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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Israeli</title>
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		<title>Palestinians Attempt to Co-Opt Jewish History</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/palestinians-attempt-to-co-opt-jewish-history/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=palestinians-attempt-to-co-opt-jewish-history</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Dec 2014 05:08:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israeli]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248061</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The desperate antics of an invented people. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_248203" style="width: 346px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/tel.jpg"><img class="wp-image-248203" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/tel-450x337.jpg" alt="tel" width="336" height="252" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">The Tel Dan Stele</p></div>
<p>In December 2011, former House Speaker and presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich made the <a href="http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2011/12/13/yes_palestinians_are_an_invented_people_99796.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">following observation</span></a> regarding the Palestinians;</p>
<blockquote><p><i>Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we&#8217;ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community…</i></p></blockquote>
<p>That comment set off a firestorm of debate and criticism but is in actuality, grounded in historical fact. As noted historian Benny Morris pointed out in his acclaimed book, <i>1948: The First Arab-Israeli War</i>, at the turn of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, most Arabs residing in the Land of Israel or “Palestine” considered themselves to be subjects of the Ottoman Empire. There were some Palestinian Arabs with vague nationalistic tendencies but even this minority considered itself to be part of Greater Syria. There simply was no reference to an independent Palestine for a distinct group of people calling themselves “Palestinians.”</p>
<p>Morris also perceptively notes that the residents of Palestinian villages routinely failed to come to the assistance of nearby villages that were under attack by Jewish forces thus reinforcing the view that Arab villagers felt little loyalty to all but clan and village. The notion of a “Palestinian people” was an alien concept to the common Palestinian villager who was not bound by any sense of duty to assist a neighboring village.</p>
<p>Occasionally, Palestinians themselves will acknowledge this fact. In a revealing 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw, PLO executive committee member <a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zuheir_Mohsen"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Zahir Muhsein</span></a> stated,</p>
<blockquote><p><i>The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct &#8216;Palestinian people&#8217; to oppose Zionism.</i></p>
<p><i>For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>It was a rare but astonishing moment of candor. A senior PLO member was openly acknowledging what few would readily admit. But his was not an isolated admission. In a March 2012 televised address, Hamas Minister of the Interior and of National Security <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAfENxzv2mc"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Fathi Hammad</span></a> essentially validated Gingrich’s assessment of the Palestinians. While pleading for Egyptian fuel, Hammad let loose with a series of embarrassing admissions that were certainly not intended for Western audiences.</p>
<p>“Every Palestinian…throughout Palestine can prove his Arab roots, whether from Saudi Arabia or Yemen or anywhere.” He went on to say that “personally, half my family is Egyptian, we are all like that.” And further buries himself deeper by stating, “Brothers, half the Palestinians are Egyptian and the other half are Saudis…Who are the Palestinians?” he asks rhetorically. “We have families called al-Masri whose roots are Egyptian, Egyptian! We are Egyptian! We are Arab! We are Muslim!” He concludes his rant with the obligatory Muslim battle cry, “Allahuakbar!” Curiously absent from his long diatribe is any recognition of an independent Palestinian identity and that’s precisely because there simply isn’t any.</p>
<p>Lacking their own independent history, culture and identity, Palestinians have adopted a strategy of <a href="http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1468"><span style="color: #0433ff;">denying Jewish history</span></a>. Arafat, for example, flat out denied the fact that great Jewish Temples, built first by king Solomon and then by Herod, once stood where the Al-Aqsa Mosque currently stands. So ridiculous were his comments that they earned a swift rebuke from President Clinton. Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas taking cue from his boss also adopted this odious position. It should therefore come as no surprise that Abbas is also a <a href="http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/exposing-abbas-5335"><span style="color: #0433ff;">confirmed Holocaust denier</span></a>, despite his transparent efforts to <a href="http://tabletmag.com/scroll/170686/mahmoud-abbas-still-a-holocaust-denier"><span style="color: #0433ff;">rehabilitate his image</span></a> for his gullible Western audience.</p>
<p>Palestinian Arabs have also attempted to recruit Western “experts” and academics to their cause. In his insightful book <i>The Fight for Jerusalem:</i> <i>Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City,</i> veteran Israeli diplomat Dore Gold chronicles the length to which Arab-Muslims and their Western lackeys will go to deny the Jewish nexus to the Land of Israel. They argued that much of ancient Jewish history was nothing but mythology including the Kingdoms of David and Solomon.</p>
<p>From the Arab perspective, the tactic was a sound one. Sever the ancient historical Jewish nexus with Israel and you severely undermine claims of indigenousness. But archeology does not lie and those very Western academics (at least the intellectually honest ones) were forced to retract their findings and conclusions after the dramatic 1993 discovery of a 9<sup>th</sup> century stele at Tel Dan in northern Israel that clearly referenced the “<a href="http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/artifacts-and-the-bible/the-tel-dan-inscription-the-first-historical-evidence-of-the-king-david-bible-story/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">House of David</span></a>.” Additional discoveries since then, including finds in <a href="http://www.aish.com/h/9av/ht/48961251.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Jerusalem</span></a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/international/middleeast/09alphabet.html?_r=0"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Tel Zayit</span></a> and at the <a href="http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/insideisrael/2013/June/Did-David-Solomon-Exist-Dig-Refutes-Naysayers/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Fortress of Elah</span></a> have further eroded claims by skeptics and naysayers.</p>
<p>Not content with denying Jewish history, Palestinian Arabs have actually attempted to co-opt it by absurdly claiming that Moses as well as King Saul were Palestinian Muslims who conquered and claimed “Palestine” for the benefit of Palestinians. These risible comments were spewed forth by “Dr.” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqjwLKdg9ro"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Omar Ja’ara</span></a>, a lecturer at Al-Najah University in Nablus and broadcast on Palestinian Authority TV. He notes further that the actions of Moses and Saul represented “the first Palestinian liberation through armed struggle to liberate Palestine&#8230; this is our logic and this is our culture.”</p>
<p>Incidentally, Al-Najah University boasts on its <a href="http://www.najah.edu/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">website</span></a> that it is “the first Palestinian University to obtain the EFQM European Certificate of Excellence.” Something to bear in mind next time any parent contemplates sending their child off to Europe for higher education.</p>
<p>Of course it doesn’t matter that Saul lived approximately 1,700 years before Muhammad was zygote. Facts play absolutely no role in Palestinian academia. Empirical data and evidence is ignored. Precedence is given to upholding a false, pernicious and viscerally anti-Semitic narrative that either denies historical fact or co-opts it.</p>
<p>As PLO bigwig Zahir Muhsein candidly noted, the claim of a Palestinian identity is a myth whose aim is not designed to achieve liberation or advancement for any particular people but rather to subjugate and destroy another people. For those of you, who still remain unconvinced; consider the <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/al-aqsa-speaker-the-slaughter-of-the-jews-is-near/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">recent comments</span></a> made by a prominent sheikh during a religious sermon at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. During his tirade, which included the usual dose of anti-Semitic vitriol, the sheikh never once uttered a desire or longing for Palestinian statehood. Instead he expresses the desire to join with ISIS in its quest for an Islamic caliphate and asks the large crowd of acolytes surrounding him to, “pledge allegiance to the Muslim Caliph,” and they in turn respond with chants of “amen!”</p>
<p>Few in the West have faced up to this malevolent reality. They continue to adhere to the harmful, dogmatic formula of a two-state solution. What they willfully fail to realize is that such a solution poses an existential threat to the Mideast’s only democracy and will most certainly have grave negative consequences for the region at large.</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>Ringleader Admits: Hamas Funded Kidnapping and Murder of Israeli Teens</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/ringleader-admits-hamas-funded-kidnapping-and-murder-of-israeli-teens/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ringleader-admits-hamas-funded-kidnapping-and-murder-of-israeli-teens</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Aug 2014 04:50:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abducted]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fund]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israeli]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[murder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[teen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238114</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Inconvenient admissions contradict media’s spin exonerating Hamas.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/140630183743-israeli-teens-found-dead-story-top.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-238115" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/140630183743-israeli-teens-found-dead-story-top-450x253.jpg" alt="140630183743-israeli-teens-found-dead-story-top" width="288" height="162" /></a>Media bias against Israel continues apace.  Even the recent apparent confirmation from the alleged ringleader that Hamas funded the abduction of the three murdered Israeli teenagers this past June gets hardly a mention or is derided in the press.</p>
<p>Some mainstream media outlets were quick from the get-go to cast the kidnapping and murder of the Israeli teenagers as essentially a rogue operation undertaken without Hamas authorization or backing. New York Magazine, for example, published an article on July 25, 2014 entitled “It Turns Out Hamas May Not Have Kidnapped and Killed the 3 Israeli Teens After All.”</p>
<p>Buzzfeed posted an article late last month that essentially exonerated Hamas of any responsibility, citing unnamed Israeli sources to back up its claim.</p>
<p>Al Jazeera, which former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said offers &#8220;real news,&#8221; published an article last month charging, without any evidence to support its accusation, that “Israel knew full well that neither Hamas nor its armed wing (al-Qassam Brigades) were behind the boys’ disappearance.”</p>
<p>Then came along Hussam Qawasmeh, the alleged ringleader of the kidnapping operation whom Israeli authorities now have in custody. He is reported to have pointed the finger at Hamas jihadists in Gaza as the source of the money to pay for the operation.</p>
<p>Instead of objectively writing about Qawasmeh’s reported reference to Hamas’s involvement, Buzzfeed chose on August 6<sup>th</sup> to compound its biased anti-Israel reporting. It focused in its lead paragraph on accusations by Qawasmeh’s lawyer and relative working on the case that Qawasmeh’s statement was obtained as a result of “heavy torture.” Buzzfeed devoted substantial space for Qawasmeh’s lawyer to air his dismissal of any Hamas connection. “Israel is trying to tie this to Gaza, by saying the money for the operation came from Gaza,” the lawyer said. “But that is not exactly true. This is something they [Qawasmeh’s family] could have planned to boost their own family’s name, for their own motives.”</p>
<p>Incredibly, Buzzfeed also quoted Ala Rimawi, a Hamas member in the West Bank, who unsurprisingly disputed any involvement of Hamas in the kidnappings and murders:</p>
<blockquote><p>“It is obvious that what happened in Hebron was an individual incident. If it had been organized by Hamas, the kidnappers would not have been allowed to kill the three boys — they would have wanted to keep them alive in order to bargain and try to use them to release prisoners.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Al Jazeera did not see fit to retract its previous unsubstantiated accusations of fabrication against Israel despite Qawasmeh’s reported revelation of Hamas funding. Rather than offer the “real news” that Hillary Clinton credited al Jazeera with providing, this propaganda outlet controlled by Hamas backer, Qatar, continues to cast Hamas in the most favorable light and Israel as the villain.</p>
<p>The New York Times published on June 17<sup>th</sup> what it purported to be a news article on the abduction under the headline “Abduction of Young Israeli Hitchhikers Spurs Debate on Conduct.”  Mind you, this headline was not referring to Hamas’s conduct. It was a reference to the “conduct of Jewish settlers in the West Bank — particularly what many consider the cavalier practice of hitchhiking.”  In other words, blame the victims for their “cavalier” behavior.</p>
<p>When it came to reporting about Qawasmeh’s capture and reported statement regarding Hamas funding of the abduction, the New York Times buried the story on p. 9 of its August 6<sup>th</sup> print edition.</p>
<p>The Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren has consistently cast Israel in an unfavorable light. One of her most blatantly biased articles was entitled “In Gaza, Epithets Are Fired and Euphemisms Give Shelter,” which appeared on p.1 of the July 21<sup>st</sup> print edition of the New York Times. More than three times as much space in Rudoren&#8217;s article “focused on Israel allegedly demonizing and inciting against Hamas (509 words) than on Hamas engaged in PR efforts, boasts or threats to Israel (149 words),” according to an analysis done by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.</p>
<p>“With her inversion of reality, selective citations, withholding of relevant and crucial information, and the sort of hollow comparisons that any elementary social science student would recognize as invalid and flawed, Rudoren&#8217;s ‘analysis’ is an example of shoddy, biased journalism at its worst,” the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America concluded.</p>
<p>Rudoren showed her pro-Palestinian leanings when she first took on the Jerusalem bureau chief post, in her exchange of tweets with Ali Abuminah, a Palestinian-American anti-Israel activist who has advocated for a third intifada:</p>
<blockquote><p>Ali Abunimah @AliAbunimah  · 14 Feb 2012</p>
