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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Arab</title>
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		<title>The Silent Intifada</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arlene-kushner/the-silent-intifada/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-silent-intifada</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arlene-kushner/the-silent-intifada/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Oct 2014 04:15:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arlene Kushner]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[intifada]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jerusalem]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Riot]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242405</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A disturbing wave of violence unleashed. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/r.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242406" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/r-450x300.jpg" alt="Palestinians hurl stones during clashes with Israeli police in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Wadi Joz" width="318" height="212" /></a>The perpetrators in the main of the new silent intifada are male Arabs, mostly young, with Jerusalem residency cards.  They have the right to live in Jerusalem, and receive the perks of citizens, but – tellingly – for political reasons have declined to become full citizens.</p>
<p>With increasing frequency in recent weeks, they are out on the streets of eastern Jerusalem and at key eastern Jerusalem locations, actively participating in violent and destructive behaviors.  Sometimes they wrap scarves around their faces so they cannot be identified.</p>
<p>Some Arab “unrest” occurs from time to time in the city.  Perhaps a demonstration protesting a perceived grievance suddenly turns into a riot.  Molotov cocktails might be thrown, or rocks large enough to kill.  Municipal infrastructure might incur some damage.</p>
<p>None of this is acceptable, but for the most part, these have been intermittent and localized occurrences.  What is happening now is something else: a form of behavior that is more persistently violent and more pervasive.</p>
<p>It comes as a shock to learn, for example, that at least 30% of the cars of the Jerusalem Light Rail are out of commission because of vandalism that takes place at the Light Rail station located in Shu’afat, an Arab neighborhood.  This is not a matter of delinquent kids with time on their hands. This is focused behavior intended to undermine the authority of the municipality.</p>
<p>This past week, on the second night of Rosh Hashana, Chanan Kupietzky, 25, and two others were walking towards the Kotel (the Western Wall) when they were accosted by some four Arabs, who began by calling, “Dirty Jews!”  At a signal from yet another Arab, they approached Kupietzky and his companions and launched a physical attack.  Other Arabs in the area began throwing rocks at the three, and at other Jews who were nearby, wounding one man in the chest.</p>
<p>“It was like an ambush,” Kupietzy said.  One Arab came at him with a two-by-four that had nails protruding from it, which was used to strike him repeatedly; ultimately his hand was so badly fractured that he required surgery.</p>
<p>One of the locations that has been most problematic is Har Hazeitim – the Mount of Olives.  This is the site of Judaism’s most ancient cemetery, with 150,000 graves. This past week, on one night alone, 40 graves were vandalized.</p>
<p>Nearby is Ma’aleh Hazeitim, a Jewish neighborhood that has been the site of stonings.  Arabs – likely from the nearby Arab neighborhood of Ras al-Amud – target cars on the road that have Jewish drivers.</p>
<p>This past week, however, a new low was reached when Arab stone-throwers made a nursery school the target of an attack.  As rocks pelted the outside of the nursery building, the teacher quickly brought the children into an air-raid shelter for safety and summoned the police.</p>
<p>These stories and many more like them have been insufficiently publicized.</p>
<p>Multiple observers have noticed that the attacks seem organized rather than random, and that there is never one person acting alone.  There are groups operating, under instruction.</p>
<p>According to one very reliable individual with direct connections to the Israeli government, what we are seeing is a limited intifada.  The Palestinian Authority has decided that a wide-scale intifada in Judea and Samaria would not be a good idea now: they have opted for one focused exclusively on Jerusalem instead.</p>
<p>It makes perfect sense. In the struggle between Israel and the PA, Jerusalem is the heart of the matter.</p>
<p>In July 1980, the Knesset passed a bill in Basic Law that reads: “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.” There is no such place as “East Jerusalem;” there is one, undivided city.  Nonetheless, the Palestinian Authority continues to promote the fiction of “East Jerusalem” as a separate place that is destined to become its capital.  In the end, the sovereignty of Jerusalem – as the sovereignty of any place – is directly connected to control on the ground.  The PA goal is to make eastern Jerusalem so difficult for Jews to live in that they will withdraw.</p>
<p>Were this to happen, it would be an unmitigated disaster, particularly as the very core of Jewish tradition in the city – including the Temple Mount – is in its more ancient eastern part. It would mean relinquishing that core, with all the implications that would follow.</p>
<p>The overriding question now is what is being done to guarantee that this does not happen.</p>
<p>There are many fine police officers at work in Jerusalem, and, in fact, their numbers have been augmented recently. But there remains a persistent unease that what may be happening when the police act is more in the way of containment than enforcement of the law to the fullest extent possible.  Sometimes violent groups are scattered and chased away rather than arrested.  At other times arrests are made but prosecutions do not follow.</p>
<p>While these instances have been observed, what is not clear is whether they are just that – separate instances, or whether they are the result of orders from above, from Minister of Internal Security, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, or police officials.</p>
<p>It is not difficult to understand the inclination to fall back on containment, no matter how ill-advised it is in the long run: The world watches Israel as it watches no other nation. One false arrest, one injury or death of an Arab during attempts to make arrests, will result in headlines and international protests.  It feels safer to go easy.</p>
<p>But it is exceedingly important for Jews to make their presence known in all parts of Israel’s capital; and they must be able to do so free of harassment or physical risk.  Protecting its citizens is a primary responsibility of the government.</p>
<p>In this instance, when the government of Israel acts to protect its citizens, it is also protecting its rights as a sovereign nation and its future in the land.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Ted Cruz&#8217;s a Badge of Honor</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/ted-cruzs-a-badge-of-honor/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ted-cruzs-a-badge-of-honor</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Sep 2014 04:17:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[In Defense of Christians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ted Cruz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[walk out]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240934</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The senator's courageous stand against virulent Jew hatred. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/tedcruz_02.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240936" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/tedcruz_02.jpg" alt="tedcruz_02" width="306" height="261" /></a>As one of the 800 attendees at the In Defense of Christians (IDC) Gala Solidarity Dinner Program at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC on Wednesday, September 10, 2014, I was among those welcoming US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) as the keynote speaker. The program brought together a wide range of ancient Eastern Christian denominations from throughout the Middle East. The ostensible reason for the IDC Conference was to give notice of concern over the persecution of Christian minorities in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq, Syria, and to a lesser extent, Egypt. Among those in attendance were a few pro-Hezbollah Lebanese Christians affiliated with General Michel Aouns’ faction that is part of the March 8 coalition led by Hezbollah. Seated at a table across from us was a group of Syrian nationalists.</p>
<p>The previous evening saw a great deal of solidarity and unity among the sometimes rival eastern Christian denominations. But on Tuesday night, September 9, 2014, the Ecumenical Christian Prayer Service, which included prelates and representatives of all churches and rites, was a moving experience. The religious leaders were united in prayer for the safety of their threatened Christian brethren in Northern Iraq and Syria. The prelates were dressed in colorful robes and headwear. They included His Eminence Leonardo Cardinal Sandri, Prefect of the Congregation of the Oriental Churches; His Most Eminent Beatitude, Patriarch Mar Bechara Boutros Cardinal Rai, Maronite Patriarch of Antioch and all of the East; Gregorios III Laham, Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, Alexandria and Jerusalem, (the most vocal agitator against Senator Cruz); Ignatius Youssef III Younan, Syriac Catholic Patriarch of Antioch and All the East; Aram I Keshishian, Catholicos of the Great House of Ceilicia of the Armenian Apostolic Church; Archbishop Cardinal Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington, DC; Joseph Zahlawi, Archbishop of New York and All of North America for the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America; Bishop Angaelos, General Bishop of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria (most eloquent speaker); and Ibrahim Ibrahim, Bishop Emeritus of the Chaldean Eparchy of Saint Thomas the Apostle. These religious leaders were most careful not to malign Islam or Muslims in their presentations. Their message was strictly religious. The keynote speaker, the Honorable John Ashcroft, former US Attorney General, was less discreet in naming the persecutors of Christians in the Middle East.</p>
<p>During the conference proceedings and in the literature produced by the IDC, there was no mention of Israel. Names used for Israel included Palestine and the Holy Land, but never explicitly Israel…until Senator Ted Cruz took to the podium. Almost from the get-go Cruz declared “Tonight we are united in defense of Jews.” There was wide applause for that. He then proceeded to say,</p>
<blockquote><p>Tonight we are united in defense of people of good faith who are standing together against those who would persecute and murder those who dare to disagree with their religious teachings (applause). Religious bigotry is a cancer with many manifestations. ISIS, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and state sponsors like Syria and Iran (a few boos from the nearby table occupied by Hezbollah supporters and Syrian nationalists) are all engaged in a vicious genocidal campaign to destroy religious minorities in the Middle East.</p></blockquote>
<p>Cruz ignored those booing and continued, “Sometimes we are told not to lump these groups together, but we have to understand their so-called nuances and differences. But we shouldn’t try to parse different manifestations of evil that are on numerous rampages through the region. Hate is hate and murder is murder. Our purpose here tonight is to highlight a terrible injustice, a humanitarian crisis. Christians are being systematically exterminated.” Cruz then offered a comparison between the plight of Jews in the recent past and that of Christians today, “In 1948, Jews throughout the Middle East faced murder and extermination and fled to the nation of Israel. And today Christians have no better ally than the Jewish state.” Mayhem erupted in the room with the anti-Semites attempting to silence Cruz with boos, and stop him. Gregorios III Laham, the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch of Antioch urged people to walk out.</p>
<p>Undeterred, Cruz continued to respond with: “Let me say this: those who hate Israel hate America, and those who hate Jews, hate Christians.” Boos enveloped the room, although many applauded and stood up in ovation for Cruz, including Joseph Hakim, President of the International Christian Union (ICU).</p>
<p>Cruz responded to those booing:</p>
<blockquote><p>And if this room will not recognize that, then my heart weeps that the men and women here will not stand in solidarity with Jews and Christians alike who are persecuted by radicals who seek to murder them.” Many in the ballroom applauded Cruz’s defiance of his detractors. “If you hate the Jewish people you are not reflecting the teachings of Christ…And the very same people who persecute and murder Christians right now, who crucify Christians, who behead children, are the very same people who target and murder Jews for their faith[.]</p></blockquote>
<p>At this point the shouting from the floor drowned Cruz’s words, and the President of IDC Toufic Baaklini took the microphone and said to the audience, “Respect the speaker.”</p>
<p>Cruz, folding his papers, turned to the crowd and said, “I am saddened to see some here, not everyone, consumed with hate…,” and again responding to hecklers, he stated, “<b>If you will not stand with Israel and Jews, then I will not stand with you</b>.” Cruz then left the stage and walked out. As he made his way out, Ambassador Gilbert Chagouri, who organized and funded the IDC Inaugural Summit and the IDC president Toufic Baaklini, ran after Senator Cruz to offer their apologies.</p>
<p>Asked to respond to Senator Cruz’s speech, Joseph Hakim, ICU’s president had this to say:</p>
<blockquote><p>In order for us (Middle East Christians) to break the taboo with regards to Israel and Jews, which means essentially silence on this subject, we must go forward and recognize the fact that Israel is a reality, and certainly not our enemy.  Middle Eastern Christians who seek support from America must recognize the shared values between Israel and America, and between American Christians and Jews. Moreover, I am 100% in support of Senator Cruz’s remarks regarding ‘the enemies of Israel being the enemies of America.’ I believe that the enemies of Israel are also the enemies of Christians.</p></blockquote>
<p>Hakim added,</p>
<blockquote><p>The words uttered by Senator Cruz were never addressed to, nor heard by Middle Eastern Christian audiences before, and I was never prouder as an American and as a Christian to hear his statements at the IDC Conference. I appreciate Senator Cruz’s support for Middle Eastern Christians persecuted in their homelands, and I am hopeful that Senator Cruz will continue to harbor a soft spot in his heart for our persecuted brethren in the Middle East.</p></blockquote>
<p>Cruz, a devoted Christian, did not do what politicians do best &#8212; pander to the crowd they are addressing. Instead, he admirably and courageously stood by his convictions, admonishing those with anti-Semitic sentiments who cannot bring themselves to recognize that Israel is on the front line in the war against the Islamic jihadists terror, whether it is ISIS, al Qaeda, Hezbollah or Hamas, who seek to exterminate those who will not submit to their fanatical ideology.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Making David Into Goliath</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/when-goliath-pretends-to-be-david-1/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=when-goliath-pretends-to-be-david-1</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Aug 2014 04:58:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Goliath]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joshua Muravchik]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238157</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Joshua Muravchik's new book reveals how the world turned against Israel.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/51kyBwZkgIL._SY344_BO1204203200_.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237743" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/51kyBwZkgIL._SY344_BO1204203200_.jpg" alt="51kyBwZkgIL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_" width="185" height="280" /></a><strong>The David Horowitz Freedom Center will be hosting an evening reception with &#8220;Making David into Goliath&#8221; author Joshua Muravchik on August 13, 2014. For more information, click <a href="http://www.eventbrite.com/e/evening-reception-and-talk-with-joshua-muravchik-tickets-12256390193">here</a>. </strong></p>
<p>Empathizing with the underdog is a natural human instinct. When we see a little David facing off against a mighty Goliath, our hearts go out to the little guy. But what happens when Goliath pretends to be David and then accuses David of really being Goliath?</p>
<p>That is the situation that Israel finds itself in and it is also the topic of Joshua Muravchik’s new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Making-David-into-Goliath-Against/dp/1594037353"><i>Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel</i>.</a></p>
<p>Muravchik’s book looks at how the Arab Muslim countries swapped a hard military war for a soft political and cultural influence operation that combined murderous terrorism with economic boycotts and academic programming to convince the world that Israel was Goliath and they were little David.</p>
<p>It’s easy to spot the absurdity of the region’s intolerant and supremacist Sunni Muslim majority reinventing its identity as that of an oppressed people, but Muravchik also shows how this reinvention used the so-called “Palestinians” as a political vehicle for larger cultural goals. The current portrayal of Arab Muslims as an oppressed group stems in part from their association with the “Palestinian” cause.</p>
<p>“The Arabs, notwithstanding their regressive social and political practices, nor their recent alignment with the fascist powers, now, in the guise of the Palestinians, assumed a place among the forces of virtue and progress while the Israelis were consigned to the ranks of the villains and reactionaries,” Muravchik writes in <i>Making David into Goliath</i>.</p>
<p>Israel, as David, was able to leverage its limited manpower and resources in strategic military strikes against much bigger, but less centered opponents. Its opponents however learned to leverage the less demanding tools of soft power, such as the United Nations, to win soft power conflicts by demonizing Israel in as many international forums as possible.</p>
<p>War is a hard test of competence and courage. Influence operations in an international body are a matter of alliances. Academia, whose corruption Muravchik extensively chronicles in his chapter on Edward Said, specializes in the ability to infinitely invert ideas and distort their meanings.</p>
<p>David could beat Goliath with a slingshot, but he couldn’t yell louder or lie better than Goliath.</p>
<p>Against terrorism, the virtues of a free nation become its weakness. A free nation has dissenters who sympathize with terrorists. Terrorists however massacre dissenters. Israel’s Fifth Column generates much of the propaganda against it, but there is no corresponding movement on the other side because Hamas and the PLO are ruthlessly totalitarian in practice and purpose.</p>
<p>A nation can put aside its differences and unite in wartime. Netanyahu’s approval ratings show that Israelis are still capable of getting behind a clearly just and necessary war. But terrorism is permanent warfare and no free society can set aside all its differences and unite permanently. The United States could not do it for very long after September 11. Temporary crisis unity also comes apart in Israel.</p>
<p>In the West, where sympathy for Israel, especially among the political classes, was even weaker, the wave of Islamic terrorism took it apart that much more readily. Few Western governments wanted to be drawn into an international conflict by acts of terrorism on their own soil or to brave oil boycotts.</p>
<p>For Muravchik the turning point came when the Six Day War demonstrated the limits of Pan-Arabist efforts to smash Israel through pure force. Israel’s victory created a disproportionate sense of its power and the military defeats of clients of the USSR led to a strategic shift toward soft power and terrorism.</p>
<p>The world’s historical “Clock” for Israel has been set to right after 1967. The initial perceptions of its aftermath; Israel’s military superiority, the “oppressed” Palestinians who suddenly came into being after coming out of the rule of Egypt and Jordan, and the urgent need for a negotiated solution, have been frozen in time as the default worldview with little regard for what came before or after.</p>
<p>By recapturing Gaza and the West Bank, Israel had hoped to put an end to terrorism and violence by putting the territories under its control. But instead the sponsors of the PLO had the responsibility for the terrorism lifted off their shoulders and the conflict increasingly came to be seen in terms of those territories, even though the conflict had long predated the Six Day War.</p>
<p>Muravchik deftly handles these topics with extensive looks at everything from the Goldstone Report to the academic work of Edward Said for a better understanding of the larger shift that took place in a variety of forums and arenas. He discusses everything from the influence of the Non-Aligned Movement at the United Nations to the impact of radical theology on the World Council of Churches and the work of domestic anti-Israel groups such as B&#8217;Tselem.</p>
<p>At times he overstates how popular Israel was. The Jewish State was never more than a brief stopover on the way to winning over Arab Muslim support for everyone from the British Empire to the International Left. It wasn’t so much that they turned on Israel, as their preference was for a powerful Goliath over an isolated David, even if they then insisted on pretending that Goliath was really David.</p>
<p>American liberals hung on longer than many others, but as liberalism was cannibalized by the left, it adopted its ideological critiques of Israel as colonialist and terrorism as a means of liberation. Liberals did not so much abandon Israel as they abandoned liberalism and adopted the radical politics that they were being fed by formerly mainstream outlets of liberal thought such as NPR and the <i>New York Times</i>.</p>
<p>The concerns of Israeli and pro-Israel Jews over the world standing of the Jewish State are real, but they are also symptoms of insecurity. Zionism and Israel were never all that popular with elites, especially those of the left. Western Jews correctly view anti-Israel sentiment as a reflection of the antipathy toward them, but that is an ancient reality that short memories after the Holocaust made short work of.</p>
<p>This insecurity leads some Jews to loudly broadcast anti-Israel sentiments in the hope of escaping anti-Semitism, but that too is a futile and destructive ambition.</p>
<p>David, for all that he was the underdog, did not set out to be liked. He set out to win. He took an insanely dangerous risk with faith that a Higher Power would help him accomplish the impossible. Israel came closest to that in the Six Day War. It is not Goliath, but it has also forgotten how to be David.</p>
<p>People are more likely to rally behind those with conviction in their own righteousness. The Muslim Goliath has carried off his imitation of David through the degree of his conviction. Israel and its defenders have strived for reasonableness over conviction, trying to prove their humanitarian credentials through a willingness to see both sides.</p>
<p>But as the conflict has become a war of ideas, it has become clear that wars of ideas are no more won by those who see both sides than wars of force are won by those who fight on both sides.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>World Ignores Christian Exodus from Islamic World</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/world-ignores-christian-exodus-from-islamic-world/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=world-ignores-christian-exodus-from-islamic-world</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Aug 2014 04:35:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iraq]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[persecution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Syria]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238075</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How Christian persecution exposes the Left's bigotry toward Israel. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/110682225.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-238076" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/110682225-450x307.jpg" alt="110682225" width="296" height="202" /></a>Originally published by the <a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4572/christian-exodus-islamic-world">Gatestone Institute</a>.</em></p>
<p>While the world fixates on the conflict between Israel and Hamas—and while most mainstream media demonize Israel for trying to survive amid a sea of Arab-Islamic hostility—similar or worse tragedies continue to go virtually ignored.</p>
<p>One of the most ancient Christian communities in the world, that of Iraq—which already had been decimated over the last decade, by Islamic forces unleashed after the ousting of Saddam Hussein—has now been wiped out entirely by the new “caliphate,” the so-called Islamic State, formerly known by the acronym “ISIS.”</p>
<p>As <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/convert-pay-tax-die-islamic-state-warns-christians-181415698--business.html?soc_src=mediacontentsharebuttons"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Reuters</span></a> reported:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>Islamist insurgents have issued an ultimatum to northern Iraq’s dwindling Christian population to either convert to Islam, pay a religious levy or face death, according to a statement distributed in the militant-controlled city of Mosul….</i></p>
<p><i>It said Christians who wanted to remain in the “caliphate” that the Islamic State declared this month in parts of Iraq and Syria must agree to abide by terms of a “dhimma” contract—a historic practice under which non-Muslims were protected in Muslim lands in return for a special levy known as “jizya.”</i></p>
<p><i>“We offer them three choices: Islam; the dhimma contract—involving payment of jizya; if they refuse this they will have nothing but the sword,” the announcement said.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>The amount of <i>jizya</i>-money demanded was $450 a month, an exorbitant sum for Iraq.</p>
<p>Hours after the demand for jizya was made, Islamists began <a href="http://www.qenshrin.com/details.php?id=35341"><span style="color: #0433ff;">painting the letter “n” on Christian homes in Mosul</span></a>—in Arabic, Christians are known as “Nasara,” or “Nazarenes”—signaling them out for the slaughter to come.</p>
<p>Most Christians have since fled. A one-minute video in Arabic of their exodus appears <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=868502626513196&amp;set=vb.100000604016240&amp;type=2&amp;theater"><span style="color: #0433ff;">here</span></a>—women and children weeping as they flee their homes—a video that will not be shown by any Western mainstream media outlet, busy as they are depicting instead nonstop images of Palestinian women and children.</p>
<p>The Syrian Orthodox bishop of Mosul said that what is happening to the Christians of Mosul is nothing less than “<a href="http://arabic.rt.com/prg/telecast/700106-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B7%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%8A%D9%82%D9%88%D8%AF%D9%8A%D9%85%D9%88%D8%B3-%D8%AA%D9%87%D8%AC%D9%8A%D8%B1-%D9%85%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%AD%D9%8A-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%88%D8%B5%D9%84-%D9%8A%D8%B9%D8%A7%D8%AF%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%AF%D8%A9-%D9%88%D9%84%D9%85-%D9%86%D8%B3%D9%85%D8%B9-%D8%A8%D8%AD%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%AF%D8%AB-%D9%82%D8%AA%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%88-%D8%A7%D8%BA%D8%AA%D8%B5%D8%A7%D8%A8/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">genocide</span></a>… not to mention the slaughters and rapes not being reported… Forcing more than a thousand Christian families out of Mosul, and turning Christian churches into Muslim mosques, is equivalent to genocide.”  Of course, the word genocide means to kill or make extinct a people.</p>
