Temple periods. In the context of any archaeological excavation of such a sensitive and historically rich site, the work would have been approached with archaeologists’ hand trowels and brushes. Yet the Israeli government &#8211; led for most of this period by Ehud Barak &#8211; did nothing to block this desecration of the Temple Mount, and the Israel Antiquities Authority likewise did nothing. A broad coalition of Israelis, drawn from across the nation’s political and religious spectra and including such luminaries as Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, formed &#8220;The Council for the Prevention of Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount&#8221; and urged the Barak government to stop the desecration, but to little avail.</p>
<p>So the Al Aqsa libel stands truth on its head: Muslim supremacism on the Temple Mount has not only been maintained since Israel gained control of the Old City, but has been expanded through aggressive Muslim actions and general Israeli acquiescence.</p>
<p>Bur the anti-Jewish libel lives on, because it, and the violence it generates, serve its purveyors. Abbas uses it to build up his own anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bonafides against the popularity of Hamas among Palestinians. He also employs it to draw wider Arab attention away from the bloody chaos enveloping much of the Arab world, chaos that has led some Arab leaders to at least temporarily relate to Israel as an ally confronting shared threats. Abbas seeks to resurrect the focusing of Arab enmity on Israel.</p>
<p>Abbas is also using the Al Aqsa libel and the accompanying bloodletting to advance his pursuit of UN and European &#8220;recognition&#8221; and international pressure on Israel for unilateral concessions, particularly withdrawal to the indefensible pre-1967 armistice lines. Abbas, like Arafat before him, seeks to achieve Israeli withdrawal while avoiding any bilateral agreement with Israel that would entail formal acceptance of Israel’s legitimacy within any borders.</p>
<p>The Grand Mufti’s Al Aqsa libel and his incitement to the murder of Jews ultimately served him well. An investigating commission sent from London found the Arabs fully responsible for the bloodshed but then recommended steps be taken against the Jews so as to assuage Arab hostility, steps that violated Britain’s obligations to the Jewish community under the terms of its League of Nations mandate.</p>
<p>European and some American media coverage of the recent violence, and the reactions of United Nations officials, various European governments and, with rare exception, the Obama administration, downplay or ignore entirely Abbas’s cynical use of the libel and incitement of murderous violence. Some distort the realities surrounding the violence into an indictment of Israel. And so again the libel and its murderous fallout redound to the perpetrator’s gain.</p>
<p><strong>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of <em>The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege.</em></strong></p>
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		<title>Israel and the Other PA: Perfidious Albion</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-levin/israel-and-the-other-pa-perfidious-albion/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=israel-and-the-other-pa-perfidious-albion</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2014 04:08:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Britain]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[British media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Elites]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243736</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The dark world of anti-Semitism in British popular opinion and officialdom.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/bb.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243829" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/bb.jpg" alt="bb" width="268" height="268" /></a><em>&#8220;There is a possibility that the Germans or their satellites may change over from the policy of extermination to one of extrusion, and aim as they did before the war at embarrassing other countries by flooding them with alien immigrants.&#8221;</em> &#8211; British Foreign Office memorandum to the U.S. State Department opposing efforts to rescue Europe’s Jews, spring of 1943.</p>
<p>The recent vote in Britain’s Parliament to recognize a Palestinian state (passed by 274 to 12) is, we are told, of no real consequence. Prime Minister Cameron’s government has said it signals no change in British policy.</p>
<p>But the vote was promoted by anti-Israel voices in Parliament that seek to pressure Israel into suicidal concessions; voices that support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel, have called for a total European trade embargo against the Jewish state, and have compared Israel to Nazi Germany. It is of a piece with other anti-Israel actions in Britain in recent years.</p>
<p>This summer’s Gaza War was triggered by Hamas &#8211; which openly declares its dedication to the murder not only of all Israelis but of all Jews &#8211; unleashing an incessant barrage of rockets at Israeli cities and villages. Even the Palestinian Authority’s representative to the United Nations observed of Hamas’s campaign that &#8220;each and every missile constitutes a crime against humanity.&#8221; But in Britain, beyond Prime Minister Cameron’s assertion of Israel’s right to defend itself, the most visible, most vocal, full-throated and widely echoed contention was that Israel did not have a right to defend itself. Even as Hamas used civilians as human shields, the inevitable civilian deaths were evidence of Israel’s Jews being, in the words of a columnist for<em> The Independent</em>, &#8220;a child murdering community.&#8221; Such claims became also the message of large public demonstrations, which in turn were accompanied by mob attacks on Israel-associated and Jewish-associated targets and new calls for boycotts and other actions against the Jewish state.</p>
<p>The response to the war, and the parliamentary vote, represent only the latest of anti-Israel convulsions that in recent years have seen British academics, unions, religious bodies, medical and architectural organizations and other groups solemnly advocate boycotts of Israel, members of Parliament call for Israel’s dissolution, and the British public vote Israel the nation representing the greatest threat to world peace. The campaigns against the Jewish state &#8211; condemning it with false, kangaroo-court indictments and embracing those who openly advocate and pursue genocidal anti-Israel agendas &#8211; inevitably bring to mind Albion’s long history of anti-Jewish perfidy.</p>
<p>No doubt the opening reference to anti-Jewish policies of the British government during World War II, indeed to Britain’s role as abettor of the Nazi genocide, will elicit irate complaints by today’s Israel-baiters. They will insist that this is just another example of the special pleading of Israel’s supporters and that in fact &#8211; regurgitating the mindless aspersion that seems to most titillate the anti-Semitic heart &#8211; Israel is today’s Nazi state.</p>
<p>But, as will be shown, the British government’s policies toward the Jews during the Holocaust were directly related to a lethal mix of old-fashioned British anti-Semitism and newer vintage anti-Zionism, and that same ugly brew is even more on display in Britain today than it was then.</p>
<p>At the same time, of course, Britain had played godfather to realization of the Zionist project, giving it the nation&#8217;s imprimatur with the 1917 Balfour Declaration in which then Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour asserted the British government’s favoring the reconstitution of Palestine &#8211; then part of the Ottoman Empire &#8211; as &#8220;the National Home of the Jewish People.&#8221;</p>
<p>Certainly, calculations of wartime expediency played a role in the issuing of the Balfour Declaration. But in addition there had been for more than a century in Britain notable individuals sympathetic to the Jews and their historical experience and predicament, and even groups that cultivated what might be characterized as philo-Semitic views. Moreover, such individuals and groups at times offered early support for Zionist aspirations, and people with similar sympathies figured in shaping the pro-Zionist perspectives reflected in the Balfour Declaration. But these attitudes have always been exceptions in Britain, particularly among the nation&#8217;s elites.</p>
<p>Lord Byron, in his 1815 <em>Hebrew Melodies</em>, might write: &#8220;The wild-dove hath her nest, the fox his cave,/ Mankind their Country &#8211; Israel but the grave!&#8221; But Byron’s readers hardly included a large following in the poet’s sympathetic views of the Jewish predicament.</p>
<p>George Eliot, whose last novel, published in 1876, was the seminal Zionist work <em>Daniel Deronda</em>, wrote in an 1878 essay, &#8220;It would be difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about [the Jews] which has not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print.&#8221; Eliot, were she alive today, would no doubt find entirely new, if not entirely surprising, contorted reasoning about the Jews in what passes for coherent conversation and writing, perhaps especially journalistic writing, in present-day Britain.</p>
<p>Eliot titled her 1878 piece &#8220;The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!&#8221; &#8211; construing contemporary anti-Jewish animus as the moral equivalent of medieval marauding Crusader gangs that, before departing for the Holy Land, would slaughter local Jewish populations while chanting &#8220;Hep! Hep! Hep!,&#8221; an acronym for Hierosolyma est perdita, &#8220;Jerusalem is lost.&#8221; Her title is likewise equally relevant today, as those who demonize Israel in British media, unions, universities, professional organizations, and religious bodies, either explicitly share the objective of, or simply make common cause with, those who would again massacre Jews with the ultimate aim of seizing Jerusalem and emptying the Land of Israel of the People of Israel.</p>
<p>Also resonant with today&#8217;s anti-Zionist/anti-Jewish bias is Eliot&#8217;s observation that other groups which had sustained a national consciousness and had recently translated that consciousness into a recreated national life &#8211; she notes particularly the Greeks and the Italians &#8211; were generally regarded positively in Britain for having done so. It was particularly the Jews whose preservation of a national identity, despite millennia-long efforts by those around them to destroy it, was viewed sourly and censoriously by much of British opinion, not least &#8220;polite&#8221; opinion, and whose aspirations to a resuscitated state enjoyed support in only limited quarters.</p>
<p>Forty years after Eliot’s essay, those leaders in Britain who did support the recreation of the Jewish national home and translated that backing into policy were quickly confronted with the overwhelmingly hostile attitudes and machinations of the nation&#8217;s military and its colonial bureaucracy in the Jewish homeland. The Zionist project was, of course, just one of many new or recreated nations that, in the wake of World War I, were carved out of the former German, Austro-Hungarian, Czarist and Ottoman empires. These included, for example, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Mandate Syria and Mandate Iraq. All of these states entailed the granting of sovereignty, or promised sovereignty in the case of the Mandates, to previously largely disenfranchised peoples, and all also encompassed other ethnic groups within their borders that chafed at the new national arrangements. Yet, consistent with George Eliot&#8217;s line of observation decades earlier, none stirred anything like the animosity displayed by many in the British government bureaucracy and other British elites at the prospect of a recreated Jewish national life.</p>
<p>The Military Administration set up in the wake of General Allenby&#8217;s wresting the territory from Turkish forces quickly exhibited anti-Jewish biases. This reflected not only ingrained anti-Semitism but also patronizing attitudes towards the Arabs and a conviction that the Arabs would be more malleable to British colonial intentions than would the Jews.</p>
<p>Some British officers played the role of agents provocateurs in encouraging Arab assaults on the Jews of the Holy Land, such as the large-scale Arab attacks on Jerusalem’s Jews in April, 1920. (The riots in the city coincided with the meeting of the Allies at San Remo that gave Allied endorsement to the British Mandate for creation of the Jewish National Home.) In addition, British authorities did little to stop the looting and killing, and the Military Administration also sought to use the riots as an excuse for curtailing Jewish immigration and other Zionist activities, arguing that local Arab antagonism would be difficult to control if such curbs were not instituted.</p>
<p>The British, in the post-war years, were attempting to maintain their Middle East territories with very limited forces and were indeed concerned with minimizing local unrest. But, of course, this does not account for Mandate officers working as agents provocateurs and stirring up anti-Jewish violence or for British authorities failing to quell Arab riots when they were fully able to do so. Nor does it explain the Military Administration&#8217;s preventing local Jewish units &#8211; elements of the Jewish Battalions &#8211; from coming to the defense of the Jews of Jerusalem. Vladimir Jabotinsky, who had played a key role in advocating Britain&#8217;s establishment of Jewish fighting units within the army, tried to organize defense. He was arrested by the British for his efforts and sentenced to fifteen years&#8217; imprisonment. Jabotinsky was soon released but only in the context of an amnesty extended also to the rioters. The British also chose to construe the Jewish units&#8217; attempts to defend the Jews of Jerusalem as an intolerable breach of military discipline and disbanded the units.</p>
<p>Lieutenant Colonel John Patterson was a non-Jewish British officer who had commanded the Zion Mule Corps (a transport unit consisting mainly of Jews who had left Turkish Palestine for Egypt during the war) at Gallipolli. Patterson was subsequently appointed commander of the 38th Jewish Battalion and led the battalion in the Palestine campaign. Patterson wrote extensively of the anti-Jewish depredations to which his troops, and the Jewish population of Palestine, were subjected by the British military&#8217;s forces in Palestine under Allenby (the Egyptian Expeditionary Force) and subsequently by the Military Administration. These depredations emanated both from the command structure and, in the wake of evident command tolerance, from the rank and file.</p>
<p>With regard to the April, 1920, Arab attacks on the Jews of Jerusalem, Patterson, referring to the assault as &#8220;the Jerusalem pogrom,&#8221; noted the Military Administration&#8217;s encouragement of the violence, its failure to intervene to stop it, its blocking of intervention by Jewish troops, its attempts to use the Arab assault as an excuse to curb Zionist programs, its scapegoating of Jabotinsky, and all of this being of a piece with general Military Administration hostility to the Jews.</p>
<p>Patterson wrote, for example, &#8220;A veritable &#8216;pogrom,&#8217; such as we have hitherto only associated with Tsarist Russia, took place in the Holy City of Jerusalem in April, 1920, and as this was the climax to the maladministration of the Military Authorities, I consider that the facts of the case should be made public&#8230;</p>
<p>&#8220;The Balfour Declaration&#8230; was never allowed [by the Military Administration] to be officially published within the borders of Palestine; the Hebrew language was proscribed; there was open discrimination against the Jews; the Jewish Regiment was at all times kept in the background and treated as a pariah. This official attitude was interpreted by the hooligan element and interested schemers in the only possible way, viz., that the military authorities in Palestine were against the Jews and Zionism, and the conviction began to grow [within Arab circles] that any act calculated to deal a death blow to Zionist aspirations would not be unwelcome to those in authority&#8230;</p>
<p>&#8220;Moreover, this malign influence was sometimes strengthened by very plain speaking. The Military Governor of an important town was actually heard to declare&#8230; in the presence of British and French Officers and of Arab waiters, that in case of anti-Jewish riots in his city, he would remove the garrison and take up his position at a window, where he could watch, and laugh at, what went on!</p>
<p>&#8220;This amazing declaration was reported to the Acting Chief Administrator, and the Acting Chief Political Officer, but no action was taken against the Governor. Only one interpretation can be placed on such leniency.&#8221;</p>
<p>Patterson wrote elsewhere of the Arab attacks: &#8220;The anti-Jewish outbreak&#8230; was carefully fostered&#8230; by certain individuals who, for their own ends, hoped to shatter the age-long aspirations of the Jewish people&#8230; There can be no doubt that it was assumed in some quarters that when trouble, which had been deliberately encouraged, arose, the Home Government, embarrassed by a thousand difficulties at its doors, would agree with the wire-pullers in Palestine, and say to the Jewish people that the carrying out of the Balfour Declaration, owing to the hostility displayed by the Arabs, was outside the range of practical politics.&#8221;</p>
<p>It was an inquiry into Arab attacks in the spring of 1920 and revelation that the military government had encouraged the assaults that led to London&#8217;s quickly dissolving the military administration and establishing a civil administration in its place. But the ranks of both the British military contingent in Palestine and the civil service remained the same, continued to harbor the same attitudes and continued to work against compliance with British obligations to the Jews as subsequently formalized in the League of Nations Mandate.</p>
<p>Winston Churchill, colonial secretary at the time, estimated that 90 percent of the British military in Palestine were opposed to Britain fulfilling its Mandate obligations. The civilian bureaucracy was so recalcitrant that Churchill circulated a memorandum to the Cabinet in 1921 suggesting &#8220;the removal of all anti-Zionist civil officials, however highly placed.&#8221;</p>
<p>Churchill, certainly more sympathetic to the Zionist project than most British officials, nevertheless in 1921 detached more than 75% of Mandate Palestine to create a new Arab nation of Transjordan. Although Transjordan formally remained part of Mandate Palestine until the end of the Mandate in 1947, its territories were closed to Jews. This occurred after endorsement of the Mandate by the Allied Powers at San Remo but before the League of Nations formally granted the Mandate to Britain. In 1923, despite the territory of the Mandate now being defined by the League of Nations, Britain detached the large portion of the Golan Heights that was within the Mandate’s borders and ceded it to the French Mandate in Syria in exchange primarily for French concessions regarding Iraq. This act was in clear violation of Britain&#8217;s League of Nations obligations.</p>
<p>So too were many other elements of British administration. The League of Nations Mandate called for Britain to promote &#8220;close settlement&#8221; of the land by Jewish immigrants; the British administration was determined to do no such thing. On the contrary, it routinely awarded large-scale grants of public lands to the Arabs while withholding public lands from the Jews. Whatever Jewish acquisition occurred did so essentially through private purchase. It also allowed virtually unmonitored migration of Arabs into the Mandate from neighboring states &#8211; people drawn by the economic opportunities created by both British and Jewish development &#8211; while at the same time repeatedly imposing limits on the admission of Jews.</p>
<p>Arab violence waxed and waned in the Mandate in a noteworthy pattern illustrated by the tenure of Lord Herbert Plumer as High Commissioner. Unlike his predecessor, Plumer generally resisted further backtracking from Mandate obligations to the Jews even in the face of Arab pressures, and his three years in office saw a marked decrease in violence. As has been recognized by a number of historians who have written on the Mandate, appeasement &#8211; to say nothing of tacit approval &#8211; tended to result in increased Arab violence as violence was perceived as yielding rewards, while a more steadfast course and rejection of concessions in the face of violence typically resulted in more peaceful interludes.</p>
<p>But Plumer&#8217;s leadership was exceptional. More typically, the Mandate administration conveyed its sympathies towards the Arabs and its favorable responses to Arab violence. In addition, over time, in the interest of Realpolitik and considerations of empire, the government in London, whether Labor or Tory, became less supportive of Zionist aspirations and more prepared to accommodate the anti-Zionist policies advocated by the Mandate bureaucracy. There emerged a recurrent cynical pattern: An outbreak of anti-Jewish violence; the dispatch from London of a commission of inquiry; determination by the commission that the violence had indeed been initiated by the Arabs; a response by the government in London that Jewish immigration should be further curtailed to placate Arab opinion.</p>