<p>As new @nytimes bureau chief, Jodi @Rudoren will get to move into this lovely property stolen from Palestinians in 1948 http://electronicintifada.net/content/ny-times-jerusalem-property-makes-it-protagonist-palestine-conflict/8705 …</p>
<p>Jodi Rudoren@rudoren   @AliAbunimah Hey there. Would love to chat sometime. About things other than the house. My friend Kareem Fahim says good things</p></blockquote>
<p>Rudoren’s “friend” Kareem Fahim, who also reports for the New York Times, has written critically of Arab nations’ apparent support for Israel over Hamas.  Writing from Cairo, Fahim expressed shock that “Egypt even blamed Hamas, the Islamist movement in Gaza, rather than Israel, for dozens of Palestinian deaths.” But then again, why listen to those who know the jihadists’ murderous ways the best?</p>
<p>Such coverage tends to treat the conduct of the latest war in Gaza by Israel and Hamas as morally equivalent at best. Often, Israel is painted as the prime violator of international law. The reason often cited by Israel bashers for portraying Israel this way is the supposed “disproportionate” force used by Israel to conduct attacks in civilian neighborhoods where Hamas militants hide and keep their weapons, causing the loss of hundreds of innocent Palestinian lives. Hamas is portrayed as the underdog, which is resisting the “occupying power.”</p>
<p>The Associated Press, for example, sent out the following tweet on July 29th, criticizing members of Congress for daring to support Israel over Hamas: <sup> </sup>“As much of world watches Gaza war in horror, members of Congress fall over each other to support Israel.” Apparently, someone at the Associated Press realized that this tweet may have gone too far since it was retracted a few hours later.</p>
<p>CNN came under criticism from Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer for not reporting in an even-handed manner. Ambassador Dermer properly noted CNN’s failure to state that Hamas was storing rockets in United Nations schools as part of its reporting on Israeli military activities in Gaza, including the alleged Israeli shelling of a UN school.</p>
<p>It is true that Israel is militarily superior to Hamas. It is also true that, in the course of Israel’s military operation in Gaza to destroy the tunnels and rockets being used by Hamas to deliberately target Israeli civilians, a substantial number of Palestinians have lost their lives, including civilians.  And yes, Israel does have the technology to protect its own citizens from Hamas’s indiscriminate rocket attacks. Iron Dome has helped to keep Israeli civilian deaths to a minimum.</p>
<p>Some in the mainstream media seem to think that the lopsided comparison of the very low number of Israeli casualties with the far larger number of Palestinian casualties resulting from the fighting in Gaza proves Israel’s culpability. It’s just not a fair fight, they believe. And they get support for that bizarre point of view from senior United Nations officials and world leaders who regularly condemn Israel for alleged “war crimes.” As reported by Breitbart, for example, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay had the audacity to recently criticize Israel for refusing to share its Iron Dome technology with the “governing authority” of Gaza – i.e., Hamas. &#8220;No such protection has been provided to Gazans against the shelling,” she is reported to have declared.</p>
<p>If Hamas were not deliberately using the civilian Gaza population as human shields and had accepted the Egyptian ceasefire proposal weeks ago that it has now tentatively accepted, ninety percent of the fatalities in Gaza could have been avoided. The mainstream media prefers to show dramatic pictures of Palestinian women and children caught in the cross-fire, implying, or sometimes stating explicitly, that it is all Israel’s fault. There is hardly any intellectually honest attempt among many journalists and analysts covering the Gaza conflict to grapple with what Hamas has done to bring those tragic circumstances about. And Hamas has threatened to end the current ceasefire and attack Israelis with even more powerful rockets if its demands are not met. If that happens and Israel is forced to resume its ground operations in Gaza in order to protect its civilians from indiscriminate attacks, guess who will be blamed for the consequences?</p>
<p>Despite the United Nation’s repeated demonstrations of bias against Israel, reporters often take their numbers of civilian Palestinian casualties from the UN, which in turn relies on data from the Hamas-run health ministry and from various human rights groups who generally oppose Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians.</p>
<p>Moreover, the mainstream media often parrots condemnations of Israel by UN officials and world leaders and opinion-makers without considering the full context of Hamas’s urban war strategy to exploit Gazan civilian deaths for propaganda purposes.</p>
<p>Incredibly, for example, there has been scant reporting of what appears to be a Hamas manual on urban warfare entitled “Introduction to the City War,” which the Israeli military said it seized. The New York Post did report on it, but it was in a distinct minority.</p>
<p>“The destruction of civilian homes: This increases the hatred of the citizens toward the attackers and increases their gathering around [to support] the city defenders,” the manual stated, according to the Israeli Defense Force. “The soldiers and [IDF] commanders must limit their use of weapons and tactics that lead to the harm and unnecessary loss of people and [destruction of] civilian facilities. It is difficult for them to get the most use out of their firearms, especially of supporting fire [e.g. artillery].”</p>
<p>This document does need to be independently verified as genuine. But the quotes above are certainly consistent with Hamas’s pattern of conduct, in which it operates in heavily populated areas and attempts to draw Israeli fire in response to Hamas military action in the vicinity of UN schools and the like. The silence of the mainstream media in essentially ignoring the existence of the alleged Hamas manual is deafening. Indeed, it shows yet again the complicity of much of the mainstream media in Hamas’s propaganda war.</p>
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		<title>Behind Robert Mackey’s Continued Assault on Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/behind-robert-mackeys-continued-assault-on-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=behind-robert-mackeys-continued-assault-on-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 20 Jun 2014 04:20:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israeli]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[kidnapped]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York Times]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Robert Mackey]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[teens]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234425</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A NY Times writer's conspiracy theory about Israel's response to three kidnapped teens. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/AMH_3230.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234426" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/AMH_3230-450x300.jpg" alt="AMH_3230" width="314" height="209" /></a>The <i>New York Times</i> has distinguished itself as one of the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/PM-advisers-letter-to-New-York-Times"><span style="color: #0433ff;">most anti-Israel papers of today</span></a>. Its writers habitually skew events to fit a particular narrative, one that is misleading and often, <a href="http://honestreporting.com/the-photo-that-started-it-all/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">devoid of any truth</span></a>. But among its cadre of writers, there stands one who is without a doubt heads and shoulders above the rest in terms of both his anti-Israel invective and propensity to engage in outright mendacity and that dubious distinction goes to Robert Mackey.</p>
<p>To say that Mackey’s coverage of Israel is reprehensible simply doesn’t do justice to the word. Consider his latest article, <a href="http://news.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/israelis-start-bringbackourboys-campaign/"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Israelis Start #BringBackOurBoys Campaign</i></span></a><i>. </i>An outpouring of sympathy for three Israeli youths kidnapped by Arab terrorists while hitchhiking prompted those supportive of Israel to take to social media in an effort to bring attention to their dire plight.</p>
<p>Here’s Mackey’s spin; “<i>A group of Israelis trained to promote their country online started a #BringBackOurBoys campaign last week after three teenagers disappeared on their way home from religious schools in the occupied West Bank</i>.” First, how does Mackey know for certain that Israelis created the site? The kidnapping produced a wave of both outrage and support throughout the international community, from <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/brazil-jewish-community-rallies-for-abducted-teens/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Brazil</span></a> to the <a href="http://www.jta.org/2014/06/17/news-opinion/united-states/american-jews-take-up-cause-of-missing-israeli-teens-1"><span style="color: #0433ff;">United States</span></a>. The Facebook page that Mackey refers to could have therefore been created in any number of countries and by any number of people of varied nationalities.</p>
<p>Second, assuming that the page was created by Israelis, how does Mackey know that those who created the page were “<i>trained to promote their country online</i>”? Mackey embeds that part of the sentence with a <a href="http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=260781"><span style="color: #0433ff;">link to an article</span></a> that talks about Haifa University offering an elective to students on ways to combat international deligitimization efforts by anti-Israel activists. But Mackey has no way of knowing that the creators of the page took such a course or even attended Haifa University for that matter and the leap is therefore beyond irrational. Indeed, Israelis are among the most prolific users of social media and are also among the most tech savvy so it’s not a stretch to imagine that some kid or a group of kids, devoid of any formal “training” commenced the campaign.</p>
<p>Here Mackey’s malevolence truly comes to the fore. He creates a moral inversion of sorts by linking grassroots Israeli efforts to free the kidnapped youths to automaton-like agents of government propaganda. This certainly is not the first time that Mackey has engaged in this sort of insidious yellow journalism.</p>
<p>Indeed, as <a href="http://blog.camera.org/archives/2012/03/robert_mackey_hostility_undimi.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">CAMERA points out</span></a>, during operation Pillar of Defense, a private Israeli citizen had uncovered yet another <a href="http://www.idfblog.com/2012/03/12/photos-gaza-aerial-strikes-proven-false/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Palestinian hoax</span></a>, this one involving the wide dissemination of a photo of an injured child purportedly hurt by indiscriminate Israeli fire. However, the caption accompanying the photo was false. The child had been injured six years prior after falling off a swing. The Israel Defense Forces then published the true version of events on its Twitter account. But to Mackey, the story wasn’t about malicious and false propaganda disseminated against the Jewish State; the story was about how, in Mackey’s words, “<i>Israel’s military pursues enemies on Twitter</i>.” Mackey displays little or no interest in reporting on substantive lies against Israel; he chooses instead to obsessively focus on how Israel’s “propaganda machine” moves into high gear.</p>
<p>Third, whereas most commentators and writers have noted that the hitchhiking youths were kidnapped in the West Bank, Mackey stands out from the crowd by reminding his readers that the kidnapping occurred not in the West Bank but the “occupied” West Bank, as if the boys brought this upon themselves for being in a place they shouldn’t have been. Moreover, by adopting such terminology, which incidentally has officially and unequivocally been <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Aussie-clarity-355907"><span style="color: #0433ff;">rejected</span></a> by the government of Australia, Mackey has clearly picked sides leaving little doubt about where his sympathies lie.</p>
<p>Fourth, as blogger Yisrael Medad very astutely points out in a talkback, Mackey is besotted (in an unhealthy way) by social media aimed at freeing the captive youths but completely ignores the Arab &#8220;<a href="http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/three-fingered-salute-new-low-even-for-palestinian-society/2014/06/17/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">three-finger salute</span></a>&#8221; campaign in which children and adults hold aloft three fingers to signify victory and identification with the terrorists who kidnapped the three Jewish children. We can deduce one of two things from this disparate treatment. Either Mackey identifies with the kidnappers or more likely, does not approve of the action but views gleeful Palestinian identification with it as harmful to the Palestinian cause and thus chooses to ignore it, much like the way the New York Times ignored <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRA0NKQ0k6E"><span style="color: #0433ff;">cheering Palestinians</span></a> after 3,000 Americans were murdered on 9-11.</p>
<p>Fifth, Mackey has a penchant for citing fringe, anti-Israel and often times, anti-Semitic bloggers in his posts. He has a particular fondness for the rabidly anti-Israel blogger Ali Abunimah who has created an online industry of vitriolic hate for the Jewish State. The instant article is no exception.</p>
<p>Mackey refers to a tweet by Abunimah in which Abunimah alleges that an Israeli Facebook page calls for the “<i>kill[ing] [of] a Palestinian every hour</i>.” Mackey accepts Abunimah’s translation of the page without reservation or equivocation, as if everything sputtered by Abunimah represents truth. In fact, the page translates as follows; “<i>Until our youth are returned, every hour we shoot a terrorist</i>.” Not exactly politically correct but a far cry from Abunimah’s deliberately skewed translation. That Mackey doesn’t even bother to double check the translation is reflective of either shoddy journalism or deliberate mendacity.</p>
<p>But ultimately, it is the vetters at the New York Times, those we trust to ensure that what we are reading is accurate, who are responsible for what we see in print. Unfortunately, the gatekeepers are  sleeping, or worse, complicit in Mackey’s deeply troubling reporting.</p>
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		<title>Legal Despots and the Threat to Israeli Democracy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/caroline-glick/legal-despots-and-the-threat-to-israeli-democracy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=legal-despots-and-the-threat-to-israeli-democracy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/caroline-glick/legal-despots-and-the-threat-to-israeli-democracy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Sep 2012 04:25:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=142516</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The radical Israeli Left and judicial enablers succeed in their efforts to destroy an Israeli community. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/migron-thumb-470x261-3014.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-142517" title="migron-thumb-470x261-3014" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/migron-thumb-470x261-3014.gif" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><em>Originally <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=283299">published</a> in the Jerusalem Post.</em></p>
<p>By Tuesday, 50 Israeli families will have been tossed out of their homes in their village of Migron, which is set for destruction.</p>
<p>They will not be dispossessed because they unlawfully squatted on someone else&#8217;s property.</p>
<p>The residents of Migron will be tossed from their homes &#8211; on the order of the Supreme Court &#8211; because Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein and his associates believe they are above the law. And due to this opinion, Weinstein and his associates refuse to recognize the sovereign authority of Israel&#8217;s government or to act in accordance with its lawful decisions.</p>