<p>Others were not as lucky to flee. According to Iraqi human rights activist Hena Edward, a great many older and disabled Iraqis, unable to pay the jizya or join the exodus, have <a href="http://www.linga.org/international-news/NjY2MA"><span style="color: #0433ff;">opted to convert to Islam</span></a>.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the jihadis continue destroying churches and other ancient Christian holy sites in the name of their religion, and murdering any Christians they can find. Among other acts, they <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/isis-torches-1800-old-mosul-church-expelling-christians-194750912.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">torched an 1800 year old church in Mosul</span></a>, stormed a fourth century monastery—formerly one of Iraq’s best known Christian landmarks—and <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/jihadists-seize-iraq-monastery-005850871.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">expelling its resident monks</span></a>.</p>
<p>Most recently, in Syrian regions under the Islamic State’s control, <span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://www.vieinter.com/themiddleeast/isis-crucifies-8-christians-in-syria-for-apostasy-from-islam/">eight Christians were reportedly crucified</a>.</span></p>
<p>The Islamic State’s call for Christians to pay <i>jizya</i> is not simply about money. It is about subjugation. Most Western media reporting on this recent call for <i>jizya</i> have failed to explain the accompanying <i>dhimma</i> contract Christians must also abide by. According to the Islamic State, “We offer them [Christians] three choices: Islam; <i>the dhimma contract</i>—involving payment of jizya; if they refuse this they will have nothing but the sword.”</p>
<p>The “dhimma contract” is a reference to the Conditions of Omar, an Islamic text attributed to the caliph of the same name that forces Christians to live according to third class citizen status.</p>
<p>In fact, several months back, when the Islamic State was still called “ISIS,” it applied the Conditions of Omar on the Christian minorities of Raqqa, Syria. The Islamic group had <span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-26366197">issued a directive</a></span></p>
<blockquote><p><i>citing the Islamic concept of “dhimma”, [which] requires Christians in the city to pay tax of around half an ounce (14g) of pure gold in exchange for their safety. It says Christians must not make renovations to churches, display crosses or other religious symbols outside churches, ring church bells or pray in public. Christians must not carry arms, and must follow other rules imposed by ISIS… “If they reject, they are subject to being legitimate targets, and nothing will remain between them and ISIS other than the sword,” the statement said [emphasis added].</i></p></blockquote>
<p>The persecution and exodus of Christians is hardly limited to Iraq. In 2011, the <a href="http://in.christiantoday.com/articles/christians-could-disappear-from-iraq-and-afghanistan/6919.htm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom</span></a> noted: “The flight of Christians out of the region is unprecedented and it’s increasing year by year.” In our lifetime alone “Christians might disappear altogether from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt,” all Muslim majority nations.</p>
<p>Under Saddam Hussein, and before the 2003 U.S. “liberation” of Iraq, more than a million Christians lived in Iraq; Mosul had some 60,000 Christians. Today there are reportedly none thanks to the new Muslim “caliphate.”</p>
<p>In Egypt, some <a href="http://www.christiannewstoday.com/Christian_News_Report_900171.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">100,000 Christian Copts</span></a> fled their homeland soon after the “Arab Spring.” But even before that, the Coptic Orthodox Church lamented the “<a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/3761/guest-column-egypt-christians-distraught"><span style="color: #0433ff;">repeated incidents of displacement of Copts from their homes</span></a>, whether by force or threat. Displacements began in Ameriya [62 Christian families evicted], then they stretched to Dahshur [120 Christian families evicted], and today terror and threats have reached the hearts and souls of our Coptic children in Sinai.”</p>
<p>In late 2012, it was reported that the <a href="http://www.fides.org/en/news/32561?idnews=32561&amp;lan=eng"><span style="color: #0433ff;">last Christian in the city of Homs</span></a>, Syria—which had a <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-plight-of-syrias-christians-we-left-homs-because-they-were-trying-to-kill-us-8274710.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Christian population of some 80,000 before jihadis</span></a> came—was murdered. An escaped teenage Syrian girl said: “We left because they were trying to kill us… because we were Christians…. Those who were our neighbors turned against us. At the end, when we ran away, we went through balconies. We did not even dare go out on the street in front of our house.”</p>
<p>In the African nation of Mali, after a 2012 Islamic coup, as many as <a href="http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=15403&amp;utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CatholicWorldNewsFeatureStories+%28Catholic+World+News+%28on+CatholicCulture.org%29%29"><span style="color: #0433ff;">200,000 Christians fled</span></a>. According to reports, “<a href="http://www.christiantoday.com/article/appeal.for.christians.in.mali/29908.htm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">the church in Mali faces being eradicated</span></a>,” especially in the north “where rebels want to establish an independent Islamist state and drive Christians out… there have been house to house searches for Christians who might be in hiding, church and Christian property has been looted or destroyed, and people tortured into revealing any Christian relatives.” At least one pastor was beheaded.</p>
<p>One can go on and on:</p>
<p>•In Ethiopia, after a Christian was accused of desecrating a Koran, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/03/24/thousands-christians-displaced-ethiopia-muslim-extremists-torch-churches-homes-2057387870/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">thousands of Christians were forced to flee their homes</span></a> when “Muslim extremists set fire to roughly 50 churches and dozens of Christian homes.”</p>
<p>•In the Ivory Coast—where Christians have been crucified—Islamic rebels “<a href="http://www.assistnews.net/STORIES/2012/s12080114.htm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">massacred hundreds and displaced tens of thousands</span></a>” of Christians.</p>
<p>•In Libya, Islamic rebels forced <a href="http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Islamists-chase-nuns-from-Libya,-people-pray-for-their-return-27021.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">several Christian nun orders</span></a> serving the sick and needy since 1921 to flee and killed several Coptic Christians, causing that community also to flee.</p>
<p>•In Muslim-majority northern Nigeria, where hardly a Sunday passes without a church bombing, Christians are fleeing by the thousands; one region has been emptied of <a href="http://barnabasfund.org/US/News/Archives/Islamist-violence-drives-nearly-95-per-cent-of-Christians-from-Nigerian-state.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">95% of its Christian population</span></a>.</p>
<p>•In Pakistan, after a Christian child was falsely accused of desecrating a Koran and Muslims went on an anti-Christian rampage, an entire Christian village—men, women, and children—<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/30/fearful-pakistani-christians-make-home-in-forest/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">was forced to flee into the nearby woods,</span></a> where they built a church, to permanently reside there.</p>
<p>Despite all these atrocities, exoduses, and even genocides, the mainstream media seems to spend every available moment airing images of displaced Palestinians and demonizing Israel for trying to defend itself. Yet Israel does not kill Palestinians because of their religion or any other personal aspects. It does so in the context of being rocketed and trying to defend itself from terrorism.</p>
<p>On the other hand, all the crimes being committed by Muslims against Christians are simply motivated by religious hate, because the Christians are Christian.</p>
<p>It is to the mainstream media’s great shame that those who slaughter, behead, crucify, and displace people for no other reason than because they are Christian, rarely if ever get media coverage, while a nation such as Israel, which kills only in the context of self-defense, and not out of religious bigotry, is constantly demonized.</p>
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		<title>Preventing an Israeli Fifth Column</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/charles-bybelezer/preventing-an-israeli-fifth-column/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=preventing-an-israeli-fifth-column</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 23 Jul 2014 04:46:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Charles Bybelezer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The disturbing statements of Arab-Israeli politicians -- who operate freely in the Knesset. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/haneen-zoabi.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236881" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/haneen-zoabi.jpg" alt="haneen-zoabi" width="273" height="205" /></a>As IDF troops were preparing to enter the Gaza Strip, with the goal of stopping incessant rocket fire on Israeli cities and neutralizing the threat caused by Hamas’ extensive tunnel infrastructure, Balad MK Haneen Zoabi penned an op-ed for the Hamas-affiliated <i>felesteen</i> news site imploring Palestinians to “besiege” the Jewish state (which she referred to throughout her article as ‘Israel,’ in quotations).</p>
<p>“‘Israel’ will in no way eliminate Hamas, the motives for the resistance or the motives for [pursuing] liberation,” she wrote. Zoabi justified Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians as a means to ending the “soft occupation” on the Strip.</p>
<p>In response, Hamas spokesman Husam Bardan praised Zoabi as a “Palestinian patriot worthy of the respect of our people.” He expressed hope that other Israeli-Arab politicians would follow her lead.</p>
<p>And indeed they have.</p>
<p>One day after the launch of Operation Protective Edge, MK Ahmed Tibi (United Arab List-Ta’al) accused the IDF of “committing war crimes in Gaza, including blowing up houses and killing entire families intentionally.”</p>
<p>During the same Knesset plenum, his fellow MK Ibrahim Sarsour read aloud the names of Palestinians who had been “murdered by IDF soldiers,” a scene bearing an eerie resemblance to the Yad Vashem exhibit in which the names of those who perished in the Holocaust are recited.</p>
<p>Arab MK Masud Gnaim, also from Tibi’s party, accused Israel of perpetrating a “massacre” in the Strip.</p>
<p>These outbursts parallel the Israeli-Arab leadership’s collective response to the recent kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens.</p>
<p>Zoabi again was front and center, describing the abductors not as terrorists, but rather as beleaguered people “forced to use these means until Israel will wake up a little.” When pressed in an interview whether she was openly siding with the kidnappers, Zoabi responded: “I’m surprised you’re still walking around freely.”</p>
<p>She went so far as to endanger the life of her own relative, rejecting seventeen-year-old Mohammad Zoabi’s call for the three boys’ immediate release as “stupid” and “twisted.” (Mohammad subsequently received multiple death threats, necessitating a round-the-clock security detail.)</p>
<p>For her actions, Zoabi did not receive so much as a slap on the wrist; this, despite the fact that a police investigation determined that sufficient evidence exists for Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein to investigate her for incitement.</p>
<p>Never to be outdone, Tibi too weighed in, responding to the kidnapping by denouncing the IDF’s “shooting of civilians and demonstrators” during its recovery mission in the West Bank. Hadash MK Afo Agbaria, like Zoabi, referred to Hamas not as a terror group, but rather as a “liberation organization.”</p>
<p>Despite this overt hostility by Israeli-Arab leaders, the public nevertheless responded with shock when riots subsequently broke out last month against Operation Brother’s Keeper.</p>
<p>Residents of Umm el-Fahm, one of the country’s largest Arab cities, threw stones at police, called for additional hostage-taking and repeatedly chanted, “With spirit and blood, we will redeem you Palestine.”</p>
<p>Arab MK and Hadash chairman Muhammad Barakei, who was on hand, described the violence as a “protest against the brutality of the IDF and against [its] illegal arrests and unlawful activities in the territories.”</p>
<p>Balad chairman Jamal Zahalka hailed the riot as the implementation of “our right and duty to protest against Israeli crimes.” Balad’s secretary-general, Awad Abderfattah, called it a legitimate expression of support for Palestinian prisoners.</p>
<p>The radicalism that reared its ugly head in Umm el-Fahm is the direct result of years of government inaction, the refusal of Israeli-Jewish leaders to punish their Arab counterparts for their provocations.</p>
<p>The case of Umm el-Fahm is particularly revealing, given the city’s former mayor is Raed Salah, leader of the Islamic Movement’s Northern Branch, which is essentially the Muslim Brotherhood in Israel.</p>
<p>For decades, Salah was permitted to spew his anti-Israel invective with impunity. He urged young Arabs to wage war against Israel so they may die as martyrs, and accused Jews of “eating bread dipped in children’s blood.”</p>
<p>Salah was previously convicted of collaborating with, and raising millions of dollars for, Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood.</p>
<p>For his ongoing crimes, this past March Salah was given an eight-month prison sentence. Upon receiving the verdict, he affirmed: “Blessed is God—I got off cheap!”</p>
<p>Despite calls by Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman for the Umm el-Fahm rioters to “be treated as terrorists in the full sense of the word,” they, not unlike their leaders, will not be.</p>
<p>The reason is, partly, due to external pressure, given the international community’s pro-Arab disposition, and the influence of people like Meretz leader Zahava Gal-On, who accused Liberman of racism for attempting to hold to account those calling for Israel’s destruction.</p>
<p>The government’s failure to address the issue has allowed a virtual powder keg to form in the heart of the country. The volatility of the situation primarily accounts for the ongoing reluctance to take action against Israeli-Arab agitators, as doing so, at this late juncture, would have serious consequences.</p>
<p>This reality was reinforced by the widespread violence that erupted in the wake of the brutal murder of teenager Muhammad Abu Khdeir, a heinous crime that was in all likelihood a revenge killing by Jews.</p>
<p>But even before a motive could be determined, rioting broke out in Jerusalem and continued there for days. In the so-called Triangle communities, including Taibe and Tira, Arab residents burned tires and attacked security forces.</p>
<p>The violence extended from the country’s center all the way up to the north.</p>
<p>This past week saw similar outbreaks of violence against Operation Protective Edge. In Jerusalem, young Arabs threw Molotov cocktails at police in Isawiya, Shuafat and At-Tur. A rally attended by thousands in Nazareth, Israel’s largest Arab city, saw demonstrators hold up placards reading, “Israeli army commits genocide in Gaza,” while some 200 masked protestors threw stones at security forces.</p>
<p>In Haifa, over a thousand Israeli-Arabs clashed with police as they attempted to block roads into the city. For her involvement, Zoabi was arrested and taken away in handcuffs and fellow Balad MK Zahalka was lightly injured in the rioting.</p>
<p>Apologists seek to justify such rampant and violent anti-Israel actions by Arabs as the byproduct of inequality; however, this argument simply confuses cause and effect.</p>
<p>While racism indeed exists in Israel—as it does in every other country—the “plight” of Israeli-Arabs, like that of the Palestinians, is primarily of their own making.</p>
<p>Since Israel’s founding, Arab parties have refused to form part of any ruling coalition, at the obvious expense of a smaller slice of the government pie. Israeli-Arab leaders have also failed their constituencies miserably by incessantly demonizing Israel—historically within the context of the greater Arab-Israeli conflict and today in relation to the Palestinians—which effectively prevented Arabs from integrating into society.</p>
<p>By contrast, had Israeli-Arab leaders ever agreed to sit in the government—especially between the end of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the start of the second intifada in 2000, when peace was formally made with both Egypt and Jordan and the Oslo Accords were signed with the PLO—they would have had much greater influence over the distribution of, and thus access to, state resources.</p>
<p>Had they shown even the slightest desire to embrace Israel as their own, their communities would almost certainly be far better off both socially and economically.</p>
<p>At the very least Israeli-Arabs would not be so openly disaffected.</p>
<p>Instead, Israel’s Arab leadership continues to maintain, and promote, rejectionist positions that view, and treat, the country as an abomination.</p>
<p>This reality was perfectly encapsulated by Tibi, when after being asked to quiet down during a recent Knesset debate by Culture and Sport Minister Limor Livnat, he responded: “You’ve been disturbing us since 1948,” suggesting Israel’s reestablishment was an affront to Arab sensibilities.</p>
<p>Increasingly commonplace, and explicit, opposition to Israel’s fundamental right to exist is not about to cease unless concerted action is counter-taken from the top-down; namely, by holding Arab leaders, especially parliamentarians, accountable for their anti-Israel incitement.</p>
<p>If sedition is otherwise permitted to continue unabated and without consequence, it will not be long before Israeli-Arabs become radicalized to such an extent that mini-Gazas begin popping up within a stone’s throw away from the country’s major population centers.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Mr. President, Where Is Your Outrage?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/mr-president-where-is-your-outrage/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mr-president-where-is-your-outrage</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Jul 2014 04:45:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Arab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Asher Palmer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Mohammed Abu Khdeir]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Shelly Dadon]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235825</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the silence to the many Palestinian murders of Israelis throughout Obama's tenure?  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/asherandyonatan.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235826" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/asherandyonatan-380x350.jpg" alt="asherandyonatan" width="294" height="271" /></a>In September 2011, Asher Palmer, a United States citizen and his infant son were <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4363168,00.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">murdered</span></a> when an Arab threw a rock at the car driven by Palmer. The rock pierced the vehicle’s windshield like a missile and shattered Asher’s skull at which point the vehicle careened out of control causing the death of both father and son. Despite the horrific nature of the crime and the fact that it involved a United States citizen, there was no condemnation by the White House and no expressions of condolences to the Israeli people.</p>
<p>On June 12, 2014 three Israeli teens, one of whom was an American citizen, were kidnapped and murdered by Arabs. It took the White House eighteen days to muster the courage to condemn the outrage and even then, the condemnation was qualified by perfunctory calls for “restraint.” Just imagine how the United States would have reacted to an atrocity that involved the harming of American citizens. The murder of four American military contractors in Fallujah in March 2004 prompted a major US invasion of that city. Calls for restraint from the White House are not only insulting; they represent the zenith of hypocrisy and moral morass.</p>
<p>On May 1, 2014 Shelly Dadon, a 20-year old Israeli was murdered by an Arab in central Galilee. She was <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/suspect-arrested-in-murder-of-20-year-old-shelley-dadon/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">stabbed 17 times</span></a> by her Arab assailant and stood no chance. She was on her way to a job interview at a telecommunications company when the terrorist attack occurred. The White House reaction? Deafening silence.</p>
<p>The victims of these atrocities were Jewish and their attackers, Arabs. Their sole crime was their nationality, a circumstance of birth. They were not known to their attackers and did nothing to provoke them but that mattered not to those with the thirst for blood. All that mattered was that they were <i>dhimmi</i> Jews with the temerity to live productive lives in their ancestral homeland.</p>
<p>President Obama’s response to these and other terrorist attacks against Israelis is disquieting to say the least. However, when one considers his reaction to attacks by Jews against Arabs – a rarity – the disparity proves difficult to ignore.</p>
<p>The killing of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a 16-year old Arab from Jerusalem, ostensibly at the hands of Jews, sparked an immediate White House condemnation and expressions of “<a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-official-slams-kerry-after-condemnation-of-arab-teens-death/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">condolences to the Palestinian people</span></a>” even before the circumstances of his unfortunate death were ascertained. Similarly, the roughing up of a Palestinian stone thrower by Israeli police prompted the White House to note that it was “<a href="https://news.yahoo.com/us-profoundly-troubled-americans-beating-israeli-custody-204629191.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">profoundly troubled</span></a>” by his treatment. An Israeli girl who is stabbed 17 times by an Arab is greeted by stone-cold silence while a violent Arab provocateur who gets roughed up warrants expressions of concern from the White House. Clearly, there is something manifestly unjust here.</p>
<p>It is no secret that Obama maintains a visceral dislike for Israel. From the moment he took office, he never missed an opportunity to take a swipe at the only democracy in the Mideast and America’s only stable ally in the region. While the Mideast is in turmoil, Israel remains a beacon of stability yet, judging by his actions and words, that matters little to Obama.</p>
<p>While Palestinian Arabs have urged Arab storeowners to destroy CCTV footage that might provide additional clues to the Arab abduction and murder of three innocent Israeli teens, Israeli police have used CCTV footage to swiftly apprehend the killers of Abu Khdeir. Similarly, an investigation is underway in connection with claims of excessive force by police against the Arab provocateur.</p>
<p>This highlights the difference between Israel and her Arab and Muslim neighbors. While the region, from Iran to Algeria is steeped in medieval backwardness where the law is effectuated through the barrel of an AK-47, Israel stands as a nation of law and justice where all can expect equal and equitable treatment, something Obama should be cognizant of the next time he chooses to criticize a loyal American ally.</p>
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		<title>Caroline Glick: The End of the &#8216;Peace Process&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/caroline-glick-the-end-of-the-peace-process/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=caroline-glick-the-end-of-the-peace-process</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Jun 2014 04:57:50 +0000</pubDate>
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				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235002</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The director of the Freedom Center's Israel Security Project discusses what's next for the Jewish State. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Editor’s note: Below are the video and transcript to Caroline Glick’s address at the Freedom Center’s 2014 Texas Weekend. The event took place May 2nd-4th at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas.</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/98198143" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/98198143">Caroline Glick</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user15333690">DHFC</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p>CAROLINE GLICK: It’s really great to be here in Texas. I already managed to buy cowboy boots for my son, so I’m pretty much set. (Applause.)</p>
<p>Anybody have any idea where we can get cowboy hats? I’d love to know. Then we’ll be done and can come back here when they’re 15.</p>
<p>But it is a pleasure to be here, and thank you.</p>
<p>And so now that I’ve gotten all the pleasantries and happiness in being in Texas out of the way, let’s talk about what’s really depressing.</p>
<p>It’s amazing. You know, the Peace Process fell apart over the past six weeks. (Applause.) I don’t know if you know that, but there’s no more Peace Process, and I know you’re all shocked by that because everybody was probably totally optimistic that for the first time in 90 years the Arabs, the Palestinian Arabs were going to say, We accept Israel’s right to exist. They’ve never done it before, but suddenly, because John Forbes Kerry is such a brilliant man and such a great negotiator and just leader in general, just all-time good guy, right? Is John [O’Neill here?]</p>
<p>Anyway, then everything would be great, right? And then it all failed.</p>
<p>Now, there’s a stunning interview that was published yesterday in (inaudible), which is Israel’s &#8212; one of Israel’s largest tabloids. It came out Friday. Friday papers in Israel are like the Sunday papers. And an unknown American official &#8212; and I am willing to put good money on saying that it was Martin Indyk &#8212; but he gave the most extraordinary interview to (inaudible), where he engaged in rank anti-Semitic diatribes against Israel in order to blame Israel for the failure of the Obama administration’s Peace Process.</p>
<p>And I actually just got this on email &#8212; sorry, Congressman Gohmert &#8212; while you were speaking. So it took &#8212; I had to read it, but I want to read it to you just for a second, just some quotes, which are extraordinary.</p>
<p>It said here, One bitter American official told (inaudible) &#8212; the reporter &#8212; I guess we need another intifada to create the circumstances that would allow progress. It says, We need another Palestinian terror war against Israelis, where Israeli men, women and children get slaughtered in order to create the circumstances that would allow the progress. A third intifada, the Americans made clear &#8212; quote &#8212; would be a tragedy &#8212; you can see them crying.</p>
<p>The Jewish people &#8212; here is the good part &#8212; the Jewish people are supposed to be smart. It is true that they’re also considered a stubborn nation. You’re supposed to know how to read the map. In the Twenty-First Century, the world will not keep tolerating the Israeli Occupation. The Occupation threatens Israel’s status in the world and threatens Israel as a Jewish state.</p>
<p>(Inaudible) went on, Pressed by (Inaudible), the reporter, on perceived international hypocrisy over Israel’s presence in the West Bank &#8212; And you have to understand, just for a second (Inaudible) is a radical leftist whose formative years were spent in the Communist Youth Movement in Israel, and, yet, here, he is pressing these American friends of his &#8212; on perceived international hypocrisy over Israel’s presence in the West Bank when the world &#8212; quote &#8212; closes its eyes to China’s takeover of Tibet, it stutters at what Russia is doing in Ukraine, et cetera.</p>
<p>The Americans were quoted as responding, Israel is not China. It was founded by a UN Resolution. Its prosperity depends on the way it is viewed by the international community.</p>
<p>The American who was speaking to (Inaudible) also said that the Palestinians will get their state whether Israel likes it or not, meaning [whether the state] is in a state of peace with Israel or in a state of war with Israel, it’s going to happen, and since Israel owes its own very survival to the good will of the UN, we can expect, then, that the United Nations will then abrogate Israel’s sovereignty somehow or another in some fashion.</p>
<p>Now, what’s amazing about all of the &#8212; aside from the fact that it just makes my fist clench up without me even, you know, realizing it &#8212; is that this is really sort of par for the course, because this interview with Israel’s leading reporter in Israel’s &#8212; one of its largest-circulation newspapers comes, of course, just a few days after John Kerry called Israel an apartheid state or that we will be an apartheid state.</p>