<p>The League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission at various times protested Britain&#8217;s betrayal of its obligations to the Jews under the Mandate. The Commission had only its moral suasion as backing for its arguments but did on occasion help bring about the British government&#8217;s retreat from anti-Jewish measures.</p>
<p>But the situation grew much worse for the Jews in the 1930&#8242;s, after the advent of the Nazi regime in Germany. Berlin quickly embarked on winning allies in the Arab world and stirring up anti-British sentiment. This provided another rationale, if one were needed, for appeasing Arab opinion regarding Mandate Palestine and imposing further hardships on the Jews. Britain did tolerate several years of increased Jewish immigration to the Mandate in the mid-&#8217;30&#8242;s. But in the wake of the 1936-39 Arab Revolt, Britain, consistent with previous precedent, found in its commission of inquiry that the Arabs had fully instigated the violence and mayhem and had sought to justify the revolt with false accusations against the Jews, but concluded that the appropriate government action should be dramatic new limits on Jewish immigration. In 1939, as war loomed in Europe and Jews were desperate to escape the continent, Britain issued a White Paper restricting admission of Jews to the Mandate to a total of 75,000 over the next five years, after which immigration would end entirely and Palestine would become an Arab state with a Jewish minority.</p>
<p>The Chamberlain White Paper elicited once more opposition from the League of Nations as a violation of Britain&#8217;s Mandatory obligations to the Jews. But the League of Nations, having failed to muster a forceful response to fascist aggression in the preceding years, was now a dying organization with little left of its former limited authority.</p>
<p>Britain&#8217;s determination, in the absence of a functioning League of Nations, to quash the Zionist enterprise once and for all played a vital role in shaping British Foreign Office, Colonial Office and military hostility to the rescue of Jews from the Nazi killing machine.</p>
<p>In some respects, the murderous animosity that then animated so much of British officialdom was less characteristic of the larger public in Britain than would seem to be the case today. Major elements of British media, clergy and Parliament called openly for government action to rescue Jews, much more so, for example, than did equivalent echelons in the United States. Among those whose efforts were particularly noteworthy was William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, who spoke out forcefully to urge rescue measures and sharply criticized Allied inaction. He was joined in his efforts by Arthur Cardinal Hinsley, leader of Britain’s Catholics.</p>
<p>A Foreign Office note in February, 1943, referred to the &#8220;striking difference between the intense propaganda campaign regarding Hitler’s Jewish victims [that is, calls for rescue] carried on here and the apparently negligible publicity in the United States.&#8221;</p>
<p>In addition Britain had admitted, among other refugees, over 8,000 unaccompanied Jewish children in the so-called Kindertransport of 1938-1939, with the children being placed in the care of Jewish and non-Jewish families. A parallel attempt to admit 20,000 children to the United States over a two-year period aroused intense opposition and was stymied.</p>
<p>Moreover, one can argue that State Department bureaucrats were as loathe to see Jews rescued and brought to the United States as Foreign Office officials were to see them in England. During the war, the State Department allowed use of only ten percent of the visas that were available for the rescue of Jews and blocked the escape from Europe even of many Jews who had received American visas. It did so by creating additional bureaucratic obstacles to their entry. Many were taken to death camps and murdered even as they possessed visas but were unable to surmount the additional levels of State Department obstructionism.</p>
<p>But where Foreign Office policy differed from that of the State Department, or at least where it set policy which the State Department all too willingly followed, was in its apparent determination to block rescue of Jews no matter where refuge might be offered. And, as Sir Martin Gilbert and others have demonstrated (in, for example, Gilbert’s <em>Auschwitz and the Allies</em>), behind anti-rescue policy in Britain largely lay concerns regarding Palestine. A dominant calculation appears to have been that Jewish survivors, no matter where they found refuge, would be a source of post-war pressure on Britain to fulfill its Palestine Mandate obligations to the Jews, whereas if no European Jews were rescued and none survived the war there would then be no basis for advocacy of a Jewish homeland.</p>
<p>It was in this context that one should understand the 1943 Foreign Office message to the State Department cited at the opening of this article, the concern that: &#8220;There is a possibility that the Germans or their satellites may change over from the policy of extermination to one of extrusion, and aim as they did before the war at embarrassing other countries by flooding them with alien immigrants.&#8221; There were other memoranda that hammered variations on the same theme, as, for example, one that spoke of &#8220;the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued.&#8221;</p>
<p>Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden’s personal secretary wrote of him in 1943: &#8220;Unfortunately, A.E. is immovable on the subject of Palestine. He loves Arabs and hates Jews.&#8221; (Churchill disagreed with Eden on Palestine policy but did not have the control over Eden that, for example, an American president has over his Cabinet members.) But British government policy toward the Jews obviously reflected a casual indifference to the Nazi genocide that went far beyond simply Eden’s anti-Jewish bigotry. (Churchill during the war cautioned another Foreign Office official &#8220;against drifting into the usual anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic channel which it is customary for British officers to follow.&#8221;)</p>
<p>(Churchill’s general sympathy for the Jews put off many of those around him. As one friend, Sir Edward Spears, informed Churchill’s official biographer, &#8220;Even Winston had a fault. He was too fond of Jews.&#8221;)</p>
<p>The lengths to which the Foreign Office went to obstruct rescue at any level and from any quarter is illustrated by the story of Chiune Sugihara, who in 1940 was the Japanese vice consul in Kovno, Lithuania. Sugihara issued several thousand visas to Jews desperate to leave Europe. Among the documents in the Japanese foreign ministry charting Sugihara’s activities have been found complaints from the British Foreign Office protesting Sugihara’s visas and warning that the rescued Jews would become a burden on Japan.</p>
<p>Throughout the war there were many European Jews who could have reached Mandate Palestine, but the British were determined to prevent their doing so. (Given the nature of British policy, it is perhaps not surprising that, after Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, provided the trigger to World War II, apparently the first to fall to British arms were not Nazi soldiers but two Jewish civilians. They were shot dead near Tel Aviv on September 2 when a British patrol vessel opened fire on refugees from Europe trying to slip into Palestine by boat.)</p>
<p>After September, 1940, when the fascist government of Ioan Antonescu seized power in Rumania, several thousand Jews fled the country via Rumania’s Black Sea ports and many died when their delapidated ships &#8211; &#8220;coffin ships&#8221; as they were popularly called &#8211; sank either in transit through the Black Sea or in attempts to evade the British blockade of Palestine. One ship sank when, having reached Palestine, it was forced back to sea by the British.</p>
<p>Another particularly notorious episode involved the Struma, likewise an essentially unseaworthy ship that limped into Istanbul harbor in December, 1941, with nearly eight hundred Rumanian Jewish refugees aboard, many among them women and children. The Turkish government offered to let the passengers disembark only if Britain agreed to admit them to Palestine. The British refused and persisted in their stance &#8211; even rejecting suggestions that they admit only the children &#8211; despite urgent requests for compassion from various quarters. The Turks ultimately had the ship towed out to sea and it quickly sank, killing all but one of the refugees.</p>
<p>By the time of the Struma’s sinking, agents of the Rumanian regime, together with German death squads, had already slaughtered some 200,000 of the 800,000 Jews within Rumania’s borders. But it was widely known that Rumanian strongman Antonescu was not entirely committed to the slaughter and was willing to go on allowing Jews to ransom their way out of the country. But the only possible refuge for them was the League of Nations-mandated Jewish National Home, and Britain continued to make certain that this remained closed to Rumanian and other Jews and that there would be no escape for them. A number of Jews were ultimately admitted to the Mandate in the course of the war, but far fewer than even the 75,000 permitted by the Chamberlain White Paper.</p>
<p>Some Jews obviously did survive the war, and the Nazi slaughter did not end the quest for realization of the promise of the Mandate. Britain still held to its opposition to creation of a Jewish state but failed in its efforts to stop the United Nations’ ratification of partition of Palestine (excluding Transjordan) into separate Jewish and Arab nations.</p>
<p>Britain then tried to achieve indirectly through military means what it failed to achieve diplomatically. The most effective of the five Arab armies that attacked the nascent Jewish state was Transjordan’s Arab Legion, led by a British officer, John Bagot Glubb (popularly known as Glubb Pasha), and with various other British officers in its senior ranks. The Arab Legion seized control of what later became known as the West Bank as well as eastern Jerusalem, including the Old City, and &#8211; in a policy of total ethnic cleansing &#8211; the Legion, under its British officers, either killed or expelled every Jew living in the territory that fell within its sway. (One is reminded of Tom Paulin, the Oxford poet renowned for his vicious, mindless rants against Israel, his unoriginal but, for many, ever-thrilling comparison of Israelis to Nazis, his advocacy of the Jewish state’s destruction and, perhaps most notably, his declared desire to kill Jews living on the West Bank. Had he been around in 1948, Paulin could have joined the British officer corps in the Arab Legion and fulfilled his fantasies of murdering West Bank and east Jerusalem Jews.)</p>
<p>As for the Palestinian Arabs dwelling in the West Bank, rather than facilitate their establishing their own state in the territory, consistent with the United Nations’ vision of a partitioned Palestine, Britain supported Transjordan’s annexation of the territory. Indeed, Britain became one of only two countries in the world that recognized the annexation, the other being Pakistan.</p>
<p>As King Hussein himself acknowledged, in the Six Day War of 1967 he ordered his troops to initiate hostilities against Israel at the war’s start and he continued to pursue the attack even as Israel urged him to remain out of the conflict and promised it would refrain from action against him if he did so. In the face of Jordanian bombardments, Israel ultimately went on the offensive in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, capturing both along with the Golan Heights from Syria and the Sinai peninsula and Gaza from Egypt.</p>
<p>Many Israelis believed then that peace with the Arabs was finally at hand; that the Arab states, eager for return of lost territories, would grant Israel peace in exchange. But the Arab nations, meeting in Khartoum in late August, 1967, instead endorsed the &#8220;three no’s&#8221;: no recognition of Israel, no negotiation, no peace.</p>
<p>Shortly afterwards, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 242 regarding steps to be taken towards ending the Arab-Israeli conflict. It called for the return of territory captured by Israel in exchange for peace, but not of &#8220;all&#8221; the captured territory. Indeed the key drafters of 242 stated that Israel should not be required to retreat to the pre-war armistice lines, that those boundaries were no more than cease-fire lines, were too vulnerable and would only invite additional aggression against Israel. The resolution called rather for the negotiation of &#8220;secure and recognized&#8221; boundaries.</p>
<p>Resolution 242 was actually introduced in the Security Council by Britain. Lord Caradon, then Britain’s ambassador to the UN and the one who presented the resolution, told an interviewer some years later: &#8220;It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That’s why we didn’t demand that the Israelis return to them, and I think we were right not to&#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>In 1969, the British Foreign Secretary stated in the House of Commons that the framers of the resolution did not envisage Israel withdrawing from &#8220;all the territories.&#8221; Subsequently, George Brown, who had been Foreign Secretary at the time of the war and passage of the resolution, made the same point in his book, <em>Out of My Way.<br />
</em><br />
The territories, most notably the West Bank, from the perspective of Resolution 242, have the status of disputed lands whose disposition is to be determined in the context of peace negotiations. In fact, a broad consensus among Israelis has supported, virtually since the war, the pursuit of a division of the West Bank that would entail Israel returning to Arab sovereignty most of the area, including the lands that are home to the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs &#8211; well in excess of 95% of the population &#8211; while retaining for Israel strategically vital and largely unpopulated areas. (With relatively few exceptions, settlement policy, along with the present placement of the settlement population, has followed this agenda and was undertaken to reinforce Israel’s claims to these strategic areas.)</p>
<p>But for British media, much of British officialdom and broad British opinion, particularly elite opinion, institutional memory regarding Resolution 242 has been erased and the resolution has been contorted into a demand that Israel return to its pre-1967 lines. Everything beyond those lines has been transmogrified into &#8220;occupied Palestinian territory,&#8221; and Israeli presence anywhere in the West Bank and east Jerusalem has been labeled &#8220;colonialism,&#8221; illegitimate, even &#8220;illegal.&#8221;</p>
<p>Moreover, popular British demands for Israel’s retreat to its 1967 line ignore the reality that no Palestinian political group with any power or following is offering Israel peace in exchange for withdrawal, however extensive Israel’s retreat. On the contrary, all parties still insist that, beyond the creation of a Palestinian state in the territories, Israel must also acquiesce to the &#8220;return&#8221; of untold numbers of Palestinian &#8220;refugees,&#8221; an agenda whose aim, consistent with the stated goals of all Palestinian parties &#8211; at least as stated in their declarations in Arabic &#8211; is Israel’s destruction.</p>
<p>And if Israelis refuse to participate in their own destruction, they are condemned in British popular opinion as the greatest danger to world peace and are the target of punishment by boycotts. At the same time, those who declare as their goal the annihilation of Israel and its Jewish population and pursue a strategy of mass murder specifically targeting civilians, indeed particularly targeting women and children, are hailed in Britain as poster children for the realization of a more just world.</p>
<p>British criticism of specific aspects of Israeli policy in the territories has likewise been characterized by hypocrisy and perfidy. One sees this not only in depictions of violent clashes between Israel and the Palestinians, which are routinely portrayed in British media, and very often by government officials as well, as unprovoked Israeli brutality or gross Israeli overreaction or collective punishment in response to Palestinian &#8220;resistance to occupation&#8221; (i.e., wholesale murder of Israeli civilians). The 2002 events virtually universally labeled the &#8220;Jenin massacre&#8221; in British media &#8211; the massacre that wasn’t, that even the United Nations acknowledged did not occur &#8211; is but one egregious example of such gross misrepresentations of Israeli-Palestinian violence. But even beyond the context of violence, anti-Israel distortions of realities in the territories are pervasive in Britain.</p>
<p>Consider the following example of Israeli policy and British response concerning Gaza. At the time that Israel gained control of the territories, the worst living conditions among the Palestinians were of those living in the refugee camps. This was particularly so in Gaza, where the camps housed a much larger proportion of the total Palestinian population than in the West Bank and where the Egyptians had allowed no electricity or running water in the camps and forbade residents to work outside the camps.</p>
<p>Under Israeli administration, camp residents, as well as the general population, had virtually universal access to employment. The Israelis also sought to alleviate the squalid living conditions in the camps. This included building new housing units outside the camps for residents and also providing building lots, infrastructure, and subsidies for those who wished to build their own houses, with, in either case, ownership being transferred to the residents. By 1983, over 3,000 Palestinian families had moved into Israeli-built houses and about 3,500 families had moved into houses they had built themselves on lots prepared and provided by Israel.</p>
<p>But the PLO and the Arab states vehemently opposed these housing programs, perceiving the provision of better living conditions to the refugees and their descendants as undercutting both the push for these people’s &#8220;return&#8221; to Israel and efforts to recruit them into PLO cadres. In addition, various arms of the UN embraced the Arab stance. In 1985, shortly after Israel opened up new housing constructed with support from the Catholic Relief Agency, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution condemning Israel’s relocating refugees to better housing as a violation of the refugees’ &#8220;right of return&#8221; to their former areas of residence in pre-1967 Israel. Included in the wording of the resolution was the statement that the General Assembly &#8220;Reiterates strongly its demand that Israel desist from the removal and resettlement of Palestine refugees in the Gaza Strip&#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>Under UN pressure, Israel did end the housing projects. Nevertheless, seemingly to preempt their resumption, the General Assembly, at Arab insistence, passed the same condemnations of Israeli efforts to provide better housing for the refugees in subsequent years as well, with the resolutions including the same wording. Through these years, the British delegation to the UN consistently supported the Arab demand that Israel desist from offering those in the camps new housing. And yet in these and subsequent years British Foreign Office representatives would visit Gaza and use photo opportunities to complain about Israel’s failure to address the atrocious living conditions in the refugee camps! (In January, 1988, for example, about a month after Britain had voted in favor of the 1987 edition of the same resolution, David Mellor, described in the media as &#8220;a Foreign Office minister with responsibilities for the Mideast,&#8221; appeared before the television cameras in Gaza to denounce Israel for tolerating conditions in the camps that were an &#8220;affront to civilization.&#8221;)</p>
<p>Even Arab blood libels against Israel and &#8220;the Jews&#8221; are given a pass by British media or blamed on Israel. A cynic might attribute this at least in part to pride of invention, as the medieval blood libel, the claim that Jews kill Christians, particularly children, to use the blood of Christian innocents for Jewish rituals, was first introduced in England. The earliest recorded such claim involved the death of one William of Norwich in 1144.</p>
<p>The blood libel was exported from England to the continent, where over eight centuries it provided a rationale for the murder of thousands of Jews. The Nazis invoked it extensively, but since the end of World War II it has enjoyed its greatest popularity in the Arab world. There it has been the subject of a book attesting to its veracity by former Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlas and has found similar sympathetic treatment in myriad Arab texts, television shows, and movies. It is also a popular theme of Arab clerics and political figures.</p>
<p>British media have not given much coverage to, or found fault with, this current popularity of the blood libel in the Arab world. On the contrary, they have tended to be apologists for manifestations of Arab anti-Semitism, however crude and vile. For example, a BBC program on anti-Semitism in Egyptian media concluded that it merely reflected support for the predicament of the Palestinians and not &#8220;hatred of Jews as a race.&#8221; It was hardly surprising then when Britain&#8217;s Political Cartoon Society gave first prize in its &#8220;Cartoon of the Year&#8221; competition for 2003 to The Independent’s Dave Brown for his drawing of a naked Ariel Sharon devouring a Palestinian child.</p>