<p>The media have alternatively presented the story of Migron&#8217;s imminent destruction as a story about a power struggle between so-called settlers and the IDF, whose forces will be called upon to eject them from their homes; or as a struggle between the Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu; or as a struggle between the radical leftists from Peace Now and its fellow foreign government-financed NGOs, and the residents of Judea and Samaria.</p>
<p>These portrayals are reasonable on the narrow level of day to day developments in the story of Migron&#8217;s struggle. But on a more fundamental level, the story of Migron and its pending destruction is the story of the power struggle between Israel&#8217;s unelected, radical legal fraternity represented by the attorney-general, the State Prosecution he directs and the Supreme Court on the one hand, and Israel&#8217;s elected governments &#8211; from the Right and from the Left &#8211; on the other.</p>
<p>Migron is the latest casualty of this struggle. The legal fraternity&#8217;s bid to wrest sovereign power of governance from Israel&#8217;s elected leadership threatens our democracy. In its continuous assault on governing authority, the legal fraternity renders it difficult if not, as a practical matter, impossible, for the government &#8211; any government &#8211; to govern.</p>
<p>It is important at the outset to recognize that there is a world of difference between the rule of law and the rule of lawyers. The fate of Migron, which was sealed on Wednesday with the decision of the Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, to remove all 50 families from their homes, is a legal atrocity.</p>
<p>Migron was founded in 1999 on 60 plots of land. In 2006, the EU-funded Peace Now petitioned the High Court claiming to represent Arab owners of five out of the 60 plots of land. Peace Now asked the court to require the state to explain why it hadn&#8217;t destroyed the town, which the group claimed was built on stolen land. Migron&#8217;s residents dispute this claim.</p>
<p>In responding to this petition, the State Attorney&#8217;s Office could have asked the court to allow the issue of ownership to be adjudicated by a lower court. Instead, the State Prosecution accepted as fact Peace Now&#8217;s unproven claim of private ownership of the land. And, after numerous delays, in 2011 the court ruled that the village must be destroyed.</p>
<p>Following its victory in the Supreme Court, Peace Now sued the state for damages for the alleged Arab landlords, claiming that the presence of the community prevented the land&#8217;s owners from harvesting nonexistent olive trees. Peace Now abruptly canceled its lawsuit when the court asked for proof of ownership.</p>
<p>For their part, Migron&#8217;s residents went through Jordanian land records and were able to find owners for only seven of the registered plots. And they managed to buy &#8211; at exorbitant cost &#8211; three of those plots. Recognizing that its claim that Migron was illegally built on private lands could no longer be justified, Peace Now changed its strategy. In the latest Supreme Court hearings, brought by Migron&#8217;s residents, Peace Now claimed that the reason all the Israelis need to be ejected from their homes, and all the homes need to be destroyed, is that the village was built without proper permits.</p>
<p>Ahead of the court hearing last month, the government&#8217;s Ministerial Committee on Settlement convened to determine the government&#8217;s position on the new Migron petition. Led by Netanyahu, the ministers decided that the government&#8217;s position was to ask for a continuance in order to enable the lower courts to adjudicate the claims of ownership of the land.</p>
<p>Rather than follow the law and represent that position to the court, Weinstein instructed attorney Osnat Mandel from the State Prosecution to inform the court he did not accept the government&#8217;s decision, and ask for a continuance in order to give him time to force the government to change its position.</p>
<p>Addressing the court, Mandel said, &#8220;The attorney- general believes that the ministerial committee&#8217;s position will raise legal difficulties. And since we&#8217;re requesting a continuance for undertaking the evacuation anyway [for unrelated reasons], he requests [time] to hold meetings with the elected leadership.&#8221;</p>
<p>On the face of it, Weinstein&#8217;s defiance of a legally binding government decision was unlawful. Certainly it would appear to be grounds for his immediate firing. But while shocking, Weinstein&#8217;s rank insubordination was not unique.</p>
<p>As relates to Israel&#8217;s legal rights in Judea and Samaria, Weinstein is guided not by the law but by the ideology of the far Left. This ideology received formal expression in a 2005 report on unauthorized Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria authored by former assistant state attorney Talia Sasson. The Sasson Report represented a wholesale renunciation of all Israeli claims to legal rights over Judea and Samaria. It was unhinged from both Israeli and international law.</p>
<p>And it was embraced by the legal fraternity.</p>
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		<title>Lies My President Told AIPAC</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/charles-bybelezer/lies-my-president-told-aipac/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=lies-my-president-told-aipac</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 09 Jun 2011 04:02:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Charles Bybelezer]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=95598</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama's latest sham rhetoric to the Jewish community fits a pattern of duplicity. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/aipac.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-95666" title="aipac" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/aipac.gif" alt="" width="375" height="298" /></a></p>
<p>U.S. president Barack Obama’s May 19<sup>th</sup> speech at the State Department &#8212; in which he assumed the most pro-Palestinian position ever by an American president &#8212; might have dealt a major diplomatic blow to the Jewish State if not for the heroics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu, during a press conference at the White House following a meeting between the two leaders, pummeled Obama into place by denouncing the president’s Middle East policy.</p>
<p>It is not surprising that Obama, following Netanyahu’s sensational rebuke, and due to the tremendous bipartisan backlash against the president’s speech, would engage in “damage control” by addressing AIPAC’s annual policy conference a few days later. However, his attempt to placate the Jewish people by pandering to the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. should be taken with a grain of salt. Obama is no friend of Israel, and, if reelected, will be completely free to imposing upon Israel a “final solution” to the Palestinian “question.”</p>
<p>Obama’s duplicity is vividly evidenced by his only other address ever given to AIPAC.</p>
<p>When then-Senator Barack Obama was campaigning for president, he addressed AIPAC in Arlington, Virginia on June 4, 2008. In his speech, he triumphantly declared: “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”</p>
<p>The day after his speech, June 5, 2008, Obama appeared on CNN’s “The Situation Room” and was asked by Candy Crowley, “You said that Jerusalem must remain undivided. Do Palestinians have no claim to Jerusalem in the future?” Obama replied: “Well, obviously, it’s going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations.”</p>
<p>A month later, July 22, 2008, Senator Obama was confronted by Katie Couric during a CBS interview: “You said not too long ago that Jerusalem should remain undivided. And then you backtracked on that statement.” Obama retorted: “If you look at what happened, there was no shift in policy or backtracking in policy. We just had phrased it poorly in the speech.… It’s the same policy [previous presidents] put forward, and that says that Jerusalem will be the capital of Israel, that we shouldn’t divide it by barbed wire[.]”</p>
<p>The next day, July 23, 2008, in an ABC interview with Charlie Gibson, Obama admitted that the status of Jerusalem “is going to have to be one of those final status decisions that are going to be made by Palestinians and Israelis.” When Gibson suggested that Obama’s statement to AIPAC regarding Jerusalem was a “rookie mistake,” the future U.S. president muttered: “I think that veterans make mistakes as well.”</p>
<p>Barack Obama’s 2011 “unshakable” commitment to Israel’s security falls into the same category as his assertion to AIPAC in 2008 that Jerusalem will always remain the undivided capital of Israel. They are both illusions, conjured up for the purpose of gaining Jewish electoral support.</p>
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		<title>Obama’s Old Senate Seat Is Haunting Him</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/obama%e2%80%99s-old-senate-seat-is-haunting-him-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama%25e2%2580%2599s-old-senate-seat-is-haunting-him-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 06 May 2011 04:25:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=92471</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Sen. Mark Kirk puts the president's anti-Israelism in its place. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/obama_incompetent13.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-92494" title="obama_incompetent1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/obama_incompetent13.gif" alt="" width="375" height="282" /></a></p>
<p>Republicans frustrated on Election Night 2010 that the GOP was unable to win Vice President Joe Biden’s old Senate seat in Delaware were heartened later in the night when they won a more symbolic and consequential seat: President Barack Obama’s seat in Illinois.</p>
<p>But it turned out that the victory was more than symbolic. The new senator from Illinois, former Rep. Mark Kirk, has been perhaps the president’s most knowledgeable and substantive critic in Congress on the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The president’s old seat then, far from being just another statistic in the Republican election wave, has been haunting him, doggedly pursuing him as he navigates the challenge of Mideast peace.</p>
<p>There are two facets to the effectiveness of Kirk’s criticisms: timing and issue depth.</p>
<p>The day Hamas and Fatah announced they had reached a unity deal, Kirk tweeted almost immediately: “Hamas+Fatah=probable suspension of US aid to Palestinian Authority&#8230;Hamas supports terror, killed 26 American citizens.”</p>
<p>Kirk’s rapid response gives him credibility on the issue—he doesn’t have to convene focus group to test its popularity or call together his advisers to find out what it all means. This would be a tremendous detriment if he was wrong, but he wasn’t. He has a strong enough grasp of American law and of Palestinian politics to know right away the implications of major developments in the region.</p>
<p>In March, we saw the brutal murders of the Fogel family (including three children) by Palestinian terrorists in the Jewish village of Itamar. While the Western media gave it scant attention and some news outlets portrayed the Fogel family as deserving of their fate for living in disputed territory, Israeli officials recognized the culprit: A Palestinian media that dehumanizes Jews to the point where slitting the throat of a young child becomes something less than barbaric.</p>
<p>Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told me a couple days after the murders that such events don’t happen in a vacuum, and that the incitement must end. Mark Kirk was one of the few in the U.S. to draw the same conclusion, and he led the writing of a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, pressing her to take a more forceful tack with Mahmoud Abbas on the issue. The letter, which garnered the signatures of more than a quarter of the Senate, read in part:</p>
<p>“Although President Abbas has expressed his sorrow over the Itamar massacre, the Palestinian Authority must take unequivocal steps to condemn the incident and stop allowing the incitement that leads to such crimes. Educating people toward peace is critical to establishing the conditions to a secure and lasting peace.</p>
<p>“The Itamar massacre was a sobering reminder that words matter, and that Palestinian incitement against Jews and Israel can lead to violence and terror.  We urge you to redouble your efforts to impress upon the Palestinian leadership that continuing to condone incitement is not tolerable.  We also urge you to consider focusing adequate training and educational programs in the West Bank and Gaza that promote peaceful coexistence with Israel.”</p>
<p>The letter, importantly, also includes other recent instances of official Palestinian incitement to back up its claims.</p>
<p>This is nothing new for Kirk. About a year ago, when the Israeli housing minister announced plans for more homes in a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem while Biden was visiting, administration officials berated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, though it was clear at the time that Netanyahu didn’t know the announcement was coming either. Kirk and Pennsylvania Democrat Christopher Carney wrote to Obama asking him to keep his eye on the ball.</p>
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		<title>Noam Chomsky, Darling of Haaretz</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidhornik/noam-chomsky-darling-of-haaretz/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=noam-chomsky-darling-of-haaretz</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 May 2010 04:05:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[P. David Hornik]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The infamous Israel-hater is denied entry into Israel; the Israeli Left is up in arms.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/chomsky3.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-60801" title="chomsky3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/chomsky3.gif" alt="" width="400" height="489" /></a></p>
<p>This week Noam Chomsky, the famed MIT linguist and radical political writer and activist, was denied entry into Israel. The Israeli Left is up in arms.</p>
<p>Boaz Okon, legal commentator for left-leaning <em>Yediot   Aharonot</em>, Israel’s largest daily, <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3890586,00.html">called</a> the barring of Chomsky “a foolish act in a…series of recent follies” that “may mark the end of Israel as a law-abiding and freedom-loving state, or at least place a large question mark over this notion.” Going on to call Chomsky a “globally recognized intellectual,” Okon claimed “it would not be exaggerated to say that the decision to silence Professor Noam Chomsky is an attempt to put an end to freedom in the State of Israel.”</p>
<p>For his efforts, Okon made it to the <em>New York Times</em> where he was <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/world/middleeast/18chomsky.html">quoted</a> by its Israel correspondent Ethan Bronner. Bronner called Chomsky “an outspoken critic both of American and Israeli policy.” Bronner was also able to quote Mark Regev, spokesman for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, that “The idea that Israel is preventing people from entering whose opinions are critical of the state is ludicrous; it is not happening. This was a mishap. A guy at the border overstepped his authority.”</p>
<p>In Bronner’s telling, “Mr. Regev suggested that if Professor Chomsky tried to enter again, he would succeed.”</p>
<p>If it wasn’t paranoid, one might suspect that even the “right-wing” Netanyahu government has a special department for tripping up people who are loyal to Israel and want to defend it. In 2008—under the left-of-center Olmert government—Israel barred two other virulent enemies, Richard Falk and Chomsky’s disciple Norman Finkelstein, from entering. Regev—in the name of his boss—should either explain that those, too, were mistakes and Israel should gladly welcome all of its worst slanderers, or not speak until he and his boss work out some sort of coherent policy.</p>