<p>And that itself, you have to understand, is an American embrace of an anti-Semitic meme that was created by the KGB in the 1960s, before the Six-Day War, by the way. The first time that the Soviets used it was at the UN Subcommittee Against Discrimination or something like that, in 1964. So this has been going on since well before there was any Israeli settlements beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines.</p>
<p>And this has been propagated over time. Everybody remembers the UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 from 1975 that referred to Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement, as a form of racism.</p>
<p>As Daniel Pipes said last night in his introduction to Ambassador John Bolton, Bolton’s role in having that resolution cancelled in 1991 was really decisive in terms of that happening.</p>
<p>But the fact that the resolution itself was rejected or was cancelled in 1991 didn’t mean that the sentiment behind it in any way went into remission. That has, since 1975, been really the guiding principle around which the entire UN system revolves, which is to try to somehow or another act in a concerted fashion in order to remove the international legitimization that was given to the Jewish national movement and the Jewish national home in 1947 in the UN Partition Resolution of the General Assembly [when it won].</p>
<p>So this has continued to be really the central motivating factor of the UN system generally since 1975, despite the good efforts of the George H.W. Bush administration in the early 1990s.</p>
<p>But this is, then, what we’re seeing now is a violent response by the Obama administration directed against Israel for the failure of Kerry’s intention of forcing Israel to make all of the necessary concessions to the PLO within nine months, so that he could get his Nobel Peace Prize, just like his boss got.</p>
<p>And this really &#8212; What’s so interesting about this drive that has been very willing, and, in fact, almost automatically devolving into rank anti-Semitism, the demonization of Jews, is just how extraordinarily hysterical the response has been. Why are they so hysterical? Why are they behaving like this? What is happening?</p>
<p>And I think that I know two aspects to it, and they both go to the heart of the nature of the two-state solution that they all claim is the be-all and end-all of U.S. Middle East policy, and specifically of Israel’s right to exist, as far as the U.S. Government is concerned.</p>
<p>So the two-state solution, you must understand it, and I go through this in the first part of my book, is based on two things, really, religious faith and Jew hatred, and they’re intertwined, and I will explain why.</p>
<p>When you look at what just happened in the last couple of weeks, well, the Palestinians refused to negotiate with Israel, so that this Peace Process that has supposedly ongoing for nine months has actually not involved face-to-face negotiations between Israeli negotiators and PLO negotiators at all. What we’ve seen is Martin Indyk and his team coming in and having conversations, on the one hand, with Israel and having conversations, on the other side, with the Palestinians, and then sort of acting as the go-between, because the Palestinians refused to sit at a table with Israelis.</p>
<p>So there haven’t actually been negotiations going on that have failed. There have been meetings of Israelis with Americans, on the one hand, and Palestinians with Americans, on the other. That has been the Peace Process, such as it is, since Kerry announced it with great, you know, ceremony and excitement nine months ago. So it hasn’t been a peace process.</p>
<p>The other thing is that, from the outset, and not surprisingly, PLO chief, Mahmoud Abbas, who serves as the president of the Palestinian Authority, despite the fact that his term of office ended in January of 2009 and there hasn’t been an election since 2006, he said, and continuously said over and over and over again that he will never recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, ever.</p>
<p>So what are we talking about? Well, essentially, we’re talking about something other than peace, right? Because if the Palestinian leader, who’s supposed to be moderate, who’s supposed to be a man of peace says, Over my dead body will a Palestinian leader ever recognize the right of Israel to exist, then we’re not talking about peace. You can’t talk about peace if you’re leading to an agreement between one side that won’t recognize another side, but that the side that isn’t recognized is expected to give up its capital city to the guy who won’t recognize it. That’s not peace. It’s something else.</p>
<p>And, then, after he did that, and then the Americans came in and tried to figure out a way to kind of square that circle by maybe saying, Well, maybe we could change the drafting. Maybe we could change the structure of the sentence, so that you can say something like, We recognize that there are Jewish people in Israel or that Jewish people like Israel, and maybe that would be acceptable to the Israeli government.</p>
<p>The Palestinians said no, and they also said, And, by the way, we’re signing a unity deal with Hamas, which is recognized by the State Department as a foreign terrorist organization, and, therefore, anyone who comes into direct contact with them is actually committing a felony under U.S. law and the United States is required, by U.S. law, to end all support for the PLO, including all military support.</p>
<p>Did you guys, by the way, know that the U.S. has been building a Palestinian army since 2007? Just for knowing, as they say. That’s supposed to stop. You’re not supposed to be giving them $500 million in budgetary assistance either. That’s not supposed to be happening anymore, because it’s all a complete breach of U.S. law, not to mention the law of nations, because the UN Security Council passed a Chapter 7, a binding international resolution, 1379, after 9/11 that said that anybody that provides this kind of support for a terrorist organization has committed an act of war against the community of nations. So this is a requirement under U.S. law and under international law for the U.S. to cut off all relations with the PLO.</p>
<p>But, instead, what we see is this hysteria, this mass hysteria of Obama administration officials that, again, have been more than willing &#8212; Their default position has been to descend into the gutters of anti-Semitic rhetoric, to attack Israel, to delegitimize Israel and even to threaten its very existence with terrorism and with a removal of international legitimization for Israel’s very existence.</p>
<p>Now, why? So the two-state paradigm &#8212; the two-state solution that they have this faith in is so attractive to them because what it says is that the core of all the problems in the Middle East &#8212; of Jihad everywhere, of misogyny, of economic backwardness, of anti-Americanism, of anti-Westernism, of anti-Christianity &#8212; it’s all due to the absence of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River on land that is (inaudible) the Jews control.</p>
<p>And if Israel would just get out of Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, then we’d have no problem. Then it would be okay to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and all of these green-on-blue shootings would end, because everybody would love America because they had gotten the Jews out of Jerusalem, and everything would be great.</p>
<p>Now, it’s a very attractive idea, for so many reasons, but the main one is that it blames the immediate victim of Islamofascism or Islamic [supremism], of Arab supremism and fascism for everything that they do against it and everything that they do against the world. It’s the Jews’ fault. It’s the Jews’ fault. Those greedy, money-grubbing, land-stealing Jews, right? They won’t leave Jerusalem, and that is why we have all of these problems in the world.</p>
<p>It is incredibly convenient, and therefore attractive, to blame Israel for everything. You don’t have to think about anything. You can pretend that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. You can call the U.S. war on terrorism an overseas contingency operation and not turn into a laughing stock because it’s all the Jews’ fault. It’s all the Jews’ fault, and that, of course, makes sense.</p>
<p>Why has John Kerry been to Israel 12 or 13 times over the past 14 months, when the entire Middle East is blowing up, without any connection whatsoever to how many Jews live beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines? Because if that’s really the cause of everything, then what does he care that children are being annihilated and killed with chlorine gas in Syria? What does he care that Iran is building nuclear weapons? What does he care that Hezbollah is doubling its strength and going through massive military experiences or al-Qaeda members from Europe, from the United States, and, of course, throughout the Islamic world who are all converging on Syria in order to go through their &#8212; whatever the Islamic version of baptism of fire would be?</p>
<p>It’s not important. It’s irrelevant, because if Israel is to blame for everything, then the only thing that you should be focusing your attention on is Israel. You should be, as he is, trying to actively subvert the political standing in Israel of the elected government of this democracy, and you should be threatening the Israeli people with economic isolation and with murder, at the hands, by the way, of the same military forces that U.S. military trainers have been training since 2007, and ignoring everything else, because Israel is the only thing that’s important.</p>
<p>Now, that kind of blame-the-Jew mentality gets wrapped into an overall faith, right? This is completely irrational. This has been a position that the British took before the United States did back &#8212; beginning in the 1920s and moving on until the British moved out of the promised land in 1948 and made room for Israel to establish its independent state in accordance with the law of nations, not in accordance with the UN non-binding General Assembly Resolution that became null and void the minute that every Arab state rejected it in 1947.</p>
<p>But I digress. The point is that the reason why the two-state formula has been working as the &#8212; Has been comprising the basis of international thinking about the Arab conflict with Israel is because it is so attractive to blame the victim, especially when the victim happens to be Jews. [Hey], they’ve been doing it for over 2,000 years. It’s a default position for millions and millions of people all over the world that’s popular, and it is faith based.</p>
<p>Why is it faith based? Because it’s not reason based. Because it has absolutely no basis whatsoever in anything resembling facts. It has nothing to do whatsoever in anything representing rationality or logic. And so it has to be faith. You rule out every logical, every rational category of thought, and all you are left with is faith.</p>
<p>And so when somebody’s messiah fails him, does he recognize this and move on to another religion? No, he strikes out at the source of what he perceives to be that failure. This is supposed to be a panacea. A panacea is a miracle. It’s something divine. This is supposed to solve everything, and these Jews, they won’t stop building. They won’t stop recognizing one another’s property rights. They won’t stop giving due process to people.</p>
<p>So we’re going to blame them and we’re going to threaten them with terrorism and with economic isolation and with international delegitimization, because they’re horrible. They’re terrible people. Look what they did. They just showed my messiah to be false. How dare they. I’m right. My faith is perfect faith, and, therefore, they must be the devil. And that’s how he’s behaving. That’s how all of these Americans are behaving now, and it is terribly frightening.</p>
<p>And the thing is that how have they maintained this over time, for 90 years? How, for the past 21 years, have they forced Israel to maintain faith with this thing that has caused the murder of over 1,000 Israeli civilians? Murder in the most heinous of ways, by suicide bombers, whose bomb belts are packed, not only with explosives, but with nails to cause maximal suffering to the victims. And who do they blow up? Families. Children. Jews.</p>
<p>It’s maintained through threats, like we see. You’re going to get whacked by terrorism. We’re all going to take our money out of Israel. Oh, and demography. By the way, if you don’t quit Judeo-Samarian Jerusalem tomorrow, well, the Arab womb is going to overwhelm you. They’re having 75 children per woman, you know? And within three minutes there’s going to be an Arab majority west of the Jordan River and you’re going to have to choose whether you want to be a bunch of racists or you’re going to give up your right to Jewish sovereignty over the Jewish homeland.</p>
<p>Then there’s also, You’re an occupying power, right? This land belongs to somebody else. You have no right to be here. Settlements, Jewish communities built beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines &#8212; And by the way, just for knowing, the Armistice Lines, what are they? Israel was invaded at the moment of its birth by five Arab military forces, unlawfully, in breach of the law of nations in the most obvious way.</p>
<p>The Armistice Lines are the lines to which the Israeli army, which was made of a bunch of peasants and Holocaust survivors, managed to push them back before the international community descended on Israel and said, Okay. Accept an armistice. That’s what the Armistice Lines were. There is no legal basis for these lines. It was just the lines to which we were able to beat back a foreign invasion of our national territory. Okay? That’s what they are. They’re completely arbitrary.</p>
<p>But they say, If you don’t give up all the land beyond these lines to people who won’t even recognize your right to exist, including your capital city that was built by King David and has been your capital city since then, you’re going to be overrun, and all of your democratic Jews, the only democrats in the entire Middle East, are going to have to decide whether you want to be racists or not. And since we know about the latent evil of Jews, we &#8212; meaning the United States Secretary of State and his entourage &#8212; can safely tell the Trilateral Commission that you will become an apartheid state, because we know you’re going to choose evil, right?</p>
<p>But you know what, it’s not true. Jews are having more children than Arabs. It’s a Jewish womb. Mine, you know, all of us who are having babies, that are the problem for the Arabs, not the other way around, because who would have thunk it, Jews know how to go forth and multiply. (Laughter.) And we are.</p>
<p>Isolation, they tell us. Isolation. You note that next year, according to the Israeli Ministry of Trade, Asia is going to outstrip the United States as Israel’s largest trading partner. Year on year, we’re getting five and 10 percent increases in our volume of trade with China, with India, with South Korea, with Japan. We’re not being isolated. We’re being shunned by, oh, who? Europe.</p>
<p>Now, what’s surprising about it is that they’re being supported by the United States, but [Boeing] is just setting up a new center in Be’er Sheva. Doesn’t sound like American industry really had heard that they’re supposed to be shunning Israel. And, by the way, neither have European firms, because, despite the fact that the epicenter of the economic war against Israel is in Europe, Britain keeps expanding its trade with Israel five percent a year. So go figure.</p>
<p>But we’re going to be isolated. They’re going to be mean to us. Well, that’s new, Europeans being mean to Jews.</p>
<p>And then fed by lies. The UN established Israel. So (inaudible) referred to it before, I just think it’s very important to get this out: No, it didn’t. No, it didn’t. The United Nations General Assembly did not establish Israel in 1947. It recognized standing international law, because in 1922, the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine gave sole sovereign rights to the land of Israel, including Israel within the 1949 Armistice Lines, unified Jerusalem, the entire West Bank of the Jordan River and the Gaza Strip to the Jews, and that assertion that the sovereign rights to the land belonged to the Jews alone was never abrogated or superseded. So the law actually says, no, it belongs to the Jews.</p>
<p>And then, of course, there are the national rights. And the international law determination of sovereign rights to the land of Israel that was made by the international powers in 1922 at the League of Nations was based upon a 3,000- or 4,000-year history of the Jewish people in the land of Israel that was widely recognized as the only nation in the world that had a sovereign claim to the land of Israel, so it was the basis of historical right that formed the basis of the international legal recognition of the sovereign rights of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.</p>
<p>And UN General Assembly Resolution [1981] that partitioned the land between a Jewish state and an Arab state was not a legal document. It was not legally binding, and it was cancelled immediately after it was passed when the Arabs rejected it and went to war against the Jewish state, so that it has no legal standing. It could never have formed the basis of anything because it’s not a legal document. It’s a UN General Assembly resolution. It does not have the force of international law, period.</p>
<p>But here is an American diplomat threatening Israel, that we are going to remove the international sanction, legal sanction that was given to the land of Israel to become a Jewish state or to the Jewish people to assert its sovereign rights over the land of Israel because Jews continue to build in Jerusalem and in Judea and in Samaria.</p>
<p>And we have people like Susan Rice and John Kerry and Obama saying that Jewish settlements beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines are illegitimate. Well, no, they’re not. I’m not a lawyer, but, apparently, I know the law a whole lot better than you do, because you’re just making this stuff up. You are just making this stuff up. None of the things that you are saying has anything to do with law. It only has to do with using legal terminology to defame innocent victims. And that’s what they’re doing.</p>
<p>You know, I wrote my book &#8212; My book basically is divided into three parts. The first part is the 90 years of failure of the two-state solution. Amazing. This is the bipartisan plan. You know, in a U.S. that is completely divided among Republicans and Democrats, everybody who’s [everybody] supports the two-state solution. Just ask. Everybody but everybody supports it. George H.W. Bush supported it. George W. Bush supported it. Clinton. Obama, of course. Nixon. Reagan. Ford. Carter. Everybody.</p>
<p>Why? Because it’s convenient, but it always failed, amazingly always failed. Truman supported it. Failed. Ike supported it. Failed. Everybody supports it. And it keeps on failing. I think the only one who didn’t support it was LBJ. God bless him (inaudible) from Texas. (Laughter.)</p>
<p>You know I was born here? I was. I was born in Houston Methodist Hospital. My true claim to fame.</p>
<p>But I think he was the only &#8212; Well, John F. Kennedy might have, too. And that’s it. Everybody else supported partition. Everybody else supported a weak Israel. Everybody else supported Israeli attempts to appease its Arab neighbors who don’t recognize its right to exist. So that’s part one.</p>
<p>And how this has dumbed down U.S. foreign policy, because if the centerpiece of your Middle East policy is this notion that everything will be solved if Israel coughs up its land to its sworn enemies, then how far are you going to get in actually understanding the region? Right? If you think that the most important aspect of the Middle East’s problems is that there’s no Arab state &#8212; additional &#8212; twenty-third Arab state west of the Jordan River, on land that’s currently controlled by the Jews, then how well are you going to understand Iraq? How hard are you going to try to understand Iran? How well are you going to understand Egypt? Not well at all, because your whole thinking is based on a total lie, and it’s based on something that is totally irrational. But if that’s the basis of your Middle East policymaking, then you’re necessarily going to discount the importance of everything else.</p>
<p>You can talk to the Taliban, and whether you’re Condoleezza Rice or Susan Rice &#8212; because it really doesn’t matter what they think, cause at the end of the day, you push the Jews around enough they’ll cough up Jerusalem and everything will be fine. Doesn’t &#8212; You know, the Taliban are insignificant. They’re unimportant. They’re objects. They’re not actors. They’re not responsible. They have no moral agency.</p>
<p>The second part of the book, I say, Okay. Enough. So now that we’ve described the failure, let’s talk about what can we do, how do we get off this train?</p>
<p>And the answer is the Israeli solution. You know what, when you look at the situation objectively, you realize that there’s only one thing that works in the Middle East today. There’s only one little engine that not only could, but is puffing along, doesn’t matter how steep the train is, we can just go up those Alps.</p>
<p>Why? Because we work really, really hard, and that’s Israel. That’s the only thing that’s working in the Middle East today. Look at anything. Close your eyes and put a finger on the Middle East and wherever you land, like pin the tail on the donkey, it’ll be a mess, unless your finger happens to land in that smidgen of land called Israel that’s so tiny that its name on world maps is written in the Mediterranean Sea. That’s the only thing that’s working.</p>
<p>So you want to make it not work? You want to go ahead and say, Okay. Israel, give up your ability to defend yourselves? Shrink yourself into indefensible borders that no one, but no one could defend in world history, and then place on your border, not just the PLO and Hamas, but all of the millions of foreign Arabs who today live in al-Qaeda- and Hamas- and Iranian- and Hezbollah-controlled refugee camps in such holiday spots as Lebanon and Syria, and deal with it, and it’ll be great.</p>
<p>Oh, no it won’t. You’ll be overrun before my oldest kid gets bar mitzvahed. Do that. That’s a great idea. We’re your best friends. You can trust us.</p>
<p>If you want to get away from that, how do you do it? What do you do? [We say], no, instead of shrinking into indefensible borders, expand them. Expand them. You know what, forget about this nonsense with the Occupation. Let’s base U.S. policy on law. Let’s base U.S. policy on rights, and let’s base &#8212; what a concept &#8212; U.S. policy on strategic rationality.</p>
<p>And let’s stand with our allies and against our enemies and say to Israel, You know what, forget it. We want more Israel. Apply your rights. Apply your sovereignty. You have them, [to] Judea and Samaria. That’s it. That’s it. We’re going to forget about this whole Palestinian statehood thing, because we recognize the fact that they don’t want a state. They want to destroy Israel.</p>
<p>Now, what would happen? Well, Israel would do with Judea and Samaria exactly what it did with Jerusalem and with Golan Heights in 1967 and in 1981 respectively, give permanent residency status, which means full civil and legal rights to the non-Jewish residents of the area, the same as the Jews have. And they’ll have the right to apply for Israeli citizenship, and if they abide by the criteria, including loyalty to Israel and rejection of terrorism, non-membership in terrorist organization, non-involvement in anti-Semitic incitement and solicitation of murder, they’ll get it. No problem.</p>
<p>You know why? Because there is a Jewish majority &#8212; guess what &#8212; a very solid and growing Jewish majority west of the Jordan River, not including Gaza. We left Gaza in 2005. Although, with Gaza, we’re still the majority, but no reason to include it. We’re gone. Let them be an independent state of Palestine if they want. Let them be part of Egypt if they want. Whatever they want. Not part of Israel.</p>
<p>So we’re talking about Judea and Samaria. We’re talking about the West Bank. Apply Israeli sovereignty to those areas. For the first time, the Palestinians will have &#8212; will be the only Arabs in the world that have full civil rights, whose legal rights are protected by a rule of law, whose human rights are respected by the rule of law, whose civil rights are respected by the rule of law, because Israel is the only country that is not ruled by the rule of the jungle.</p>
<p>You know, in my book, Part 3 talks about how other international actors &#8212; the Palestinians, the Arab neighbors of Israel, the European Union &#8212; are likely to respond to an Israeli move to apply its law to Judea and Samaria. And my conclusion is that the party that is likely to have the most negative response to it is not the Arabs. It’s the Europeans, because their whole unified foreign policy is really just based on hostility to Israel. They don’t have anything other than that, so that if Israel were to apply its laws to Judea and Samaria then they would react in a very foul manner.</p>
<p>But, unfortunately, when I look at these statements by Kerry and by an unnamed U.S. official, I’m coming more and more to the conclusion that the Obama administration may actually respond with greater hysteria than Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, who is, you know, unapologetically anti-Semitic. Lady Ashton.</p>
<p>And, you know, people say, Well, how can this work, Caroline? And what I say is my book, I think, is step one in a multiyear campaign that, first and foremost, has to involve getting out the facts, getting out the facts to the American people and even getting out the facts to the Israeli people, although we don’t need them as much, cause we get it.</p>
<p>But, you know, let’s talk about who the land actually belongs to under international law. Let’s have a discussion about occupation. Let’s talk about the fact that this is a lie and this is a malicious slander of Israel to claim that we are somehow or another illegally occupying land that belongs to us by sovereign right under international law, not to mention history.</p>
<p>Let’s talk about the nature of Palestinian nationalism and show that the father of Palestinian nationalism was a Nazi and that he is still considered the George Washington of the Palestinian national movement, a Nazi, Haj Amin al-Husseini.</p>
<p>Let’s talk about what moderation really means in Palestinian terms. It means being willing to talk and shoot at Jews, as opposed to just shoot at them, and that that isn’t moderation. Let’s just mention that, you know, and let us talk about the fact that Israel is the most important ally that the United States has in the Middle East, that, as Israel’s minister of defense, Moshe Ya’alon, said, Israel is an aircraft carrier, a U.S. aircraft carrier, from an American perspective, from its northern tip in Metula down to its southern tip [in a lot] by the Red Sea. Let’s talk about this.</p>
<p>You know, we heard a lot today and yesterday about the Obama administration, and John Bolton said that the greatest threat to U.S.’s national security is the president. And it is very dangerous and very frightening what’s happening today in the United States of America, but we’ll only fix things in the United States if we have a discussion about what’s really happening. That’s why gatherings like this are so important, and that’s why truth is so important. I mean, it was Jesus who said, The truth will set you free. Jesus was a Jew. (Laughter.)</p>
<p>We have to talk about these things. We have to talk about the truth. We have to cast aside these illusions that are based upon false faith and that are based upon hatred of Jews. We have to stop blaming the Jews for the pathologies of their victimizers, of their oppressors, of their would-be destroyers. We certainly have to stop making it the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy.</p>
<p>You know, in Israel, things are actually going pretty well, as I think the extremely fruitful Israeli womb indicates. When things go well in Israel, we have more children, not fewer. We’re an international outlier. The more wealthy we become, the more prosperous, the more kids, because, for us, finding out who our inner self is involves going to the delivery room as often as possible.</p>
<p>This is a healthy society. This is a society that believes in itself, that believes in who it is. And our alliance with the United States throughout these years had more to do with trying to find an outside power to help us along when we’re in this horrible neighborhood.</p>
<p>It had to do, also, with idealism, that we saw in the United States, we still see in the American people, kindred spirits, people who value the same thing, yes, who have faith in the same God as the people of Israel, and we abide by that. And I think most Americans still do as well.</p>