<p>One can certainly argue that the Jews and the Jewish state are not the only targets of bigotry in British popular opinion and in the attitudes of British elites and British officialdom. But with regard to Israel and the Jews, today&#8217;s smug and casual hatred, with its transparently ludicrous veneer of moral superiority, has a long, dark history that renders it different from other, quotidian biases; renders it rather one more chapter in a long record of anti-Jewish perfidy.</p>
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		<title>Israel and a Tale of Two British Exports</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Sep 2014 04:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blood libel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Britain]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239821</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Inside the dark world of the British anti-Semitic mind. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/england-uk.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239963" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/england-uk-450x293.jpg" alt="england-uk" width="323" height="210" /></a>Arguably the UK’s most successful domestically produced export to Israel has been parliamentary democracy. Arguably its most successful domestically produced export to the Arab world has been the anti-Semitic blood libel, the claim that Jews use the blood of non-Jewish children to bake their Passover matzah or for other ritual purposes. What is curious is that there are so many in Britain for whom the latter &#8220;achievement&#8221; resonates more and finds expression in new domestic iterations of this hoary, murderous British creation.</p>
<p>The blood libel first appeared in Norwich, England in 1144. A subsequent libel in the same vein, concerning the death of a boy in Lincoln in 1255, was immortalized by Chaucer’s reference to it in &#8220;The Prioress’s Tale&#8221; in The Canterbury Tales. At least into the early twentieth century, versions of the libel could be found in collections and recordings of British ballads.</p>
<p>The anti-Semitic libel enjoyed wide popularity across Europe throughout the Middle Ages and blood libel accusations were often accompanied by the mass murder of Jewish communities. Versions of the libel have persisted in Europe into the present century.</p>
<p>In the Arab world, evidence of successful European introduction of the blood libel can be traced at least as far back as the Damascus blood libel in 1840. But it is particularly in recent decades that the blood libel has won almost ubiquitous currency among Arabs. Former Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass published The Matzah of Zion in 1986, promoting the blood libel as fact, and the book gained a very wide audience and has gone through many reprints . There have been a number of Arab television dramatizations of the blood libel and myriad assertions of the libel&#8217;s veracity by Arab religious and political leaders.</p>
<p>In April 2013, the Palestinian non-profit MIFTAH, founded by Hanan Ashrawi and funded in part by the British Council, took President Obama to task for hosting a seder at the White House. MIFTAH complained: &#8220;Does Obama in fact know the relationship, for example, between ‘Passover’ and ‘Christian blood’..?! Or ‘Passover’ and ‘Jewish blood rituals?!’ Much of the chatter and gossip about historical Jewish blood rituals in Europe are real and not fake as they claim; the Jews used the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover.&#8221;</p>
<p>During the recent Israeli-Hamas fighting, Hamas official Osama Hamdan declared (translation by MEMRI): &#8220;We all remember how the Jews used to slaughter Christians, in order to mix their blood in their holy matzos. This is not a figment of imagination or something taken from a film. It is a fact, acknowledged by their own books and by historical evidence.&#8221;</p>
<p>In medieval Europe, both secular rulers, like Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in 1236, and various popes &#8211; Innocent IV and Gregory X in the thirteenth century, Martin V and Nicholas V in the fifteenth century &#8211; issued emphatic statements condemning the blood libel and declaring that Jews did not prey on Christian children and did not use blood in their rituals. One would be hard pressed to find equivalently prominent figures in the Arab world condemning the blood libel today.</p>
<p>Prompted by this popularity of the blood libel in the Arab world, and by the anti-Israel slant to Middle East events that prevails in Britain, the theme of Jews preying on non-Jewish children has won new prominence in Britain, particularly within the British chattering classes: in the media and among cultural elites.</p>
<p>To be sure, British invocation of the blood libel does not require an Israel-linked context. For example, in April, 2005, The Guardian published a political cartoon that portrayed then Conservative Party leader Michael Howard, a Jew, with a fang dripping blood as he grinned and held up a blood-filled glass. The caption read: &#8220;Are you drinking what we’re drinking? Vote Conservative.&#8221; But it is primarily the Arab-Israeli conflict and anti-Israel bias that provide the background for most contemporary British regurgitations of the blood libel.</p>
<p>The faux, bandied justification for British libeling of Israeli Jews as child killers is the claim that Israeli forces target Palestinian children. But this sets reality on its head. In fact, Hamas openly declares its religious duty to kill not only all Israelis but all Jews, including all Jewish children. And the Palestinian Authority, under the leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, uses its media, mosques and schools to declare that all Palestinians must dedicate themselves to Israel’s destruction and to praise as role models those Palestinians who have carried out terrorist attacks against Israelis, including attacks that targeted children.</p>
<p>In addition, all Palestinian groups have translated their words into deeds. For example, in the years immediately following Yasser Arafat’s launching of his terror war against Israel in September, 2000, more pre-teen Israeli children were killed than pre-teen Palestinian children (that is, children below the age of almost any possible role in hostilities on either side). More broadly, some eighty percent of Israeli fatalities were non-combatants, as compared to about forty-six percent of Palestinian fatalities. Nor can this difference reasonably be attributed, as it sometimes has been, to Palestinians having less precise weapons with which to target Israelis. The Palestinians’ primary weapon during those years was the suicide bomber, a very precise weapon indeed in honing in on a target.</p>
<p>Moreover, Arafat, an authoritarian power whose goal of destroying Israel always took precedence over the welfare of the Palestinian people, diverted Palestinian assets, including the huge contributions received from Europe and the United States, to that goal and away from the needs of his people. In a similar vein, he pursued a policy of using Palestinian civilians, including children, as human shields, knowing any ensuing civilian casualties will redound to his own propaganda gain. (Hamas, since taking control of Gaza in 2007, has pursued the same course and has openly acknowledged its use of Palestinian civilians as human shields.)</p>
<p>But despite this reality, the Observer, in February, 2001, published a poem by Tom Paulin entitled &#8220;Killed in Crossfire,&#8221; picking up the theme of Jewish targeting of children, and managing, with a poet’s efficiency, to pack the piece with a slew of anti-Semitic tropes:</p>
<blockquote><p>We’re fed this inert<br />
this lying phrase<br />
like comfort food<br />
as another little Palestinian boy<br />
in trainer jeans and a white teeshirt<br />
is gunned down by the Zionist SS<br />
whose initials we should<br />
- but we don’t &#8211; dumb goys -<br />
clock in the weasel word crossfire.</p></blockquote>
<p>Also during this period, The Independent ran a cartoon depicting a naked Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s prime minister, devouring Palestinian children, and the UK’s Political Cartoon Society subsequently honored the drawing with its Political Cartoon of the Year Award for 2003.</p>
<p>In the 2009 Gaza War, which involved an Israeli incursion after, as with the present war, extensive firing of rockets by Hamas and its allies into Israel, estimated Palestinian fatalities range from around 1200 to about 1400. Hamas stated during and immediately after the war that only fifty of its fighters were killed in the conflict. Israel claimed that Hamas and allied combatants killed numbered around 700, or approximately half of total Palestinian deaths. Only in November, 2010, did Hamas admit that, in fact, between 600 and 700 of its fighters were among the dead and that the Israeli figures were essentially correct.</p>
<p>But British media almost exclusively parroted the figures put out by Hamas (or by the UN, which itself adopted the numbers fed it by Hamas). British media also, then as now, was essentially silent on Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields. The story, then as now, was of Israel targeting Palestinian civilians and, more particularly, the toll on Palestinian children of Israel’s supposedly heartless and inexcusable aggression.</p>
<p>Colonel Richard Kemp, formerly commander of British forces in Afghanistan, stated in an interview on BBC during the war:</p>
<p>&#8220;I think – I would say that from my knowledge of the IDF and from the extent to which I have been following the current operation, I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.</p>
<p>&#8220;When you look at the number of civilian casualties that have been caused, that perhaps doesn’t sound too credible – I would accept that.</p>
<p>&#8220;However, Hamas, the enemy they have been fighting, has been trained extensively by Iran and by Hezbollah, to fight among the people, to use the civilian population in Gaza as a human shield.&#8221;</p>
<p>But Colonel Kemp’s perspective, repeated in the context of the current war, was basically ignored by the British commentariat then as now.</p>
<p>Similarly, Hamas’s belated acknowledgment that the ratio of civilian to fighter deaths in the 2009 war was about 1:1 &#8211; this compared to, for example, Western campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kosovo, where the ratio of civilian to fighter deaths has most reliably been estimated at between 3:1 (Afghanistan) and 4:1 (Iraq and Kosovo) &#8211; had virtually no impact on the popular characterization in Britain of Israeli behavior in the war as entailing intentional killing of Palestinian civilians, particularly children.</p>
<p>Representative of British attitudes, at least among the chattering classes, was a six-minute play by Caryl Churchill produced in 2010 to much critical acclaim and entitled &#8220;Seven Jewish Children.&#8221; The play consists of seven segments, each entailing actors discussing what should be told to &#8220;her&#8221; &#8211; a Jewish child &#8211; about events in the lands they and she subsequently fled, her presence in Israel and the conflict with the Arabs. The play offers up standard anti-Israel, anti-Semitic tropes: that the Jews stole the land, stole Arabs’ houses, steal Arab water, regard Arabs as sub-human and themselves as superior and, of course, kill Arab children and feel justified and pleased to do so.</p>
<blockquote><p>Don’t tell her the boy was shot&#8230;<br />
Tell her we&#8217;re entitled&#8230;<br />
Don’t tell her how many of them have been killed<br />
Tell her the Hamas fighters have been killed<br />
Tell her they&#8217;re terrorists<br />
Tell her they&#8217;re filth&#8230;<br />
Don’t tell her about the family of dead girls<br />
Tell her you can’t believe what you see on television<br />
Tell her we killed the babies by mistakeTell her about the family of dead girls, tell her their names why not, tell her the whole world knows why shouldn’t she know? tell her there&#8217;s dead babies, did she see babies? tell her she&#8217;s got nothing to be ashamed of. Tell her they did it to themselves. Tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them, tell her I&#8217;m not sorry for them, tell her not to be sorry for them&#8230; tell her they&#8217;re animals living in rubble now, tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out&#8230; tell her we&#8217;re chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it&#8217;s not her&#8230;</p></blockquote>
<p>A 2011 study, conducted in a number of European countries by a German university, found that 42% of those interviewed in the UK agreed with the statement that &#8220;Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.&#8221; (If Israel’s intent has been extermination, it has been uniquely inept at pursuing it. For example, looking primarily at UN statistics covering most of the period of Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza, which began, of course, in 1967, life expectancy for Palestinians rose from 48 in 1967 to 72 in 2000 (compared to an average of 68 in 2000 for all of the Middle East and North Africa); Palestinian infant mortality dropped under Israeli health programs from 60 per 1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 live births in 2000 (compared to 40 in Egypt, 23 in Jordan and 22 in Syria); and Israeli inoculation programs eradicated polio, whooping cough, tetanus and measles.)</p>
<p>What has led people in the UK to this bizarre, bigoted comprehension of Israel? Obviously, beyond what anti-Jewish animus abroad in the society they may have absorbed, the explanation lies in large part in what has been fed to them regarding Israel by biased British media, British academia, British cultural outlets, including the examples already cited.</p>
<p>Coverage of the present war has followed the well-worn path of that same bias. Despite previous experience of Hamas providing distorted casualty figures that overstate civilian deaths and hide combatant losses, British media typically parrot Hamas figures (or those figures as repeated by the UN) and cast Israel as unconscionably targeting civilians, with children being the most notable victims of Israeli policy. (The actual ratio of civilian to fighter deaths, according to Israel, is the low figure for such conflicts of about 1:1, as in the 2009 war, and this will almost certainly prove to be correct.)</p>
<p>British media likewise report very little if anything about Hamas using civilians as human shields, firing rockets from inside or near schools, mosques, hospitals, hotels, and other civilian locations, or about Hamas preventing civilians from leaving areas from which it is firing or from rocket storage sites, rocket manufacturing facilities and command and control centers.</p>
<p>It is true that Hamas monitors the foreign media in Gaza, and journalists who report honestly about these matters would put themselves in some danger. But journalistic integrity obviously would require either factual reporting on what is happening in Gaza, including the intimidation of the foreign press, or no reporting at all. British media, instead, have submitted to Hamas guidelines without reporting their doing so; and, in fact, those guidelines are consistent with the bias British media bring to the story.</p>
<p>The BBC, in a rare brief spasm of journalistic integrity, did, on August 8, post a report by its head of statistics noting difficulties with widely cited claims, emanating ultimately from Hamas either directly or via the UN, concerning the percentage of fatalities in Gaza that were civilians. The numbers &#8211; the UN was declaring at the time that at least 72% of the dead were civilians &#8211; had been used in many instances as supporting assertions that Israel was simply randomly killing Gazans or even intentionally targeting civilians.</p>
<p>The BBC report states: &#8220;An analysis by the New York Times looked at the names of 1,431 casualties and found that ‘the population most likely to be militants, men ages 20 to 29, is also the most overrepresented in the death toll. They are 9% of Gaza’s 1.7 million residents, but 34% of those killed whose ages were provided’&#8230; ‘At the same time, women and children under 15, the least likely to be legitimate targets, were the most underrepresented, making up 71% of the population and 33% of the known-age casualties.’&#8221;</p>
<p>The report goes on to cite Israel’s claim that at least 1,068 of the dead were combatants and to acknowledge that: &#8220;It is important to bear in mind that in Operation Cast Lead [the 2009 war] Hamas and Gaza-based organizations claimed that only 50 combatants were killed, admitting years later the number was between 600 and 700, a figure nearly identical to the figure claimed by the IDF.&#8221;</p>
<p>But this exercise in objective journalism was soon replaced by business as usual. For example, five days later the BBC web site, promoting an appeal for funds for Gaza, was declaring that &#8220;85%+&#8221; of those killed in Gaza were civilians.</p>
<p>And it was business as usual in other British media, in British street demonstrations vilifying Israel, and within other British institutions, where the theme of Israelis/Jews as child killers again enjoyed a particular prominence. As Brendan O’Neill, editor of the British online journal Spiked, noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;What has been most striking about the British response to the Gaza conflict is the extent to which all the things that were once said about Jews are now said about Israel. Everywhere, from the spittle-flecked newspaper commentary to angry street protests, the old view of Jews as infanticidal masterminds of global affairs has been cut-and-pasted onto Israel.</p>
<p>Consider the constant branding of Israelis as ‘child murderers.’ The belief that Israel takes perverse pleasure in killing children is widespread. It was seen in the big London demonstrations where protesters waved placards featuring caricatured Israeli politicians saying ‘I love killing women and children.’ It could be heard in claims by the U.K.-based group Save the Children that Israel launched a ‘war on children.’ It was most explicitly expressed in the Independent newspaper last week when a columnist described Israel as a ‘child murdering community’ and wondered how long it would be before Israeli politicians hold a ‘Child Murderer Pride’ festival.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Surely any explaining the popularity of the child murderer trope must acknowledge that central to its appeal is that it titillates the anti-Semitic mind.</p>
<p>Matthew Arnold wrote of Oxford as &#8220;whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age.&#8221; Today the last grotesquerie of the Middle Age is not whispered but shouted, from Britain’s newspapers and magazines, its literary journals and professional journals, its theaters and made-for-television dramas, its NGO’s and street demonstrations, its university common rooms and lecture rooms, its union halls and town halls and corridors of national power: the Jew-baiting, blood libel shout.</p>
<p><em> Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of &#8220;The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege.&#8221;</em></p>
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		<title>Promoting &#8216;Proportionality&#8217; in the Service of Genocide</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-levin/promoting-proportionality-in-the-service-of-genocide/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=promoting-proportionality-in-the-service-of-genocide</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Jul 2014 04:30:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[proportional]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237202</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Sanctimonious depravity of Israel-critics on full display. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/prop.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237231" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/prop.jpg" alt="prop" width="333" height="211" /></a>Once again, in warfare between Israel and its neighbors, Israel’s critics note the many more dead and wounded among the Jewish state’s adversaries than among Israelis and attack Israel for disproportionate use of force. While photos of dead and wounded civilians, or of non-combatants desperately fleeing fighting around their homes, should elicit everyone’s sympathy, the translating of that sympathy into a &#8220;proportionality&#8221; argument with which to beat Israel is less an expression of humane sensitivity to the plight of innocent victims than a display of sanctimonious depravity.</p>
<p>International law includes a concept of proportionality as it applies to warfare. Intentionally targeting civilians constitutes not simply a criminal act but a crime against humanity. It is also considered a crime to attack a military target when it is clear that the likely incidental civilian injuries and deaths will be disproportionate to any likely military advantage to be gained as a result of the attack.</p>
<p>Consider the nature of the conflict between Hamas and Israel. Hamas is explicit in its genocidal intent, stating in its charter and in myriad declarations by its representatives that its goal is not only the annihilation of Israel but the slaughter of all Jews. It makes clear that it has zero interest in the establishment of a Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel.</p>