<p>But to get back to the Israeli Left’s reactions, Bradley Burston of the far-Left daily <em>Haaretz</em> also quoted Okon on the barring of Chomsky. In doing so, Burston kicked off an <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/special-place-in-hell/special-place-in-hell-rebranding-israel-as-a-state-headed-for-fascism-1.290977">1100-word diatribe</a> against Israel as a “state headed for fascism” that uses the words fascism, fascist, and fascistic a total of twelve times, including calling Chomsky’s exclusion “fascism by rubber stamp.” Another <em>Haaretz </em>commentator, Gideon Levy, was more precise, <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/democracy-according-to-reichman-1.291143">asserting</a> that “When Israel closes its gates to anyone who doesn’t fall in line with our official positions, we are quickly becoming similar to North   Korea.”</p>
<p>But the honors went to <em>Haaretz</em>’s <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/declaring-war-on-the-intellect-israel-and-noam-chomsky-1.290903">editorial</a> on the issue, haughtily titled “Declaring War on the Intellect: Israel and Noam Chomsky.”</p>
<p>“By stopping the illustrious American scholar Prof. Noam Chomsky at the Allenby  Bridge,” <em>Haaretz</em> wrote,</p>
<blockquote><p>and barring his entry into Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the government’s outrageous treatment of those with the audacity to criticize its policies has reached new heights. Israel looks like a bully who has been insulted by a superior intellect and is now trying to fight it, arrest it and expel it.</p></blockquote>
<p>Going on to call Chomsky “a controversial and bold intellectual” who “bluntly and acerbically attacks any government that he thinks deserves it,” <em>Haaretz</em> said it would be</p>
<blockquote><p>hard to imagine any country that would not feel honored to be visited by Chomsky, apart from Israel, which has its own accounts to settle with him…. Chomsky has roundly condemned the occupation and displayed sympathy for the Palestinian struggle against it.… Israel, however, has lost its last remnants of tolerance for anyone who does not join its shrinking chorus of supporters.</p></blockquote>
<p>So there you have it. Chomsky, according to Okon, Bronner, Regev (speaking for Netanyahu), Burston, Levy, and <em>Haaretz</em> is at most a “critic,” but more significantly, for some of them, an “illustrious scholar,” a “superior intellect,” and a “bold intellectual” whose presence should honor anyone including the state of Israel, which could only have barred him in an act of careless folly or fascistic madness.</p>
<p>Who, actually, is Noam Chomsky? This <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1232">useful overview</a> notes, among much else, his admiration and apologetics, sustained over a decade and a half, for the genocidal Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. Closer to Israeli concerns, Chomsky—an American Jew who lived briefly in Israel during the 1960s and knows Hebrew—has made the following statements (again, among many others) over the years, each of them documented on <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/noamchomskyprofile.html">this site</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>* “I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the holocaust. Nor would there be anti-Semitic implications, per se, in the claim that the holocaust (whether one believes it took place or not) is being exploited, viciously so, by apologists for Israeli repression and violence.”</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>* “I objected to the founding of Israel as a Jewish state. I don’t think a Jewish or Christian or Islamic state is a proper concept. I would object to the United   States as a Christian state.”</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>* “The Hebrew press is much more open than the English language press, and there’s a very obvious reason: Hebrew is a secret language, you only read it if you’re inside the tribe.”</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>* “Of course [suicide bombers are] terrorists and there’s been Palestinian terrorism all the way through. I have always opposed it….But it’s very small as compared with the US-backed Israeli terrorism.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Robert Wistrich, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, notes in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lethal-Obsession-Anti-Semitism-Antiquity-Global/dp/1400060974/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1274285320&amp;sr=1-1">A Lethal Obsession</a></em>, a widely praised overview of contemporary anti-Semitism published in January, that Chomsky “stooped to the level of offering support to [notorious French] Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson and defending his credentials.” Chomsky, who contributed a preface to a 1980 Holocaust-denial book by Faurisson,</p>
<blockquote><p>told <em>Le Monde</em> on January 19, 1981, that he was personally “agnostic” about the Nazi massacres. He did not want people “to have religious or dogmatic positions about the existence of the Holocaust.” This, too, was grist to the mill of many Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis, who eagerly promote Chomsky’s books and speeches condemning American and Israeli imperialism on their websites. They understand that Chomsky’s backing for Faurisson and such left-wing libertarian Holocaust deniers as Pierre Guillaume has considerably bolstered the “revisionist” cause. (Wistrich, <em>A Lethal Obsession</em>, Random House, 2010, p. 532)</p></blockquote>
<p>Two and a half decades later, in May 2006, Chomsky’s enthusiasm for Jew-hatred was again on display when he <a href="http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&amp;x_issue=11&amp;x_article=1151">paid a fawning visit to Hezbollah</a> in Lebanon and said “Hezbollah’s insistence on keeping its arms is justified.” Chomsky was also quoted (see the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-jh2R-_eQY">video</a>) as telling his hosts that “the victory achieved by the resistance is a victory for all the peoples that fight injustice and oppression,” and had himself filmed standing beside a destroyed Israeli vehicle.</p>
<p>Less than two months later, when Hezbollah used its arms to mount the murderous cross-border attack against Israel that triggered the Second Lebanon War, Chomsky <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2006/7/14/noam_chomsky_u_s_backed_israeli#transcript">told a radio interviewer</a> that he hoped Hezbollah’s actions could yield results.</p>
<p>Okon’s and <em>Haaretz</em>’s reactions, then, to Israel denying entry to Chomsky—an apologist for genocide, exponent and promoter of Holocaust denial, and terror groupie—can <em>at best</em> be ascribed to gross, inexcusable ignorance. Or, if it is not ignorance, one does not like to think what else could drive them to verbally pommel their government and country and extol Chomsky in this episode.</p>
<p>And, to repeat, the Prime Minister’s Office has acquitted itself miserably in this affair as well.</p>
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		<title>Israel’s Welfare Threat</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidhornik/israel%e2%80%99s-welfare-threat/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=israel%25e2%2580%2599s-welfare-threat</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 04:05:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[P. David Hornik]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[Ben-David]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Dan Ben-David]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Horovitz]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why a growing welfare state burden may be an existential threat.
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/cr_mega_284_ultra-orthodox.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-60186" title="cr_mega_284_ultra-orthodox" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/cr_mega_284_ultra-orthodox-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a></p>
<p>Dan Ben-David, an economics professor at Tel Aviv University and executive director of the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Jerusalem, has been stoking fears lately in Israel with a 350-page report that says the country’s economic picture is grim.</p>
<p>The problems, Ben-David says, arise from two sectors: Israeli Arabs and ultra-Orthodox (or haredi) Israeli Jews. Both groups have high unemployment rates and are an increasingly onerous welfare burden on the productive part of the society. Unemployment among Arab men, as Ben-David recently <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/topofthetimes/topstories/la-fg-israel-idle-20100511,0,2113135,full.story">told</a> the <em>Los Angeles Times</em>, now stands at 27%, and for ultra-Orthodox Jewish men at no less than 65%.</p>
<p>Ben-David says the unemployment (or more precisely, nonemployment—referring to those who don’t desire to work) rate for ultra-Orthodox men has tripled since 1970 as more and more of them opt for a state-subsidized life as yeshiva students. Meanwhile the tax burden on ordinary Israelis—already augmented by particularly high defense and immigrant-absorption expenditures—keeps getting worse, and some blame it for Israel’s major “brain drain” problem of young academics going to live abroad.</p>
<p>But the scariest—even in a time of the Iranian threat—aspect of Ben-David’s message is demographic. He notes that, while Arabs and ultra-Orthodox together currently constitute less than 30% of the population, they account for nearly 50% of school-age children. Ben-David earlier <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?ID=172704">told</a> <em>Jerusalem Post</em> editor David Horovitz that according to current projections, by 2040 “78% of primary school enrollment will be haredi and Arab.” Such an entity would no longer be the Jewish-Zionist-democratic state of Israel, not least because the large majority of both Israeli Arabs and ultra-Orthodox are non- or anti-Zionist and don’t serve in the army.</p>
<p>Ben-David’s is not the only voice to sound these warnings of late. Ron Huldai, mayor of Tel Aviv, recently <a href="http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3883809,00.html">said</a> the situation called for “rebellion” by Israel’s “silent civilian majority” and that “today Israel is probably the only country in the world where private education is being funded by the public, without it having to adhere to a minimum of educational demands”—referring particularly to the lack of secular subjects in the ultra-Orthodox schools. Columnist and TV personality Yair Lapid <a href="http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3883019,00.html">wrote</a> in a “Letter to My Haredi Friend” that</p>
<blockquote><p>I can no longer pay. The money is gone. There’s no more left. I don’t have enough to give my children, and I don’t have enough to give yours.</p></blockquote>
<p>Many believe that both Huldai and Lapid have national political aspirations and so are starting to ride a handy issue. But if so, it only underlines the deep concern about the situation.</p>
<p>Indeed, Ben-David told Horovitz that educational reform is crucial and that Israelis—of all kinds—who are aged 29-54 and have a university degree fare far better:</p>
<blockquote><p>Among Arab women in that age range who don’t finish high school, fewer than 10% have work, but among Arab women with a degree, the figure is 70%. And it’s around 90% for Arab men and for non-haredi Jewish men and women.</p></blockquote>
<p>The difficulty is that educational reform in Israel is an intensely political issue. On the one hand, the ultra-Orthodox sector in particular has a deep ideological distrust of secular learning and resists calls to introduce subjects like math, English, and computers in its schools. On the other, in Israel’s fragmented parliamentary system, ultra-Orthodox parties keep wielding pivotal power in coalition governments.</p>
<p>Last year, for instance, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, a free marketeer who as finance minister sharply reduced child allowances to ultra-Orthodox families, nearly doubled some of them as the price for getting two ultra-Orthodox parties into his coalition.</p>
<p>At that time there was talk of the two largest secular parties—Netanyahu’s Likud plus former foreign minister <a href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2003/2/Tzipi+Livni.htm">Tzipi Livni</a>’s Kadima—forming the core of a secular government that would bring about both electoral reform <em>and</em> educational reform, overcoming the ultra-Orthodox resistance to the latter. That idea foundered, though, both on Livni’s personal pique at not being premier and her professed belief in an <a href="../2010/05/11/fake-%E2%80%9Cpeace%E2%80%9D-for-israel/">illusory peace process</a>.</p>
<p>Although some say Ben-David’s projections are exaggerated, even if they’re only partially right the problem will need addressing. For that, at least functional unity among secular parties will indeed be the key—requiring, in turn, leaders with both vision and responsibility on the national level.</p>
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		<title>Bottom-up Peace?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/joseph-puder/bottom-up-peace/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bottom-up-peace</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 04:00:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Are grassroots peace measures outpacing the work of the political class in the West Bank? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/up.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-60218" title="up" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/up.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="261" /></a></p>
<p>The realization that political leaders have been unable to bring peace to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that involvement of the international community has only sharpened the division between Arab and Jew, has prompted the people of Eretz-Shalom (Land Peace) to seek peace from the bottom up.</p>
<p>The Israeli Left has made numerous attempts to make peace between Israeli-Jews and Palestinian-Arabs.  The <a href="http://www.mideastweb.org/general">Geneva document drafted by MK Yossi Beilin- and P.L.O spokesperson Abd –Rabbo in October 2003</a> failed as did the previous attempt, the <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/peoplesvoiceplan.">Ayalon-Nusseibeh Peace Plan of July 27, 2002</a>, both of which were supported and funded by the European Union and Western (mostly European) NGOs.  These two peace plans represented the views and expectations of the secular leftist-European-and liberal worldview to the exclusion of the traditional values of the people who are both physically and emotionally tied to their land. Both these peace plans have been relegated to the dustbin of history.   It is the people who work on the land and who have personally experienced closely the price of war and its cost in blood, who are, in the end, the best possible peace-makers.</p>
<p>In “settlement” communities such as Kedumim in Samaria, the people are determined to live in peace with their Arab neighbors.  There is no fence around Kedumim, and the residents travel to Arab villages, while Arab villagers come to be served in the settlement’s gas station. This is true for other communities as well. “We are open and ready to settle our differences with our Arab neighbors on the basis of live and let live with mutual respect for one another” says Raphaella Segal of Kedumim. Although Raphella is not yet an active member of Eretz-Shalom, she supports the idea behind the movement.</p>