<p>And we just have to get this message out. We have to get this message out. This land belongs to the Jews. And it will happen, cause a two-state solution is a faith. It is not a policy, and it is a false faith. It will always fail. At the end of the day, this is going to happen. We will apply our laws to Judea and Samaria, because it’s the only viable option, and thank God it’s a viable option. We have to make sure it stays a viable option. We do that by making sure that Israel stays strong and secure and continues to believe in itself. And I think that we’re doing that in Israel.</p>
<p>And I think that the United States has to stand by Israel, because I think part of regaining its sanity in foreign affairs involves recognizing why it is that Israel is such an indispensable ally to the United States. And, by the way, it’s all there in my book.</p>
<p>And those are my thoughts and I’d be happy to take questions, unless we’ve run out.</p>
<p>UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: We have run out of time.</p>
<p>CAROLINE GLICK: Okay.</p>
<p>UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: Thank you, Caroline. (Applause.)</p>
<p>CAROLINE GLICK: Thank you.</p>
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		<title>The Anti-Israel Movement Campaign Explained</title>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 20 Jun 2014 04:45:14 +0000</pubDate>
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		<title>The Myth of Ethnic Inequality in Israel</title>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2014 04:05:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Steven Plaut]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The data that dismantle the leftist lies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_233329" style="width: 342px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/458.jpg"><img class="wp-image-233329" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/458.jpg" alt="458" width="332" height="234" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Ethnicity in Israel is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. Both Jews and Arabs are subdivided into ethnic sub-groups, and there are important differences in socioeconomic status among Arab Muslims, Arab Christians, and Arab Druze.</p></div>
<p><em>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.meforum.org/3839/israel-inequality">Middle East Quarterly</a>. </em></p>
<p>It is commonplace to attribute much of Israel&#8217;s domestic tensions to supposed Jewish discrimination against the country&#8217;s Arab citizens.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[1]</span> Nearly every Israeli Arab nongovernmental organization insists that such discrimination characterizes the Jewish state in general and its labor markets in particular.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[2]</span> The Israeli media routinely interview Israeli Arabs (and non-Ashkenazi Jews) who claim to have been victims of discrimination. These allegations are echoed by Jewish Israeli academics, think tanks, and journalists, especially on the political Left, not to mention the international anti-Israel movement and the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign. Indeed, the U.S. Department of State has even joined the growing outcry concerning Israel&#8217;s alleged racist discrimination against its Arab citizens.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[3]</span></p>
<p>Of course, in reality, Israel is the only Middle Eastern entity that is not an apartheid regime, and the apartheid slander holds no water whatsoever save in the minds of the Jewish state&#8217;s enemies and defamers. Yet discrimination is a scientifically empirical question subject to testing and not a matter of subjective personal opinion. Stripping away the venomous anti-Israel rhetoric, the legitimate question remains whether and how much discrimination really exists in Israel.</p>
<p style="color: #ad3031;"><b>Inequality Myths</b></p>
<p>Ethnicity in Israel is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. Both Jews and Arabs are subdivided into ethnic sub-groups, making exploration and analysis of ethnic disparities a complex challenge. In official statistical data on income, Israeli Arabs are treated as a single population group, but this is somewhat misleading. There are important differences in socio-economic status and performance among Arab Christians, Arab Muslims, and Druse. Those sub-categories are in fact amalgams of even smaller divisions. For example, there are interesting differences between &#8220;ordinary&#8221; Arab Muslims and Bedouins. The Israeli Income Survey sample does not include the Arab population of the &#8220;occupied territories,&#8221; except for East Jerusalem and the small population of the Golan Heights, both of which are formally annexed to Israel.</p>
<p>Ethnicity among Jews is even more complex. It is commonly measured in Israel for statistical purposes based upon the continent of birth of the person or the person&#8217;s father. Jews born in Asia and Africa (or the children of fathers born there) correspond roughly to Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews. Those born in Europe, the United States, or Australia (and their children) correspond roughly to Ashkenazi or Western Jews. These distinctions are imperfect as there are Ashkenazi Jews who come from Asia and Africa (including South Africa and some Egyptian Jews) and Sephardic Jews who come from Europe (including from Greece, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria). Over time this &#8220;continent of birth&#8221; criterion for defining ethnicity is losing its validity because of the rapid increase in native-born Israelis who are themselves sons and daughters of native-born Israelis. In addition, the high intermarriage rate among Jews in Israel from different communities is blurring ethnic distinctions.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[4]</span></p>
<p>Before tackling the specific patterns of ethnic inequality and discrimination in Israeli labor markets, it is necessary to dispose of certain myths and superstitions, beginning with the assumption that heterogeneity proves discrimination. It is a common but mistaken belief that, in the absence of discrimination, the numerical representation in any profession or wage range for all groups in a society should be the same as the proportion of that group in the general population. This might be called the false axiom of &#8220;natural homogeneity.&#8221; Thus if Group A is over-represented in a profession, compared with its weight in the general population, then it must be the beneficiary of discrimination in its favor. If Group B is under-represented, it must be suffering from discrimination against its members. Many then conclude that affirmative action quotas are needed to remedy the problem. This is known as the &#8220;disparate impact&#8221; standard or pseudo-evidence.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[5]</span></p>
<p>But the axiom of natural homogeneity is completely specious. Nowhere in the real world does fair competition produce homogeneous representation in any market. Indeed, the only way in which such homogeneity can be achieved is through a rigid anti-competitive system of assignments in hiring or admissions by quota, one that suppresses individual interests, skills, culture, economics, family, educational and regional backgrounds, and meritocracy.</p>
<p>The world is full of examples of radical departures from numerical homogeneity in representation that clearly have nothing at all to do with discrimination: Jews around the world are over-represented among those admitted into universities relative to their numbers in the general population even in countries that have official policies of discriminating against Jews. Asian Americans are also over-represented among U.S. college students but not because these colleges discriminate against non-Asians. American blacks are not prominent in sports because of anti-white discrimination. About 60 percent of the medical students in Israel are women, and this is not because the medical schools discriminate against men. Israeli Arabs are grossly over-represented among students in schools of pharmacy, and it is not because these schools discriminate against Jews. Men are enormously over-represented among the prison populations in all countries, and it is not because of gender discrimination. And so on and so forth.</p>
<div id="attachment_233331" style="width: 290px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/459.jpg"><img class="wp-image-233331" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/459.jpg" alt="459" width="280" height="214" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">About 60 percent of Israeli medical students are women while Israeli Arabs are over-represented in schools of pharmacy. This is not because these schools discriminate against male Jews. Israeli Arabs own proportionately twice as many cars as Israeli Jews; no one has suggested that this attests to discrimination against Jews.</p></div>
<p>The fallaciousness of the idea that discrimination is proven by deviation from numerical homogeneity in representation cannot be over-emphasized. It crops up in almost every debate about ethnic or gender discrimination. When feminists, media commentators, and even many academics wish to prove that discrimination exists, their proof usually consists of presenting numbers that show departure from homogeneity. Such figures are selected when they serve the agenda of the commentator or advocate. Yet it turns out that Israeli Arabs own proportionately twice as many cars as Israeli Jews;<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[6]</span> no one has suggested that this attests to discrimination in Israel against Jews.</p>
<p>In 2013, the Israeli newspaper <i>Haaretz</i> ran an exposé about supposed discrimination against Israeli Arabs by Israeli banks, which quickly became the focus of a parliamentary investigation.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[7]</span> The alleged evidence was that Israeli Arabs were paying, on average, higher bank fees than Jews for certain services. But a closer look showed that Arab bank accounts tend to be held in small rural banks with higher per-unit costs and may both be smaller on average and in different sorts of accounts than those held by Jews. For example, Arabs hold fewer long-term provident savings or retirement accounts, in part because the age structure of the Arab population is younger than its Jewish counterpart. All this results in different arrays of fees being charged but has nothing to do with discrimination. However, such an explanation would provide little sensationalist grist for the media or headline-grabbing power for politicians.</p>
<p>If numerical representation and deviation from natural homogeneity add nothing in terms of understanding discrimination, what about analyzing differences in wages and salaries directly? It would seem that if discrimination does indeed exist in a society, the most promising arena to seek it out is the labor market. But here, too, problems exist.</p>
<p>Analysis of possible discrimination as reflected in labor market wages has the advantage of being able to utilize a rich data set, unlike other markets in which discrimination is alleged. It also matters more. Few, including Arab leaders, would care very much if, after controlling for all the other possible explanations, Israeli Arabs were really paying higher bank fees than Jews. But everyone would think it is important if Arabs were the victims of wage discrimination. Having noted this, it still needs to be emphasized that the mere documentation of a disparity in wages between Jews and Arabs does not in and of itself prove anything, much less discrimination.</p>
<p>Consider the following situation: Suppose that it is found that 45-year-old Israeli Jewish software engineers with postgraduate degrees earn several times the wages of 20-year-old Arab youths who never finished high school. Would this datum be evidence of discrimination against Arabs in the labor market?</p>
<p>Of course, 45-year-old engineers in any ethnic population generally earn far more than 20-year-old high school dropouts. Their labor is simply worth more, and the market prices it accordingly. If one controls for education, age, and field of study, it is possible to compare 45-year-old Jewish engineers with Arab engineers, or 20-year-old Jewish with Arab high school dropouts, to see if there are any residual gaps in wages. There could also be other factors not yet taken into account that explain observed residual disparities, for example, disparities between wages in rural/peripheral labor markets and those in metropolitan areas. Any suspected ethnic discrimination is tentative and needs to be assessed in light of many other non-ethnic factors that affect wages.</p>
<p>Special attention needs to be paid to differences in labor force participation rates. Arab women in Israel, especially married Muslim women, have very low participation rates. This means that most employed Arab women are young and not yet married, which in turn generates a considerable gap in earnings levels when compared with Jewish women (and men of all groups). Gender differences in wages must be separated out to understand patterns of ethnic inequality.</p>
<p>It has been demonstrated in other countries that something as innocuous as age structure may often explain a considerable portion of disparities in earnings across ethnic/racial groups. For example, the eminent economist Thomas Sowell has demonstrated that one of the major causes for racial inequality in the United States is age difference, with the black and Hispanic population considerably younger than the white population for a variety of demographic reasons. He pointed out that &#8220;Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans have median ages of less than twenty years while the average Irish American or Italian American is more than thirty years old, and Jewish Americans are over forty.&#8221;<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[8]</span> Since 40-year-olds invariably earn far more than 20-year-olds, a significant portion of earnings disparities among American ethnic groups reflects nothing more than age structure differences.</p>
<p>Age structure also explains part of the earning differences in Israel since Israeli Jews are on average considerably older than Israeli Arabs, particularly Israeli Muslims. It is estimated that the median age of Muslim Israelis is 19 while the median age of Jewish Israelis is 31.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[9]</span> (Interestingly, Christian Arabs have an age structure similar to that of Jews, with median age 30, and also have mean earnings very close to those of Jews.) So an age-explained earnings gap similar to that in the United States arises where age explains part of ethnic inequality.</p>
<p style="color: #ad3031;"><b>Data and Raw Inequality Patterns</b></p>
<p>The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) conducts an annual survey of income and wages. It is a large, scientifically-designed, representative survey that covers the entire Israeli population excluding the population in the &#8220;occupied territories,&#8221; foreign temporary workers, and tourists. The CBS is staffed with professional statisticians of the highest caliber, and its operations are in line with international standards of professionalism and integrity.</p>
<p>Part of the income survey is based on households (N = 14,996) and measures income at the household level from various sources. Another is based on income from salary and other sources for individual earners (N=35,680) aged over 15. A household can have multiple earners. Income measured includes that from salaries, self-employment, capital, pension, alimony, social insurance, governmental support, and other categories.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[10]</span> Other variables contained in the survey include age, marital status, schooling, ethnicity, occupation, and location of residence.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[11]</span></p>
<p>What does the income survey show about ethnic inequality in Israel? One can begin to digest the data starting with the raw numbers and measures of earnings, not adjusted for variables such as age and years of schooling. These numbers explain little about actual patterns of income inequality in Israel but offer a starting point for exploration.</p>
<p>In the Israeli &#8220;Income Survey of 2011,&#8221; the average salary for the entire population of Israeli Arab males was 50.2 percent of the mean for the entire population of Jewish males. Jewish females on average earned salaries that were 61.8 percent of those of Jewish males. Arab females earned only 34 percent of the salaries of Arab males and 28 percent of the salaries of Jewish females,<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[12]</span> but this was no doubt in part because of part-time employment common among Arab women. Raw household income disparities follow a somewhat different pattern because salaries are only one component of household income. Household income for Arabs was about 55 percent that of Jews. While these raw disparities appear large, they are not unusual when comparing across ethnic populations within countries. The real question remains what is causing them.</p>
<p>There are also disparities in the raw figures among subgroups of Jews, to some extent caused by age structure. The groups with the highest salaries and household incomes are native-born Jews. Those born elsewhere are usually divided between recent immigrants and earlier immigrants. The dividing line for distinguishing recent immigrants is necessarily arbitrary; in the discussion here, the cutoff used is 1990. In the last two decades, the largest group of new immigrants has been from the former Soviet Union. A separate smaller group, about whose economic performance relatively little is known, consists of Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia. These will be separated out here from other immigrants by distinguishing them as recent immigrants born in Africa. This, too, is an imperfect measure, and some Jews from North African countries and from South Africa are probably mixed into this sub-sample definition as well.</p>
<p>Among native-born Israelis, the Ashkenazi males earn 16 percent more than the Mizrahi/Sephardic males. Ashkenazi and Mizrahi females earn exactly the same average salaries, which are about 40 percent lower than for native-born Ashkenazi males. Among foreign-born Jews, Mizrahim earn average salaries 32 percent lower than Ashkenazim for males, and 39 percent lower for females. Women in all population groups earn less than men in the same groups.</p>
<p>So the starting point is a set of seemingly wide disparities in average earnings across Israeli ethnic groups. Jews earn more than Arabs, in fact twice as much on average; women earn less than men; Mizrahim earn less than Ashkenazim. Two additional caveats need to be mentioned. First, these numbers are based on reported salaries. While survey respondents were told the information was confidential and would not be passed on to the tax authorities, it is possible that some of the salary numbers are in fact under-reported. Israel is thought to have a significant underground or unreported economy where cash is earned under the table. For a variety of reasons, including concentrations in occupations in which non-reporting is easier and more common, it is generally believed that non-reporting of income is higher among Arabs than among Jews.</p>
<p>An additional caveat is that disparities across ethnic groups in salaries and in household income are different from disparities in household expenditures. Standards of living are ultimately measured in real consumption rather than in monetary terms, and in Israel, gaps in levels of expenditure among the ethnic groups are considerably smaller than those in salaries or incomes. In addition, intentional under-reporting of income is unlikely to affect reported levels of expenditure, and so these data may be more reliable. The bottom line is that raw inequality among Israeli ethnic groups is considerably smaller when measured in terms of expenditures rather than incomes.</p>
<p style="color: #ad3031;"><b>Analysis of Individual Salary and Earnings</b></p>
<p>To understand properly the role of ethnicity in explaining disparities in earnings, one needs to take into account other non-ethnic factors that affect earnings, notably gender, age, education (measured in several different ways), marital status, number of persons in household, immigration status (new immigrant vs. not), membership in certain elite professions such as manager or engineer, and geographic variables (residence in one of the large cities, in medium-sized towns, etc.). Statistical estimates of the impact upon earnings by individuals of a variety of ethnic, demographic, and other factors are presented in Table 1 below.</p>
<p>First, after controlling for age, education, and other non-ethnic explanatory variables, is it really the case that Arabs underperform in the Israeli labor market when compared with Jews? The answer is generally, no. It does depend on which definition of earnings is being used.</p>
<p>When estimating only salaries for both men and women together (not shown in the table), Arabs do indeed underperform when compared with Jews. The difference is not very large (approximately 450 shekels a month or a bit over $100), and this is very small when compared to the raw disparity between earnings of Jews and Arabs, seen above as being approximately a 100 percent difference. The disadvantage in salary earnings for Arabs is about the same as that experienced by Jewish new immigrants in Israel.</p>
<p>But salaries are only one component of individual earnings. Salaries are what employees receive from employers while &#8220;all individual earnings&#8221; include things such as self-employed income by artisans or shop-owners or owners of proprietary establishments. Such self-employed and proprietary income is probably more common among Arabs than Jews, the latter being more likely to be salaried employees. The numbers in the table here show the results when analyzing all individual earnings from all sources, including such non-salary sources. When controlling for age, schooling, and the other non-ethnic factors, Israeli Arabs outperform Jews on average, earning more than Jews of similar age and schooling levels. Indeed, on average Arabs earn more than both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, about 9 percent higher, other things being equal.</p>
<p>The fact that the labor market disadvantage of Israeli Arabs disappears entirely when total individual earnings (as opposed to salaries alone) are analyzed may be because many Arabs are self-employed.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[13]</span> In any case, it turns out that not only do non-ethnic factors explain the bulk of the raw disparity in earnings between Israeli Arabs and Jews, but in many cases they explain more than the total disparity. In the case of total individual earnings income, they explain more than 100 percent of the raw disparity (meaning that, after controlling for explanatory variables, Arabs actually outperform Jews).</p>
<p>The picture becomes clearer when men and women earners are analyzed separately. This has the advantage of removing gender differences in labor force participation rates from the analysis of the role of ethnicity. The gap in earnings for Arab women compared with Jewish women is quite small when controlling for other variables; it is only about 2 percent to the advantage of Jews. But for males, Arabs are at a 10 percent advantage over Jews in total individual earnings. Again, Arabs outperform Jews.</p>
<div id="attachment_233332" style="width: 318px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/460.jpg"><img class="wp-image-233332 " src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/460.jpg" alt="460" width="308" height="232" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">It is important to distinguish between salaries and earnings. For example, Israeli Arab males may make on average 50 percent less than Israeli Jewish males in salary, but in earnings (which include income sources such as self-employment), they out-perform Israeli Jews by approximately 9 percent on average.</p></div>
<p>Arabs also have a disadvantage compared with Jews when it comes to total household earnings (not shown in the table), as opposed to total individual earnings. But the wider gap at the household earnings level is due to factors outside the labor market. Jews have higher savings rates than Arabs, and thus have higher levels of household capital income.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[14]</span> Jews are also older and so receive on average higher amounts of retirement income. These disparities in non-labor income at the level of households largely reflect differences between Jews and Arabs in savings behavior and household composition and cannot be attributed to labor market discrimination.</p>
<p>What about disparities across ethnic sub-groups of Israeli Jews? The first notable pattern is this: The main group that over-performs compared with others is native-born Israeli Jews or <i>sabra</i>s. Being born in the country confers a distinct earnings advantage in Israel as it does in most other countries. There is a modest advantage in income, about 8 percent for men and 2 percent for women, for those who are native-born Israeli Jews, compared with those who are foreign-born. And this is true for both Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews.</p>
<p>When controlling for other non-ethnic factors, Ashkenazim have a small advantage over Mizrahim among men, about 2 percent for total individual income and 4 percent for salary alone, much smaller than the gap in the raw earnings numbers, and much smaller than the premium enjoyed by native-born Jews. For women, Ashkenazim slightly underperform Mizrahim. More generally, because of the advantage of being a <i>sabra</i>, a native-born Mizrahi Jew would generally outperform a non-native Ashkenazi Jew, other things being equal. When men and women are separated in the analysis of earnings, the &#8220;natives&#8221; retain an earnings advantage among both genders. Mizrahi Jewish women are outperforming the Ashkenazi Jewish women.</p>
<p>Recent immigrants in Israel are at an earnings disadvantage compared to the other population groups. Controlling for age, education, and the other non-ethnic factors, recent immigrants earn about 5.5 percent less in total individual earnings while for salary alone (not shown in the table), they earn 10-14 percent less than other Israelis. The earnings disadvantage is larger for men than for women. Interestingly, immigrants from Africa (mainly Ethiopians) do not suffer from any special earnings disadvantage as compared with the earnings levels of all recent immigrants. All immigrants are at a modest disadvantage in the labor market, but Ethiopians no more so than non-Ethiopian immigrants. When men and women are analyzed separately, Ethiopians slightly outperform the other immigrants.</p>
<p style="color: #ad3031;"><b>Are Israeli Arabs Disadvantaged Because of Schooling?</b></p>
<p>Economists like to describe schooling and degrees as &#8220;human capital,&#8221; and it is possible to measure the returns or market rewards to this capital using statistical methodologies. One issue that has frequently been debated in Israel is whether educated Arabs are at a market disadvantage, since—because of discrimination—they are less capable of capitalizing upon their educational achievements.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[15]</span></p>
<p>Once again, the presumption of discrimination does not survive empirical statistical analysis. The truth is quite the opposite: The return on schooling for Israeli Arabs is generally considerably higher than it is for Israeli Jews. In almost every estimate, using different measures of schooling and of earnings, the return on education appears to be higher for Arabs after controlling statistically for other variables.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[16]</span> This is true both for salaries and for all individual earnings. Since the reward for educational achievement is, if anything, higher for Arabs than for Jews, this rules out the claim of systematic discrimination against Arabs who accumulate human capital and capitalize upon it in the labor market.</p>
<p>The return on schooling is not the same, however, as the reward for membership in elite professions. Arabs, like Jews, who are members of managerial or other professional groups (lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc.) enjoy a significant earnings advantage over those who are not members of these groups. The bonus or premium for Arabs, however, is lower than that for Jews. Discrimination cannot be ruled out as a causal factor here although other factors unrelated to discrimination could also explain these disparities, including differences in distribution among professions within the broader elite professional categories.</p>
<p style="color: #ad3031;"><b>Where Is the Apartheid?</b></p>
<p>The most surprising conclusion from the econometric analysis of ethnic earnings disparities in Israel is how many of the stereotypical characterizations of Israel turn out to be false. Ethnicity in Israel simply does not play a large role in the labor market, in contrast with gender or schooling.</p>