<p>Apologists for Hamas’s Gaza regime claim that Israel, by blocking open access to Gaza, has, in effect, created an open-air prison in which Gazans suffer constant deprivation and so the organization has the right to try to break the Israeli siege. But from the time that Israel pulled all its citizens and troops out of Gaza, in 2005, the Palestinian leadership in the territory has pursued rocket attacks into Israel, and those attacks only escalated after Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007. To the degree that Israel has limited access to Gaza, it has done so in response to these incessant bombardments and other assaults. In addition, its doing so is consistent with international law regarding states of belligerency and, for example, the United Nations has upheld the legitimacy of Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza.</p>
<p>Moreover, the Israeli &#8220;siege&#8221; is typically overstated as totally cutting off Gaza from the wider world. In fact, one of Gaza’s borders is controlled by Egypt, not Israel. Further, huge amounts of goods enter Gaza on an almost daily basis from Israel and many Gazans cross back and forth between Gaza and Israel. Even during the current war, Israel continues to supply electricity and water to Gaza and continues to allow the daily passage of tons of goods, including food and medicine, into Hamas-controlled territory.</p>
<p>Also noteworthy is that Israel not only fully withdrew from the territory but left behind assets that could have contributed to Gaza establishing itself on a sound economic foundation. With the extensive financial support poured into Gaza by the international community, it could have become a Middle East Hong Kong or Singapore.</p>
<p>But Hamas has chosen to pursue its war of annihilation against Israel rather than create a prospering polity. It destroyed many of the economic assets left behind by Israel and devoted the huge influx of money provided by the Arab world and others in the international community to killing Israelis and trying to expunge the Jewish state instead of seeking to improve the lives and welfare of its people.</p>
<p>A major element of the current fighting is Israel’s effort to dismantle the extensive and highly sophisticated tunnel system built by Hamas to infiltrate and attack Israelis and to protect rocket launch sites and command and control centers. Israel had for a time, in the wake of earlier hostilities with Hamas, withheld deliveries of cement out of concern that it would be used to build underground military installations rather than houses and public facilities such as schools and hospitals. It subsequently bowed to international pressure and allowed extensive transfer of cement and related construction materials from Israel to Gaza, and its worst fears proved prescient. For Hamas, the well-being of Gaza’s civilians counts for nothing when measured against the murder of Israelis and extermination of their state.</p>
<p>Hamas initiated the recent conflict with indiscriminate rocket fire into Israel, targeting towns and villages and aiming &#8211; consistent with its broad genocidal objective &#8211; to kill as many Israelis as possible. It pursued its attacks with its leaders, its fighters, its caches of rockets, its launchers and its command and control centers, imbedded in heavily populated areas of Gaza, amid civilian houses and often within or in close proximity to hospitals, mosques and schools.</p>
<p>Hamas is thus doubly guilty of crimes against humanity as conceived in international law, guilty both in its targeting of civilian populations and in its use of civilian populations as human shields. (Regarding the former, even the Palestinian representative at the UN Human Rights Council acknowledged earlier this month that &#8220;[t]he missiles that are now being launched against Israel &#8211; each and every missile constitutes a crime against humanity whether it hits or misses, because it is directed at a civilian target.&#8221;</p>
<p>Israel, in turn, is faced with the choice of simply tolerating the onslaught, resigning itself to a large majority of its population living under the threat of recurrent rocket attack and forced repeatedly to flee to shelter or to spend hours in safe rooms, or of responding and attacking Hamas in an effort to end the threat. No nation would choose the former.</p>
<p>Any honest observer would acknowledge that Israel, unlike its enemies, does not intentionally target civilians. Moreover, in its targeting of Hamas operatives and assets, it goes to unique levels to avoid civilian casualties. This includes telephoning and leafleting civilians, and taking other measures as well, warning them to leave areas about to be struck. Israel does so despite the fact that it is thereby giving advanced notice to those it is targeting. Commonly, Hamas urges their human shields not to act on the warnings but to stay where they are, and the civilians, either out of devotion to Hamas or out of greater fear of Hamas than of the Israelis, do not leave. Israel also frequently aborts attacks, even on high-level Hamas military personnel, when civilians are nearby. Hamas sees itself as winning whatever Israel does: If Israel aborts attacks or gives sufficient warning so that operatives can escape and assets be moved, Hamas gains by maintaining its war machine. If Israel attacks despite the presence of civilians, Hamas can cynically use the death of innocents as propaganda tools against Israel and will have willing accomplices among the world’s political leaders and media outlets to promote its propaganda message.</p>
<p>At times, of course, Israel does err in a military strike, as is inevitable in warfare. It may have faulty intelligence about who is at a location. It may, rarely, mistake innocents for combatants (and Hamas combatants do not wear uniforms, largely to be able to blend into the civilian population and make it more difficult for Israel to distinguish them). Its ordinance may misfire and land somewhere other than the intended target. It may hit depots that contain much more explosives than anticipated and set off extensive secondary explosions that engulf innocents.</p>
<p>But while Israel’s critics may at times latch onto errors of this sort, particularly if their tragic consequences provide, for Hamas propaganda, good photo opportunities, their accusations of disproportionality against Israel rest more broadly on the point of Palestinian casualties far exceeding in number Israeli victims.</p>
<p>Again, however, the issue of proportionality in terms of international law refers not to numbers but to the obligation not to take military action when the likelihood of civilian casualties outweighs the military significance of the target.</p>
<p>Yet, since Hamas so thoroughly imbeds its personnel and materiel within civilian populations, it is inevitable that &#8211; in situations where Israel is able to defend its own population despite intense and indiscriminate attack, as in the current conflict with use of the Iron Dome system &#8211; Palestinian casualties will be much higher than Israeli casualties. The accusation of disproportionality based on numbers of dead and injured routinely leveled against Israel, despite its efforts to minimize the harming of civilians, becomes then essentially an argument that there is no Hamas military asset Israel can target that justifies the endangerment of civilian lives.</p>
<p>It becomes, in effect, an argument that Hamas should be free to pursue its genocidal campaign against Israel without Israel being allowed to defend itself.</p>
<p>The disproportionality accusation is ultimately an argument in support of the destruction of Israel. This is the ultimate thrust of, for example, British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s accusing Israel of &#8220;a disproportionate form of collective punishment,&#8221; and complaints of Israel’s use of disproportionate force by the prime ministers of Belgium and Finland, and the declaration issued by the EU that Israel &#8220;must act proportionately,&#8221; with its implication that Israel has not been doing so, and the promotion of such indictments by myriad voices in the world’s media.</p>
<p>To be sure, many such accusations are accompanied, at least in the political arena, by criticism of Hamas for its rocket attacks. Nick Clegg’s statement is certainly different in tone from that of his fellow Liberal Democrat MP, David Ward, who wrote that if he lived in Gaza he would likely join in Hamas’s crimes against humanity by firing rockets targeting Israeli civilians. But any accompanying criticism of Hamas is little more than <em>pro forma </em>when Israel is, in effect, being taken to task for any effort to strike back at her attackers and end the onslaught against her. The thrust of the disproportionality argument is to deprive Israel of effective self-defense and is a display of moral perversion on the part of its purveyors.</p>
<p><strong>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of <em>The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege.</em></strong></p>
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		<title>Jeffrey Goldberg, Jackson Diehl and Obama’s Targeting of Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-levin/jeffrey-goldberg-jackson-diehl-and-obamas-targeting-of-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jeffrey-goldberg-jackson-diehl-and-obamas-targeting-of-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 12 Mar 2014 04:43:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Diehl]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A clear-eyed Washington Post editor tells the truth about Obama's bullying of Israel.]]></description>
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<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/obama-looks-at-netanyahu-during-talks-at-oval-data.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220829" alt="obama-looks-at-netanyahu-during-talks-at-oval-data" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/obama-looks-at-netanyahu-during-talks-at-oval-data-450x331.jpg" width="270" height="199" /></a>In his recent hour-long White House interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, President Obama once more unleashed a biased, dishonest attack on Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu. Goldberg, like all too many high-profile writers and commentators, gave the president a pass on his anti-Israel riff and even seconded it. A striking contrast, demonstrating incisive, reality-based coverage of Obama’s anti-Israel slant and its inevitable negative consequences, has been provided over the past five years by the <i>Washington Post</i>’s Jackson Diehl.</p>
<p>Goldberg’s interview received wide attention for the president’s warnings to Netanyahu that he must quickly reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians or Israel could face dire consequences from a world impatient with the Jewish state’s supposed foot-dragging in ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, now in the tenth year of a four-year term, the president had only positive things to say, including definitively characterizing him as ready for a peace deal.</p>
<p>The Goldberg interview, broadcast on Bloomberg News, was wide-ranging, touching extensively on Iran and Syria as well as Israel, and Goldberg has been praised by some for his handling of the hour. Elliot Abrams, on <i>The Weekly Standard </i>website, wrote: &#8220;&#8230; kudos to Goldberg; he pressed Obama repeatedly, challenging vague formulations and seeking clarity. Goldberg pushed Obama hard, especially on Iran and Syria.</p>
<p>But on Israel Goldberg pushed Obama not at all, even when the president made assertions untethered from reality.</p>
<p>Abbas has said that he would never recognize Israel as a Jewish state, a recognition that Obama has himself acknowledged is necessary for any meaningful peace. Abbas has said he will not give up the so-called &#8220;right of return&#8221; of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to Israel, a formula for the dissolution of the Jewish state. He has denied any Jewish connection to the land and insisted the Jews are mere colonial interlopers whose state is illegitimate. He has praised murderers of Israeli civilians as heroes who should be emulated and has overseen the naming of schools, sports teams, and other public entities in their honor. He has presided over an education system that teaches all of &#8220;Palestine&#8221; &#8211; meaning the West Bank, Gaza and Israel &#8211; properly belongs to the Palestinians and that Palestinian children must dedicate themselves to liberating it from the Jews and eradicating the Jewish state.</p>
<p>Yet when Obama declared, &#8220;I believe that President Abbas is sincere about his willingness to recognize Israel and its right to exist,&#8221; and offered other comments in the same vein, Goldberg mustered no question invoking the counter-evidence. On the contrary, he essentially endorsed the president’s ludicrous assessment and only raised the question of whether Abbas could deliver, despite his good intentions: &#8220;Abu Mazen [Abbas] &#8211; all these things you say are true, but he is also the leader of a weak, corrupt and divided Palestinian entity&#8230; Do you think he can deliver more than a framework agreement?&#8221;</p>
<p>In contrast to Goldberg’s meekly echoing the president’s distortions, <i>Washington Post </i>editor and columnist Jackson Diehl has repeatedly offered clear-eyed assessments of Obama’s anti-Israel bias and misguided views on the path to peace.</p>
<p>In May, 2009, in an op-ed entitled &#8220;Abbas’s Waiting Game,&#8221; Diehl observed, &#8220;[President Obama] has revived a long-dormant Palestinian fantasy: that the United States will simply force Israel to make critical concessions, whether or not its democratic government agrees, while Arabs passively watch and applaud.&#8221; To Diehl, the president’s tack was obviously wrong-headed and counter-productive.</p>
<p>At the time, the Obama administration was already focusing on a settlement freeze as the key to moving the peace process forward. In subsequent weeks, the administration ratcheted up this demand, and defined the insisted upon &#8220;freeze&#8221; in all-inclusive terms that were unprecedented either for any American administration or in the context of any previous Israeli-Arab or Israeli-Palestinian agreements. In addition, Obama did so without mention of need for a single concession on the part of the Palestinians.</p>
<p>Once again Diehl was direct and clear, in an article written a month after the previous piece and entitled &#8220;End the Spat with Israel.&#8221; Diehl points out how unprecedented the demands regarding settlements were, and how unnecessary given previously agreed upon limitations to settlement growth, limitations to which the Israelis were adhering. He also notes concessions Netanyahu had made in recent weeks, including for the first time agreeing to Palestinian statehood. He reiterates that Obama’s stance was allowing the Palestinians, and the Arabs more broadly, to avoid making any necessary concessions of their own. His point once more was how Obama’s anti-Israel approach, if left unmodified, was doomed to fail.</p>
<p>In fact, when Netanyahu did subsequently agree to a ten month moratorium on all settlement construction, Abbas refused to restart negotiations until two weeks before the moratorium’s end, persisted in offering no concessions of his own, and demanded an extension of the building freeze as a pre-condition to continuing negotiations. Diehl was, of course, proved right in his criticism of Obama’s strategy.</p>
<p>Yet again, two years later, in a May, 2011 op-ed entitled &#8220;Mahmoud Abbas’s Formula for War,&#8221; Diehl takes Obama to task for his ongoing, wrong-headed bias. He notes the president was still focusing on pressuring Israel, while &#8220;short shrift is given, as usual, to Netanyahu’s putative partner. Yet the leader of the Palestinian ‘moderate’ branch, Mahmoud Abbas, is not only refusing to make any concessions of his own but is also turning his back on American diplomacy &#8211; and methodically setting the stage for another Israeli-Palestinian conflict.&#8221;</p>
<p>Diehl goes on to cite Abbas’s recent public commitment to seek a UN General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood the following fall. Diehl quotes Abbas to the effect that, rather than pursuing a state through a negotiated peace with Israel, &#8220;Palestine would then be negotiating from the position of one United Nations member whose territory is militarily occupied by another.&#8221;</p>
<p>This tack is consistent with what had always been Yasser Arafat’s intent. Arafat was never going to sign an &#8220;end-of-conflict&#8221; agreement, and neither will his long-time friend and ally Abbas. It was because such an agreement was demanded of them in return for the far-reaching Israeli territorial concessions offered by Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton in 2000 and 2001 and by Ehud Olmert in 2008 that Arafat walked away from the former and Abbas from the latter. Arafat then launched his terror war and at the same time sought international recognition of &#8220;Palestine&#8221; without committing to a final status agreement and without closing the door to ongoing pursuit of Israel’s annihilation. Abbas is intent on following the same playbook.</p>
<p>Diehl, writing in 2011, notes that &#8220;the Obama administration and its allies appear suitably alarmed by [Abbas’s UN strategy]. But their principal reaction so far might be summed up as, ‘Now we really have to put the screws to Netanyahu.’&#8221;</p>
<p>In the context of giving Secretary of State Kerry his requested nine months to solve the conflict, Abbas agreed to forego returning to the UN last fall to seek additional trappings of nationhood there. But he is clearly determined to continue avoiding concessions to, and an end-of-conflict agreement with, Israel, and instead to seek international recognition of statehood in all of the West Bank and Gaza and the freedom to use those territories for pursuing Israel’s destruction.</p>
<p>President Obama, in his Jeffrey Goldberg interview, has now essentially legitimized the Arafat strategy. Abbas, Obama insists, is committed to an agreement with Israel. The problem is the settlements built in support of Israeli claims to areas of the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. If Israel fails to meet Palestinian demands, Obama continues, it is hard to see how the United States can go on protecting Israel from anti-Israel measures taken by, for example, the United Nations and the European Union.</p>
<p>In a subsequent interview with talk show host Charlie Rose, Goldberg said he took Obama’s comments <span style="font-size: small;">&#8220;</span>&#8230;to be a little bit of a veiled threat, to be honest&#8230; It’s almost up there with, you know, nice little Jewish state you got there, I’d hate to see something happen to it.&#8221;</p>
<p>But when it counted, during the interview, Goldberg did not challenge Obama on his threat. Nor did he raise the issue of Israel’s legitimate security concerns and its right to claim in negotiations strategic areas of the West Bank, as acknowledged, for example, in UN Security Council Resolution 242. Nor did he refer to the Palestinians’ continuing refusal to recognize Israel’s legitimacy within any borders, or their indoctrinating their children to wage war on Israel until it is annihilated. No; he essentially let Obama’s biased attack on Israel and apologetics for the Palestinians stand unchallenged.</p>
<p>There are many more Jeffrey Goldbergs than Jackson Diehls among Middle East commentators inside the Beltway. Their obsequiousness to Obama and to his hostility vis-a-vis Israel helps assure that, in the administration’s remaining three years, the Jewish state will endure additional besiegement and the prospect for genuine peace will only recede further.</p>
<p><em>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of &#8220;The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege.&#8221;</em></p>
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		<title>From Surf to Serfdom</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/kenneth-levin/from-surf-to-serfdom/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=from-surf-to-serfdom</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Oct 2012 04:25:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[decline]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fishing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[industry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Massachusetts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[regulation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Solyndra]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[workers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=147559</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What the plight of the Massachusetts fishing industry tells us about Big Government.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/kenneth-levin/from-surf-to-serfdom/port-of-new-bedford/" rel="attachment wp-att-147621"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-147621" title="Port-of-New-Bedford" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Port-of-New-Bedford.gif" alt="" width="315" height="235" /></a>Unemployment in my home state of Massachusetts is less than the national average. In August, it stood at 6.3% compared to 8.1% nationally.</p>
<p>The state benefits from very robust high-tech sectors. But, of course, low-tech industries also figure in its economy. Particularly hard hit among the latter in the current downturn has been the state’s large fishing industry. Its problems, and the plight of workers dependent on fishing for their livelihood, are illustrative both of the general difficulties of the economy across the country and of ways in which specific Obama administration policies have compounded the overall decline.</p>