<p>The Land Peace movement began with meetings between local Palestinians and Jewish settlers in the Etzion Bloc (Gush Etzion) and moved southward to the Mt. Hebron region and northward towards Samaria.  In an interview with the Israeli Hebrew daily Makor Rishon, Nachum Petznick, one of the founders of Land Peace explained that,</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Land Peace<em> </em>grew from the bottom by regular people both Palestinian-Arabs and Jewish settlers who understood that there is no time to wait while politicians who try time and again to present unsuccessful peace plans.  Reality is more complex, however, and while the politicians discuss peace agreements something entirely different is occurring on the ground.  Our aim is to impact on reality while understanding that both the Palestinians and we, the Jewish settlers, are here to stay.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“We are now several hundred strong.” says Petznick, “The mere fact that we are meeting with scores of Palestinian-Arabs who are interested, and that we are getting to know each other is of immense importance, Petznick said.  The conversation in the political Left is about “recognizing” the Palestinians while at Land Peace we “get to know” real Palestinians as individual people,” Petznick added.  To recognize something is undefined, but to know somebody is real, according to Petznick. The people associated with Land Peace want to live side by side in peace with their neighbors, but as Petznick puts it, the word “peace” has been exploited and beaten up from all directions, “I prefer to talk about good neighborly relations and mutual respect &#8211; rather than use the word &#8216;peace.&#8217;”</p>
<p>S., a former Hamas activist who must hide his name for fear of retribution, found his way to Land Peace through an Israeli prison system. He tells the story of a young Palestinian named Tzudki Zaro in prison with him who told him without remorse that he murdered the Jewish baby Shalhevet Pas.  When S. asked him if he was proud of his deed, Zaro replied “of course, why not?” S. described the shock he felt knowing that this human monster was proud of murdering a baby who was just a few months old.  After that S. recounts, “I began to think differently.” As S. told a Makor Rishon reporter, “I reached the conclusion that I did not want to be with people like Zaro, and that both you (the Jews) and us (Palestinians) live on this land, and that we do not have another land, so what are we to do? You fire at us, we fire at you, you kill and we kill, and when will it end?&#8221;</p>
<p>S. described how he has been searching for ways to talk to Israelis and how he found the Land Peace movement.  According to S., the peace from above failed, and the leadership on both sides failed.  “I do not care about Abu Mazen or Netanyahu, but I do care about my neighbors, and I want the firing on each other to stop. I want my Jewish neighbor to give me a ride and I want to do the same for him, and we together will force our leaders to make peace.”</p>
<p>S. is clear about the way to peace: “The leaders failed to bring peace because the public was not prepared for it.  The leaders sat together and wrote agreements and then delivered the message through the press to the people.  But, the people have not seen a difference, and they are still suffering.” S. concluded, “Peace will come not when the leadership will cook and we will eat from it, but rather, when we shall cook for ourselves.”</p>
<p>Shai Ben Josef, another key figure in Land Peace<em> </em>observed that, “For seventy years people are trying to divide the land and have failed because it is a small land and because we live amongst each other, and share the same roads, breathe the same air, and drink the same water.  We must therefore find a way in which each nation (Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs) will be able to fulfill its self determination separately, but at the same time share in things that could be run together.”</p>
<p>The message of Land Peace to President Obama and the European Union is clear: let us “cook” peace for ourselves.</p>
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		<title>Dennis Ross and Dual Loyalties</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/dennis-ross-and-dual-loyalties/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dennis-ross-and-dual-loyalties</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 09 Apr 2010 04:10:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=57802</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama’s Middle East advisor is singled out for a pernicious smear. ]]></description>
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<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/d2.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-57803" title="d2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/d2.jpg" alt="" width="466" height="367" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Visit <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/">Pajamas Media</a></strong></p>
<p>Last week, Laura Rozen at the <em>Politico </em><a rel="external" href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0310/Fierce_debate_on_Israel_underway_inside_Obama_administration.html">gave space</a> to an anonymous Obama administration official to smear Dennis Ross, the White House’s Middle East strategist. Ross’s grave offense, apparently, was to evince some understanding of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s position, which also happens to be the mainstream Israeli position, that Israel has a legitimate right to construct new housing in Jerusalem. That earned Ross the smear that he “seems to be far more sensitive to Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests,” a crude implication of dual loyalties and a classic anti-Semitic slander. Now Harvard professor Stephen Walt has <a rel="external" href="http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/04/02/on_dual_loyalty">emerged</a> to defend the charge under the guise of rejecting it.</p>
<p>Walt, it will be recalled, is co-author of <em>The Israel Lobby</em>, and thus an unlikely voice to come to the defense of someone who shows any empathy for Israel’s position. Indeed, although Walt curiously does not mention it, that book counted Ross as a prominent member of “the Israel lobby” — a term with ominously dark connotations — because he has the temerity to believe, as the authors put it, that the United States should support Israel even when the two countries disagree. (Presumably the “realist” position, which Walt is said to represent, would be that the United States should break all support for countries with which it fails on occasion to see eye to eye.) And sure enough, after some <em>pro-forma</em> hand-wringing about anti-Semitism by which he seems untroubled in other contexts and a few banalities about the nature of political attachments, Walt comes to the conclusion that the real problem with the dual loyalty smear, at least in Ross’s case, is the phrasing. He suggests that it should be called a more sanitary-sounding “conflict of interest.”</p>
<p>Walt no doubt imagines this to be the pragmatic position. He is as usual mistaken. For one thing, what is the conflict of interest in Ross’s case? That he shows some appreciation of Israeli public opinion and understands Israeli domestic politics? Note that Ross has not come out and said that the United States should accept Israel’s position on Jerusalem, which would be eminently reasonable counsel. He has only advised the administration to show more understanding of Israel’s position on that issue. The only way this could be interpreted as a “conflict of interest” is if one believes, as Walt apparently does, that any willingness to listen seriously to Israeli concerns represents the elevation of Israeli interests over American ones. This in fact happens to be an extreme position.</p>
<p><strong>To continue reading this article, <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/dennis-ross-and-dual-loyalties/">click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Tolerating Violence Against Jews on Campus</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/richard-l-cravatts/tolerating-violence-against-jews-on-campus/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=tolerating-violence-against-jews-on-campus</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/richard-l-cravatts/tolerating-violence-against-jews-on-campus/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Feb 2010 05:00:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=50243</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Is assaulting Jewish students on Canadian campuses now legitimate criticism of Israel?]]></description>
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<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/antisemitism02.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-50393" title="antisemitism02" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/antisemitism02.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="265" /></a></p>
<p>In a country where multiculturalism has a reverent following and criticism of protected minorities has essentially been criminalized as “hate speech,” it is more than ironic that on some Canadian campuses radical students have taken it upon themselves to target one group, Jewish students, with a hatred that is nominally forbidden for any others. And with a recent incident that took place at the beginning of February, York University in particular, has now revealed a troubling pattern of tolerating physical and emotional assaults by pro-Palestinian radicals against Jewish students and others who dare to demonstrate any support for Israel or question the tactics of Islamists in their efforts to destroy the Jewish state.</p>
<p>At a February 1<sup>st</sup> event, Hasbara Fellowships at York  University, with the permission of the University, had set up a table to inform interested students about Hezbollah-kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit as part of Hasbara’s ongoing campaign called “Free Palestinians from Hamas.” Typically, York’s outspoken and volatile pro-Palestinian students were less than willing to let such benign sentiments be aired, and, according to Hasbara’s co-president, Tyler Golden, demonstrated their displeasure by surrounding the table in an angry mob of some 50 activists, spewing forth anti-Semitic and anti-Israel slurs at the Jewish students.</p>
<p>“At around 4 o’clock,” said Golden, “several known anti-Israel faces on campus came to start questioning us and debate with us . . . Security has asked us, when we come across this type of situation, to call them, which we did. We also videotape so they can see the faces and hear the voices of the people that do it. A few students who were surrounding us were upset that there were cameras in their faces, so they started yelling and screaming. As they were trying to push the cameras out of the way, they actually hit two of our students.” Muslim student groups have consistently attempted to disrupt the speeches of guests whose view are considered “unacceptable” because they might cause discomfort or “intimidation” for students unwilling to face the reality of radical Islam and unable to see any villain in the Middle East except Israel.</p>
<p>And the recent brawling at York  University is not the first instance of anti-Israelism gone amuck on that campus. York’s radicalized students had already revealed a rabid anti-Semitic leaning, when in February 2009, some 100 pro-Palestinian students initiated a near-riot, as police had to be called to usher Jewish students to safety after they had been barricaded inside the Hillel offices and were “isolated and threatened” by the physically and verbally aggressive demonstrators.</p>
<p>Parroting the morally-incoherent and factually-defective exhortations of Israel-haters elsewhere of “Zionism equals racism!” and “Racists off campus!” the York mob, members of both the York Federation of Students and Students Against Israeli Apartheid, demonstrated once again that what is positioned as “intellectual debate” on campuses about the Israeli/Palestinian issue has devolved into something that is not really a conversation at all. Rather, it is something more akin to an ideologically-driven shout fest with a new version of pro-Palestinian brown shirts who pretend that they are merely criticizing Zionism but are actually slurring Jews. So York’s supporters of the cult of Palestinianism apparently no longer felt even a bit uncomfortable voicing what was actually on their minds when the subject of Israel comes up: when the York Hillel students were trapped inside locked offices, surrounded by an increasingly violent and aggressive mob, the intellectual “debate” that day included such invidious and raw slurs as “Die Jew―get the hell off campus.”</p>
<p>That thuggery by pro-Palestinian Jew-haters had already become something of a tradition on the York campus. A year earlier in April 2008, Barbara Kay of Canada’s <em>National Post</em> reported, York’s Hillel had invited then-Knesset member Natan Sharansky to deliver an address. Not content with allowing anyone with a pro-Israel viewpoint to shares his or her views on campus, the Palestinian Students Association and Students Against Israeli Apartheid@York (SAIA) used the now common tactic of intellectual bullies on American and Canadian campuses: they jeered at and shouted down Sharansky, spoke loudly among themselves during his talk, and generally prevented anyone in the audience from listening to the content of the speech, but not before they had articulated their own vitriol with such comments as “Get off our campus, you genocidal racist” and “you are bringing a second Holocaust upon yourselves.”</p>
<p>Violence, and threats of violence, against Jewish students during conversations about Israel have occurred at other Canadian universities, as well. At the University of Toronto’s invidious 2009 Israeli Apartheid Week, for instance, the annual event had so devolved into a racist, rabid rally that proceedings were closed to cameras and reporters, and individuals who actually attempted to participate in a dialogue about the issues being raised by the noxious event in the first place were confronted with physical intimidation and threats, encountering the dark side of pro-Palestinianism.</p>
<p>One of these individuals, Isaac Apter, a Jewish alumnus of the University  of Toronto, recounted how he and others in the audience of one evening’s events quizzed a speaker about why Hamas had persistently refused to recognize the legitimacy of Israel—did “Israel have the right to exist?”—and when the speaker side-stepped the questioning repeatedly, some audience members shouted out, “Answer the questions!” Apter found himself approached from behind by a member of a private guard retained by Students Against Israel Apartheid, slapped in the head, yanked from his seat, and yelled at with the warning, “You shut the f&#8211;k up!” A second Jewish attendee was similarly assaulted that night by one of the hired security team and given a far more chilling warning, particularly in light of the barbaric practice of beheadings in the Middle East:<strong> </strong>“Shut the f&#8211;k up or I’ll saw your head off.”  Not only was the Jewish state being attacked and degraded throughout these events, but now Jews themselves were being targeted for emotional and physical assault, an unsurprising outcome of a prolonged, virulent campaign against the concept of Israel as a Jewish state.</p>
<p>University officials regularly proclaim, as they did when they had to defend sponsoring Israeli Apartheid Week,<strong> </strong>that they have a “commitment to the principles of freedom of inquiry, freedom of speech and freedom of association.” But that empty exhortation has shown itself, repeatedly, to be, at best, disingenuous, and, at worst, a masking of their true intention:  enabling favored victim groups to utter vitriol and libel against Israel and Jews, with the pretense that they have somehow encouraged intellectual debate and productive political discussion. This is not scholarship at all; it is Jew-hatred dressed up in academic clothes.<strong> </strong></p>
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		<title>History as Propaganda</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/brendan-goldman/history-as-propoganda/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=history-as-propoganda</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/brendan-goldman/history-as-propoganda/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Feb 2010 05:01:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Brendan Goldman]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49535</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Anti-Israel professor Rashid Khalidi politicizes and academic awards ceremony. 