<p>While it is widely presumed that the Arab minority underperforms in the labor market of the Jewish state, either because of discrimination or other structural or cultural disadvantages, this turns out not to be so. That accusation is central to the claim that Israel is some sort of apartheid regime. While the raw mean earnings of Arabs are considerably lower than those of Jews, the two populations differ in many significant ways, including age and schooling, and little can be concluded from this raw comparison on its own. When education, age, marital status, geographic location, and professional group membership are taken into account, Arab-Jewish earnings disparities all but disappear, and in some cases, they even invert, so that the Arabs outperform the Jews. This is particularly true of male earners.If the data fail to show a clear pattern of Arab underperformance in earnings compared with Jews with similar levels of schooling, the stereotype of Ashkenazi Jews outperforming Mizrahi or Sephardic Jews appears just as inaccurate. Once education and the other explanatory variables are controlled, there is very little difference between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim earnings, and in a few cases, particularly for women, Mizrahim outperform Ashkenazi women. The Ashkenazi-Mizrahi distinction certainly appears to be less important in explaining earnings differences than the distinction between native-born Jews and foreign-born Jews or recent immigrants. Here again, there are differences between men and women. Ashkenazi women slightly underperform Mizrahi women, other things being equal, while Ashkenazi men slightly outperform compared with Mizrahi men. The bottom line is that the data do not support the presumption that Mizrahim are systematically disadvantaged in Israeli labor markets.</p>
<p>While new immigrants underperform relative to other Jewish Israelis, other things being equal, Ethiopians do not appear to suffer from any special earnings disadvantage compared with other immigrants. If Ethiopian immigrants earn low levels of salary, it is because they have low levels of schooling. But given their level of schooling, they earn the same on average as immigrants from Russia, South Africa, and Argentina. When estimating total individual income separately for men or for women, the Ethiopians even slightly outperform the other immigrants.</p>
<p>In spite of what statistical analyses have to show, the subject of discrimination in Israel continues to fill the media, which seem to be obsessed with it even while refusing to examine actual data. For example, in the summer of 2013, a television documentary on Israel&#8217;s Channel Ten, produced by popular journalist Amnon Levy, triggered considerable media debate inside Israel. It claimed to have investigated and discovered that anti-Mizrahi discrimination is as bad as it had been back in the early decades of Israeli independence.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[17]</span> Real data show otherwise.</p>
<p>The problem is not just in the media. The academic careers of many in Israel, particularly in sociology, have been constructed entirely upon unsubstantiated allegations of Israeli racism. Israeli sociologists in general tend to accept at face value the notion that any documented disparity in earnings or numerical representation between Israeli Jews and Arabs must be due to discrimination.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[18]</span> Perhaps the most notorious example is that of Yehouda Shenhav, a sociologist at Tel Aviv University. Shenhav is father of the notion that &#8220;Oriental Jews&#8221; are in fact &#8220;Arabs of the Mosaic faith,&#8221; and together with Arabs, share a victimhood imposed upon them by racist Ashkenazi Zionists.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[19]</span> Shenhav and those of similar ideological orientation operate the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow, dedicated to liberating &#8220;Oriental Jews&#8221; from Ashkenazi bigotry and capitalism.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[20]</span></p>
<p>In Israel&#8217;s media, it is considered common knowledge that Arabs, Mizrahim, and Ethiopians are victims of harsh discrimination.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[21]</span> The accusations of apartheid may be malicious, disingenuous, and over-the-top—or so most Israeli commentators and sociologists would agree—but the presumption of an underlying widespread pattern of discrimination is, to their minds, undeniable. The extent to which some in Israel go to manufacture evidence of discrimination can be awe-inspiring. For example, the ordinarily prestigious Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), a left-wing think tank, published a study in May 2013 that claimed to have discovered unambiguous proof of widespread discrimination in Israel against Arabs.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[22]</span> Composed by IDI legal staffer Tanya Steiner under the supervision of Hebrew University professor Mordechai Kremnitzer, the study&#8217;s evidence was the number of complaints about discrimination submitted to the Israeli Commission on Equal Opportunities in Employment. Yet while numerous complaints from women reached the commission, only 3 percent of the complaints it received were from Israeli Arabs, who represent about 18 percent of the labor force. Of these, only three of the complaints received in the entire 2011 year by the commission about alleged anti-Arab discrimination were deemed worthy of investigation. So instead of concluding that the evidence points to an absence of discrimination, the IDI&#8217;s conclusion was that it all proves how badly discriminated Israeli Arabs are in Israel; after all, they are so victimized that they do not even file complaints about discrimination.</p>
<p style="color: #ad3031;"><b>Conclusion</b></p>
<p>There is no evidence that points to ethnic discrimination against Israeli Arabs or Mizrahi Jews in Israeli labor markets. Recent immigrants appear to be the one group in the country at an earnings disadvantage. But it would be difficult to make a case that even their disadvantage is due to discrimination since immigrants in all societies are at a competitive disadvantage compared with natives.</p>
<p>There could be other groups in Israeli society that are victims of discrimination, but the data are not available in a form that allows for investigation. In particular, a plausible case for such discrimination may be that against ultra-Orthodox Jews. Gender discrimination also cannot be ruled out, but that is a separate and difficult methodological question beyond the scope of the discussion here.</p>
<p>The nearly complete absence of evidence of ethnic discrimination in Israeli labor markets does not, of course, preclude its existence in other markets or aspects of society. As was shown here, Arabs earn a higher return on education than Jews. But this does not rule out possible discrimination against Arabs in admissions to universities and colleges. It should be noted, however, that Israeli universities routinely implement affirmative action preferences in favor of Arabs and sometimes in favor of Mizrahim (and women).<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[23]</span> The only other documented university discrimination is that which grants some preferences to army veterans, a practice found in most countries.</p>
<p>There have also been allegations that Israel discriminates in its fiscal allocations and revenue sharing where Arab towns and villages are underfunded. But an empirical analysis of the question found just the opposite; if anything, the Arab local authorities were being over-funded.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[24]</span> Evidence regarding other alleged forms of discrimination by Israel tends to be just as skimpy. Some accusations are based upon Israel&#8217;s granting automatic citizenship to Jews under its &#8220;Law of Return.&#8221; But such citizenship entitlements are not unusual in the world and can be found in many other countries, such as Armenia, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, and are guaranteed under the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Covenant_on_Civil_and_Political_Rights"><span style="color: #2a69a1;">International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights</span></a>.<span style="color: #2a69a1;">[25]</span> Another indictment of Israel concerns the discriminatory nature of its military conscription. Jews and Druse are conscripted into the Israeli military while Arabs may volunteer for service but are not conscripted. Again, this practice may indeed constitute discrimination but that discrimination is against Jews, not against Arabs.</p>
<p>None of this proves that discrimination never exists in Israel against Arabs, against Mizrahi Jews, or anyone else. But the very fact that empirical evidence of discrimination is so hard to discern or observe must itself serve as an important warning indicator about its magnitude or lack thereof.</p>
<p><b>Steven Plaut</b> teaches at the Graduate School of Management at the University of Haifa.</p>
<p style="color: #ad3031;"><b>Table 1: Impact Effect of Various Factors on Salary Earnings for Men and Women</b><span style="color: #2a69a1;"><b>[26]</b></span></p>
<table style="color: #000000; height: 1618px;" border="1" width="566" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154"></td>
<td valign="top" width="115">
<p align="center">(3)</p>
<p align="center">Individual&#8217;s Total Income (includes self-employ and &#8220;other&#8221; income)<br />
– Males and Females</p>
</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">
<p align="center">(1)</p>
<p align="center">Individual&#8217;s Total Income from all Sources<br />
– Males Only</p>
</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">
<p align="center">(3)</p>
<p align="center">Individual Total Income<br />
from all Sources<br />
– Females Only</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Age</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Decreases by 1.3% for each extra year</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">Decreases by 1.1% for each extra year</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">Decreases by 1.5% for each extra year</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Effect of adding one extra year of schooling</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">&#8211;</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">&#8211;</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">Increases 6.0%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Increment for having matriculation diploma (only)</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Decreases by 6.0%</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">Decreases by 7.6%</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">&#8211;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">College graduate dummy (increment over matriculation alone)</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Increases 39.6%</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">Increases 42.5%</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">&#8211;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Postgraduate degree (increment over having BA)</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Increases 10.6%</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">Increases 12.5%</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">&#8211;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Increment for being married</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Increases 44.9%</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">Increases 56.5%</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">Increases 35.5%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Increment for being male</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Increases 35.3%</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">&#8211;</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">&#8211;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Adding one person to household size</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Decreases by 3.6%</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">Decreases by 3.4%</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">Decreases by 3.8%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Increment for being Arab</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Increases 8.5%</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">Increases 9.8%</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">Decreases by 2.1%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Increment for being native born (<i>sabra</i>) Israeli Jew</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Increases 7.3%</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">Increases 8.3%</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">Increases 2.1%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Increment for being Ashkenazi</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Decreases by 0.1%</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">Increases 1.8%</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">Decreases by 3.7%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Increment for residence in Jerusalem</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Decreases by 7.6%</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">Decreases by 15.4%</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">Decreases by 3.2%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Increment for residence in Tel Aviv</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Increases 17.2%</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">Increases 15.0%</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">Increases 20.6%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Increment for residence in Haifa</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Decreases by 13.5%.</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">Decreases by 12.0%</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">Decreases by 15.0%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Increment for being new immigrant (arrived since 1990)</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Decreases by 5.5%</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">Decreases by 7.5%</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">Decreases by 4.3%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Increment for being new immigrant from Africa (over previous increment for being immigrant)</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Decreases by additional 2.9%</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">Increases by 0.3%</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">Increase by 8.1%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Dummy if employed in &#8220;academic&#8221; profession</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Increases 45.7%</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">Increases 45.6%</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">Increases 45.5%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Dummy if employed as &#8220;professional&#8221;</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Increases 31.6%</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">Increases 36.3%</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">Increases 23.7%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Dummy if employed as &#8220;manager&#8221;</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">Increases 75.6%</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">Increases 72.2%</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">Increases 75.9%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154"></td>
<td valign="top" width="115"></td>
<td valign="top" width="104"></td>
<td valign="top" width="117"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="154">Size of sample used for estimates</td>
<td valign="top" width="115">20,069</td>
<td valign="top" width="104">10,424</td>
<td valign="top" width="117">9,703</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<hr style="color: #000000;" align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[1]</span> See, for example, Ayal Kimhi, &#8220;Jewish Households, Arab Households, and Income Inequality in Rural Israel: Ramifications for the Israeli-Arab Conflict,&#8221; <i>Defence and Peace Economics</i>, Aug. 2010, pp. 381-94.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[2]</span> For example, &#8220;<a href="http://adalah.org/upfiles/2011/Adalah_The_Inequality_Report_March_2011.pdf"><span style="color: #2a69a1;">The Inequality Report</span></a>: The Palestinian Arab Minority in Israel,&#8221; Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, Haifa, Mar. 2011.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[3]</span> <i>Digital Journal</i> (Toronto), <a href="http://digitaljournal.com/article/349233"><span style="color: #2a69a1;">May 1, 2013</span></a>.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[4]</span> Yinon Cohen, Yitzhak Haberfeld and Tali Kristal, &#8220;Ethnicity and Mixed Ethnicity: Educational Gaps among Israeli-born Jews,&#8221; <i>Ethnic and Racial Studies,</i> Sept. 1, 2007, pp. 896-917.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[5]</span> Knesset member Zehava Galon of the leftist Meretz party recently introduced a bill that would require all proposals of new legislation in Israel to contain estimates of disparate impact. See<i> Haaretz</i> (Tel Aviv), Apr. 17, 2014.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[6]</span> Ibid.<i>,</i> Sept. 12, 2012.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[7]</span> Ibid., <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/business/.premium-1.531396"><span style="color: #2a69a1;">June 23, </span></a>July 30, 2013; <i>The Jerusalem Post</i>, <a href="http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Meretz-MK-Farij-attacks-racism-in-banking-system-322205"><span style="color: #2a69a1;">June 8, 2013</span></a>.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[8]</span> Thomas Sowell, &#8220;<a href="http://cascourses.uoregon.edu/geog471/pdfs/1206/sowell.pdf"><span style="color: #2a69a1;">The American Mosaic</span></a>,&#8221;<i> Ethnic America: A History</i> (New York: Basic Books, 1981).</p>
<p style="color: #2a69a1;">[9]<span style="color: #000000;"> <a href="http://www1.cbs.gov.il/popisr/table5.pdf">&#8220;Projections of population in Israel for 2010–2025, by sex, age and population group,&#8221;</a> Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv); &#8220;<a href="http://www1.cbs.gov.il/www/statistical/arab_pop08e.pdf">The Arab Population in Israel</a>,&#8221; idem, p. 2.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[10]</span> &#8220;<a href="http://www1.cbs.gov.il/reader/?MIval=cw_usr_view_SHTML&amp;ID=405"><span style="color: #2a69a1;">Economic Characteristics</span></a>,&#8221; Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, accessed Dec. 19, 2013.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[11]</span> &#8220;Income Survey, 2010,&#8221; Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Feb. 2012. Only people earning at least 100 NIS per month in salary are counted in the analysis below, with the others presumed to be absent from the labor force.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[12]</span> Percentages computed by author from data found here: &#8220;<a href="http://www1.cbs.gov.il/reader/?MIval=cw_usr_view_SHTML&amp;ID=419"><span style="color: #2a69a1;">Income of Individuals (Income survey)</span></a>,&#8221; Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Table 25.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[13]</span> Yossi Shavit and Ephraim Yuchtman-Yaar, &#8220;<a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/20628611"><span style="color: #2a69a1;">Ethnicity, Education, and Other Determinants of Self-Employment in Israel</span></a>,&#8221; <i>International Journal of Sociology</i>, Spring, 2001, pp. 59-91.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[14]</span> <i>Haaretz</i>, June 23, 2013.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[15]</span> See, for example, &#8220;Israel Must End Discrimination against Arab College Graduates,&#8221; <i>Haaretz</i>, June 15, 2012.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[16]</span> Pnina O. Plaut and Steven E. Plaut, &#8220;Income Disparities by Ethnicity in Israel,&#8221; <i>Israel Affairs</i>, forthcoming.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[17]</span> <a href="http://panim.nana10.co.il/Article/?ArticleID=995592&amp;sid=267"><span style="color: #2a69a1;"><i>Panim Amitiyot</i></span></a>: <i>Pirakim Milayim</i>, Aug. 22, 2013, Nana 10 web site.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[18]</span> See, for example, Noah Lewin-Epstein and Moshe Semyonov, <i>Stratification in Israel: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender</i> (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 2003), pp. 175-281; idem, &#8220;Local labor markets, ethnic segregation, and income inequality,&#8221; <i>Social Forces</i>, June 1992, pp. 1101–19; Sammy Smooha and Yohanan Peres, &#8220;The Dynamics of Ethnic Inequalities: The Case of Israel,&#8221; in Ernest Krausz, ed., <i>Studies of Israeli Society</i> (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1980), vol. no. 1.</p>
<p style="color: #2a69a1;">[19]<span style="color: #000000;"> Yehouda Shenhav, <a href="http://972mag.com/spineless-bookkeeping-the-use-of-mizrahi-jews-as-pawns-against-palestinian-refugees/56472/">&#8220;Spineless Bookkeeping: The Use of Mizrahi Jews as Pawns against Palestinian Refugees</a>,&#8221; <i>+972 e-magazine</i> (Israel), Sept. 25, 2012.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[20]</span> &#8220;Hakeshet Hademocratit Hamizrahit,&#8221; web site, accessed Dec. 10, 2013.</p>
<p style="color: #2a69a1;">[21]<span style="color: #000000;"> For example, Yitzhak Laor, &#8220;<a href="http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/the-glorious-state-of-israel-and-its-anti-arab-discrimination.premium-1.515462">The Glorious State of Israel and Its Anti-Arab Discrimination</a>,&#8221; <i>Ha&#8217;aretz</i>, Apr. 15, 2013.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[22]</span> Talya Steiner, <a href="http://en.idi.org.il/analysis/idi-press/publications/hebrew-policy-papers/combating-discrimination-against-arabs-in-the-israeli-workforce"><span style="color: #2a69a1;"><i>Combating Discrimination against Arabs in the Israeli Workforce</i></span></a>, Policy Paper No. 97 (Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute, 2003).</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[23]</span> <i>Haaretz</i>, <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/2-000-students-owe-university-place-to-affirmative-action-1.3883"><span style="color: #2a69a1;">Nov. 19, 2009</span></a>; John Rosenberg, &#8220;Affirmative Action … In Israel,&#8221; Discriminations Blog, Sept. 3, 2002; Noga Dagan-Buzaglo, &#8220;<a href="http://www.adva.org/uploaded/Affirmative%20Action%20in%20Israel%20in%20the%20Area%20of%20Employment.pdf"><span style="color: #2a69a1;">Non-discriminatory hiring practices in Israel</span></a> towards Arab Citizens, Ethiopian Israelis and new immigrants from Bukhara and the Caucasus,&#8221; Adva Center, Tel Aviv, Nov. 2008.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[24]</span> Tal Shahor, &#8220;<a href="http://www.stat-d.si/mz/mz7.1/shahor.pdf"><span style="color: #2a69a1;">Fiscal Allotment Policy vis á vis Minorities</span></a>: An Empirical Measurement of the Way in Which Israel&#8217;s Majority Government Makes Its Fiscal Allotments to the Arab Minority,&#8221; <i>Metodološki zvezki</i> (Ljubljana, Slovenia), no. 1, 2010, pp. 73-93; Efraim Karsh, &#8220;Israel&#8217;s Arabs: Deprived or Radicalized?&#8221; <i>Israel Affairs</i>, Jan. 2013, pp. 1-19.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[25]</span> <a href="http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/"><span style="color: #2a69a1;">Universal Declaration of Human Rights</span></a>, United Nations General Assembly, New York, Dec. 10, 1948, art. 14.</p>
<p><span style="color: #2a69a1;">[26]</span> The effects of isolated changes in individual factors while holding all other factors constant. The &#8220;default&#8221; or base case upon which the ethnic increments are computed is for &#8220;Foreign-born Mizrahi Jews.&#8221; The figures in the table should be taken as the best estimate for changes in earnings caused by isolated changes in each individual explanatory factor (ethnicity, gender, and so on) while holding all other factors constant. This shows the isolated effect for Arabs, for example, on earnings while holding schooling, age, and other factors constant. The schooling variable is measured differently for the men-only column (where the effects of achieving degrees are estimated) than for the women-only column (where the effect of an additional year of schooling is estimated). The estimates allow us to see the &#8220;clean&#8221; effects or impacts of ethnicity and other factors upon earnings in Israel because these effects are statistically isolated from the many intermingled effects of the other variables. Estimates taken from regression analysis equations that are elaborated and appear in full in Pnina O. Plaut and Steven E. Plaut, &#8220;Income Disparities by Ethnicity in Israel,&#8221; <i>Israel Affairs</i>, forthcoming.</p>
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		<title>Inconvenient Truths about Race &amp; Slavery</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/inconvenient-truths-about-race-slavery/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=inconvenient-truths-about-race-slavery</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 15 May 2014 04:20:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Where an "honest discussion" about race should start. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/201102_108_Slavery_art.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225522" alt="201102_108_Slavery_art" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/201102_108_Slavery_art.jpg" width="280" height="244" /></a>“The truth is harsh.”</span></p>
<p>So spoke the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, back in the 19<sup>th</sup> century.</p>
<p>On no topic is the truth harsher than on that of race.</p>
<p>The Eric Holders of the world incessantly bemoan the absence of an “honest discussion of race” in America.  But such a discussion, beginning, as it must, with a discussion of slavery, is actually the last thing that they could afford to have, for such a discussion would include facts that would undermine much of the ideologically-invaluable conventional wisdom concerning this topic.</p>
<p>For instance, the very word “slave” stems from “Slav,” i.e. a reference to the experience of millions of (white) <i>Slavish </i>people who endured centuries of slavery at the hands of <i>African </i>Muslims.   This, of course, is a most inconvenient truth, for it is a most Politically Incorrect truth.  But it <i>is</i> the truth.</p>
<p>Yet the Slavish aren’t the only whites who spent centuries in captivity: Europeans of various backgrounds were enslaved by African Muslims as well.  All of this is heavily documented in such neglected pieces of scholarship as Robert Davis’s <i>Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 </i>and Paul Baepler’s <i>White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives. </i></p>
<p>Nor is it just that millions of whites <i>in Europe </i>were made to toil in bondage for hundreds of years.  Don Jordan’s <i>White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America </i>and Michael Hoffman’s <i>They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America </i>impeccably establish that whites were enslaved in colonial America as well.   Moreover, these brave authors show that the conditions that whites, including, most tragically, white <i>children, </i>had to endure both en route to the colonies as well as once they arrived were at least as dreadful as those experienced by Africans.</p>
<p>This last point would as well be included in an honest discussion of slavery.  The word “kidnapping” that is so often, but erroneously, used to describe the circumstances that allegedly resulted in the transportation of Africans to the New World derives from the fact that British children—<i>kids</i>—were regularly “nabbed’ off of the streets of England and sold into slavery in America. <i> </i></p>
<p>An honest discussion of race would mention what no less a figure than black Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates recently discovered: free blacks were in America <i>before </i>slavery.  While researching the book and documentary <i>The African-Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, </i>Gates admits to having been shocked to discover that blacks freely came to America, to Florida, as early as 1513—<i>over 100 years earlier </i>than the standard date of 1619.  And the one black man whose name is now known was a <i>conquistador</i> who came in search of the Fountain of Youth with Ponce de Leon.</p>
<p>Gates also notes that it is simply not true that blacks didn’t become aware of Christianity until they were enslaved by Europeans.  Many Africans who were eventually sold to Europeans—at least one out of four—came from the Kingdom of Angola, where they had been converted to Roman Catholicism as early on as the 15<sup>th</sup> century.</p>