<p>While Massachusetts high-tech has been a relative bright spot, it, too, has not been immune to the economy&#8217;s problems. In addition to being affected by the general downturn, the fortunes of particular sectors and individual companies have been subject to the vagaries of administration selection of favored and unfavored industries and companies. For example, biotechnology is a key component of high-tech here. Within biotech, the big pharmaceutical companies cut deals with the administration around Obamacare. They were involved in fashioning Obamacare in ways that benefitted them, and they, in turn, lent their support to passage of the health care legislation. The big pharmaceutical companies have done relatively well, including in Massachusetts.</p>
<p>The medical device industry, also well represented in the state, is one of the most innovative and productive segments of the high-tech economy. But it differs from the pharmaceutical industry in consisting mainly of smaller companies. Consequently, it had neither the political nor financial heft to play the role in deal-making and agenda-shaping with the administration that the latter played. One result was that it was regarded by the administration as relatively expendable, and, to help fund the leviathan of Obamacare and offset the deal-making and costs elsewhere, the medical device industry was hit with a new, special tax. It is a 2.3% tax applied not just to profits but to gross receipts. This is, predictably, a major problem for the industry, and is affecting both its creativity and its generation of jobs and revenue in the state.</p>
<p>The Obama administration’s playing favorites in industries is not limited, of course, to which companies could help with particular legislation. In other instances, favorites have been picked to benefit supportive constituencies, such as unions, as in the government bailout of General Motors. In still other cases, it has been to reward individuals who have funded Obama’s campaigns. For example, campaign backers and bundlers received 80% of clean energy government grant dollars. This includes leading figures in Solyndra and in nearly a score of other companies that have failed, resulting in huge taxpayer losses.</p>
<p>The Solyndra fiasco, and similar instances of extensive government grants being provided to alternative energy enterprises, can be seen as reflecting efforts to at once reward the president’s financiers and please his environmentalist supporters. But in other policies, the former consideration seems to take priority over the latter.</p>
<p>For example, a Wall Street Journal editorial of August 14 noted &#8220;the Interior Department announced that it will allow construction permitting on 285,000 acres of public land&#8230; for solar projects&#8230;&#8221; and that the department also said &#8220;energy firms can petition Interior to build solar installations ‘on approximately 19 million acres&#8230;’&#8221; Moreover, &#8220;the agency is also streamlining National Environmental Policy Act approval&#8221; for the solar projects. While environmentalists may support the promotion of clean energy, many would likely balk at providing these favors to the solar industry at the cost of riding roughshod over considerations of the environmental impact on proffered federal lands.</p>
<p>Losers among the nation’s industries in the administration’s political calculus include, of course, fossil fuel companies, which are the <em>bete noire </em>of government environment watchdog ideologues as well as Obama’s alternative-energy-linked<em> </em>financiers and many environmentalist supporters. Thus, the Keystone pipeline is stopped despite, as environmental studies of the project strongly indicate, almost certainly threatening much less environmental damage than the Interior Department’s approved &#8220;solaring over&#8221; of huge swathes of federal land.</p>
<p>The Massachusetts fishing industry and its workers have been sacrificed on similar administration altars. The preservation of fishing stock and the dangers of over-fishing are important concerns both to environmentalists and to fishermen. Indeed, there is general acknowledgment that the state and region’s fishing fleets have long been adhering to federal catch limits. But new layers of federal bureaucracy created without congressional authority but rather by an Obama executive order &#8211; under the rubric of &#8220;The National Ocean Policy&#8221; &#8211; have introduced dramatic additional restrictions on catches on the basis of questionable stock assessments and dubious new guidelines for protecting and maintaining fisheries; policies that have elicited bi-partisan challenges in Congress.</p>
<p>The bureaucrats responsible for formulating and enforcing the new policies have demonstrated little interest in the bi-partisan criticism directed at them in Congress. They have similarly given short shrift to the difficulties of Massachusetts and other northeastern fishermen and their families, as well as myriad others dependent on the fishing industry, who have been deprived of livelihoods and face the specter of their industry suffering long-term and possibly permanent decline.</p>
<p>The administration’s high-handedness, not only vis-a-vis these people’s circumstances but with regard to workers in all industries that have suffered from the general economic downturn or have had their difficulties compounded by the government’s picking of favored and unfavored, winners and losers, seems in no small part to be due to the administration’s viewing the plight of American workers as a win-win situation. Those who are doing well will, it is assumed, translate their positive situation into support for the administration; while those who are out of work will join the burgeoning ranks of Americans dependent on public assistance and are likely to back an administration that delivers more and more such aid.</p>
<p>No doubt the majority of Massachusetts fishermen just want to return to their boats and their work. But as doing so becomes more remote, and potentially only temporary if it occurs at all, the prospect of losing government support &#8211; both that available to others in need and the additional support their representatives are now trying to move through Congress &#8211; becomes more anxiety-provoking and daunting. This is the way the virtually unprecedented numbers of Americans on welfare (by Obama fiat no longer constrained by workfare rules), on food stamps, on other forms of government assistance continue to grow, and along with those rolls the constituency for its political promoters.</p>
<p>This perhaps most cynical element in the Obama administration’s policy calculus, as it has been applied to Massachusetts fishermen and to so many others across the nation, gives a new twist to the well-known Chinese proverb: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. For the Obama administration and too many Democrat Party leaders, the translation of proverb into policy runs more like: Enable a man to fish and you free him from want and dependence for a lifetime; create obstacles to fishing, make them the norm, while giving a man a fish, and another tomorrow, and another the day after that, and you own him, and his vote, for all his days.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Minority Elites and Israel’s Jewish Defamers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/kenneth-levin/minority-elites-and-israel%e2%80%99s-jewish-defamers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=minority-elites-and-israel%25e2%2580%2599s-jewish-defamers</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 27 Aug 2012 04:10:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arabs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[arafat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jewish defamers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oslo]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=141577</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A glimpse into the dark world of the collaborators. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/thomas.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-141663" title="thomas" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/thomas.jpg" alt="" width="260" height="227" /></a>In a 1977 Supreme Court opinion, Thurgood Marshall, the court’s first African-American justice, observed, &#8220;Social scientists agree that members of minority groups frequently respond to discrimination and prejudice by attempting to disassociate themselves from the group, even to the point of adopting the majority&#8217;s negative attitudes towards the minority.&#8221;</p>
<p>Marshall further noted that &#8220;such behavior occurs with particular frequency among members of minority groups who have achieved some measure of economic or political success and thereby have gained some acceptability among the dominant group.&#8221; In fact, such behavior is particularly common within minority group elites more broadly; not only those to whom Marshall refers but also, for example, academic, artistic and journalist elites. In addition, it is more common not simply among those who have achieved elite status but also those who aspire to such status.</p>
<p>Of course, not all members of these elites within minorities embrace the wider society’s bigoted indictments of their own group; nor is the embrace of those indictments limited to the besieged community’s elites. But elites typically play an especially prominent role in this phenomenon.</p>
<p>In the context of Jewish experience, this has been a recurrent pattern throughout the history of the Diaspora and has figured in Israeli history as well. (Virtually all the psychological characteristics of minorities chronically denigrated, marginalized, and otherwise targeted by surrounding majorities are found as well within the populations of small states chronically besieged by their neighbors.)</p>
<p>The Oslo process of the 1990&#8242;s is illustrative. The path to Oslo was paved by journalists, academics, novelists, purveyors of other arts, and elements of the political elite who argued that the Palestinian-Israeli, and the broader Arab-Israeli, conflict remained unresolved because Israel had failed to make sufficient territorial and other concessions. If Israel would only return essentially to the pre-1967 armistice lines and were also more forthcoming in other ways, they argued, peace would be achieved. By the early 1990&#8242;s they had won about half of Israel’s population to variations of this view.</p>
<p>In doing so, they ignored the reality that throughout this same period, as well as in the wake of the initial Oslo accords of 1993, Yasser Arafat and his followers continued to tell their constituency that their goal was Israel’s annihilation and continued to promote terror to achieve that goal. During the years of Oslo, the editors and journalists of Israel’s three Hebrew dailies failed to report on the incessant defamation of Israel and calls for her extermination that permeated not only speeches by Arafat and his associates but broadcasts of Palestinian media more generally as well as sermons in Palestinian mosques and curriculum in Palestinian schools. The upsurge of terror that followed the initial Oslo accords was downplayed by the Israeli political leadership that had championed the Oslo process. Israeli academics, both immediately before and during the Oslo years, created a bogus &#8220;New History&#8221; that rewrote Israel’s past in a manner supporting the delusions of Oslo, the claims that Israeli missteps were perpetuating the conflict and Israeli concessions would resolve it. Israeli novelists, dramatists, film makers, as well as painters and others in the plastic arts, promoted the same delusions. A similar pattern of distortions characterized the work of many Jewish community leaders, journalists, academics, and artists in the Diaspora.</p>
<p>The reason so many Israelis followed the nation’s elites and embraced Oslo’s rationales is not difficult to fathom. Their doing so reflected the nation’s desire for peace and people’s wish to believe themselves in control of circumstances over which, in reality, they had, and have, no control. Both then and now, Palestinian and broader Arab media, mosques and schools purvey not simply the message that Israel must be destroyed but a broader, genocidal anti-Semitism. This is true as well in parts of the Muslim world beyond the Arab states. Peace will come only when internal political changes in these domains translate into abandonment of the drumbeat for killing Jews and annihilating Israel. It will come on the Arabs’ timetable. In fact, Israeli actions have little impact on this reality. Israel can neither appease its way to peace nor fight its way to peace. At best, it can deter aggression and suppress aggression when deterrence fails.</p>
<p>But for many, this lack of control over circumstances so central to their well-being is intolerable. The psychological response is like that of chronically abused children, who almost invariably blame themselves for their predicament. They choose to believe they are abused because they have been &#8220;bad&#8221; and that if they only become &#8220;good&#8221; the abuse will end. They do so, enduring the pain of the self-indictment, because the delusion preserves a sense of control over circumstances that are in reality beyond their control. Similarly, elements of minorities abused by the surrounding majority and small states besieged by their neighbors choose to embrace comparable delusions rather than acknowledge their helplessness to end their besiegement.</p>
<p>Even the dramatic upsurge in terror that accompanied the first years of the Oslo process had only limited impact on public support for the accords. It was not until Arafat, in 2000, rejected all compromise at Camp David, offered no counter-proposals, and instead launched his all-out terror war &#8211; which in the ensuing few years claimed another thousand Israeli lives and maimed thousands more &#8211; that Israelis in large numbers abandoned their Oslo delusions. Still more gave up their wishful thinking when Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 led only to more terror, much of it in the form of thousands of rockets targeting Israeli communities from the evacuated territory.</p>
<p>But hardly all Israelis have turned away from their Oslo delusions, and it is &#8211; perhaps even more than earlier &#8211; particularly elements of the elites that continue to embrace the argument, for example, that Israel does not require defensible borders. It is disproportionately members of the elites who insist return to the pre-1967 armistice lines will bring about a peace that will render &#8220;defensible borders&#8221; unnecessary, and that therefore it is Israeli intransigence that perpetuates the conflict.</p>
<p>The embrace of the indictments of one’s besiegers does not necessarily take the form of seeking to reform one’s community in accordance with those indictments, seeking to appease the besiegers in this way. It can also entail seeking to distance oneself from the community &#8211; to, as Thurgood Marshall put it, &#8220;disassociate themselves from the group&#8221; &#8211; to spare oneself the pain of the besiegement. And it is members, or those who aspire to be members, of the elites that disproportionately choose the path of distancing themselves from Israel’s predicament.</p>
<p>This is so because it is disproportionately members, or would-be members, of the elites who aspire to acceptance by circles beyond the nation, circles that have their own biases against Israel and its Jewish supporters. It is members, or would-be members, of the elites who choose to identify themselves less as Israelis and more as academics, writers, other artists, journalists, eager for the approval of their peers abroad and aware that being critical of Israel, whatever the reality of the nation’s predicament, is a surer path to that approval. It is disproportionately the academic defamers of Israel who get the visiting lectureships in Europe and elsewhere, including in the United States. It is the novelists and film-makers and journalists most critical of Israel who are awarded prizes and feted in Europe and elsewhere. It is the Israeli NGO leaderships most given to defaming the nation and promoting the indictments of its enemies, however bigoted and absurd, that are most showered with encomiums and lavish funding by governments in Europe and foundations in America.</p>
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		<title>Bill Clinton’s Anti-Israel Screed</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/kenneth-levin/bill-clinton%e2%80%99s-anti-israel-screed/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-clinton%25e2%2580%2599s-anti-israel-screed</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Nov 2011 04:07:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benjamin Netanyahu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=111394</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The former president's defamatory hit on the Jewish state.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/bill-clinton.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-111397" title="bill-clinton" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/bill-clinton.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="529" /></a></p>
<p>In late September, former President Bill Clinton made the  outrageous assertion that the absence of Arab-Israeli peace is primarily  the fault of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. While focusing his  attack on Netanyahu and insisting other Israeli prime ministers were  more prepared for peace, Clinton’s declaration &#8211; and additional,  related, claims indicting elements of the Israeli population &#8211; are, in  fact, a defamatory hit on the Jewish state.</p>
<p>This is most obvious in his exonerating Palestinian leaders from  any responsibility for the absence of peace. On the contrary, he  characterizes Palestinian president Abbas and his government as prepared  to establish a genuine peace and only lacking an Israeli partner.  Clinton is silent on Abbas’ refusal to recognize Israel as the national  home of the Jewish people &#8211; even as Netanyahu has explicitly stated his  preparedness to see a Palestinian Arab state created alongside Israel.  Clinton is silent about Abbas’ repeated praise of Palestinian suicide  bombers and other mass murderers of Israelis and his holding them up as  role models for all Palestinians.</p>
<p>Clinton says nothing of Abbas and the Palestinian Authority’s  persistent use of their media, mosques and schools to deny any Jewish  connection to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean,  to insist that the Jews are merely usurpers who have no legitimate claim  to a presence in any part of &#8220;Palestine,&#8221; and to urge Palestinians to  dedicate themselves to Israel’s destruction. Clinton ignores Abbas’s  insistence that he and his government will never give up the so-called  &#8220;right of return,&#8221; the flooding of Israel with descendants of refugees  from the 1947-48 war and transformation of Israel into yet another Arab  Muslim state.</p>
<p>So determined is Clinton to close his ears and eyes to Palestinian  declarations and actions and his mind to Palestinian intentions that he  actually states at one point in his September screed: &#8220;For reasons that  even after all these years I still don’t know for sure, Arafat turned  down the deal I put together [in 2000 at Camp David and subsequent  meetings] that [then prime minister] Barak accepted.&#8221; Of course, it’s  obvious why Arafat turned down the Camp David proposals, made no  counter-offers, and instead launched his terror war. Both Barak and  Clinton insisted that any agreement be explicitly recognized by all  parties as permanently ending the conflict, and Arafat was unprepared to  do so, to even present the appearance of foregoing future claims on  Israeli territory and ultimately achieving annihilation of the Jewish  state.</p>
<p>Abbas has demonstrated &#8211; in his determined avoidance of  negotiations with Netanyahu, and in his rejecting of former Prime  Minister Olmert’s proposals in 2008, again without presenting a  counter-offer &#8211; that he is no more prepared to come to an  end-of-conflict agreement than his predecessor and friend Arafat. Only  the willfully self-deluding or incorrigibly biased could think  otherwise.</p>
<p>In contrast to Abbas’s policy of circumventing negotiations and  seeking to advance Palestinian statehood without dealing with Israel &#8211;  via, for example, UN recognition &#8211; Netanyahu has taken unprecedented  steps to promote negotiations. This includes his ten-month suspension of  construction in settlements. Previous prime ministers, including  Yitzhak Rabin, had explicitly rejected any such suspension, and a  cessation of construction was never part of the Oslo agreements or a  precondition to any previous Israeli-Palestinian or other Israeli-Arab  negotiations. Abbas’s response to Netanyahu’s move was to continue his  refusal to talk until shortly before the ten-month suspension expired,  then to demand an extension as a condition for continuing the talks.  Clinton is silent about all of this.</p>
<p>Clinton contrasts Netanyahu to Rabin and insists he wishes to see Rabin’s vision of peace realized. In a <em>New York Times </em>op-ed  commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the prime minister’s  assassination and entitled &#8220;Finish Rabin’s Work&#8221; (November 3, 2010), the  former president declares, &#8220;Since his death, not a week has gone by  that I have not missed him. I loved him&#8230; I continue to believe that,  had he lived, within three years we would have had a comprehensive  agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians&#8230; Rabin’s spirit  continues to light the path, but we must all decide to take it.&#8221;</p>