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				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/rashid_khalidi.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-49536" title="rashid_khalidi" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/rashid_khalidi-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" /></a></p>
<p>“This is not an Israeli-Palestinian debate,” Stanley Cohen, the director of the Scone Foundation, said. “It is [a conference] to honor the archivist profession.”</p>
<p>Cohen’s statement was half true: the event was not a “debate,” but only because there were no dissenting opinions to challenge keynote speaker <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/6418">Rashid Khalidi’s</a> monologue portraying the Palestinians as powerless victims of an Israeli foe intent on destroying their historical records.</p>
<p>Cohen was speaking to an audience of approximately 150 people, mostly members of the general public and scholars of the Middle East, at the Scone Foundation’s “Archivist of the Year” award ceremony, held January 25 at the CUNY Graduate Center’s expansive auditorium in the heart of New York City.</p>
<p>The event was billed as an opportunity to honor the joint recipients of the seventh Archivist of the Year award, Yehoshua Freundlich of the Israeli Archives and Khader Salameh of the Al-Aqsa Mosque Library. <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/search.php?cx=015692155655874064424%3A-cjrsa07xqe&amp;cof=FORID%3A9&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=khalidi&amp;sa=Search#922">Khalidi</a>, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and a <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/1211">former spokesman for the PLO</a>, and <a href="http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/history/myers/">Professor David Myers</a>, the director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, were the event’s keynote speakers.</p>
<p>Cohen made clear from the start that he subscribed to the political biases of academia. He claimed that a previous recipient of the Archivist of the Year Award had been “shelved by the Defense Department” for opposing Operation Iraqi Freedom. “Archivists cannot oppose faith-based policies,” Cohen joked with his seemingly sympathetic audience.</p>
<p>Salameh’s and Freundlich’s speeches followed Cohen’s address. The two archivists were dispassionate, thoughtful, and apolitical in describing their work. Salameh demonstrated a fluent grasp of Hebrew when speaking to an Israeli during his presentation, and Freundlich talked about his determination to preserve documents related to Palestinian history.</p>
<p>The American academics proved decidedly less capable of keeping politics out of their speeches. Myers spoke first, stating before he began his address that, “self-critical research,” meaning criticism of the Palestinian narrative, was a “defining feature of [Khalidi’s] work”—a preposterous claim that could not withstand the evidence presented in Khalidi’s own words.</p>
<p>Khalidi began his speech by saying that the “statelessness” of the Palestinians is a “condition that manifests itself directly in the lack of Palestinian national archives.”  This proved a half-hearted attempt to make his digression into politics relevant to the subject of the ceremony.</p>
<p>While Myers had discussed how Israel’s leftist “<a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/New_Historians.html">New Historians</a>” challenged the alleged “myths” of Israelis’ “collective memory,” Khalidi sounded almost giddy when he stated, “the founders of the [Israeli] state would be turning in their graves [if they read what these historians wrote].”</p>
<p>Khalidi later made clear that Palestinians, unlike Israelis and Americans, are exempt from the obligation to challenge their national myths: “The collective memory of the Palestinians was perfectly clear,” Khalidi said of the precision of the Palestinian refugees’ recollection of their “expulsion” from the Jewish state.</p>
<p>He neglected to mention that even according to the controversial estimates of the New Historians, <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/refugees.html">at most a third of the Palestinian refugees</a> of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence were expelled; the rest left on their own accord, Palestinians’ “collective memory” to the contrary notwithstanding.</p>
<p>Khalidi claimed Palestinian archives were systematically destroyed by the Israelis, adding that this issue was “exacerbated by the destruction or desecration of religious and historical sites.” He later expanded on this claim: “These actions are often linked to efforts to deny the existence of Palestinians in Palestine.”</p>
<p>The only examples Khalidi offered of such Israeli actions were the bombing of Palestinian archives at a PLO building in Beirut during the <a href="http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1678203/the_first_lebanon_war_arab_israeli.html">First Lebanon War</a> and the closing of the PLO’s Jerusalem headquarters and archives at the <a href="http://www.orienthouse.org/about/index.html">Orient House</a> during the Second Intifada. The intuitive reason for such actions—<a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/testimony/5.pdf">the PLO’s documented support for terrorism</a> and not a desire to “deny the existence of Palestinians”—was seemingly lost on Khalidi.</p>
<p>Given Khalidi’s abandonment of any pretense of discussing the work of the two archivists, Myers was clearly hesitant to challenge Khalidi’s assertions during the question and answer session. He further politicized the conference with a digression on how historians could use their trade to assist Palestinians who claimed to have lost property in Jerusalem. Myers neglected to discuss how historians could help redeem the <a href="http://info.jpost.com/C003/Supplements/Refugees/12-13.html">much more significant financial losses</a> of the approximately <a href="http://www.meforum.org/263/why-jews-fled-the-arab-countries">900,000 Jews who fled Arab lands</a>.</p>
<p>However, to his credit, Myers did argue for the “ameliorative role” of archives and their “possibility to craft a shared history [between Israelis and Palestinians].” Cohen had also claimed in <a href="http://www.newyorkhistoryblog.com/2010/01/palestinian-israeli-archivists-feted-as.html">a flier</a> for the conference that, “Open archives may very well be instruments to reduce divergence, expand mutual understanding and fruitful cooperation [between Israelis and Palestinians].&#8221;</p>
<p>Khalidi ended the awards ceremony on a decidedly less optimistic note. He discussed how Germany and France had fought wars for a century and a half and had to wait 60 years after those conflicts ended before they could establish a joint “peace” curriculum for their schools. He then concluded, “[A Palestinian State], I fear, is unlikely to see the light of day anytime soon, if ever.”</p>
<p>Khalidi’s politicization of an awards ceremony intended to honor the unsung heroes of the archivist profession was predictable to anyone familiar with his public lectures, which routinely politicize rather than analyze the contemporary Middle East. More disturbing was Myers’s and the audience’s complacent acceptance of his usurpation. The professionalism of the Israeli and Palestinian archivists stood in stark contrast to the unwillingness of the American academics to check their politics at the door. The honorees deserved better.</p>
<p><em>Brendan Goldman is a senior at New York University majoring in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, and an intern at the Middle East Forum. This essay was sponsored by </em><em><a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/">Campus Watch</a>, a project of the <a href="http://www.meforum.org/">Middle East Forum</a>.</em></p>
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		<title>Fighting the Goldstone Report</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/alan-m-dershowitz/fighting-the-goldstone-report-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fighting-the-goldstone-report-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/alan-m-dershowitz/fighting-the-goldstone-report-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:08:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alan M. Dershowitz]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48458</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Israel’s military investigation can establish the truth about Gaza and Hamas terrorism. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-48459" title="n500134185_776885_2974" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/n500134185_776885_2974.jpg" alt="n500134185_776885_2974" width="604" height="453" /></p>
<p>In its most recent response to the Goldstone report, the Israeli government has catalogued the investigations being conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Of the 150 incidents, so far 36 have been referred for criminal investigation. To date, criminal investigators have taken evidence from almost 100 Palestinian complainants and witnesses, along with approximately 500 IDF soldiers and commanders. The Paper describes some of the challenges encountered in the conduct of the investigations, including accessing evidence from battlefield situations and the need to make arrangements, together with non-governmental organizations such as B’Tselem, to locate and interview Palestinian witnesses. To address these challenges, special investigative teams have been appointed and are currently investigation complaints arising from the Gaza Operation.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Some charges being investigated derive from the Goldstone report. Others go beyond the report. The Israeli response explains the extensive investigatory mechanisms employed by Israel, several of which are completely independent of the military chain of command. It compares the Israeli investigatory mechanisms with those of other democratic nations, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.</p>
<p>It then discloses the results of investigations regarding several of the charges made in the Goldstone report, proving by photographic and other evidence that they are unfounded or exaggerated. Of the 150 charges investigated, “36 criminal investigations [were] opened thus far.” The investigations are ongoing.</p>
<p>No other democratic country in the world, with comparably thorough investigative mechanisms, would be told that it had to do more—that a<em> judicial</em> investigation was also required. Neither the United States nor United Kingdom have been told that a judicial inquiry, beyond the investigations already underway, must be conducted. But the Goldstone report demands that Israel and Israel alone must go beyond its normal investigative mechanism and bring in outside judges. This reflects yet another double standard.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, it would be prudent for Israel to conduct a completely independent judicial review. Not that its results would ever satisfy the world’s numerous Israel-bashers. It ought to be conducted to satisfy Israel and supporters of Israel that no stone has been left unturned.</p>
<p>Such a review could include the issuance of subpoenas to soldiers, commanders and policy makers, as in a trial. Or it could be limited to traditional “judicial review” of the findings of military investigators, as in an appeal. That should be up to the Israeli government to decide.</p>
<p>Whatever type of review is decided upon, it will be real—as distinguished from the so-called “investigation” conducted by Hamas, which has already decided that those who fired rockets into Israel had no intention to kill Israeli civilians. Why then did they fire the rockets when children were on the way to school? Why did they fire them in the direction of cities and towns?</p>
<p>What will happen if Israel conducts a probing investigation and Hamas conducts a whitewash? According to the Goldstone report, that should result in referring Hamas, but not Israel, to the International Criminal Court and other tribunals. Will that happen? Don’t hold your breath.</p>
<p>The reality, which any truly independent investigation of Hamas and Israel would disclose, is that many of the civilians who were killed during Operation Cast Lead were, in fact, the victims of a deliberate and willful policy of killing Palestinian civilians in order to gain a non-military advantage. The real question is who killed these civilians and who should be held responsible for their deaths.</p>
<p>Any fair assessment of the evidence leads to the following conclusion: Hamas deliberately conducted its terrorist activities against Israel in a manner calculated by Hamas to produce Palestinian civilian deaths from Israeli weapons. Any fair assessment of the evidence also leads to the conclusion that, while Israel loses from the death of every Palestinian civilian, Hamas gains from every such death. As Golda Meir once put it: “We can perhaps forgive you for killing our children, but we can never forgive you for making us kill your children.”</p>
<p>The last thing Israel wants to do is kill innocent Palestinian civilians. But every democracy is obligated to protect its own civilians from rocket attacks. The truth is that Hamas deliberately fired rockets at Israeli civilians from densely populated civilian areas precisely to put Israel to a Hobson’s choice: either do nothing and allow Israeli civilians to be subject to indiscriminate rocket attacks; or attack those who are firing the rockets, thereby assuring that there will be some Palestinian civilian deaths. The Goldstone report inverted these conclusions because of the evidentiary bias it showed in evaluating the facts. It falsely blamed Israel rather than Hamas for the civilian deaths caused, both factually and morally, by the longstanding Hamas tactic.</p>
<p>It is a well-accepted principle of law, both domestic and international, that when a terrorist fires from a crowded area at innocent people, and the only way the police have of stopping the terrorist from endangering innocent lives is by shooting at him—if the policeman, despite his best efforts, shoots and kills innocent civilians, the <em>terrorist</em> is responsible for those deaths, not the policeman. Any fair assessment of the events in Gaza must begin with that principle—a principle totally ignored by the Goldstone report.</p>
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		<title>The Anti-Israel Revelation</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/mark-d-tooley/the-anti-israel-revelation/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-anti-israel-revelation</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/mark-d-tooley/the-anti-israel-revelation/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Jan 2010 05:02:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark D. Tooley]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47781</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Evangelical leftist Brian McLaren searches for “truth” in “Palestine.” 
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47783" title="brian-mclaren" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/brian-mclaren.jpg" alt="brian-mclaren" width="520" height="390" /></p>
<p>“Emergent Church” guru Brian McLaren is a key figure on the Evangelical Left who is trying shift Evangelicals, who are America’s most pro-Israel demographic, into a more neutralist stance. Currently, he is leading a delegation through Israel and “Palestine” to broadcast the sins of Israeli oppression against Palestinians by “listening, learning, thinking, observing, reflecting.”  His blog is providing daily updates of his discoveries, all of which confirm his previously often declared bias against Israel.</p>
<p>“I hope you will start questioning what you think you know about the situation here,” McLaren warned on his <a href="http://www.brianmclaren.net/">blog</a> recently, with the assumption that most readers are deceived by pro-Israel partiality. “I&#8217;ve been an avid reader on the subject for quite a while, but being here now, I see how many of my most basic assumptions were skewed from a lifetime of half-truths, unfair and imbalanced news, well-planned propaganda, and misinformation.”</p>
<p>McLaren, of course, used to be a more traditional, conservative Evangelical.  So his emergence into the Evangelical Left in recent years, including the requisite negativity towards Israel, is part of an ongoing spiritual rebirth into which he invites his fellow Evangelicals.  Of course, McLaren insists that he is not anti-Israel, and certainly not anti-Jewish.  He simply wants to liberate both Palestinians and Jews from the enslaving mindset of the “occupation” that holds both peoples captive.</p>
<p>“The struggle here is about people being held in various forms bondage &#8211; both occupiers and the occupied each in their own ways, and everyone needs liberation,” McLaren explained.  He is himself apparently one agent of that “liberation.”  In his typical post-modern way, he further posits that none of the people in that region are really responsible for the strife and horrors.  Rather, it is the “harmful ideologies and world views and narratives that rule and exert power in and through people&#8217;s lives” and “cause them to do terrible things they would never do in their right minds.”  Indeed, he warned, that “when hateful and dehumanizing ideologies take control, both victimizers and victims are dehumanized.”</p>