<p>Gates delivers a double whammy to the orthodox line on race and slavery in America when he reveals both that it was the “African elites” who “converted” the African masses to Christianity <i>and </i>that it was these same elites—not European abductors—who sold their fellow black Africans into slavery across the Atlantic.</p>
<p>Of the <i>12.5 million</i> Africans sold during the era of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, Gates further observes, only about <i>388,000</i> were shipped to America.</p>
<p>An honest discussion of race in America would include the fact that whites were slaves, for sure, but it would also have to accommodate the obscene truth that as many as <i>4,000</i> free black families <i>owned </i>slaves in the antebellum South<i>. </i>More stunning still is that, arguably, the first slave master in early America was a black man<i>.</i></p>
<p>Anthony Johnson—a name, doubtless, of which few people today, black or white, would have heard—was an Angolan who was first sold by Africans to Arabs before winding up as an indentured servant in Virginia. There, he attained his freedom, became a planter, and acquired his own indentured servants. One of the latter, John Casor, a black man, served his mandatory seven years—but Johnson refused to set him free. Through a long, windy series of court battles, Johnson succeeded in prevailing upon the courts to declare Casor Johnson’s servant for life<i>.  </i>Slavery was born, as this was the very first time in the colonies when it was legally determined that a person who had committed no crime had to spend the rest of his remaining existence in bondage.</p>
<p>We are a long ways off from having a truly honest discussion of race.  Now we see why.</p>
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		<title>Israel in 1968 &amp; 2014: The Jews Are Alone</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/israel-in-1968-2014-the-jews-are-alone/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=israel-in-1968-2014-the-jews-are-alone</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Feb 2014 05:15:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Revisiting a prescient article by philosopher Eric Hoffer published just after the Six-Day War.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ds-6day_war-41.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218536" alt="ds-6day_war-41" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ds-6day_war-41.jpg" width="222" height="211" /></a>In 1968, a longshoreman named Eric Hoffer wrote an amazing op-ed in the <em>LA Times</em>, which is as relevant today as it was then. He was a non-Jewish American social philosopher who wrote newspaper columns, as well as books. He died in 1983, after writing nine books and winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His first book, The True Believer, published in 1951, is widely recognized as a classic.  Eric Hoffer was one of the most influential American philosophers and free thinkers of the 20th Century. </span></p>
<p>Acclaimed for his thoughts on fanaticism, Hoffer&#8217;s <em>LA</em> <em>Times</em> column from May 26, 1968 is worth rereading. Entitled “Israel’s peculiar position,” he said:</p>
<blockquote><p>The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it.  Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchman. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single one.</p></blockquote>
<p>Indeed, today in the year 2014 we hear about the Palestinian Arab claim for the right of return – yet no one discusses the one million Jews from Arab and Muslim states, who were forced to flee persecution, imprisonment and pogroms. While there is so much talk today about the need for refugees to be protected, Jewish refugees naturally are ignored.</p>
<p>Hoffer further states:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious, it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world. Other nations, when they are defeated, survive and recover but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June [1967], he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>The facts are simply that in 1967, Israel tried desperately to avoid war, endlessly tried to avert it, and this young nation faced threats from the entire world. Israel won the defensive war, and indeed, to the victors go the spoils &#8212; even when they are Jewish.</p>
<p>In 1967, Hoffer said,<i> </i></p>
<blockquote><p><i>There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Blacks are executed in Rhodesia. But, when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one demonstrated against him.  The Swedes, who were ready to break off diplomatic relations with America because of what we did in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore, and ball bearings, and serviced his troops in Norway. The Jews are alone in the world.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>Indeed, in February 2014, in Central Africa, 800,000 Muslims have fled their homes, and an entire nation’s Muslims are endangered.  It’s not news – yet every time the Jews lift a finger to protect themselves, the world goes nuts.  As it was in 1968 when Hoffer wrote this article it is in the year 2014, when the world endlessly condemns and criticizes Israel – the Jews are alone in the world.</p>
<p>As Hoffer concluded, “I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the Holocaust will be upon us all.”<i> </i>Indeed, the enemies of Israel remain the enemies of America – there’s big Satan and little Satan for the Muslim fundamentalists.</p>
<p>And I, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ronn-torossian/">Ronn Torossian</a>, realize that history often repeats itself – and this article from 1968 is just as relevant in 2014 as it was then.</p>
<p>Hoffer said in a later interview that</p>
<blockquote><p>A world that did not lift a finger when Hitler was wiping out six million Jewish men, women, and children is now saying that the Jewish state of Israel will not survive if it does not come to terms with the Arabs. My feeling is that no one in this universe has the right and the competence to tell Israel what it has to do in order to survive. On the contrary, it is Israel that can tell us what to do. It can tell us that we shall not survive if we do not cultivate and celebrate courage, if we coddle traitors and deserters, bargain with terrorists, court enemies, and scorn friends.</p></blockquote>
<p>President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry should heed these words – and stop kowtowing to terrorists.  They’d also do well to leave Israel alone – Israel remains the only country in the world that suffers universal criticism and condemnation.</p>
<p>Just last year Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the international community of &#8220;deafening silence&#8221; in response to Hamas threatening to destroy Israel.  As Netanyahu said: “This weekend the leader of Hamas, sitting next to the Hamas leader of Gaza, a man who praised Osama Bin Laden, this weekend openly called for the destruction of Israel. Where was the outrage? Where were the U.N. resolutions? Where was President Abbas? Why weren&#8217;t Palestinian diplomats summoned to European and other capitals to explain why the PA president not only refused to condemn this but actually declared his intention to unite with Hamas? There was nothing. There was silence and it was deafening silence.&#8221;</p>
<p>Indeed, today as in 1968, Israel is very much alone.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Jamie Glazov&#8217;s</strong> video interview with <b> Mudar Zahran, </b>a secular leader of Palestinians in Jordan who has been living in exile in the UK since 2010. He calls out John Kerry on his Mideast &#8220;Peace&#8221; Plan &#8212; and asks why a U.S. Secretary of State is threatening Israel to commit suicide:<em><br />
</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/2AjTjpmC5q4" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
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		<title>U.S. vs. Christians</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/u-s-vs-christians/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=u-s-vs-christians</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Feb 2014 05:35:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[How Obama's policies are threatening Christians in Syria and elsewhere.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Syrian_Church_Destroyed_03_540x404.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218295" alt="Syrian_Church_Destroyed_03_540x404" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Syrian_Church_Destroyed_03_540x404-450x336.jpg" width="315" height="235" /></a>The Times of London </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/west-bankrolls-free-syrian-army-fightback/story-fnb64oi6-1226820979028">reported Thursday</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that “the West and Gulf states are funding a new military offensive by rebel forces around Damascus in an effort to throw the Assad regime on to the back foot before a second round of Syria peace talks. The assault marks an attempt by the Free Syrian Army and its allies abroad to reassert control after months of rebel infighting.” The chief victim of this funding, however, may not be Bashar Assad, but the nation’s Christians.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The report notes that the Obama government “has established a training base for the FSA, say rebel field commanders. It includes $57 million in cash to pay the rebels.” The U.S. is also supplying weapons: “late last month, the US approved a supply of a big shipment of arms to rebels in Jordan.” This aid is supposed to go to the “moderates” of the Free Syrian Army in order to help them counter Syrian rebel forces that are aligned with al Qaeda.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On the ground in Syria, however, the distinctions between the various anti-Assad groups are often not easy to discern, especially since U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar have “channelled the lion’s share of funding and weapons to hardline religious factions such as the Islamic Front,” and the rebel factions are not fighting each other, but are all fighting against Assad. Another U.S. ally, Turkey, has likewise aided the anti-Assad forces.</span></p>
<p>All these groups are not just battling Assad; they’re also fighting against the nation’s Christians. This is true not just of the al Qaeda groups, but of the Obama-backed Free Syrian Army as well. In July 2013, Free Syrian Army fighters <a href="http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/blog/2013/08/christians-massacred-by-free-syrian-army-terrorists-rebels/">entered the Christian village of Oum Sharshouh</a> and began burning down houses and terrorizing the population, forcing 250 Christian families to flee the area. <a href="http://www.worthynews.com/12470-free-syrian-army-massacre-christian-village">Worthy News reported</a> that just two days later, Free Syrian Army rebels “targeted the residents of al-Duwayr/Douar, a Christian village close to the city of Homs and near Syria’s border with Lebanon….Around 350 armed militants forcefully entered the homes of Christian families who were all rounded-up in the main square of the village and then summarily executed.”</p>
<p>In September 2013, a day after Secretary of State John Kerry praised the Free Syrian Army as “a real moderate opposition,” the <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/09/07/Syrians-Rebels-Kerry-Called-Moderate-Post-Videos-Of-Their-Attack-On-Christian-Town">FSA took to the Internet</a> to post videos of its attack on the ancient Syrian Christian city of Maaloula, one of the few places where Aramaic, the language of Jesus, is still spoken.</p>
<p>This is just the faction Obama is backing. The rebel factions funded by our “allies” Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey behave even worse toward the Christians.</p>
<p>Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch Gregory III Laham, who lives in Damascus, <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/10/syria-islamic-jihadists-plant-bombs-in-confessional-box-of-one-of-the-worlds-oldest-churches">explained in October 2013</a> that the persecution was the result of the perception that the Syrian Christians supported the Assad regime: “Some people are saying that we Christians are the friends of the regime, but we are not, we are just ordinary Syrians, and we pray for all. Besides, even if we are for the regime, that is our right as free people.”</p>
<p>Back in May 2011, the Patriarch wrote to Western leaders <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/05/melkite-patriarch-dont-encourage-mideast-revolutions">asking them</a> not to intervene in Syria: “Our Arab countries are not ready for revolutions, and not even for democracy of the European kind and model. I am asking the West not to encourage revolutions unconditionally here and there in the Arab world.”</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This request went unheeded; yet now the reason why it was so sagacious is abundantly clear. Late in January a delegation of Syrian Christian leaders went to Washington at the invitation of the Westminster Institute and Barnabas Aid in order, according to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.westminster-institute.org/articles/syrian-christian-leaders-in-washington/">a statement</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> issued by the Westminster Institute, “to raise awareness of the humanitarian catastrophe that the Syrian conflict has become, and to explore concrete steps that can be taken by the United States to help end the crisis and to protect Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities in Syria.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">According to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2014/02/gop-sen-apologizes-for-mccain-tantrum-at-syrian-christian-leader-meeting/">a Judicial Watch report</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, at least one of the meetings could have gone better: “Senator McCain, an Arizona Republican, evidently doesn’t want to hear negative stories about the rebels he’s working to arm. So he stormed out of a closed-door meeting with the Syrian clergy officials last week….McCain marched into the committee room yelling, according to a high-level source that attended the meeting, and quickly stormed out. ‘He was incredibly rude,’ the source told Judicial Watch, ‘because he didn’t think the Syrian church leaders should even be allowed in the room.’”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Was McCain lashing out so disgracefully in an attempt to silence his guilty conscience? If he doesn’t have a guilty conscience, he should. He bears primary responsibility for the fact that Obama’s avidity to arm and fund the Free Syrian Army enjoys bipartisan support. There is no national political figure in Washington who is speaking up for the Syrian Christians or pointing out that all the Syrian rebel factions are Islamic jihadists who have vowed to establish an Islamic state in Syria after Assad falls – a state that will impose Islamic law and institutionalize discrimination against and harassment of Christians in a state where they have enjoyed relative freedom and tolerance for decades.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Through all this, American Christian leaders remain largely silent, either ignorant of or indifferent to the suffering of their brethren in Syria and all over the Middle East, and sanguine about the role of the U.S. government in abetting and perpetuating that persecution. One hopes that this will not continue. The only hope for Middle Eastern Christians may be for their American coreligionists to realize before it is too late that to shrug their shoulders and ask, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” does not absolve them of the responsibility to stand for justice even when it is difficult, or harms the “dialogue” they are enjoying with Muslim leaders in this country.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Christians are embattled and defensive in Obama’s America today, but that is no excuse. Churches of all denominations and Christian groups need to pressure their elected representatives to end this madness of aiding the Syrian jihadist rebels. If those rebels prevail, the Christians of Syria will not be their only victims; the reverberations of that victory will ultimately be felt even in the comfortable suburban churches outlying America’s cities. For the global jihad will not, having toppled Assad, hang up its weapons and retire on its laurels. It will, instead, turn to fresh Infidel targets, and not exempt from its wrath fond and foolish Infidels like John McCain, who probably thinks that the FSA owes him a lot of favors and will help him out when the chips are down. It won’t. “The appeaser,” said Winston Churchill, “is the man who feeds a crocodile in the hope that it will eat him last.” The jihadis may eat McCain and all their other Washington friends last. But eat them they will.</span></p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Jamie Glazov&#8217;s</strong> video interview with <strong>Walid Shoebat</strong>, who sheds disturbing light on <strong><em></em></strong>the Obama administration&#8217;s Islamist odyssey, the terror links of Obama&#8217;s brother, Malik Obama, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-FOR-Islamophobia-Americas/dp/0982567960"><em>The Case for Islamophobia,</em></a> and much, much more:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ihfr-yx5aB4" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><strong>To sign up for </strong><em><b>The Glazov Gang</b></em><strong>: </strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Click here</b></a><strong>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Canada Takes Its Place at the Table</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/canada-takes-its-place-at-the-table/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=canada-takes-its-place-at-the-table</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 24 Jan 2014 05:42:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[How Canada's support for Israel has improved the country's geopolitical standing.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/000.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217213" alt="000" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/000.jpg" width="289" height="233" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Canada-takes-its-place-at-the-table-339222">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p>During a press conference with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, an Israeli reporter asked Prime Minister Stephen Harper, “Is Canada paying a price for being so supportive of Israel? Is it possible to support Israel and still have ties to the Arab world?”</p>
<p>This question goes to the heart of what is generally perceived as Israel’s greatest weakness. The Arab boycott of Israel and of countries doing business with Israel has served as one of the most potent weapons in the anti-Israel arsenal for over a generation. Indeed, since the OPEC oil embargo in 1974, it has been the Arabs’ single most powerful weapon in their unceasing campaign for the destruction of the Jewish state.</p>
<p>It was Arab economic bullying that forced African nations to cut their ties with the Jewish state.</p>
<p>It was the Arab use of the oil weapon after the 1973 Yom Kippur War that convinced Western Europe to end its diplomatic support for Israel and throw in with the PLO.</p>
<p>More than anything else, it is the Arab economic boycott of companies that do business with Israel that has eroded Israel’s diplomatic standing over the past two generations and transformed the only human rights respecting democracy in the Middle East into an international pariah.</p>
<p>And yet, under Stephen Harper, as the noose of international isolation is drawn around Israel’s neck more tightly every day, Canada has emerged as an outspoken supporter and defender of the Jewish state.</p>
<p>So in essence, the Israeli reporter’s question to Harper could easily be rephrased as, “Are you crazy?” Harper responded to the question by rejecting its premises – that the Arab world behaves as a bloc, and that standing up for your convictions is a losing proposition when those convictions involve taking unpopular stands.</p>
<p>As he put it, “I wouldn’t want to say there is no price, but my general view of the world is that people respect your view, if you express it appropriately and they understand it’s genuine….The fact of the matter is, Canada has deep relations with many Arab countries…. And frankly [there are] many matters where we probably far more often agree than disagree. So look, I don’t think it’s automatically the view that if you have a particular issue where you disagree, that this needs to rupture relationships irrevocably.”</p>
<p>In other words, what Harper acknowledged was that yes, Canada has lost contracts in some Arab countries due to its support for Israel. But by and large, it hasn’t taken a serious hit.</p>
<p>The obvious follow-up question would have been to ask if Canada gains anything from its support for Israel that can compensate for the economic hits it takes for it.</p>
<p>The answer to that question is yes, Canada, and other countries that support Israel now, when such support is more notable than it was in the past, do gain significantly from their actions. This is true on two levels.</p>
<p>First, economically, Israel is in a far different position than it was 20 years ago. During Harper’s visit, Canada and Israel updated their free trade agreement and signed a number of other agreements enhancing cooperation in multiple fields.</p>
<p>As Netanyahu said, “I think that cooperation makes us both stronger and more prosperous and more secure countries.”</p>
<p>Canada isn’t alone in recognizing the economic potential of good ties with Israel. Consider Norway.</p>
<p>For the past 15 years, Norway has distinguished itself as a trailblazer in the European bid to isolate Israel politically and wage economic warfare against it. Norway was among the first European countries to divest from Israeli companies.</p>
<p>Its trade unions have been leading purveyors of anti-Israel propaganda and economic warfare.</p>
<p>Last fall Norway elected a new conservative government. And under the leadership of Prime Minister Erna Solberg, Norway is seeking to rebuild its ties with Israel. Just after the election, the Israeli embassy in Oslo hosted a meeting of Norwegian and Israeli businessmen. Norway’s new finance minister is interested in cooperation between Norway’s oil industry and Israel’s new natural gas sector.</p>
<p>Norway’s new minister of culture, Thorhild Widvey, held a workshop for 160 Norwegian television producers with Israeli producers who successfully sold Israeli series to the US market.</p>
<p>Disowning the boycott Israel movement, Widvey said, “We don’t see the boycott as an effective tool to promote positive change.”</p>
<p>Today, the economies of the Arab world are collapsing. Fracking technologies are lowering demand for Middle Eastern oil. Political instability is drying up foreign investment and tourism.</p>
<p>And local universities are incapable of producing graduates able to function in the global economy.</p>
<p>As a consequence, the Arabs’ capacity to intimidate governments into rejecting the economic benefits Israel has to offer is steadily decreasing.</p>
<p>Israel’s ability to compensate for potential loss of Arab business is not the main reason why supporting Israel helps Canada. Far more importantly for Canada, support for Israel gives Ottawa a say in global affairs. Canada today has the power to shape the global agenda to a degree it never had before.</p>
<p>Until Harper came along, Canada’s foreign policy was mainly characterized by Ottawa’s enthusiasm for all UN-related things. But Canada’s involvement in the UN never bought it a place at the table.</p>
<p>Down south in Washington, to the extent anyone thought about Canada at all outside the contexts of oil, beer and hockey, it was considered a run-of-the-mill NATO ally which occasionally expressed mild hostility to US power.</p>
<p>Under Harper’s leadership, Canada has become a player in the global arena for the first time. And this achievement owes in large part to his decision to support Israel.</p>
<p>Since the US became the leader of the free world at the end of World War II, several of its loyal allies built up their international position by exerting moral leadership and so convincing – through inspiration or shame – Washington to follow their example.</p>
<p>Britain is the prime example of this model.</p>
<p>Both Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher won Britain a place at the table by staking out moral and strategic positions on Communism and other issues that the US was unable to reject without openly breaking with its own interests and stated goals.</p>
<p>Israel has also managed to stake out a position on the global stage – currently on the issue of Iran’s nuclear weapons program – by pointing out the contradictions between the US’s national interest of cultivating a stable Middle East and its current policy of mollycoddling the mullahs in Tehran while facilitating their nuclear weapons program.</p>
<p>By standing with Israel, Canada is filling a part of the leadership vacuum that the Obama administration has created by stepping away from the US’s responsibilities as the leader of the free world. From the G8 to the UN and beyond, Canada’s support for Israel has enabled Ottawa to influence US and European policy to a degree it never has before.</p>
<p>Canada’s enhanced moral stature was demonstrated this week with UNESCO’s abrupt decision to cancel the opening of an exhibition on the Jewish people’s 3,500-year history in the Land of Israel that was scheduled to open at UNESCO’s Paris Headquarters on Sunday.</p>
<p>Canada, Israel and Montenegro co-sponsored the exhibition which was organized jointly by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and UNESCO.</p>
<p>On January 9, the US rejected the Wiesenthal Center’s request for US co-sponsorship.</p>
<p>Kelly Siekman, director of the Office of UNESCO Affairs at the State Department wrote, “At this sensitive juncture in the ongoing Middle East peace process, and after thoughtful consideration with review at the highest levels, we have made the decision that the United States will not be able to co-sponsor the current exhibit during its display at UNESCO headquarters.”</p>
<p>In other words, the Obama administration opted to reject the historical fact that the Jews are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel in order to promote a peace process with the PLO, which, like the Arab world in general, rejects historical fact in its bid to delegitimize with the aim of destroying the Jewish state.</p>
<p>Five days after Siekman rejected the Wiesenthal Center’s request, the Arab members of UNESCO wrote a letter to UNESCO President Irina Bokova demanding that the exhibition be canceled in the interest of the peace process. Bokova quickly bowed to their will, in the interest of the peace process.</p>
<p>While the administration was quick to condemn UNESCO’s decision, it was left stuttering when the media discovered that UNESCO’s actions were of a piece with the administration’s own policy decision.</p>
<p>The administration’s embarrassment at this revelation was exponentially amplified by the fact that its duplicity, hypocrisy and preference for political expedience over historical facts came to light while Harper was in Israel, since unlike the Obama administration, the Harper government did co-sponsor the canceled exhibition.</p>
<p>Harper emerged from the UNESCO affront to the historical record as an unrivaled force of conscience and as a moral leader on a world stage populated by opportunists, at best. His position served as a warning to the US that its sacrifice of truth on the altar of the peace process will not go unnoticed.</p>
<p>Canada, it should be noted, is not the only country whose support for Israel is distinguishing it as a moral leader and facilitating its rise to a position of global influence. Australia’s new center-right Liberal government is also making a name for itself by rejecting anti-Israel nostrums that have become accepted wisdom despite the fact that they are based on lies.</p>
<p>For years, the false Arab claim that Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines are illegal under international law has gone unchallenged.</p>
<p>But last week, Australian Foreign Minister Julia Bishop dropped a bombshell when, in an interview with The Times of Israel, she broke from the consensus of mendacity saying, “I would like to see which international law has declared them illegal.”</p>
<p>Statements by Australian foreign ministers seldom receive global coverage. But Bishop’s did.</p>
<p>And the more outspoken Australia is in its support for Israel and rejection of the discourse of lies that characterizes the discussion of Israel, the more attention Australia will get and the more influential it will become on the world stage.</p>
<p>Like Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Harper’s decision to support Israel is rooted in his most deeply held convictions about right and wrong. There is nothing opportunistic about his policy.</p>