<p>But, in fact, Clinton has betrayed Rabin’s path. Rabin, like the  authors of UN Security Council Resolution 242 &#8211; still the foundation  stone of Israeli-Arab peace negotiations &#8211; recognized that Israel’s  pre-1967 armistice lines left the nation too vulnerable to future  aggression. He insisted Israel must retain a significant portion of the  West Bank to block traditional invasion routes and to protect both  Jerusalem and the low-lying coastal plain, the latter home to some 70%  of the nation’s population. In his last speech in the Knesset before his  assassination, Rabin declared:</p>
<p>&#8220;The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution,  will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will  not return to the 4 June 1967 lines.</p>
<p>&#8220;And these are the main changes, not all of them, which we envision and want in the permanent solution:</p>
<p>&#8220;A.  First and foremost, united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma&#8217;ale  Adumim and Givat Ze&#8217;ev &#8212; as the capital of Israel, under Israeli  sovereignty, while preserving the rights of the members of the other  faiths, Christianity and Islam, to freedom of access and freedom of  worship in their holy places, according to the customs of their faiths.</p>
<p>&#8220;B. The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.</p>
<p>&#8220;C.  Changes which will include the addition of Gush Etzion, Efrat, Beitar  and other communities, most of which are in the area east of what was  the ‘Green Line,&#8217; prior to the Six  Day War.</p>
<p>&#8220;D. The establishment of blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria&#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>Netanyahu’s vision of defensible borders for Israel essentially  conforms to the parameters laid out by Rabin. But Clinton rejects those  parameters and promotes Israel’s return to the indefensible pre-1967  lines. In the same article in which he urges continuing along Rabin’s  path, he endorses a very different vision: &#8220;Because of the terms  accepted in late 2000 by Prime Minister Ehud Barak, supported in greater  detail by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert [and involving an accord based  largely on the 1967 lines], and approved by President Mahmoud Abbas&#8230;  everyone knows what a final agreement would look like.&#8221; (In reality,  Abbas did not accept Olmert’s offer.)</p>
<p>While Rabin believed Israel could gain in the Oslo negotiations  agreement to the defensible borders Israel requires, there were many in  his government, and in the population more broadly, who convinced  themselves Israel no longer needed defensible borders. They ignored what  Arafat and the PA were saying to their own people, in their media,  mosques and schools, about their ultimate goal remaining Israel’s  destruction. They ignored as well the involvement of Arafat and his  minions in the dramatic increase in terror that marked the initial years  of Oslo. They ignored the threats beyond Arafat and the PA. They  convinced themselves that Israel did not require defensible borders  because in the coming era of &#8220;peace&#8221; there would be nobody against whom  they would need to defend themselves.</p>
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		<title>Palestinians Promote Genocide; NYTimes Silent</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/kenneth-levin/palestinians-promote-genocide-nytimes-silent/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=palestinians-promote-genocide-nytimes-silent</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Sep 2011 04:05:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=105157</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The indoctrination has consequences.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/nyt.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-105161" title="nyt" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/nyt.jpg" alt="" width="475" height="312" /></a></p>
<p>If Palestinian leaders indoctrinate their people to pursue genocide and the <em>New York Times </em>doesn’t report it, is the indoctrination nevertheless of consequence?</p>
<p>In a recent poll of Palestinian opinion &#8211; conducted by Stanley Greenberg, leading pollster for the Democratic party, in conjunction with the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion, and sponsored by the Israel Project &#8211; 73% agreed with a quote from the Hamas charter on the need to kill all Jews.</p>
<p>Those who get their news on the Arab-Israeli conflict from the <em>Times</em> would likely be surprised and befuddled by this result. Alternatively, they might attribute it to hostility generated by Palestinians living with elements of self-government but, at least in the West Bank, that self-governance significantly short of full independence from Israel. Of course, the latter view makes little sense. Those who embrace it would very probably not expect, for example, that 73% of Tibetans wish to murder all Chinese, or 73% of the people of Darfur desire to kill all Sudanese Arabs; yet these groups live under infinitely more onerous conditions than the Palestinians of the West Bank or Gaza.</p>
<p>In addition, the same poll revealed that only 34% of Palestinians questioned would accept the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel as a permanent solution to the conflict. Presumably, if the &#8220;occupation&#8221; were the source of Palestinians’ genocidal hostility, they would view attaining an independent state as the arrangement that would assuage that hostility. No doubt the people of Tibet and Darfur, as well as dozens of other populations around the world living under genuine occupation, would be delighted to be offered independence. Rather, 66% of Palestinians said that a two-state arrangement might be a starting point but that the Palestinian goal should be the annihilation of Israel.</p>
<p>In fact, Palestinian dedication to Israel’s destruction, and indeed to the annihilation of the Jews, would be of little surprise to anyone who has bothered to follow the agenda set by Palestinian leaders since Israel’s creation. Insistence on its destruction pre-dated Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza, and calls for killing of all Jews is not only part of the Hamas charter. It has, for example, been a fixture of Palestinian Authority indoctrination &#8211; at times in cooperation with Hamas &#8211; virtually since creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994 and subsequent PA control over a large network of media, mosques and schools.</p>
<p>Yet, as central as the promotion of genocide is to Palestinian indoctrination, evasion of the issue is no less central to <em>Times </em>misrepresentation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. If there is any allusion to it in the <em>Times, </em>it is almost invariably to minimize its significance and even to ridicule Israeli concern about it.</p>
<p>Emblematic is a story by <em>Times </em>reporter William Orme published in October, 2000, shortly after Yasir Arafat had rejected Israeli concessions offered at Camp David, had likewise dismissed President Clinton’s additional proposed concessions, had offered no counter-proposals, and instead had launched his terror war against Israel. On October 13, the day after the lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah, the official Palestinian Authority television station broadcast a sermon by Sheik Ahmad Halabaya in which the sheik declared:</p>
<p>&#8220;Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews&#8230; They are the terrorists. They are the ones who must be butchered and killed, as Allah the almighty said: Fight them; Allah will torture them at your hands, and will humiliate them&#8230; Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them. Whereverr you are, kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them&#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>Halabaya, in this official Palestinian Authority broadcast, also asserted that all of Israel properly belongs to the Arabs.</p>
<p>Orme, in his <em>Times </em>article published eleven days later, notes Israeli complaints of the PA’s using its official media for incitement, and his tone is clearly dismissive of Israel’s position. He writes at one point, &#8220;Israelis cite as one egregious example a televised sermon that defended the killing of two soldiers. ‘Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews,’ proclaimed Sheik Ahmad Abu Halabaya in a live broadcast from a Gaza City mosque the day after the killings.&#8221; That is all Orme says of the sermon; nothing about Halabaya’s exhortations to butcher Jews wherever one finds them, nothing about his assertions that all of Israel belongs to the Arabs, nothing about his invoking of Allah as calling for the torture and murder of the Jews.</p>
<p>Orme’s intent was obviously to make the Israeli complaints look unfounded and ridiculous.</p>
<p>In June, 2001, New York’s two Senators at the time, Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, sent a letter to President Bush lauding his efforts to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire but noting that, &#8220;Unless the Palestinians take unequivocal steps to stop the rhetoric of hate emanating from official Palestinian Authority (PA) statements, media organizations and textbooks in Palestinian schools, any peace agreement will have little meaning&#8230; For nearly ten years, while Mr. Arafat and the Palestinian leadership were speaking the language of peace with Israel and the West, they were continuing their calls for the destruction of Israel to the Palestinian people and the Arab world.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Senators included in their letter illustrations of Palestinian incitement and hate-mongering. Among them were a statement from a PA minister, made a few months before the outbreak of hostilities, that Oslo was merely a first step toward Israel’s destruction; an article in an official PA newspaper calling for the killing of Jews wherever they are found; and citations from Palestinian school texts declaring that &#8220;there is no alternative to destroying Israel&#8221; and proposing that the Jews had been brought to &#8220;our land&#8221; in order to be annihilated. But the <em>New York Times </em>could still not bring itself to cover the issue of genocidal Palestinian incitement, or of Palestinian incitement more broadly.</p>
<p>The same is true now. The PA declares Israel illegitimate. It denies any historical connection between Jews and the land and insists Jews are simply usurpers in Palestinian lands. It teaches Palestinian children they must dedicate themselves to Israel’s destruction. It lauds murderers of Jews as models whom Palestinian children should aspire to emulate. It promotes the murder of all Jews. Often, PA president Mahmoud Abbas participates directly in this incitement.</p>
<p>And the indoctrination has consequences. As a generation of young Palestinians has grown up knowing only the PA’s education curriculum, and PA media and mosque incitement has shaped broader Palestinian opinion for almost two decades, the indoctrination has rendered the possibility of genuine peace only more remote. The recent poll cited above illustrates this inevitable reality.</p>
<p>(All of which was, in fact, predictable. In the context of Jordan’s having renounced any claims to the West Bank in the late 1980&#8242;s, Yitzhak Rabin began promoting the idea of a UN-overseen election in the territories for leaders from within the territories who would then negotiate a peace with Israel. He continued to do so through the months immediately following his becoming prime minister in 1992. Rabin recognized that such leaders would almost certainly be much more amenable to genuine peace than Arafat and those around him in Fatah and the PLO. But while there was significant interest in the proposal among Palestinians in the territories, potential candidates were intimidated by PLO threats. In addition, foreign leaders, and many within Rabin’s own Labor Party, insisted he deal only with Arafat as a &#8220;peace partner&#8221;; and Rabin ultimately accepted the disastrous Oslo path.)</p>
<p>But if Palestinian incitement to Jew-hatred and genocide has consequences, so, too, does the <em>Times’ </em>consistent failure to cover that incitement. It distorts <em>Times </em>readers’ understanding of the nature of the Palestinian-Israeli, and broader Arab-Israeli, conflict. In addition, as the <em>Times </em>remains in some respects America’s newspaper of record whose stances are regurgitated by myriad other news outlets, it inculcates belief in those distortions in a much wider audience.</p>
<p>But apparently that’s the <em>Times’ </em>intention. The explanation for its failure to cover Palestinian incitement to Jew-hatred and genocide is unwillingness to publish truths that undermine its editorial bias. That bias is, essentially, that genuine peace can be achieved by sufficient Israeli territorial concessions, and that Israel’s making those concessions does not entail exposing the Jewish state to unacceptable threats. This is the line pursued in <em>Times </em>editorials, in the articles of the paper’s op-ed writers, and even in news stories.</p>
<p>For example, in an August 7, 2011, editorial entitled &#8220;Palestinians and the U.N.,&#8221; the paper expresses &#8220;sympathy for [Palestinian] yearning and&#8230; frustration. For years, they have been promised a negotiated solution&#8230; and they are still empty-handed.&#8221; The editorial calls on the United States and &#8220;its partners&#8221; to &#8220;put a map on the table, with a timeline for concluding negotiations,&#8221; supports that map being based &#8220;on pre-1967 borders with mutually agreed land swaps,&#8221; (in fact, there were no pre-1967 borders, only armistice lines, and the <em>Times </em>itself has corrected this error on multiple occasions in the past but apparently still cannot resist repeating it for its rhetorical value) and ridicules Prime Minister Netanyahu and others who characterize those lines as &#8220;indefensible.&#8221;</p>
<p>Nowhere in the editorial is there any reference to the obstacles to peace presented by Palestinian leaders’ refusal to accept Israel’s legitimacy within any borders and their persistent  incitement to the state’s destruction. Of course, the editorial is silent on the Palestinian promotion of the extermination of Jews.</p>
<p>The same basic biases were recently repeated in another <em>Times </em>editorial on September 11, entitled &#8220;Palestinian Statehood.&#8221; In this piece, the editors indict the United States, Israel and Europe for failing to offer Abbas enough to dissuade him from seeking recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN. Standing truth on its head &#8211; ignoring that it has been Abbas who has consistently refused to negotiate, except briefly near the end of Israel’s ten-month construction freeze in the West Bank, and has instead waited for the Obama administration to deliver Israeli concessions as a condition for negotiations &#8211; The <em>Times </em>editors, in their ascription of fault, assert, &#8220;We put the greater onus on Mr. Netanyahu, who has used any excuse to thwart peace efforts.&#8221;</p>
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		<title>Obama’s Neville Chamberlain Speech</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/kenneth-levin/obama%e2%80%99s-neville-chamberlain-speech/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama%25e2%2580%2599s-neville-chamberlain-speech</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 23 May 2011 04:43:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=93890</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The president charts a course for Israel comparable to that charted for Czechoslovakia in 1938.]]></description>
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<p>In his May 19 speech on the Middle East, President Obama, in a matter of minutes, abandoned Security Council Resolution 242, which for more than four decades had been the cornerstone of diplomacy in pursuit of Arab-Israeli peace; likewise abandoned the Roadmap, adopted in 2003 by the so-called Quartet (the U.S., UN, EU and Russia) as a blueprint for resolving, more specifically, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; committed his Administration to pushing Israel back to indefensible borders; and essentially adopted as Administration policy Mahmoud Abbas’s variation on Arafat’s &#8220;Plan of Phases&#8221; for Israel’s destruction.</p>
<p>The cumulative impact of Obama’s declarations is to chart a course for Israel comparable to that charted for Czechoslovakia in 1938 when Neville Chamberlain endorsed Hitler’s demands of that country.</p>
<p>&#8220;We believe,&#8221; declared the President, in just one of his statements undermining Israel, &#8220;the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines.&#8221;</p>
<p>Resolution 242, adopted unanimously by the Security Council a few months after the 1967 war, calls for establishment between Israel and its neighbors of &#8220;secure and recognized boundaries.&#8221; The resolution does not call for Israel to return to the pre-war armistice lines, and the resolution&#8217;s authors asserted that this omission was intentional, that those lines were an invitation to further aggression against Israel and the future borders ought to be elsewhere.</p>
<p>Lord Caradon, Britain&#8217;s ambassador to the UN at the time and the person who introduced Resolution 242 in the Security Council, told a Lebanese newspaper in 1974:</p>
<p>&#8220;It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That&#8217;s why we didn&#8217;t demand that the Israelis return to them, and I think we were right not to&#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>Lyndon Johnson, then President, stated that Israel&#8217;s retreat to its former lines would be &#8220;not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities&#8221;; and he advocated new &#8220;recognized boundaries&#8221; that would provide &#8220;security against terror, destruction, and war.&#8221;</p>
<p>Subsequent presidents have endorsed Israel’s need for &#8220;defensible borders,&#8221; and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comments at the White House on May 20, to the effect that Israel is indefensible within the pre-1967 armistice lines and cannot return to those lines, are more consistent with traditional American policy than is Obama’s new stance. In addition, Congress has likewise backed Israel’s right to defensible borders. For example, an April, 2004, letter from the United States to Israel stipulating that the nation was not expected to return to the pre-1967 lines but, rather, was entitled to &#8220;defensible borders,&#8221; had the endorsement of a bipartisan consensus in both houses of Congress.</p>
<p>Israel’s vulnerability within the pre-1967 lines goes beyond its being reduced to a nine-mile width at its center, as mentioned by Netanyahu. Those boundaries also mean forces on the other side would control the hills that totally dominate Israel’s coastal plain, home to 70% of its people.</p>
<p>Despite this longstanding American support for new, defensible boundaries for Israel, and the obvious threats represented by the pre-1967 lines, there are some who insist on characterizing Netanyahu’s strong opposition to a return to those lines as reflecting his being &#8220;right-wing.&#8221; But Yitzhak Rabin, Labor prime minister in the first years of the Oslo process, articulated Netanyahu’s position in even stronger terms. In his last speech in the Knesset, shortly before his assassination in November, 1995, Rabin declared:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines.</p>
<p>And these are the main changes, not all of them, which we envision and want in the permanent solution:</p>
<p>A. First and foremost, united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma&#8217;ale Adumim and Givat Ze&#8217;ev &#8212; as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty, while preserving the rights of the members of the other faiths, Christianity and Islam, to freedom of access and freedom of worship in their holy places, according to the customs of their faiths.</p>
<p>B. The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.</p>
<p>C. Changes which will include the addition of Gush Etzion, Efrat, Beitar and other communities, most of which are in the area east of what was the ‘Green Line,&#8217; prior to the Six Day War.</p>
<p>D. The establishment of blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria&#8230;&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Obama, in promoting Israel’s retreat to the pre-1967 lines, did throw in the sop of a reference to &#8220;mutual agreed [territorial] swaps.&#8221; The meaninglessness of this with regard to Israel’s self-defense is illustrated by Obama’s reference in the preceding sentence to &#8220;permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt&#8230;&#8221; Here he dismisses the necessity of Israel retaining control of the Jordan Valley, without which hostile forces east of the Jordan would have easy access &#8211; whether for invasion or for smuggling arms &#8211; to those heights that, again, render the vast majority of Israelis ready prey for attack, both by regular forces and by terrorist rockets and mortars such as those that currently target Israeli communities near Gaza. Obama reinforced this element of his undermining Israel’s self-defense by calling as well for &#8220;the full and phased withdrawal of Israeli military forces,&#8221; rejecting even some limited Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley.</p>