<p>Of course, though McLaren wants to liberate everybody from their various spiritual/political blindness, he implies that most or all of the spiritual confusion comes from Jewish Israel and its Christian supporters.  He is very concerned about Israeli “razor wire and segregation walls,” as part of the “ugliness of occupation.” But he is not as interested in the Palestinian and Islamist terror that generate Israel’s defenses.  He helpfully included photos of graffiti art on the infamous security wall, and other blank slates, by left-wing British graffitist Bansky.  One shows the Statue of Liberty pulling out her empty pockets, perhaps illustrating the bankruptcy of American capitalism, or America’s hoped for inability to back Israel.  Another graffiti artwork shows a Palestinian girl searching an Israeli soldier, in a hoped for role reversal.</p>
<p>McLaren recited first hand from his West Bank visit “heart-shattering stories of Palestinians being arrested without cause, tortured, humiliated, re-arrested, re-tortured.”  Amazingly, he has discovered a “lack of hatred” and a thirst for “non-violent” action among Palestinians, despite all the abuse from their Israeli “victimizers,” and the mischaracterizations from the purportedly pro-Israel U.S. media.   Revealingly, McLaren learned that Palestinians do not want a “two-state solution” but instead desire to “live in peace with Israelis” and want “Jews, Muslims, and Christians to learn to live together as neighbors.”  In other words, the Palestinians want the eradication of Jewish Israel and the creation of a new Palestinian and Islamic dominated state where, purportedly, Jews and Christians also could live, at least for a time.  McLaren finds this discovery to be very “powerful” and encouraging.</p>
<p>“We in the US have been given a terribly false impression &#8211; from the media, from political leaders, and from many Christian and Jewish leaders as well,” McLaren incredulously recounted of the “quiet but gracious attitude” he found among Palestinians towards Israel.  “All of us who are here in Palestine are now witnesses to realities we can&#8217;t be silent about in the future.”</p>
<p>One of McLaren’s fellow pilgrims is former journalist Greg Barrett, author of <em>The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions &amp; Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok</em>.  Maybe not quite as naïve as the rose-tinted McLaren, Barrett blogged that Palestinians graciously endure American tourists despite all the torments that America purportedly inflicts on them through Israel because “we help buoy a difficult economy.”  But deep down, Palestinians are justifiably “tired of us and our elected officials who look the other way while an oppressed people is bullied, robbed and mocked.”  Christian tourists have too long visited Bethlehem to see Christ’s birthplace while “we’ve failed to follow His teachings.”</p>
<p>Appropriately, Barrett cited a favorite social activist/philosopher for the Left:  “Seeing the infamous Wall built by Israel to imprison the Palestinians, I was reminded of Saul Alinsky’s <em>Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals</em>. In it, Alinsky writes about ‘the rules pertaining to the ethics of means and ends.’ First among them is the belief that a person’s concern with the ethics of a social action correspond to one’s distance from the consequences of action or inaction.”</p>
<p>Perhaps Barrett should instead have cited Alinsky’s better known quote about left-wing polemics:  &#8220;Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.&#8221;  McLaren’s Holy Land tour, whether deliberately or cluelessly, seems like just another Alinsky-inspired cause from the Religious and Evangelical Left, which are determined to demonize Israel and its U.S. ally, in pursuit of “liberation” for Palestinians.  But this brand of “liberation” would result in the eventual eradication of Jewish Israel in favor of an Islamist dominated “Palestine,” where fellow-travelling Christians like Brian McLaren would be tolerated largely for their political utility.</p>
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		<title>At Last, Some Decent Israeli Films</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-solway/at-last-some-decent-israeli-films/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=at-last-some-decent-israeli-films</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-solway/at-last-some-decent-israeli-films/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:08:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46783</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Film-makers emerge who don't care to please the anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish crowd.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-46785" title="filmreel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/filmreel.gif" alt="filmreel" width="450" height="338" /></p>
<p>The Israeli film industry as a whole leaves little to the imagination and much to disappoint. It is dominated by political ideologues of a distinctly leftist slant who tend to see their country through the eyes of its enemies, favoring the Palestinian narrative, claiming to understand the policies and grievances of the surrounding Muslim nations, relentlessly critical of the army, the settlers and the so-called religious Right, and basking parasitically in the approval of the liberal elites who give out the international prizes and citations.</p>
<p>An excellent example of such opportunistic practices is provided by Ran Edelist who directed a documentary entitled <em><a href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P1-135983867.html">Ruach Shaked</a></em> about an Israeli reconnaissance unit operating in the Sinai during the Six Day War. The film claims that the unit had killed 250 Egyptian prisoners of war, a revelation which caused a media firestorm and led to members of the Egyptian parliament calling for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador and the suspension of diplomatic relations with Israel. Edelist has admitted that errors were made with regard to voice-over commentary and wrongly juxtaposed archival footage—in point of fact, the enemy casualties were actually <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/Fedayeen.html">fedayeen</a> trying to infiltrate into Israel and no POWs were executed. Such films, however, are pre-screened and it is hard to believe that such obtrusive blunders were overlooked, yet Edelist and Ittay Landsburg Nevo, head of the left-leaning Israel Broadcasting Authority, defended the production whose pejorative effect on the political scene could have been predicted with even the most rudimentary foresight.</p>
<p>Similarly, Israel’s cable TV Channel 8 and the Jerusalem Cinematheque have been willing to fund anti-Zionist filmmaker <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyal_Sivan">Eyal Sivan</a>, a typical self-abnegating Jew who managed to avoid his military service, was a speaker at “Israeli Apartheid Week” in London in 2007, and signed a public document condemning “the brutality and cruelty of Israeli policy” during the summer 2006 war with Hizbullah. Israel’s Channel 2’s Keshet franchise has frequently aired the docudramas of <a href="http://www.jewish-theatre.com/visitor/article_display.aspx?articleID=869">Motti Lerner</a>, who plays fast and loose with the historical truth and believes, according to a paper he delivered at Brandeis University, that Israeli society is diseased, suffering from an “inability…to empathize with the Palestinians.” Along the same lines, Shimon Dotan’s documentary, <em><a href="http://www.altfg.com/blog/film-reviews/hot-house-shimon-dotan/">Hot House</a></em>, funded chiefly by Israel’s New Foundation for Film and Television, sympathetically profiles female terrorist Ahlam Tamini who murdered fifteen people, eight of them children, in the bombing of the Sbarro pizzeria on August 9, 2001. Yet, speaking for the Palestinians, Dotan comments: “We owe them empathy.”</p>
<p>Then we have Ari Folman’s recent <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltz_with_Bashir">Waltz with Bashir</a></em>, the recipient of many awards and critical accolades. Although an improvement over the general run of Israeli-bashing films, it nevertheless magnifies the strength and firepower of the enemy while appearing to stress the comparative weakness and fear of the IDF. Its effect is to demoralize. Israeli soldiers are portrayed as a cohort of flakes, freaks, wimps and anxiety-ridden semi-losers who have trouble reconciling the importance of their mission with the courage and resolution required of them—indeed, the central character is so traumatized he <em>cannot even remember</em> the operation and travels about interviewing his former comrades to fill in the yawning blank. And the entire context of the march into Lebanon, the reason it was deemed necessary by the Israeli high command, the years of indiscriminate shelling, incursions and kidnappings suffered by Israelis in the north of the country, is conveniently forgotten not only by the protagonist but by the director as well.</p>
<p>Israeli cineaste Hannah Brown, puffing what she calls Israel’s <a href="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1261364558313&amp;pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull">smash hit</a> decade, revels in the acclaim flowing from the politically correct international festivals and derides individuals skeptical of this trend as right-wing “party poopers.” Regrettably, this doesn’t change the fact that “most directors are on the Left,” as she graciously allows, and that their partisan colors show through their productions. Any film by the widely celebrated, tediously pedantic and unfailingly depressing left-winger <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Gitai">Amos Gitai</a> renders this obvious. As <a href="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&amp;cid=1261364476523">Seth Frantzman points out</a>, Israeli directors tend to make films about a Jewish woman falling for a Palestinian suicide bomber (Dror Zahavi’s <a href="http://www.qantara.de/webcom/show_article.php/_c-310/_nr-617/i.html"><em>For My Father</em></a>) or a Jewish woman falling in love with an Arab who murders her brother (Keren Yedaya’s <em><a href="http://cineuropa.org/trailer.aspx?lang=en&amp;documentID=108740">Jaffa</a></em>). What is the message of such films? Frantzman asks, and replies: “That Israelis should ‘love the other’ to the extent that they love murderers.” That seems to be about right.</p>
<p>Fortunately, there are some notable film-makers who are more concerned with telling the truth than with making a reputation for themselves by catering to the anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish crowd. Eran Kolirin’s <em><a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/bands_visit/">The Band’s Visit</a></em> is a fine companion piece to Eytan Fox’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walk_on_Water_%28film%29"><em>Walk on Water</em></a> and Gidi Dar’s <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushpizin">Ushpizin</a></em>,<em> </em>all superbly directed films with fascinating characters, a non-ideological theme and a credible story about evolving relationships that bring people closer together rather than set them apart in resentment and intransigence. These are beautifully composed and warm-hearted movies that affirm Israeli life, for all  its warts, avoiding both sentimentality and the lurid, selective episoding of the mainstream <em>mishpoca</em>.</p>
<p>Now comes a new film that joins the Reform Cinemagogue of refreshing, untendentious and largely non-sectarian productions, altering the jaundiced tone and acerbic flavor of their majoritarian predecessors. <em><a href="http://www.film.com/movies/lemon-tree/19012819">The Lemon Tree</a></em>, directed by Eran Riklis, already famed for <a href="http://www.fest21.com/en/blog/sharonabella/interview_with_film_director_eran_riklis"><em>The Syrian Bride</em></a>, is a sensitive, bittersweet look at the Israeli/Palestinian imbroglio which tries to be reasonably fair to both sides in the conflict. The story turns upon the status of a lemon grove owned by Salma Zidane, a Palestinian widow whose family has tended the lemon trees for generations. Her peace and modest prosperity is shattered when the just-appointed Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Navon, and his wife Mira move into their new home on the Green Line, which abuts directly on the widow’s property.</p>
<p>The issue is security, for the lemon grove furnishes perfect cover for Palestinian terrorists who might be planning to attack the minister’s home. At the same time, the widow’s livelihood is equally at stake. The minister oversees the construction of a fence between the two properties, preventing the widow from tending to her trees, which begin to wither from lack of water. He then orders the lemon grove razed—a scenario based on a similar, real-life situation involving former Israeli Defense Minister <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaul_Mofaz">Shaul Mofaz</a>. The emblem, of course, is unmistakable. The clash between the widow and the minister, between two homes, two narratives and two necessities, is obviously Riklis’ allegory of the Israeli/Palestinian standoff and of the “wall,” both physical and psychological, which divides them.</p>
<p>Plainly, the Israelis are not given a free pass. The minister is self-righteous, loud and aggressive, relishing his recent appointment, enjoying the perquisites of authority, and deaf to the legitimate needs of his Palestinian neighbor. The soldier who guards the Minister’s home is a good-natured idiot, who reflects rather poorly on the IDF. The Israeli military lawyer is a bully. To Riklis’ credit, however, the Palestinians are not depicted as romantic innocents who can do no wrong, or as the world’s chosen <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_%282009_film%29">Na’vi</a> struggling to regain their illusory Pandora. We are afforded a glimpse behind the politically-generated image. The widow has a brief affair with the young lawyer she has hired to represent her as her case moves through the Israeli justice system. For this breach of “honor” she is threatened by the local clan chieftain with certain unspecified but clearly menacing consequences. This is still a primitive and misogynous society, as we are meant to see, caged in tribal preconceptions. The lawyer is a sympathetic figure but eventually succumbs to the allure of PR glory for having won a partial legal victory—the fence will remain but only half the orchard will be cut down—exchanging his disheveled attire for a shiny new suit, his unprepossessing office for an upscale address, a commitment for a career, and his unpretentious self for the heroic persona of defender of “the people.” He is on the make, like most of the Palestinian nomenklatura.</p>
<p>The film’s intentions are noble but, if it has a weakness, it concerns precisely the controversial nature of the fence, or “wall,” which, in the political and military framework of the hostility between two peoples, is the direct result of the Palestinian intifadas. The Minister may be a rather disagreeable figure, obstreperous and peremptory, but he surely does not deserve his wife’s growing estrangement over the raising of the fence and her decision to leave the marriage. The fence is meant to protect her too, despite her vicarious identification with the beleaguered widow. More importantly, the fence that Navon has ordered built, aka the “separation barrier” condemned by much of the world, and the partial lopping of the orchard, are not the product of personal caprice or of a policy of invasive sequestration. It is Salma’s own people who have made it inevitable, indeed who may be said to have built the fence on their own initiative by unleashing a campaign of terror against Israeli civilians.</p>
<p><em>The Lemon Tree</em> skirts the central issues of Israeli security and Palestinian responsibility, and in this way partly conforms to the “progressivist” and post-Zionist bias that actuates much of the Israeli intelligentsia, the media and the so-called “peace” faction. It does not in this regard bear adequate witness to the true situation that prevails in the country. The fact that it was co-written by Israeli-Arab <a href="http://www.a2palestinefilmfest.org/filmmakers.html">Suha Arraf</a>, a former journalist for the left-leaning <em>Haaretz</em> newspaper, might explain this partial skewering of reality. And yet it must be admitted that <em>The Lemon Tree</em> distinguishes itself from the general run of Israeli anti-Israeli films and “documentaries,” treating its characters in the round, introducing an element of human tenderness, leveling criticism on both parties to the conflict—a welcome departure from the norm—and thus constructing at least a theoretical fence between itself and the majority of one-sided cinematic lemons that have it in for Israel.</p>
<p><strong>[Editor&#8217;s note: To order a copy of David Solway&#8217;s new book <em>Hear, O Israel!</em>, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hear-O-Israel-David-Solway/dp/0973406534/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1256122893&amp;sr=1-1"><em>click here</em>.</a></em>]</strong></p>