<p>It is therefore wonderful and empowering that by staying true to his beliefs, Harper is also transforming Canada into a force to be reckoned with on the global stage. Moreover, he is setting an example that will likely be followed by more and more countries, as the benefits of his embrace of Israel become widely recognized.<br />
<em><br />
Caroline Glick’s new book, </em>The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East<em>, is due out on March 4.</em></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Goal of Obama&#8217;s Foreign Policy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/caroline-glick/the-goal-of-obamas-foreign-policy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-goal-of-obamas-foreign-policy</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 26 Nov 2013 05:50:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=211644</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What we can conclude from the Iranian nuke deal. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/131123233322-iran-agreement-04-horizontal-gallery.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-211645" alt="131123233322-iran-agreement-04-horizontal-gallery" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/131123233322-iran-agreement-04-horizontal-gallery-450x305.jpg" width="270" height="183" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Our-world-The-goal-of-Obamas-foreign-policy-332993">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p>It isn’t surprising that the US and the other five powers signed a deal with Iran on Saturday. Over the past few weeks, US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry made it clear that they were committed to signing a deal with Iran as quickly as possible.</p>
<p>And it isn’t surprising that the deal these overeager leaders signed with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism makes the world a much more dangerous place than it was before the agreement was concluded.</p>
<p>With the US and its allies far more eager to reach an accord with Iran on its illicit nuclear weapons program than Iran was, it was obvious from the outset that any deal ultimately reached, at least as long as these negotiating conditions remained in force, would facilitate rather than inhibit Iran’s quest to build a nuclear arsenal. And indeed, the sanctions relief that Iran has gained simply by signing on the dotted line will be sufficient to buffet the Iranian economy through a successful nuclear weapons test.</p>
<p>Iran will achieve nuclear capability while enriching itself through the deal because the deal gives Iran sanctions relief without requiring Iran to make any irreversible concessions. Indeed, Iran just received the international community’s permission to continue to enrich uranium, keep all its nuclear installations open and build new centrifuges.</p>
<p>While the deal isn’t surprising in and of itself, Obama’s decision to conclude it now makes clear the true goal of his foreign policy. To understand that goal, it is first necessary to consider an aspect of the deal that, on the surface, makes little sense.</p>
<p>The negotiations with the Iranians that culminated in Saturday night’s agreement went on for a year.</p>
<p>And yet, the final deal reflects Iran’s opening positions.</p>
<p>That is, over the course of the entire year, American and European negotiators were not able to move Iran’s positions one iota.</p>
<p>So what has the Obama administration been doing for the past year? Since Iran’s positions were the same all along, why didn’t they sign this deal a year ago? The US’s strength relative to Iran did not diminish significantly since a year ago. So the US didn’t need this agreement more now than it did a year ago.</p>
<p>Clearly, Obama did not spend the last year trying to build domestic American support for a deal that enables the regime that calls daily for the annihilation of America to become a nuclear power. With Iran building military bases all over Central and South America, Obama never bothered trying to make the case to the American people that they would be more secure with this regime in possession of the capacity to kill millions of Americans with one bomb.</p>
<p>Obama never stood before the Congress to explain how a deal that gives America’s Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to Iran’s illicit nuclear weapons program advances US national security. He never explained how allowing Iran to continue to enrich uranium decreases the likelihood of war.</p>
<p>So what did Obama need the last year for? If he wasn’t concerned with getting a less dangerous deal, and he didn’t care what the American people though about his facilitation of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, what prevented him from okaying the agreement last year? To ascertain the answer, it is worth considering Finance Minister Yair Lapid’s comments Sunday morning. Beyond noting the nuclear deal’s danger to Israel’s security, Lapid said, “I am worried not only over the deal but that we have lost the world’s attention.”</p>
<p>And indeed, Israel has lost the world’s attention. Its appropriately deep concerns over Iran’s nuclear behavior were belittled, ignored and derided, first and foremost by the Obama administration. Worse than belittling Israel’s concerns, which are completely shared by the Sunni Arab world, Obama and Kerry have castigated as warmongers those Americans who agree with Israel’s concerns and have attacked them as traitors who seek to push America into an unnecessary war. At the same time, they have presented the dispute as one of Israel against the rest of the world, ignoring that the Sunni Arab world shares Israel’s concerns.</p>
<p>Statements to this effect from US officials have been legion since the details of the deal were first divulged to Israel and the Gulf States by the French and the British three weeks ago.</p>
<p>The brazenness of these anti-Israel statements points to the main action that Obama and his advisors have engaged in for the past year, while not moving Iran a millimeter from its opening position at the nuclear talks.</p>
<p>Over the past year, Obama has engaged in systematically weakening Israel’s position both regionally and in Washington. Regionally, the US has forced Israel into talks with the Palestinians that are engineered to weaken Israel strategically and diplomatically. The US has delegitimized Israel’s legal rights to sovereignty and self-defense, while effectively justifying Palestinian terrorism as a legitimate response to Israeli actions – which themselves were perfectly legal. So, too, the US has given a green light to the EU’s illegal, discriminatory economic war against Israel.</p>
<p>Beyond that, the Obama administration has significantly expanded the prospect of war between Israel and Syria by leaking Israeli strikes against Syrian targets that posed a threat to Israel’s security.</p>
<p>The US has also weakened Israel’s capacity to take steps short of war to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons possessing state by leaking key components of Israel’s covert operations against Iran’s nuclear program.</p>
<p>In the US, the Obama administration has targeted Israel’s American supporters. This has been advanced, first and foremost, by actively weakening AIPA C. As Lee Smith explained in Tablet, the administration has taken three key steps to neutralize AIPA C as an effective force in Washington.</p>
<p>It has supported J Street and so legitimized anti-Israel policymaking.</p>
<p>Obama appointed outspoken critics of the US-Israel alliance to key positions in his national security team. First and foremost in this arena was his appointment of Chuck Hagel to serve as defense secretary.</p>
<p>Finally, Obama discredited AIPA C, painting it as an unthinking warmonger by forcing the group to lobby Congress to support his helter-skelter rush to war against Syria. The coup de grace was Obama’s sudden abandonment of his plans to bomb Syria, which left AIPA C high and dry, looking like an anti-Semitic caricature of itself.</p>
<p>The culmination of this long process of delegitimizing Israel as a warmongering, ungrateful ally and its supporters as turncoats who are forcing the US to endanger itself for the benefit of the Jewish state was the administration’s hysterical campaign against Israel and its supporters in the lead-up to Saturday’s signing ceremony in Geneva. Everyone, from the White House to Kerry, accused Israel and its supporters of trying to force the US to fight an unnecessary war.</p>
<p>When we consider Obama’s decision to wait for a year to sign the deal that enables Iran to become a nuclear power in the context of his main activities over the past year, we understand his foreign policy.</p>
<p>His goal is not to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. It isn’t even to facilitate a rapprochement between America and Iran. The goal of Obama’s foreign policy is to weaken the State of Israel.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Academic Bolshevism in Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-dror-yemini/academic-bolshevism-in-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=academic-bolshevism-in-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Nov 2013 04:30:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben-Dror Yemini]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209496</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Radical Left liquidates Israeli academic freedom.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ac.jpeg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-209508" alt="ac" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ac.jpeg" width="275" height="344" /></a><i>The following is a translation by Steven Plaut of excerpts from Maariv editor Ben Dror Yemini&#8217;s </i><a href="http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/518/846.html?hp=1&amp;cat=479"><i>recent column:</i></a></p>
<p>In a certain Israeli university department, a seminar included the presentation of &#8220;field research&#8221; on the subject of Israeli colonialism under the occupation.  The seminar was conducted by a professor who is active in the BALAD (Arab fascist &#8212; SP) party and his two course assistants were radical leftist activists.  The &#8220;field research&#8221; for the course was funded by radical leftist organizations.</p>
<p>In a different school a book was published containing articles about the Israeli control of the occupied territories.  Every single chapter, with no exceptions, was written by radical leftists.  In a different school of social sciences, 10 out of the 11 members of the faculty are radical leftists.  In the past and following complaints from students, we exposed the fact [in Maariv] that a &#8220;law clinic&#8221; is being operated by the University of Haifa that is an extension and subsidiary of the [radical Arab nationalist, anti-Israel -- SP] ADALAH organization.  This is the same department that in the past cancelled the singing of the national anthem at graduation ceremonies.  All the above is just a very small sample.  New findings indicate that the problem is worsening.</p>
<p>What is interesting and fascinating is the automatic Pavlovian reaction of all the spokespersons and officials &#8212; that it is all just academic freedom.  [… ] Yes of course having a marketplace for competing ideas is essential.  The problem is that the competition of ideas is disappearing.  In many a department in the social sciences, there exists hegemony by anti-Zionist and post-Zionist ideology.</p>
<p>In a certain academic journal recently an article written by a professor who is a member of MERETZ was rejected because it carried some Zionist content.  In other journals, articles that do not toe the line and sing the anti-Zionist tune are rejected by an editor who is part of the anti-Zionist choir.  The university heads, who are not part of this trend, are living in denial. [… ] The result is the liquidation of academic freedom.</p>
<p>In Israeli academia, anyone who is not a member of the bolshevik horde has difficulties finding positions and getting in, and his articles will not get published, or he will simply be treated as an outcast.  So the problem here is not heterodox ideas and opinions, or even the university law clinic that functions as an extension of a radical political organization.  The problem is quite simply that Israel is losing its academic freedom, which is being replaced by academic bolshevism.  Because there is not the slightest chance in hell that any university will ever open a law clinic that is under the control of some radical rightwing organization, and it is good that this is so.  But every case of &#8220;collaboration&#8221; is always in a single direction, that with radical leftist organizations.</p>
<p>It is quite possible that the &#8220;Im Tirtzu&#8221; student group is, as the university chiefs claim, interested in provocations.  Fine &#8212; let the university chiefs prove that their charges are false.  Come show us cases of collaboration between university units and NGOs that are <em>not</em> from the radical left, similar to the collaboration between the University of Haifa Law School and ADALAH.  To demonstrate for us the pluralism that is flowering. But the universities have nothing to say in their defense besides charges of &#8220;provocations&#8221; and &#8220;McCarthyism.&#8221;  There is something very, very alarming going on in Israeli academia and it is nothing less than the suppression of academic freedom.</p>
<p>It was only last year that the bolshevik campaign succeeded in stifling criticism of the Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University.  And it does not matter <em>who</em> is expressing the criticism.  It is not only in response to criticism from right-wing NGOs that the kneejerk reactions proliferate.  It was exactly the same reaction when the critics were a panel of international experts.  In fact it is the same reaction heard when even professors from the sane moderate Left speak out.</p>
<p>[…]</p>
<p>The problem is that all these activities and &#8220;collaborations&#8221; with NGOs always are in a single direction with a single ideology.  The problem is the absence from the university course syllabi of publications that do not toe the ideological line of the leftist choir.  The problem is that students feel intimidated and stifled.  This is not academic freedom but rather its diametrical opposite.</p>
<p>[Yemini ends the column with a quote he heard from a man who recently served as the head of an Israeli university and admitted to him that the radical Left is exercising hegemony over Israeli academic institutions.  Yemini says that they <em>all</em> know this is true.]</p>
<div>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>How Historic Revisionism Justifies Islamic Terrorism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/raymond-ibrahim/how-historic-revisionism-justifies-islamic-terrorism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-historic-revisionism-justifies-islamic-terrorism</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Oct 2013 04:35:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Islam: the great "liberator" of the Middle East? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/koran-kalashnikov-500x332.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209168" alt="koran-kalashnikov-500x332" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/koran-kalashnikov-500x332.jpg" width="256" height="198" /></a>How important, really, is history to current affairs?  Do events from the 7<sup>th</sup> century—or, more importantly, how we understand them—have any influence on U.S. foreign policy today?</span></b></p>
<p>By way of answer, consider some parallels between academia’s portrayal of the historic Islamic jihads and the U.S. government’s and media’s portrayal of contemporary Islamic jihads.</p>
<p>While any objective appraisal of the 7<sup>th</sup> century Muslim conquests proves that they were just that—conquests, with all the bloodshed and rapine that that entails—the historical revisionism of modern academia, especially within Arab and Islamic studies departments, has led to some portrayals of the Muslim conquerors as “freedom-fighters” trying to “liberate” the Mideast from tyrants and autocrats. (Beginning to sound familiar?)</p>
<p><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=WZdDbmxe_a4C&amp;pg=PA59&amp;lpg=PA59&amp;dq=muslim+liberated+egypt+from+byzantines&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=yb0e1LAGcv&amp;sig=1rwK4wI9IVz09E0CE7KFatTogqQ&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=DIRpUrCuEsWX2QX4poCYCA&amp;ved=0CFYQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&amp;q=muslim%20liberated%20egypt%20from%20byzantines&amp;f=false">Today’s approach</a> to teaching the history of the Muslim conquests of the 7<sup>th</sup> century is something as follows: Yes, the Mideast was Christian, but local Christians helped Arab Muslims invade and subjugate their countries in preference to Christian Byzantine rule, which was oppressive due to doctrinal disagreements over the nature of Christ.  Hence, the Muslim conquerors were actually “liberators.”</p>
<p>This perspective, as with many modern Western perspectives concerning Islam, is a product of modern day epistemic distortions, chief among them: 1) repackaged narratives of the “noble savage” myth—yes, 7<sup>th</sup> century Muslim invaders were coarse, but had elevated ideals, including a fierce love for freedom and religious tolerance in comparison to Christians of the time (not to mention now); and 2) entrenched political correction that seeks to <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/surreal-and-suicidal-modern-western-histories-of-islam/">whitewash the true history of Islam</a> followed by the uncritical acceptance of Islamic apologetics, <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/were-conquered-christians-really-liberated-muslims/">some of which border on the absurd</a>.</p>
<p>Of course, before the Islamic “liberator” thesis had become mainstream, historians such as Alfred Butler, author of <i>The</i> <i>Arab Conquest of Egypt</i>, had this to say about it:</p>
<blockquote><p>Even in the most recent historians it will be found that the outline of the story [of the 7<sup>th</sup> century conquest of Egypt] is something as follows:… that the Copts generally hailed them [Muslims] as deliverers and rendered them every assistance; and that Alexandria after a long siege, full of romantic episodes, was captured by storm. Such is the received account. It may seem presumptuous to say that <i>it is untrue from beginning to end, but to me no other conclusion is possible</i>. (emphasis added; pgs. iv-v).</p></blockquote>
<p>In fact, one of the major themes throughout Butler’s <i>Arab Conquest of Egypt</i>—which, published in 1902, is heavily based on primary sources, Arabic and Coptic, <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/52/islam-a-short-history">unlike more modern secondary works</a> that promote the Islamic “liberator” thesis—is that “there is not a word to show that any section of the Egyptian nation viewed the advent of the Muslims with any other feeling than terror” (p. 236).</p>
<p>Butler and other politically incorrect historians were and are aware of the savage and atrocity-laden nature of the Islamic conquests.  The Coptic chronicler, John of Nikiu, a contemporary of the Arab conquest of Egypt and possibly an eyewitness, wrote:</p>
<blockquote><p>Then the Muslims arrived in Nikiu [along the Nile]…  seized the town and slaughtered everyone they met in the street and in the churches—men, women, and children, sparing nobody.  Then they went to other places, pillaged and killed all the inhabitants they found….  But let us say no more, for it is impossible to describe the horrors the Muslims committed…”</p></blockquote>
<p>Nonetheless, today’s accepted narratives do not come from antiquated historians or primary historical texts; they come from the <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=13551">Saudi-funded ivy league</a>— Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, Georgetown, Harvard, Princeton, etc.—all of which peddle pro-Islamic propaganda (I personally had direct experience at Georgetown), including the “freedom loving jihadis” vs. “oppressive tyrants” thesis.</p>
<p>Percolating out of liberal academia to liberal mass media, the effects of this well-entrenched but false narrative have taken their toll, ultimately helping to create a disastrous U.S. foreign policy.</p>
<p>Put differently, the Islamic terrorists waging jihad against autocratic (but secular, religiously tolerant) governments—most notably in Syria today—are easily portrayed in the West as “freedom fighters” against oppressive tyrants and thus deserving of U.S. support in great part because this motif has permeated the social consciousness of America—as molded by <a href="http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1408320/posts">Hollywood</a> and the <a href="http://www.humanevents.com/2013/09/03/fox-news-asks-raymond-ibrahim-why-christians-persecute-muslims/">news rooms</a>—thanks to the academic distortion of events that took place nearly fourteen centuries ago.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Islamic “freedom fighters” are <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=528121740608901">slaughtering</a>, <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/new-fatwa-permits-rape-of-non-sunni-women-in-syria/">raping</a>, <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/syrias-graphic-beheading-videos/">beheading</a>, <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/al-qaeda-promises-to-slaughter-christians-after-u-s-liberates-syria/">persecuting and plundering</a>—<i>just as they have been for </i><a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/surreal-and-suicidal-modern-western-histories-of-islam/"><i>nearly fourteen centuries</i></a>.</p>
<p>That is the only unwavering constant in this sad story.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss Jamie Glazov&#8217;s video interview with Raymond Ibrahim about how Obama enables Islam&#8217;s new war on Christians:</em></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/i-UBjuUOBHw" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></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>How Liberal Jewish Groups Harm America and Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/how-liberal-jewish-groups-harm-america-and-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-liberal-jewish-groups-harm-america-and-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Jul 2013 04:10:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why must the Jewish state always be the first to sacrifice?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/9154299550_5e95f151fc_b-e1372361582802.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-198786" alt="9154299550_5e95f151fc_b-e1372361582802" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/9154299550_5e95f151fc_b-e1372361582802-450x345.jpg" width="315" height="241" /></a>The liberal American Jewish establishment continues to manipulate the public, via their allies in the liberal media, by falsely claiming that American Jews support the upcoming Middle East peace talks. Patriotic Americans (including American Jews) may indeed want peace talks in the Middle East – in countries like Egypt and Syria where significant American interests in the region are in danger. Despite the fact that liberal Jewish lemmings issue press releases indicating they haven’t learned from history and ignore political reality on the ground in the Middle East, American Jews do not support endangering Israel at a time when Western interests are so endangered in the region.</p>
<p>Listening to the loud-mouths of the Israel Policy Forum (IPF), one may wrongly believe that the Oslo peace process was a success.  Universally, Oslo is regarded as a colossal failure, where violence continues in part because of this catastrophic disaster.</p>
<p>Surely, American interests in the region aren’t in a better place by Israel, our one secure ally in the Middle East, further sacrificing. Despite countless bus bombings, dead Jews and continued violence, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/liberals-ignore-middle-east-racism-discrimination/" target="_blank">liberal Jews</a> feel the overwhelming need to repeat their mistakes. A mouthpiece of the Democratic Party, the IPF continues with its supposed mission of “ensuring Israel’s future as a strong, secure, Jewish and democratic state which requires achieving a lasting two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.”</p>
<p>With no regard for negotiating at the negotiating table, the IPF shares its pressure on Israel loudly and foolishly. A cursory review of the IPF website makes no mention of the current events taking place in Iran, Egypt, Syria or the entire region in crisis.  What Egyptian coup? 100,000 dead Syrians? Iranian bomb? All non-factors for these blind liberal American Jews. Even if one were to assume (wrongly) that the Palestinian Arabs want peace, the IPF makes no mention of any dispute that exists between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, nor how to solve these issues.  Nor does the group consider what would happen if, heaven forbid, Islamic interests were to control even more of the precarious Middle East.</p>
<p>The IPF’s most recent anti-Israel action was sending a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu signed by 140 prominent American Jews which states, in part, “We recognize that achieving a two-state solution will require a territorial compromise that provides for a Palestinian state without jeopardizing Israel’s security. That is why we applaud your understanding that one must be ‘willing to make painful compromises to achieve this historic peace.’” Even if they feel this way, why tell Israel to sacrifice before even getting to the table? These press-hungry, self-appointed leaders seek support for previously failed policies, endangering America and Israel. Noteably, the IPF sent no letter to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Iranian leaders, or Muslim Brotherhood leaders calling on them to stop violence.</p>
<p>Similarly, the self-proclaimed “premier global Jewish advocacy organization,” the American Jewish Committee (AJC) has loudly, proudly (and shamefully) condemned Naftali Bennett, a democratically elected Israeli senior cabinet minister who recently spoke out against a Palestinian state.  These liberals care so much about democracy – except in Israel where they cannot accept a right-wing government, instead giving cover to Islamic anti-American forces.</p>
<p>These organizations harm Israel’s interests with their open letters and press releases, which are picked up by the media and used to further pressure Israel. These anti-Israel <a href="http://ronntorossian.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">public relations</a> activities strengthen Israel’s opponents, who can falsely claim American Jews support them and point to a division between American Jews and Israel. What pro-America or pro-Israel interest can this possibly serve?</p>
<p>The reality is that these liberals represent a small percentage of American Jews. Rest assured, the Orthodox aren’t included in these organizations. If one surveyed synagogues in America on any Shabbat, there’d be a considerable gap between the IPF and the AJC positions and Jews who observe Jewish traditions. Neither the IPF nor the AJC have the gumption to support American interests in the region by demanding peace between Arabs and Arabs or Arabs and Iranians before calling on Israel to sacrifice.</p>
<p>America’s best interests can be served by peace in the region, but it will not be accomplished by Israel sacrificing further. Will the peace-loving people in the Arab world all of a sudden start singing kumbaya once a peace treaty is signed with Israel? Or maybe, just maybe, will they then look to further harm America, which supports religious freedoms, women’s rights and a free way of life?  As a <a href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/07/25/five-proud-20th-century-jews-who-changed-the-world/" target="_blank">proud American Jew</a>, it is time organizations like the IPF and the AJC finally wake up and realize that with Syria, Egypt and the Middle East in chaos the problem in the Middle East isn’t with Israel – it’s with the Arabs. These elitist liberal American Jewish organizations harm American and Israeli interests.</p>
<p>As Benjamin Netanyahu once said, “The truth is that if Israel were to put down its arms there would be no more Israel. If the Arabs were to put down their arms there would be no more war.”</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>The Mendacious Roger Cohen</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ari-lieberman/the-mendacious-roger-cohen/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-mendacious-roger-cohen</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Jul 2013 04:17:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The New York Times’ resident mullah apologist plays fast and loose with the facts.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/3725747733_30d1575517.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-198517" alt="3725747733_30d1575517" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/3725747733_30d1575517-450x327.jpg" width="270" height="196" /></a>Roger Cohen is at it again. The Islamic Republic’s <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/ari-lieberman/roger-cohen-and-the-new-york-times-useful-idiots/">favorite columnist</a> and mullah apologist is up to his old antics, criticizing Israel and its democratically elected Prime Minister, while giving the Palestinian Authority’s unelected strongman, Mahmoud Abbas, a free pass. It seems that whenever the banal and unimaginative Cohen runs out of material, he reverts to his default favorite past time of criticizing the only democracy in the Middle East, while skewing or ignoring the facts so that they comport with his convoluted views.</p>