<p>On the territorial front, as if this were not enough of an assault on Israel, Obama threw in that the Palestinians have the right to &#8211; in keeping with Palestinian demands &#8211; a &#8220;contiguous&#8221; state. But there can be no contiguity between Gaza and the West Bank without splitting Israel in two, and the President had nothing to say about Israeli contiguity.</p>
<p>Beyond demanding suicidal territorial concessions from Israel, the President then insists that these concessions, and the accompanying &#8220;security arrangements&#8221; with the &#8220;non-militarized [Palestinian] state&#8221; &#8211; a largely meaningless, unenforceable flourish, as the Oslo experience dramatically demonstrated - should be spelled out in detail before two other key issues, &#8220;the future of Jerusalem&#8221; and &#8220;the fate of Palestinian refugees&#8221; are addressed. But, of course, the President has already defined the Administration’s stand on the future of Jerusalem in his call for Israel’s return to the pre-1967 armistice lines. And Israel is to surrender its essential bargaining chip, the extent of its territorial concessions, before the Palestinian demand for the so-called &#8220;right of return,&#8221; the plan to flood and overwhelm Israel with descendants of refugees from the 1947-48 war, is even addressed. Moreover, there is nothing in Obama’s speech calling for the Palestinians to give up this path to Israel’s dissolution.</p>
<p>The insistence on both pushing Israel back to the pre-1967 boundaries and establishing the territorial dimension of an agreement before other issues are addressed, as well as the President&#8217;s refraining from taking issue with the &#8220;right of return,&#8221; reflect his embracing demands made by the Palestinians while ignoring consideration of the untenable situation in which they place Israel.</p>
<p>The president&#8217;s agenda also entails an abandonment of the Roadmap. For example, in the Roadmap territorial issues only begin to be addressed in Phase II, and then only in terms of creating provisional borders and testing Palestinian intent and preparedness for statehood before there are any steps toward definition of permanent borders. On the other hand, in Phase I, indeed at its very outset, the &#8220;Palestinian leadership issues unequivocal statement reiterating Israel’s right to exist in peace and security and calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire to end armed activity and all acts of violence against Israelis anywhere. All official Palestinian institutions end incitement against Israel.&#8221;</p>
<p>Obama does acknowledge as a problem that Israelis live &#8220;with the fear that their children could be blown up on a bus or by rockets fired at their homes, as well as the pain of knowing that other children in the region are taught to hate them.&#8221; But he has little further to say about Palestinian terror &#8211; beyond the vague references to security arrangements &#8211; and nothing more to say about incitement. That Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority uses its media, mosques and schools to indoctrinate Palestinians into believing that Jews have no historical or legal connection to the land but are mere usurpers whose presence must be extirpated; that those who massacre Israelis are heroes who must be emulated &#8211; a line of hate-indoctrination upon which Abbas himself seems particularly fond of elaborating; and that it is the obligation of Palestinian children to dedicate themselves to Israel’s destruction; are not, to our President, particularly troubling issues warranting immediate and focused attention.</p>
<p>With regard to Hamas, Obama does ask rhetorically, &#8220;How can one negotiate with a party unwilling to recognize your right to exist?&#8221; But Hamas is not simply a &#8220;rejectionist party&#8221; or a &#8220;terrorist entity&#8221; as designated by the United States. It is an explicitly genocidal organization, declaring in its charter its dedication to the murder of all Jews; and its leaders continually assert their fealty to their charter and their undying commitment to its program. Hamas’s incitement to the eradication of the Jews is a violation of Article 3 of the 1948 UN genocide convention; a violation which the contracting parties, including the United States, have undertaken to punish.</p>
<p>But some leaders of Hamas have also indicated that, to advance their ultimate goal, they are willing to pursue a temporary ceasefire and go along with negotiations aimed at getting Israel to withdraw to the pre-1967 lines. And President Obama has signaled that if they adopt and maintain this mask for some while, desisting from trumpeting their ultimate intent, he is prepared to ignore their genocidal agenda and join with them in pushing for an indefensible Israel.</p>
<p>Of course, Fatah is now forming a national unity government with Hamas, which, in addition to Abbas and the PA’s anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement, would presumably raise further questions about the PA’s reliability as a peace partner. So, too, one might imagine, would its ongoing promotion of the &#8220;Plan of Phases&#8221; for Israel’s destruction. But President Obama’s program, while violating Resolution 242 and the Roadmap, actually adheres to the agenda put forth by Arafat and Abbas to advance the &#8220;Plan of Phases.&#8221;</p>
<p>At the time of the initiation of the Oslo accords, on the evening of the famous signing and handshake on the White House lawn in September, 1993, Yasir Arafat appeared on Jordanian television and explained to his constituency and wider Arab audience that they should understand Oslo in terms of the Plan of Phases, formulated in 1974. The Plan called for the Palestine Liberation Organization to acquire whatever territory it could by negotiations, then use that land as a base from which it would pursue its ultimate objective of Israel&#8217;s destruction. Arafat repeated this understanding of Oslo many times thereafter.</p>
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		<title>The Munich Three Find Their Target: Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/kenneth-levin/the-munich-three-find-their-target-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-munich-three-find-their-target-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Apr 2011 04:00:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[arab israeli war]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[armistice lines]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[arthur goldberg]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[control]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Council]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Defense]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[resolution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[return]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security council resolution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[un security council resolution 242]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[How the moral bankruptcy of today’s betrayal of Israel exceeds that of the betrayal of Czechoslovakia in 1938. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/israel23.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-91314" title="israel23" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/israel23.jpg" alt="" width="504" height="358" /></a></p>
<p>In 1938, the leaders of Britain, France and Germany met in Munich  to decide the fate of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia was not invited.  The three conferees agreed to strip the targeted nation of the  Sudetenland, whose population consisted largely of ethnic Germans, and  transfer that territory to German control. This deprived the victim  state not simply of land but of those areas &#8211; mountainous, fortifiable -  necessary for Czechoslovakia to be able to defend itself.</p>
<p>Today, the same three nations are doing the same vis-a-vis Israel.  They are discarding UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed  unanimously in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and since then the  cornerstone for all Middle East negotiations. They are ignoring the  language of the resolution and the explicit declarations of its authors  that Israel should not be forced to return to the pre-1967 armistice  lines; that those lines left defense of the country too precarious and  should be replaced by &#8220;secure and recognized boundaries&#8221; to be  negotiated by Israel and its neighbors.</p>
<p>Lord Caradon, Britain’s ambassador to the UN at the time and the  person who introduced Resolution 242 in the Security Council, told a  Lebanese newspaper in 1974: &#8220;It would have been wrong to demand that  Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions  were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places  where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting  stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That’s why we didn’t  demand that the Israelis return to them, and I think we were right not  to&#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>Arthur Goldberg, the American UN ambassador, made much the same  point, stating that the reference to &#8220;secure and recognized boundaries&#8221;  intentionally pointed to the parties negotiating new lines entailing a  less than complete Israeli withdrawal and that &#8220;Israel’s prior frontiers  had proved notably insecure.&#8221; Lyndon Johnson, then President, declared  Israel’s retreat to its former lines  would be &#8220;not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities.&#8221; He  advocated new &#8220;recognized boundaries&#8221; that would provide &#8220;security  against terror, destruction, and war.&#8221;</p>
<p>Subsequent American presidents have reiterated Israel’s right to defensible borders.</p>
<p>The dangers for Israel of a return to the pre-1967 cease-fire lines  are evident from even minimal consideration of the region’s topography.  Such a withdrawal would not only reduce the nation to a width of nine  miles at its center but would entail Israel’s handing over to people who  continue to call for her ultimate dissolution control of hill country  entirely dominating the coastal plane that is home to some 70% of  Israel’s population.</p>
<p>It would also give potential hostile forces beyond the Jordan River untrammeled access to those heights.</p>
<p>This was what the drafters of Security Council Resolution 242  sought to preclude. And this is what the Munich Three now choose to  ignore by calling upon the Quartet or the UN to abandon the emphasis on  negotiations between the parties and to present a plan of its own based  on Israeli retreat to the pre-1967 lines.</p>
<p>In the wake of the 1938 Munich agreement, British Prime Minister  Neville Chamberlain declared, of course, that the parties had achieved  &#8220;peace in our time.&#8221; But Britain and France also offered solemn promises  that, should Germany unexpectedly violate the agreement and move  against what remained of Czechoslovakia, they would come to the rump  nation’s defense.</p>
<p>Less than six months after Munich, Hitler conquered the rest of Czechoslovakia. Britain and France did nothing.</p>
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		<title>Celebrating Genocide</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/kenneth-levin/celebrating-genocide/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=celebrating-genocide</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jun 2010 04:09:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=63303</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Europe's longtime tolerance of all things Jew-hating. ]]></description>
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<p>Many are puzzled by the widespread support in European democracies of Palestinian groups and Arab states that promote genocidal anti-Semitism. After all, Palestinian and broader Arab anti-Semitism draws heavily, in its anti-Jewish propaganda, on Nazi models, and Western Europe and the European Union are supposed to be opposed to everything touching on Nazism and its genocidal policies.</p>
<p>Hamas’s charter quotes a Hadith in which Allah declares that the Day of Judgement will not come until the Jews are all killed and even the stones and trees will assist in murdering them. The charter adds that Hamas &#8220;aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take.&#8221; Hamas employs its media, mosques and schools to convey the same message. Its schools and children’s television programming teach their young audience the necessity of killing Jews.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, in many quarters of the European mainstream, the Hamas rulers of Gaza are besieged heroes and Israel and &#8220;the Jews&#8221; are the villains.</p>
<p>Despite recent statements to the contrary by Mahmoud Abbas at the White House, the Palestinian Authority hardly lags behind its Islamist rivals in peddling genocidal Jew-hatred. PA media depict Jews as a cancer that must be excised and, like Hamas, insist it is a religious duty to do so. PA indoctrination includes delineations of the nature of Jews that entail virtually every hoary anti-Semitic caricature. PA leaders use their vehicles of incitement to instill in Palestinians not only commitment to annihilating Israel but also dedication to extirpating the Jews.</p>
<p>For example, a recent official Palestinian Authority Friday sermon, broadcast on PA TV and translated by The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), had the preacher declaring: &#8220;The Jews are the enemies of Allah and His messenger… the enemies of humanity in general… Our mutual enmity with the Jews is a matter of faith more than an issue pertaining to occupation and land… The prophet Muhammad said: ‘You will fight the Jews, and you will kill them…’&#8221;</p>
<p>Yet there is virtually universal clamor in Europe for Israeli concessions to the PA, universal impatience with any invoking by Israel of a need to be able to defend itself, and universal silence on the PA’s genocidal objectives.</p>
<p>In the wider Arab world, even in countries allied to the West, the same Nazi-like message is incessantly promoted. A recurrent feature of Saudi government television is of clerics or other authority figures demonizing Jews, often with the speaker having children present to whom they are imparting their Jew-hating wisdom.</p>
<p>Even in countries with which Israel is officially at peace, such as Egypt, variations on the same theme are prominent in government-controlled media. Egyptian television and government newspapers have, for example, featured clerical and academic authorities confirming that Jews do indeed use the blood of non-Jews in their recipes for Passover matzoh.</p>
<p>Again, the primary European response to all this is silence, together with castigation of Israel and its Jewish supporters for not being more accommodating of Arab demands.</p>
<p>But puzzlement over this reality is misplaced. The truth is that, during the Nazi era as today, to the extent that the peoples of Europe’s democracies regarded the Jews as an inconvenience, they were not only indifferent to the genocidal intent directed at them but in various ways abetted it.</p>
<p>Two democracies on the Continent remained unoccupied by Hitler. Switzerland handed over an estimated 30,000 Jews to the Nazi death machine. The victims were people who had either found their way to Switzerland’s borders and were turned away or had crossed into Switzerland but were rounded up and pushed back into Nazi-occupied territory, often transferred directly to German authorities. Swiss citizens who sought to shelter Jews were subject to prosecution and imprisonment. Switzerland also aided the Nazis financially, not least in receiving and managing resources stolen from Holocaust victims.</p>
<p>Sweden, the other unoccupied democracy, had a mixed history during the Nazi era. In the latter part of the war, it took in Jews fleeing Denmark and Norway. But it was essentially closed to Jews seeking refuge in the preceding years, and throughout the war it provided extensive industrial and financial support to Hitler’s regime. <em>Aftenbladet</em>, Sweden’s largest newspaper and recently the notorious inventor and purveyor of an anti-Jewish blood libel claiming that Israeli forces killed Palestinians to harvest their organs for transplants, was staunchly pro-Nazi through the Hitler years.</p>
<p>As to the United Kingdom, its wartime record is illustrated by a spring, 1943, Foreign Office memorandum to the State Department opposing efforts to rescue Europe’s Jews:</p>
<p>&#8220;There is a possibility that the Germans and their satellites may change over from the policy of extermination [of the Jews] to one of extrusion, and aim as they did before the war at embarrassing other countries by flooding them with alien immigrants.&#8221;</p>
<p>Other Foreign Office memos conveyed the same message, referring repeatedly to, in the words of one, &#8220;the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued.&#8221;</p>
<p>In fact, Great Britain’s abetting the Nazi genocide went far beyond merely discouraging rescue efforts by others and was directly linked to British policies regarding the Jewish presence in what was then Mandate Palestine. Those policies, and British behavior before as well as during the war, foreshadow current British attitudes towards Israel.</p>
<p>In the context of the post-World War I reallocation of some German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and czarist Russian territories, nations were created for previously subjugated peoples. Europe saw the birth, for example, of a new Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland, together with other states. In the Middle East, France was granted a mandate by the League of Nations for establishment of a new Arab nation, Syria, and Britain was, of course, given mandates for creation of another Arab state in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and for establishment of a Jewish national home in what was labeled the &#8220;Palestine Mandate.&#8221;</p>
<p>The League of Nations delineated among Britain’s Mandate responsibilities in Palestine promoting &#8220;close settlement of the land&#8221; by Jews. But local British authorities, as well as many in London officialdom, repeatedly balked at carrying out Britain’s Mandate obligations to the Jews, moved both by anti-Jewish bias and by perceptions of imperial pragmatism. With regard to the latter, the British generally viewed the Arabs of the region as more pliant to British hegemony than the Jews.</p>
<p>Britain’s betrayal of the Jews included the use of agents provocateurs to encourage Arab attacks on the Jews, as well as standing by while Jews were slaughtered, after which British officials would claim that carrying out commitments to the Jews was impossible because there was violent Arab resistance which could not be controlled. It included giving public lands to Arabs while withholding such lands from Jews, in direct violation of Mandate stipulations. It entailed turning a blind eye to large-scale Arab migration into the Mandate territory, drawn mainly by Jewish-driven economic growth, while repeatedly creating obstructions to Jewish immigration. It also entailed illegally transferring a substantial portion of the Golan Heights, part of Mandate Palestine, to French control in 1923 in exchange for French acquiescence to British steps elsewhere in the Middle East. (Article 5 of the League of Nations Mandate states: &#8220;The Mandatory shall be responsible for seeing that no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control of the Government of any foreign Power.&#8221;)</p>
<p>(The British also closed to Jews about 77% of Mandate territory, all the land east of the Jordan River. This was done after approval of the mandate for creation of the Jewish national home by the victorious World War I allies at San Remo in 1920, but before League of Nations adoption of the Mandate in 1922.)</p>
<p>The League of Nations Permanent Mandate Commission repeatedly censured Britain for betrayals of its Mandate obligations to the Jews, and at times Britain would reverse some anti-Jewish measure, only to re-institute it at a later date.</p>
<p>With the rise of Nazism and Nazi inroads in winning Arab support and stoking anti-British sentiment in the Arab world, the British &#8211; if somewhat disabused of their convictions of Arab affection for them &#8211; were now eager to appease Arab opinion and so had another motive for reneging on their Mandate commitments.</p>
<p>Shortly before the start of World War II, despite the desperate plight of Europe’s Jews, and despite yet another censure by the Permanent Mandate Commission, Britain implemented a sharp curtailment of Jewish immigration to Palestine with a view to ending Jewish entry entirely in five years and allowing Palestine to become one more Arab state, with an ongoing British presence.</p>
<p>The subsequent Nazi genocide was viewed by many in the Foreign Office as a way of permanently assuring realization of Britain’s objectives in Palestine. If no Jews survived in Nazi-controlled territories, there would be little remaining rationale for creation of the Jewish national home.</p>
<p>Consistent with this objective, Britain went to great lengths to prevent Jews from escaping Europe. Illustrative is the story of the <em>Struma</em>, one of many ships that carried Jews who had boarded overcrowded and unseaworthy vessels in the Rumanian Black Sea port of Constanta in doomed efforts at escape. The <em>Struma, </em>with 761 Jews aboard,<em> </em>limped into Istanbul harbor on December 15, 1941, its engine malfunctioning and a leak in its hull. The Turkish authorities said it would allow the passengers to disembark if Britain would grant them entry to the Mandate territory. Britain refused. In the course of negotiations that dragged on for weeks, Britain was asked to admit at least the children aboard. At one point it appeared that permission would be given for some seventy of the children, but Britain never officially authorized this. Its stance remained one of refusal. After some two months, the Turkish government gave up on any British change of heart and had the ship tugged into open water. It sank the next day with one survivor.</p>
<p>Then as now, there were those in Britain who strongly objected to anti-Jewish strains in national opinion and national policy. In particular, there were those who led public campaigns aimed at changing policy and promoting rescue of European Jews. Especially notable among these voices were the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, and the leader of Britain’s Catholics, Arthur Cardinal Hinsley. But there was no change in policy.</p>
<p>Those in the Foreign Office who initiated and carried out anti-Jewish policies were not, of course, pro-Nazi, nor were most of their sympathizers among the British public. But they had their biases, and their views of Britain’s interests in the Middle East, and in these lights the Jews were expendable. Anthony Eden was a leading Conservative Party opponent of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement before the war, but as wartime foreign minister he was a key architect and enforcer of British opposition to rescuing Jews from the Nazi genocide. Eden’s personal secretary wrote of him in 1943: &#8220;A.E. is immovable on the subject of Palestine. He loves Arabs and hates Jews.&#8221;</p>
<p>British policy after the war remained directed at thwarting establishment of the Jewish national home. When, in November, 1947, the United Nations voted for partition of Mandate Palestine west of the Jordan into a Jewish state and an Arab state, Britain aided attacks on Jewish enclaves by irregular Arab forces entering the Mandate from surrounding nations. When Israel declared its independence the following spring, Britain supported the ensuing invasion by Arab armies.</p>
<p>The most effective of those armies was that of Transjordan (the Arab entity created by Britain in the Mandate territories east of the Jordan that had been closed to Jews). Its Arab Legion, commanded by a British general and staffed by a number of senior British officers, conquered what became known as the West Bank, as well as eastern parts of Jerusalem including the Old City. The Legion killed or expelled every Jew living in the areas it seized. Transjordan subsequently annexed the conquered areas, an act endorsed by only two of the world’s nations: Britain and Pakistan.</p>
<p>Attitudes in Britain today &#8211; among both leaders and much of the general public &#8211; towards Israel and the Jews closely resemble the biases of the past, most notably of the 1940&#8242;s. Perhaps this is hardly surprising, given that the importance on the world stage of Arab oil, and Arab political and economic clout, has, of course, only grown in the past six decades.</p>
<p>Exemplifying such attitudes is Nick Clegg, head of the Liberal Democrats and now deputy prime minister. Not long ago Clegg questioned the concept of a &#8220;Jewish state&#8221; and Israel’s insistence &#8211; consistent with the 1947 UN partition plan &#8211; that it be recognized as such by its neighbors. Clegg has expressed no similar misgivings about the world’s several dozen officially Muslim states.</p>
<p>Now, too, as in the 1940&#8242;s, there are voices in Britain protesting the demonization of Israel, the support given its enemies and the silence regarding those enemies’ genocidal agenda that are so prevalent in British media, academia, unions and other circles. But now as then, those protesting voices are of very limited impact.</p>
<p>Two hundred years ago, Lord Byron, in his <em>Hebrew Melodies</em>, wrote, &#8220;The wild-dove hath her nest, the fox his cave,/ Mankind their Country &#8211; Israel but the grave!&#8221; For Byron, the lines were a reproach to a bigoted world. For many in Britain today, they are an enthusiastically embraced objective.</p>
<p>While no other nation had Britain’s direct involvement with Israel’s modern rebirth, Britain’s record on Jewish matters in the 1940&#8242;s has its parallels, as noted, in other European democracies.</p>
<p>That &#8220;decent&#8221; Britons and other Europeans can today embrace Israel’s enemies and be indifferent to their Nazi-like genocidal incitement and aspirations is not an anomaly but all too familiar. We’ve seen it before.</p>
<p><em>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of </em><em>The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege.</em></p>
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		<title>Promoting a Genocidal &#8220;Peace&#8221;</title>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Apr 2010 04:10:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[What is achieved when Israel’s enemies are encouraged in promoting their plans for a Middle East Holocaust? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/PaliNaziSalute.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58262" title="PaliNaziSalute" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/PaliNaziSalute.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="225" /></a></p>
<p>Indoctrination to genocidal anti-Semitism is epidemic among Palestinians and in Arab and other Muslim states. &#8220;Peace&#8221; plans that do not recognize this as the major obstacle to genuine peace, but rather push steps which ignore it, inexorably lead to more violence and are doomed to fail. Even worse, by their silence on this issue they pander to and help promote such deadly hate-mongering.</p>
<p>Demonization not only of Israel&#8217;s Jews but of all Jews, and calls for their mass murder, are a staple of Palestinian institutions, those controlled by Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority as well as those of Hamas.</p>
<p>Hamas&#8217;s charter quotes a Hadith in which Allah declares that the Day of Judgement will not come until the Jews are all killed and even the stones and trees will help in murdering them. The charter adds that Hamas &#8220;aspires to the realization of Allah&#8217;s promise, no matter how long that should take.&#8221;</p>
<p>Hamas systematically employs its media, mosques and schools to convey the same message. Its schools and children&#8217;s television programming teach their young audience the virtues of killing Jews.</p>
<p>The Palestinian Authority hardly lags behind its Islamist rivals in peddling genocidal Jew-hatred. PA media depict Jews as a cancer that must be excised and, like Hamas, insist it is a religious duty to do so. PA indoctrination includes delineations of the nature of Jews that entail virtually every hoary anti-Semitic caricature. While PA leaders such as Mahmoud Abbas talk of &#8220;peace&#8221; to Western leaders and media, they use their vehicles of incitement to instill in Palestinians not only commitment to annihilating Israel but also dedication to extirpating the Jews.</p>
<p>For example, a recent official Palestinian Authority Friday sermon, broadcast on PA TV and translated by The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), had the preacher declaring: &#8220;The Jews are the enemies of Allah and His messenger&#8230; the enemies of humanity in general&#8230; Our mutual enmity with the Jews is a matter of faith more than an issue pertaining to occupation and land&#8230; The prophet Muhammad said: ‘You will fight the Jews, and you will kill them&#8230;’&#8221;</p>
<p>In the wider Arab world, even in countries allied to the United States, the same message is incessantly promoted. A recurrent feature of Saudi government television is of clerics or other authority figures demonizing Jews, often with the speaker having children present to whom they are imparting their Jew-hating wisdom.</p>
<p>Even in countries with which Israel is officially at peace, such as Egypt, variations on the same theme are prominent in government-controlled media. Egyptian television and government newspapers have, for example, featured clerical and academic authorities confirming the Jews do indeed use the blood of non-Jews in their recipes for Passover matzoh.</p>
<p>Robert Wistrich, a leading authority on the history of anti-Semitism and author of the recently published book on the subject,  <em>A Lethal Obsession</em>, has written:</p>
<p><em>&#8220;In the Middle East, [anti-Semitism] has taken on a particularly dangerous, toxic and potentially genocidal aura of hatred, closely linked to the ‘mission’ of holy war or jihad against the West and the Jews&#8230;</em></p>
<p><em>&#8220;The scale and extremism of the [anti-Semitic] literature and commentary available in Arab or Muslim newspapers, journals, magazines, caricatures, on Islamist websites, on the Middle Eastern radio and TV news, in documentaries, films, and educational materials, is comparable only to that of Nazi Germany at its worst.&#8221;</em></p>
<p>Also noteworthy is that, aside from the exacerbations introduced by the rise of Islamist groups in recent decades, similar anti-Jewish depredations permeated much of the Arab world before the 1967 war and Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza, and even before Israel’s founding.</p>
<p>What has been the Western response to this promotion of genocidal Jew-hatred? Largely silence. In the Palestinian arena, the indoctrination has actually been paid for in part by the European Union and individual European states, the United Nations and even American government funds.</p>
<p>But no less morally obscene is the virtual absence of any acknowledgment of this hate indoctrination from all discussions of &#8220;peace.&#8221; There are, here and there, some bland references to ending &#8220;incitement,&#8221; but no evident outrage over the level and nature of the incitement or discussion of what must be done &#8211; or the time it will take &#8211; to reverse the impact of decades of hate-inculcation.</p>
<p>Nor is there any recognition of Israel’s need to be able to defend itself from the onslaught that it has faced in the past and will inevitably face in the future as a result of this indoctrination. The need for Israel to have defensible borders &#8211; recognized in 1967 by the authors of UN Security Council Resolution 242 in the wake of the Six Day War, and by various U.S. presidents in the ensuing decades &#8211; gets scant recognition from today’s self-styled promoters of peace, even as the intensity and impact of Palestinian and broader Arab genocidal Jew-hatred has only grown.</p>
<p>Territory beyond the pre-1967 cease-fire line that Israel has every right under 242 and under international law to claim for the purpose of national defense, territories that should, given their legal status, be depicted as &#8220;disputed,&#8221; are declared &#8220;Palestinian&#8221; by Western politicians and media.</p>
<p>Israel’s claims are dismissed as illegitimate land-grabs and the threats against her are ignored.</p>
<p>Those interested in a genuine peace would recognize that true peace is a long way off and will never be achieved as long as Israel’s enemies continue to indoctrinate their people in genocidal anti-Semitism. They would draw public attention to this obscenity and to its obstruction of possible movement toward a real peace. And they would seek in the interim lesser, and less murder-enabling, goals entailing a separation of Palestinians from Israel to the degree commensurate with Israel’s retaining strategic territories necessary for its defense; goals that, for example, would not put Israel’s major population centers within range of the type of assaults that have followed upon Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.</p>
<p>Genuine peace-seekers would aspire to arrangements that enable Palestinians to pursue their own, separate political course without rendering Israel more vulnerable to those whose agenda is the annihilation of its people.</p>
<p>Promoters of anything less, of any plan that is silent about the hate-indoctrination and the existential threat it represents to Israel, or gives it no more than a passing nod of acknowledgment as a problem, are not pursuing peace. Promoters of any formula that talks of &#8220;peace&#8221; as reachable in short order and dismisses Israel’s need for defensible borders are not agents of serious attempts to attain peace. Whether such formulas emanate from gentile or Jew, from the EU, or individual European states, or the UN, or the Quartet, or the State Department or the White House, or are advanced by Israel’s Meretz party, or the devotees of Peace Now, or the beneficiaries of the New Israel Fund, or the groupies of J Street &#8211; their promoters are in reality silent appeasers and accommodators, and not infrequently abettors, of those who are both propagandizing for and actively aspiring to another genocide of the Jews.</p>
<p><strong>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of <em>The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege.﻿</em></strong></p>
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		<title>Auto-Genocide, Jewish Style &#8211; by Kenneth Levin</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/kenneth-levin/auto-genocide-jewish-style-by-kenneth-levin/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=auto-genocide-jewish-style-by-kenneth-levin</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Dec 2009 05:12:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Meet the Jewish collaborators in the Islamic war against the Jews.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-43155" title="norman_finkelstein" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/norman_finkelstein.gif" alt="norman_finkelstein" width="450" height="338" /></p>
<p>Demonization not only of Israel&#8217;s Jews but of all Jews, and calls for their mass murder, are a staple of media, mosques and schools throughout most of the Arab world and in some non-Arab Muslim countries such as <span id="lw_1261624590_3">Iran</span>. Jews are portrayed as vermin or as satanic beings, the source of all human ills, ritual murderers of Muslim and Christian children, evil-doers fit only for extermination.</p>
<p>Yet, as in virtually every past situation when incitement against Jews and attacks on them have intensified, some Jews have rushed to volubly defend the Jews&#8217; attackers. They have become supporters and cheerleaders even for those most committed to translating their Jew-hatred into action.</p>
<p><span id="lw_1261624590_4">Hamas</span>&#8216;s charter quotes a <span id="lw_1261624590_5">Hadith</span> in which Allah declares that the Day of Judgement will not come until the Jews are all killed and even the stones and trees will help in murdering them. The charter adds that Hamas &#8220;aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take.&#8221; Hamas has, of course, perpetrated innumerable terrorist attacks targeting Israeli civilians, including suicide bombings and rocket and mortar barrages, and Hamas children’s television instructs its young audience to kill Jews.</p>
<p>Yet Jewish member of Britain’s Parliament <span id="lw_1261624590_6">Gerald Kaufman</span> has affectionately compared Hamas to Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto. American Sara Roy, a &#8220;researcher&#8221; at Harvard&#8217;s Center for <span id="lw_1261624590_8">Middle East Studies</span> and a perennial figure on the Israel-bashing lecture circuit, has waxed rhapsodic about the supposed &#8220;evolution in [Hamas's] political thinking&#8230; [and] its position on a <span id="lw_1261624590_9">two-state solution</span>&#8221; and defends the organization&#8217;s administration of Gaza. This as Hamas seeks to impose Sharia law across Gaza and repeatedly proclaims its unswerving commitment to its anti-Israel and anti-Jewish agenda.</p>
<p>Hezbollah head <span id="lw_1261624590_11">Hassan Nasrallah</span> has declared that &#8220;If [the Jews] all gather in <span id="lw_1261624590_12">Israel</span>, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide,&#8221; and Hezbollah has in fact gone after them worldwide, as in its 1994 bombing of the <span id="lw_1261624590_13">Jewish Community Center</span> in Buenos Aires that claimed 87 lives. But none of this has constrained <span id="lw_1261624590_14">Noam Chomsky</span> from visiting with Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders, praising the organization and advocating its arming. Norman Finkelstein has likewise met with Hezbollah leaders and offered encomiums to the group. Emoted  Finkelstein at one point, &#8220;I say this without fear: for those who believe in freedom and dignity, we are all Hezbollah now.&#8221;</p>
<p>Iran&#8217;s Achmadinejad has, of course, repeatedly asserted there was no Holocaust while promising to visit a future Holocaust on Israel. He has virulently attacked &#8220;the Jews&#8221; and ratcheted up Iran&#8217;s support in money, weapons and training to Hamas and Hezbollah. Yet Achmadinejad&#8217;s Iran, too, has its Jewish supporters, who cast the Iranian theocracy as Israel&#8217;s victim. This is not limited to the usual culprits such as Chomsky. For example, the voice of the blog &#8220;Tikun Olam&#8221; (which has now widely come to mean somehow healing the world by attacking and seeking to undermine the Jewish state), one Richard Silverstein, declared, regarding Iran&#8217;s nuclear threat, &#8220;Of course, the Iranians do not have an ICBM to carry such a warhead. Nor do they have a nuclear weapon. But these are mere technicalities when it comes to frightening the world into adopting the Israeli government’s priorities and interests.&#8221;</p>
<p>Noteworthy is that many of those who embrace today&#8217;s would-be exterminators of the Jews make a point of advertising that they are themselves children of Holocaust survivors. Examples are Finkelstein and Sara Roy. In their twisted thinking, they trumpet their parents&#8217; history as though it somehow confers on them a special right to back forces that aspire to another Holocaust.</p>
<p>A variation on outright Jewish support for purveyors of genocidal Jew-hatred is the spectacle of Jews who downplay the threat and indict those taking it seriously. The latter are ridiculed as paranoiacs mentally scarred by past assaults on the Jews and simply projecting that past onto a relatively benign present. The leader of the new American <span id="lw_1261624590_18">Jewish lobby</span> &#8220;J Street&#8221; (which has opposed stronger <span id="lw_1261624590_19">sanctions against Iran</span>), Jeremy Ben-Ami, characterized as irrational anyone who would construe the threat presented by Hamas or Hezbullah or Iran as so great as to justify a military response. Ben-Ami went on to observe, in a <em>New York Times </em>interview, &#8220;&#8230; there&#8217;s their grandmother&#8217;s voice in their ear; it&#8217;s the emotional side and the communal history&#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>Some Israelis promote the same line. <span id="lw_1261624590_20">Hebrew University</span> political scientist Yaron Ezrahi has virtually made a career of purveying this comprehension of reality. Ezrahi has suggested that the perception of existential threats reflects in large part less actual dangers than a warped world view embraced by some Jews and &#8220;founded on a long memory of persecution, genocide, and a bitter struggle for survival&#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>Many more Jews could be mentioned who support those openly calling for the Jews&#8217; annihilation, and still more who downplay the threat and caricature concerned voices. Hardly less unsavory are the myriad Jews who attack Israel&#8217;s policies as the source of all the nation&#8217;s difficulties, insist that &#8220;peace&#8221; can be had if only Israel would reform itself and make sufficient concessions, militantly advocate such a course and say nothing of the genocidal agenda of the nation&#8217;s enemies or of their aggressive indoctrinating of additional cadres dedicated to enacting that agenda.</p>
<p>M.J. Rosenberg, erstwhile director of Israel Policy Forum&#8217;s Washington Policy Center, has written multiple articles on, for example, Israel and Hamas. He has invariably used them to excoriate Israel and complain about the Jewish state and the U.S. not being more forthcoming to the Palestinian Jihadists &#8211; as in &#8220;The U.S. should be extending carrots to Hamas&#8221; &#8211; and has never addressed Hamas&#8217;s explicit and continually reasserted commitment to the extermination of Israel and the Jews. He has acknowledged Hamas&#8217;s involvement in terror and its opposition to Israel&#8217;s existence but has uniformly done so in the context of criticizing Israeli policies.</p>
<p>Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian mullahs and others of Israel&#8217;s enemies have not hidden their objective. As has been the case whenever Jews have been under threat, there is no shortage of those from the community who side with the aggressors, or dismiss the threat and demean anyone taking it seriously, or rationalize the threat, cast fellow Jews as instigating it and demand their reform. All, shamefully, lend succor and cover to the would-be annihilators.</p>
<p><strong>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of <em>The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege.</em></strong></p>
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<p><strong>To see Frontpage’s series on Jewish Collaborators, <a href="../2009/12/04/collaborators-in-the-war-against-the-jews-richard-a-falk-by-steven-plaut/">click here</a>. </strong></p>
<p><strong>To get the whole story on the psychology of Jews who aid and abet those who wish to annihilate them, read Jamie Glazov’s new book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602">United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.</a></em></strong></p>
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