<p>Cohen’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/opinion/global/roger-cohen-the-two-state-imperative.html?hp&amp;_r=1&amp;">latest drivel</a> centers on the so-called “two-state imperative” and how Israel risks losing its Jewish and democratic character if the scheme is not implemented in expeditious fashion. To make his point, Cohen cites skewed and misleading Arab demographic figures and notes that there are currently 4.4 million Arabs living in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Where Cohen gets this dubious figure from is unclear. Moreover, Cohen fails to note that Israel no longer “occupies” Gaza, having withdrawn its military forces and civilian residents in 2005. There is not a single Jew living in Gaza. Gaza is officially <i>Juderein</i>, as the Nationalist Socialists would say. Consequently, Gaza’s 1.4 million residents cannot and should not be included when computing demographics.</p>
<p>That leaves us with Judea &amp; Samaria (the &#8220;West Bank&#8221; in Cohen’s vernacular) and East Jerusalem. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), there are 2.6 million so-called Palestinians residing in these areas. Yet when we subtract Gaza’s population (1.4 million) from Cohen’s initial count (4.4 million) we are left with 3 million residents, representing a 400,000 discrepancy between the PCBS and Cohen’s figures.  As I stated, Cohen is opaque when it comes to providing sources and he offers no explanation for such a glaring discrepancy.</p>
<p>The PCBS’s figures themselves are highly suspect. The PCBS is an agenda-driven arm of the Palestinian Authority. Its methods are dubious and motivations suspect. For example, the PCBS’s census data on Judea and Samaria include some <a href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/04/08/israel%E2%80%99s-jewish-demography-defies-projections/">400,000</a> overseas residents. It also includes 300,000 residents of East Jerusalem, who are already counted as Israeli Arabs by Israel’s CBS. Consequently, even assuming that the PCBS figure of 2.6 million is accurate – and there is ample reason to doubt its veracity – that count must necessarily be reduced by 700,000 (300,000 double counted Jerusalem residents + 400,000 overseas residents) bringing the total figure down to 1.9 million residents. That’s a far cry from Cohen’s original 4.4 million. Moreover, Cohen neglects to note, likely deliberately, that according to the most recent data, the average Jewish woman in Israel is having <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Israels-fast-evolving-demography-320574">more children</a> than the average Arab woman. Cohen’s fear-mongering, demographic boogeyman falls short and represents nothing but the same old banality from self-hating pseudo-intellectuals, afflicted with a variant of <a href="http://israel-thrives.blogspot.com/2012/04/dan-has-some-words-jewish-stockholm.html">Stockholm Syndrome</a>.</p>
<p>This isn’t the first time that Cohen has played fast and loose with numbers. In the context of Israel’s 2008-09 anti-terror Gaza offensive, Cohen <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/ari-lieberman/enough-of-roger-cohens-anti-israelism/">routinely cites</a> casualty figures noted by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, a partisan, virulently anti-Israel group. What he deliberately fails to note is that the PCHR figures have been <a href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/terrorism/pages/vast_majority_palestinians_killed_operation_cast_lead_terror_operatives_26-mar-2009.aspx">vociferously disputed</a> and that even by Hamas’s <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/hamas-admits-600-700-of-its-men-were-killed-in-cast-lead-1.323776">own account</a>, more than half of those killed in the fighting were Palestinian combatants.</p>
<p>Cohen begins and ends his column with references to Nelson Mandela. The symbolism here is difficult to ignore and cannot be understated. He is quite clearly using the reference to equate democratic Israel with the Apartheid relic.  The Apartheid analogy is often regurgitated ad nauseam in <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/05/29/the-color-of-anti-semitism-part-two-alice-walker-92nd-street-y/">BDS forums</a> and among International Solidarity Movement (ISM) types and its acceptance is regulated to a marginal, mostly anti-Semitic, <a href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/05/21/prominent-israel-hater-alice-walker-believes-world-run-by-reptilian-space-aliens/">lunatic fringe</a>. Cohen, well-crafted in the art of self-preservation, knows full well that the analogy is beyond defamatory and that is why he attempts to forward the platitude in subliminal fashion. To openly accuse Israel of practicing Apartheid (or moving in that direction) would only serve to invite a flurry of rightful indignation and further tarnish his <a href="http://forward.com/articles/111452/roger-cohen-digs-himself-deeper/">already battered</a> image.</p>
<p>Lastly, Cohen’s article ignores the 800-pound gorilla in the room. He implies that Prime Minister Netanyahu is rejectionist, but offers no such criticism for the duplicitous, <a href="http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/exposing-abbas-5335">Holocaust-denying</a> Abbas. I <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ari-lieberman/the-palestinian-endgame-exposed/">recently authored</a> a piece detailing the Palestinian Authority’s endgame. In it, I argued that the Palestinian Authority views the peace process in tactical rather than strategic terms, a way of securing “Palestine” in its entirety through guile, double-speak and subterfuge, from the “<a href="http://www.pierrerehov.com/ftrtts.htm">River [Jordan] to the [Mediterranean] Sea</a>.” Past statements – some of which thought to have been off-record – by Yasser Arafat and other high level Palestinian officials lend credibility to this notion.</p>
<p>Indeed, any lingering doubts about the Palestinian Authority’s nefarious intentions were confirmed by the PA’s Religious Endowments Minister, Mahmoud al-Habbash. In a Friday sermon delivered just days ago, Habbash <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=Q86jQX6GJKA#at=85">equated</a> negotiations with Israel to a medieval pact signed between Muhammad and his rivals, which he violated once achieving sufficient strength and military parity. Arafat had issued <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/316/al-hudaybiya-and-lessons-from-the-prophet-muhammads">similar statements</a> in 1994 (barely a year after signing an agreement with Israel) in what he thought was an off-record talk in a Johannesburg mosque.</p>
<p>More astonishing than the statements, however, was the fact that they were made in the presence of Abbas and much of his cabinet without protest; similar to the way Egypt’s now deposed Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohammed Morsi, <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/in-morsis-presence-egyptian-preacher-urges-allah-destroy-the-jews/">mouthed concurrence</a> with a sermon that called for the destruction of the Jews. There are just two differences between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Hamas officials do not wear ties and are brutishly honest when it comes to their intentions concerning the “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5tqi84fJak">descendants of apes and pigs</a>.” PA officials are more polished, with tailored Italian suits. They speak with forked tongues and their smiles and handshakes belie their true pernicious intentions.</p>
<p>Roger Cohen is either mendacious or willfully ignorant. The facts are indisputable yet Cohen chooses to obfuscate and ignore. Perhaps Cohen should take a more circumspect look at the decrepit state of the Arab world before advocating for a twenty-third Arab state, one whose maximalist goal seeks the annihilation of the Middle East’s only democracy and expulsion or subjugation of its indigenous inhabitants.</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>Christian Tragedy in the Muslim World</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/christian-tragedy-in-the-muslim-world/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=christian-tragedy-in-the-muslim-world</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/christian-tragedy-in-the-muslim-world/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Jul 2013 04:40:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslims]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[persecution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=198283</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim's invaluable exposé on the new "Great Persecution" of Christians. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/church-burning1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-198284" alt="church-burning1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/church-burning1.jpg" width="257" height="190" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/152651">Hoover Institution Journal</a>.</em></p>
<p><strong>To order Raymond Ibrahim’s <em>Crucified Again</em>, <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=8ZHEY5TSMB9H">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Few people realize that we are today living through the largest persecution of Christians in history, worse even than the famous attacks under ancient Roman emperors like Diocletian and Nero. Estimates of the numbers of Christians under assault range from 100-200 million. According to one estimate, a Christian is martyred every five minutes. And most of this persecution is taking place at the hands of Muslims. Of the top fifty countries persecuting Christians, forty-two have either a Muslim majority or have sizeable Muslim populations.</p>
<p>The extent of this disaster, its origins, and the reasons why it has been met with a shrug by most of the Western media are the topics of Raymond Ibrahim’s <i>Crucified Again.</i> Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an associate fellow of the Middle East Forum. Fluent in Arabic, he has been tracking what he calls “one of the most dramatic stories” of our time in the reports and witnesses that appear in Arabic newspapers, news shows, and websites, but that rarely get translated into English or picked up by the Western press. What he documents in this meticulously researched and clearly argued book is a human rights disaster of monumental proportions.</p>
<p>In <i>Crucified Again</i>, Ibrahim performs two invaluable functions for educating people about the new “Great Persecution,” to use the label of the Roman war against Christians. First, he documents hundreds of specific examples from across the Muslim world. By doing so, he shows the extent of the persecution, and forestalls any claims that it is a marginal problem. Additionally, Ibrahim commemorates the forgotten victims, refusing to allow their suffering to be lost because of the indifference or inattention of the media and government officials.</p>
<p>Second, he provides a cogent explanation for why these attacks are concentrated in Muslim nations. In doing so, he corrects the delusional wishful thinking and apologetic spin that mars much of the current discussion of Islamic-inspired violence.</p>
<p>Ibrahim’s copious reports of violence against Christians range across the whole Muslim world, including countries such as Indonesia, which is frequently characterized as “moderate” and “tolerant.” Such attacks are so frequent because they result not just from the jihadists that some Westerners dismiss as “extremists,” but from mobs of ordinary people, and from government policy and laws that discriminate against Christians. Rather than <i>ad hoc</i> reactions to local grievances, then, these attacks reveal a consistent ideology of hatred and contempt that transcends national, geographical, and ethnic differences.</p>
<p>In Afghanistan, for example, where American blood and treasure liberated Afghans from murderous fanatics, a court order in March 2010 led to the destruction of the last Christian church in that country. In Iraq, also free because of America’s sacrifice, half of the Christians have fled; in 2010, Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad was bombed during mass, with fifty-eight killed and hundreds wounded.</p>
<p>In Kuwait, likewise, the beneficiary of American power, the Kuwait City Municipal Council rejected a permit for building a Greek Catholic church. A few years later, a member of parliament said he would submit a law to prohibit all church construction. A delegation of Kuwaitis was then sent to Saudi Arabia––which legally prohibits any Christian worship–– to consult with the Grand Mufti, the highest authority on Islamic law in the birthplace of Islam, the Arabian Peninsula.</p>
<p>The Mufti announced that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region,” a statement ignored in the West until Ibrahim reported it. Imagine the media’s vehement outrage and condemnation if the Pope in Rome had called for the destruction of all the mosques in Italy. The absence of any Western condemnation or even reaction to the Mufti’s statement was stunning. Is there no limit to our tolerance of Islam?</p>
<p>Moreover, it is in Egypt––yet another beneficiary of American money and support–– that the harassment and murder of Christians are particularly intense. Partly this reflects the large number of Coptic Christians, the some sixteen million descendants of the Egyptian Christians who were conquered by Arab armies in 640 A.D. Since the fall of Mubarak, numerous Coptic churches have been attacked by Muslim mobs. Most significant is the destruction of St. George’s church in Edfu in September 2011. Illustrating the continuity of mob violence with government policy, the chief of Edfu’s intelligence unit was observed directing the mob that destroyed the church. The governor who originally approved the permit to renovate the building went on television to announce that the “Copts made a mistake” in seeking to repair the church, “and had to be punished, and Muslims did nothing but set things right.”</p>
<p>The destruction of St. George’s precipitated a Christian protest against government-sanctioned violence against Christians and their churches in the Cairo suburb of Maspero in October 2011. As Muslim mobs attacked the demonstrators to shouts of “Allahu Akbar” and “kill the infidels,” the soldiers sent to keep order helped the attackers. Snipers fired on demonstrators, and armored vehicles ran over several. Despite the gruesome photographs showing the crushed heads of Copts, the Egyptian military denied the charges, but then claimed that Copts had hijacked the vehicles and ran over their co-religionists.</p>
<p>False media reports of Copts murdering soldiers fed the violence. Twenty-eight Christians were killed and several hundred wounded. In the aftermath, thirty-four Copts were retained, including several who had not even been at the demonstration. Later, two Coptic priests had to stand trial. Meanwhile, despite an abundance of video evidence, the Minister of Justice closed an investigation because of a “lack of identification of the culprits.”</p>
<p>The scope of such persecution, the similarity of the attacks, and the attackers’ motives, despite national and ethnic differences, and the role of government officials in abetting them, all cry out for explanation. Ibrahim clearly lays out the historical and theological roots of Muslim intolerance in the book’s most important chapter, “Lost History.” Contrary to the apologists who attribute these attacks to poverty, political oppression, the legacy of colonialism, or the unresolved Israeli-Arab conflict, Ibrahim shows that intolerance of other religions and the use of violence against them reflects traditional Islamic theology and jurisprudence.</p>
<p>First Ibrahim corrects a misconception of history that has abetted this misunderstanding. During the European colonial presence in the Middle East, oppression of Christians and other religious minorities was proscribed. This was also the period in which many Muslims, recognizing how much more powerful the Europeans were than they, began to emulate the political and social mores and institutions of the colonial powers.</p>
<p>Thus they abolished the discriminatory sharia laws that set out how “dhimmis,” the Christians and Jews living under Muslim authority, were to be treated. In 1856, for example, the Ottomans under pressure from the European powers issued a decree that said non-Muslims should be treated equally and guaranteed freedom of worship. This roughly century-long period of relative tolerance Ibrahim calls the Christian “Golden Age” in the Middle East.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, as Ibrahim writes, the century-long flourishing of Middle Eastern Christians “has created chronological confusions and intellectual pitfalls for Westerners” who take the “hundred-year lull in persecution” as the norm. In fact, that century was an anomaly, and after World War I, traditional Islamic attitudes and doctrines began to reassert themselves, a movement that accelerated in the 1970s. The result is the disappearance of Christianity in the land of its birth. In 1900, twenty percent of the Middle East was Christian. Today, less than two percent is.</p>
<p>Having corrected our distorted historical perspective, Ibrahim then lays out the justifying doctrines of Islam that have made such persecution possible during the fourteen centuries of Muslim encounters with non-Muslims. The foundations can be found in the Koran, which Muslims take to be the words of God. There “infidels” are defined as “they who say Allah is one of three” or “Allah is the Christ, [Jesus] son of Mary”––that is, explicitly Christian. As such, according to the Koran, they must be eliminated or subjugated. The most significant verse that guides Muslim treatment of Christians and Jews commands Muslims to wage war against infidels until they are conquered, pay tribute, and acknowledge their humiliation and submission.</p>
<p>In the seventh century, the second Caliph, Omar bin al-Khattab, promulgated the “Conditions of Omar” that specified in more detail how Christians should be treated. These conditions proscribe building churches or repairing existing ones, performing religious processions in public, exhibiting crosses, praying near Muslims, proselytizing, and preventing conversion to Islam, in addition to rules governing how Christians dress, comport themselves, and treat Muslims.</p>
<p>“If they refuse this,” Omar said, “it is the sword without leniency.” These rules have consistently determined treatment of Christians for fourteen centuries, and Muslims regularly cite violations of these rules as the justifying motives for their attacks. As a Saudi Sheikh said recently in a mosque sermon, “If they [Christians] violate these conditions, they have no protection.” From Morocco to Indonesia, Christians are attacked and murdered because they allegedly have tried to renovate a church, proselytized among Muslims, or blasphemed against Mohammed––all reasons consistent with Koranic injunctions codified in laws and the curricula of school textbooks.</p>
<p>Both Islamic doctrine and history show the continuity of motive behind today’s persecution of Christians. As Ibrahim writes, “The same exact patterns of persecution are evident from one end of the Islamic world to the other––in lands that do not share the same language, race, or culture––<i>that share only Islam</i>.” But received wisdom in the West today denies this obvious truth. The reasons for this attitude of denial would fill another book. As Ibrahim points out, the corruption of history in the academy and in elementary school textbooks have replaced historical truth with various melodramas in which Western colonialists and imperialists have oppressed Muslims.</p>
<p>These and other prejudices have led American media outlets to ignore or distort Islamic-inspired violence, as can be seen in the coverage of the Nigerian jihadist movement Boko Haram. These jihadists have publicly announced their aim of cleansing Nigeria of Christians and establishing sharia law, yet Western media coverage consistently ignores this aim and casts the conflict as a “cycle of violence” in which both sides are equally guilty.</p>
<p>As Ibrahim concludes, even when Western media report on violence against Christians, “they employ an arsenal of semantic games, key phrases, convenient omissions, and moral relativism” to promote the anti-Western narrative that “Muslim violence and intolerance are products of anything and everything––poverty, political and historical grievances, or territorial disputes––except Islam.”</p>
<p>Within the global Muslim community, there is a civil war between those who want to adapt their faith to the modern world, and those who want to wage war in order to recreate a lost past of Muslim dominance. We do the former no favor by indulging Islam’s more unsavory aspects, since those aspects are exactly what need to be changed if Muslims want to enjoy the freedom and prosperity that come from political orders founded on human rights and inclusive tolerance. Raymond Ibrahim’s <i>Crucified Again</i> is an invaluable resource for telling the truth that could promote such change.</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>Jews From Muslim Lands: The Forgotten Refugees</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/noah-beck/jews-from-muslim-lands-the-forgotten-refugees/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jews-from-muslim-lands-the-forgotten-refugees</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Jul 2013 04:14:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Noah Beck]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[1948]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jewish]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[refugees]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=194928</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Middle East's shameful expulsion of Judaism. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/jewishrefugees.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-195002" alt="jewishrefugees" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/jewishrefugees.jpg" width="263" height="201" /></a>June 20 was World Refugee Day, dedicated to nearly 60 million people worldwide who were forcibly displaced by conflict or persecution. One group of refugees rarely acknowledged is the Jews who were indigenous to Muslim lands but compelled to flee around the time that the State of Israel was established.</span></b></p>
<p>A Google search for “1948 refugees” produces about 6 million results. All but a few (at least through page six) are about the Palestinian Arab refugees, as if they were the only refugees of 1948. But it is estimated that from the beginning of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War through the early 1970s, up to 1,000,000 Jews fled or were expelled from their ancestral homes in Muslim countries. 260,000 of those refugees reached Israel between 1948 and 1951 and comprised 56% of all immigration to the fledgling state. By 1972, their numbers had reached 600,000.</p>
<p>In 1948, Middle East and North African countries had considerable Jewish populations: Morocco (250,000), Algeria (140,000), Iraq (140,000), Iran (120,000), Egypt (75,000), Tunisia (50,000), Yemen (50,000), Libya (35,000), and Syria (20,000). Today, the indigenous Jews of those countries are virtually extinct (although Morocco and Iran each still has under 10,000 Jews). In most cases, the Jewish population had lived there for millennia.</p>
<p>Few know this history because the Jewish refugees of 1948 were granted citizenship by the countries to which they fled, including Israel. By contrast, many Muslim countries refused to integrate the Palestinian refugees, preferring to leave them as second-class citizens in order to maintain a domestic demographic balance and/or a political problem for Israel.</p>
<p>Media bias also explains why so few people know about the 1948 Jewish refugees from Muslim lands. A search for “1948 refugees” on the BBC news site generates 41 articles (going back to 1999); 40 discuss the Palestinian Arab refugees of 1948. Only three of those 40 (dated 9/22/11, 9/2/10, and 4/15/04) even mention the Jewish refugees from Muslim lands, and two do so only in a single, superficial sentence that presents the issue as a claim rather than a historical fact.</p>
<p>A search for “1948 refugees Jews from Arab lands” on the New York Times site produces 497 results (replacing “Arab” with “Muslim” halves the results), while “1948 Palestinian refugees” yields 1,050 results. Consider a comparison using Sri Lanka, another war-torn, multi-ethnic country that gained its independence from Britain in 1948. The nearly 26-year ethnic conflict there began in 1983 and claimed 80,000–100,000 lives, many multiples of the total casualties from the nearly 100-year Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sri Lanka’s conflict also produced hundreds of thousands of refugees, including at least 200,000 Tamil refugees in Western Europe alone. Yet a search for “Tamil refugees” generates only 531 articles – less than 5% of the 11,300 results for “Palestinian Arab refugees.”</p>
<p>Institutionalized favoritism at the UN has also enabled the Palestinians to monopolize the refugee issue, which undoubtedly reinforces the media’s bias. All non-Palestinian refugees around the world (nearly 55 million) are cared for by the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, which works under the guidelines of the Convention on Refugees of 1951. But Palestinian refugees (whose original population was under one million) have a UN agency dedicated exclusively to them (UNRWA).</p>
<p>UNRWA’s unique definition of “refugee” includes anyone “whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict.” So, in addition to families who lived in the area for generations, UNRWA’s definition includes any migrants who arrived as recently as 1946 but were then displaced. And because the definition includes “descendants of fathers fulfilling the definition,” UNRWA’s refugee population has grown from 750,000 in 1950 to 5,300,000 today (making resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue even harder). Despite these problems, the United States continues to support UNRWA (with over 4.1 billion dollars since 1950).</p>
<p>The rest of the world’s refugees are assisted by the High Commission, which is mandated to help refugees rapidly rebuild their lives, usually outside the countries that they fled. Jewish refugees from Muslim lands did just that: they rebuilt their lives in Israel and elsewhere. But the fact that they quietly adapted and Israel granted them full citizenship doesn&#8217;t lessen the wrongs committed by their countries of origin. These Jewish refugees from Muslim lands suffered legal and often violent persecution that resulted in immeasurable emotional and physical loss. They lost billions in property and endured huge socioeconomic disadvantages when forced to rebuild their lives from scratch. Israel was unfairly burdened with the colossal social and economic cost of suddenly absorbing so many refugees. So any suggestion that Jewish refugees from Muslim lands don&#8217;t deserve compensation is resoundingly wrong.</p>
<p>On the recent World Refugee Day, the Israeli Knesset member Shimon Ohayon, whose family fled Morocco in 1956, called on the Arab League to “accept their great responsibility for driving out almost a million Jews from lands [in] which they had lived for millennia.” He explained that “In 1947, the Political Committee of the Arab League drafted a law that&#8230;called for the freezing of bank accounts of Jews, their internment and [the confiscation of their assets]. Various other discriminatory measures were taken by Arab nations and subsequent meetings reportedly called for the expulsion of Jews from member states of the Arab League.” Ohayon challenged the League to accept responsibility for “the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish population from most of the Middle East and North Africa&#8230;[and] to provide redress to the Jewish refugees.”</p>
<p>A just and comprehensive Mideast peace is possible only when Muslim states recognize their role in two historic wrongs: 1) displacing one million indigenous people only because they were Jews, and 2) perpetuating the plight of Palestinian refugees by denying them citizenship. The first wrong requires financial compensation to the families of Jewish refugees from Muslim lands, which reparation can be administered by the states that absorbed them. The second wrong should be remedied by granting full citizenship to Palestinian refugees (and their descendants) who have resettled in Muslim lands. Both wrongs have festered for too many decades.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>. </strong></p>
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