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		<title>An Israeli Stalinist Professor’s War Against Israel &#8211; by Steven Plaut</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/steven-plaut/an-israeli-stalinist-professor%e2%80%99s-war-against-israel-by-steven-plaut/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=an-israeli-stalinist-professor%25e2%2580%2599s-war-against-israel-by-steven-plaut</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Jan 2010 05:09:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Steven Plaut]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[And how it contradicts the Koran’s teaching that Israel belongs to the Jews.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-44899" title="sand" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/sand.gif" alt="sand" width="450" height="450" /></p>
<p>Islamist fascism has a problem.  It is that traditional Islam, and the Koran in particular, explicitly acknowledge that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people.  The war of Islamofascism against Israel and its population thus directly contradicts the teachings about Jews and Israel found in the Koran itself.  The Islamofascists, however, have found a solution to this dilemma.  And they are being provided with this “solution” by a notorious Jewish anti-Semite.</p>
<p>Let me explain.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.templemount.org/quranland.html">Koran itself is extraordinarily clear</a> about the status of the Land of Israel in Islam.   While in general criticizing Jews for their supposed sinfulness, something the Jewish Bible does quite a lot of also, <a href="http://www.thejc.com/judaism/judaism-features/what-koran-says-about-land-israel">the Koran relates</a> in Sura 5:21, that Moses (a revered teacher in Islam) tells the Jews to &#8220;enter into the Holy Land which Allah has assigned to you.&#8221;   Moses adds to his people, according the Koran:</p>
<blockquote><p>“O my people!  Remember the bounty of  God upon you  when  He bestowed  prophets upon you , and  made  you  kings and gave you that which  had not been given to  anyone before you amongst  the nations. O my people!  Enter the Holy Land which God has written for you, and do not turn tail, otherwise you will be losers.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Elsewhere (Sura 17, 104) the Koran proclaims: &#8220;And thereafter We [Allah] said to the Children of Israel: &#8216;Dwell securely in the Promised Land. And when the last warning will come to pass, we will gather you together in a mingled crowd.&#8217;&#8221;   The founder of modern Zionism, Theodore Herzl, could not have said it better.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://jmm.aaa.net.au/favicon.ico">legitimacy of Jewish claims to the Land of Israel</a> is repeated in Sura 10:93-94<span style="text-decoration: underline;">: </span></p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"> </span></p>
<blockquote><p>“We settled the Children of Israel in a beautiful dwelling-place (Israel)&#8230;If thou wert in doubt as to what We have revealed unto thee, then ask those who have been reading the Book from before thee.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>The Koran also explicitly documents the existence of the Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.  Sura 17:7 records the destruction of the First Jewish Temple by Babylon and the Second Temple by Rome, and Mohammed never contests the Bible&#8217;s claim that the Temples were in Jerusalem. Indeed, the return of the Jews to their homeland after centuries of exile can be seen as the fulfillment <em>of Islamic</em> prophecy. Sura 17:104 of the Koran says: “And we said to the Children of Israel afterwards,  ‘Go live into this land (Israel). When the final prophecy comes to pass, we will summon you all in one group.&#8217;”</p>
<p>As <a href="http://97.74.65.51/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13587">noted by Prof. Khaleel Mohammed</a><em>, </em>from the Department of Religious Studies at San Diego  State University, the medieval exegetes of the Koran – roughly analogous to the Talmud for Judaism – recognize Israel as belonging to the Jews, as their birthright given to them by God.  Two of Islam’s most famous exegetes explained thus: ‘Ibn Kathir said: “That which God has written for you, i.e. that which God has promised to you by the words of your father Israel that it is the inheritance of those among you who believe.”  Muhammad al-Shawkani interprets Kataba to mean “that which God has allotted and predestined for you in His primordial knowledge, deeming it as a place of residence for you.”’</p>
<p>From the above, one would think that Islamofascism faces a theological quandary in its attempts at conscripting Islam for a genocidal jihad against Israel and the Jews.   But Islamofacsists have invented a solution.  They can <em>jihad</em> all they want against Israel and the Jews, Islamic theology notwithstanding, because they claim that the Jews … are not the Jews.  If modern Jews are really not Jews at all, then Israel is not a country of Jews, and so Israelis have no rights to sovereignty in their own homeland as promised in the Koran.</p>
<p>So just why are modern Jews not Jews, in the pseudo-theology of the <em>jihadis</em>?  Because the Islamofascists are recycling the old mythology about European Jews or “Ashkenazim” being nothing more than converted Khazars.  And the new guru of the “Jews-Not-Being-Jews” hoax is none other than Tel Aviv University history professor Shlomo Sand.</p>
<p>To explain this mind-numbing development, let’s take a few steps back.  Yes<a href="http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/21499/The_Khazar_Myth_and_the_New_Anti-Semitism.html">, there was indeed a Kingdom</a> of Turkic peoples living north of the Black Sea in the Dark Ages called the Khazars, and – yes – its ruling family and part of its population did convert to Judaism.  The Khazar kingdom was largely destroyed by the expanding Russian kingdom in the tenth century, and anything remaining was destroyed in the Mongol invasions.  What actually became of the Jewish Khazars is unknown.  Some may have integrated themselves into other Jewish communities in the Middle  East, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe.</p>
<p>Later a myth was created about the Khazars being an important component of European Jewry.  This myth was to a large extent the invention of the 1976 book, <em>The Thirteenth Tribe</em> by Arthur Koestler, a writer better known for his lifelong battles against totalitarianism in all its forms.  Koestler wrote his book largely in order to create interest and sympathy for Jews and Israel, believing the Khazar story would serve as a basis for respect and fascination with Jewish history.  In reality, there is very little evidence of any type, from genetic markers to family and place names, that there is any significant Khazar “blood” among Western or Ashkenazi Jews.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Koestler’s public relations ploy backfired.  In recent years, the Khazar myth <a href="http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/21499/The_Khazar_Myth_and_the_New_Anti-Semitism.html">has been hijacked</a> by Neo-Nazis and Islamofascists to invent a racialist argument against Jews being entitled to self-determination, independence, or a homeland in the Land of Israel.  If Jews are nothing more than converted Khazars, or so goes the argument of the anti-Semitic racialists, then they are foreign interlopers in the Levant and have no right to statehood there.</p>
<p>Now, as a matter of fact, even if the Khazar myth <em>were true</em>, and Ashkenazi Jews <em>were</em> descendent from converted Khazars (and – we repeat &#8211; the myth is NOT true!), it still would not make the slightest difference.  Jews never defined themselves in genetic or racial terms.  They always saw themselves as an ethnic group marked off by religion, tradition, and language.  Converts are just as Jewish as are those born to a Jewish mother and just as entitled to participate in Jewish self-determination.  And, to top it all off, most Israeli Jews are not even Ashkenazi Jews.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the popularity of the Khazar myth among anti-Semites represents a return of modern anti-Jewish bigotry to the racialism of the 1930&#8242;s and earlier.</p>
<p>Nearly every anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi website denounces Zionists and Israelis as &#8220;Khazars.&#8221;  Web chat lists in which Jews defending Israel are dismissed as &#8220;Khazar usurpers&#8221; are too numerous to count.</p>
<p>The racialism once again in vogue holds that Jews would only have legitimate claims to the right of self-determination in their homeland if they were appropriately Semitic from a racial point of view.  Palestine is part of the Semitic racial <em>lebensraum</em> and those who do not possess the correct pure racial markings have no business being there.  Racial purity is suddenly the new basis for national rights.</p>
<p>If we take the racialist argument to its illogical conclusions, Palestinian Arabs have the right to exercise all claims to sovereignty in Israel due to their being true racial Jews, while Zionists are non-Jewish Khazars &#8211; racial imposters and usurpers.  But to make things even sillier, Arabs themselves are, of course, a mix of racial strains, with a particularly large Caucasian component thanks to Arab intermixing with Spanish and Italian Europeans, Caucasian Berbers, Vandals, Goths, and even some Vikings.</p>
<p>Lest the world dismiss “Khazar Zionist” nonsense as something as pathetic as the conspiracist “911-Truth” form of mental illness, along comes an anti-Semitic pseudo-academic from Tel Aviv University itself to lead the racialist charge against the Israeli “Khazars” and against Jewish self-determination.   <a href="http://www.tau.ac.il/humanities/faculty/sand_shlomo">Professor Shlomo Sand</a> is a hard-core Stalinist <a href="http://www.google.com/cse?cx=003938713500856905333:ghdjn7wl9zu&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;q=shlomo+sand&amp;siteurl=www.google.com/cse/home?cx=003938713500856905333:ghdjn7wl9zu">and Jewish anti-Semite</a>.  He was active for a while in the 1960s and 1970s in a tiny Israeli Maoist splinter named <em>Matzpen</em>.  From its ranks emerged an espionage ring of Israeli Jewish and Arab communists, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,906703,00.html">who trained as terrorists in Syria</a> and were jailed by Israel in the 1970s.  Writing mainly in French, Sand has built much of his “academic” career on churning out Marxist boilerplate diatribes.  He is a fanatic anti-Zionist and makes no attempt to hide his desire to see his own country obliterated.</p>
<p>Sand last year recruited himself to the aid of the Islamists seeking to annihilate Israel.  So the Koran says the Land of Israel belongs to the Jews?  In that case, Sand himself, a professor at Tel Aviv University, will recycle Neo-Nazi mythology about Israeli Jews being converted Khazar interlopers.  The result was Sand’s book, <em>The Invention of the Jewish People</em>, a pseudo-history published in English by <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/favicon.ico">Verso Books</a>, a publishing house set up by “<a href="http://www.newleftreview.org/">New Left Review</a>,” specializing in communist and Bash-Israel “books.”</p>
<p>Sand’s book about Jews being a fraudulent “invention” is amazingly un-original.  If submitted as a student paper I suspect it would be rejected as plagiarism of the contents of anti-Jewish web sites.   Sand’s book has been hailed as ground-breaking scholarship by Neo-Nazis, jihadists, terrorist web sites, anti-Semites and communists of all stripes.  <a href="http://www.isracampus.org.il/Extra%20Files/Anita%20Shapira%20-%20Shlomo%20Sand%20book%20review.pdf">Serious historians have dismissed it</a> as pseudo-academic poppycock, as <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/999386.html">fraud</a>, and as little more than <a href="http://forward.com/articles/108457/?utm_medium=email&amp;utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&amp;utm_content=70937483&amp;utm_campaign=July+3,+2009+_+ijktul&amp;utm_term=Opinion:+Jewish+Peoplehood+Denied,+While+Israel%E2%80%99s+Foes+Applaud">a comic book recycling</a> of Neo-Nazi myths about Jews being Khazars.  Sand’s conclusions from the imaginary “evidence” about the Khazar roots of Israelis resemble those of his <em>jihadi</em> groupies, namely, that Israel has no right to exist and that Jews are not Jews at all, certainly not any sort of a people.  Tel Aviv University has won for itself the dubious honor of serving as home base for arguably the world’s worst “academic” anti-Semite, and has raised questions all over the globe about the academic standards it has obviously abandoned.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, we have grown accustomed in our 21<sup>st</sup> century to the bizarre collaboration between Islamist fundamentalists and far-leftists.  Even so, one cannot help marvelling at the spectacle of an Israeli Stalinist professor devoting himself so passionately to prolierating the myths required by Islamofascist fundamentalists, and by so doing grant them the means for ignoring the Koran itself.</p>
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		<title>Sderot Children Send New Year Messages to Gaza &#8211; by Anav Silverman</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/anav-silverman/sderot-children-send-new-year-messages-to-gaza-by-anav-silverman/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sderot-children-send-new-year-messages-to-gaza-by-anav-silverman</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:05:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Anav Silverman]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Defiant Israelis declare "A New Decade for Hope and Peace."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-44486" title="sderot" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/sderot.jpg" alt="sderot" width="450" height="514" /></p>
<p>Sderot, Israel:  Hours before the new year, as hundreds of pro-Palestinian and Arab demonstrators gathered at the Erez Crossing chanting &#8220;Katyushas on Ma&#8217;alot, Qassams on Sderot,&#8221; Israeli demonstrators at another Gaza viewpoint a few meters away gathered together to communicate a very different message.</p>
<p>&#8220;A New Decade for Hope and Peace,&#8221; was the theme behind the Sderot Rally for Hope, initiated by Sderot Media Center, a social media organization dedicated to bringing the voices of Sderot residents to the attention of the international community. Over 300 supporters, including Israeli youth and international students from France, Australia, South Africa, United States and Canada, were led by the Sderot mayor, David Buskila, and the Israeli Minister of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, Yuli Edelstein.</p>
<p>The marchers, carrying Israeli and international flags, along with signs that read &#8220;Children for Hope, Not for War,&#8221; trekked up a muddy hill to release white balloons with peace messages that children from a local Sderot Elementary School had written to Gaza children a day before.</p>
<p>Edelstein noted that the there has been a year of relative quiet following Operation Cast Lead, &#8220;with only 286 rockets fired at Israel.&#8221;</p>
<p>Sderot mayor, David Buskila, stated on the hilltop that &#8220;we want the leaders of Hamas to know, who  are unfortunately are still continuing to prepare for war, that Sderot residents come today in peace. And we will never leave this part of Israel.&#8221;</p>
<p>Earlier in the day, Hamas leader, Ismail Al-Haniyeh spoke to Gaza supporters gathered on both sides of the Erez Crossing via Israeli Arab MK Tal A-Sana&#8217;s mobile phone. Haniyeh stated that Palestinians would never stop fighting for a state and that Hamas had become even stronger thanks to international support. On the Gaza side, 100 participants in the Gaza Freedom March, mobilized by Jewish activist, Medea Benjamin, gathered together to show solidarity exclusively with Gazans.</p>
<p>Other anti-Israel rhetoric that came out of the Gaza solidarity demonstrations were directed from Israeli-Arab MK Jamal Zahalka, who stated in front of international press that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak &#8220;enjoys classical music and killing children in Gaza.&#8221;</p>
<p>Back in Sderot, marchers convened together in the only rocket-proof theater in the western Negev, to hear 22-year old Sderot resident, Moshe Amar perform John Lennon&#8217;s song, Imagine. Amar also shared his family&#8217;s harrowing experience following a direct Qassam explosion on their home two years on December 13, 2007, which destroyed their home. Both US President Barack Obama and US Senator John McCain visited the site of the Amars&#8217; home during their US presidential campaign in 2008.</p>
<p>&#8220;Try to imagine that everything you love, the things that are supposed to be the most secure in your life&#8211; your home and your family—are directly terrorized,&#8221; said Amar to the audience. &#8220;For almost a year, we were left homeless. To this day, that Qassam attack still traumatizes my family—we will never be the same.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Sderot Rally for Hope also featured a former member of the Zambian Parliament, the Hon. Dr. Saviour Chishimba, who is also the 2011 Presidential candidate for Zambia&#8217;s United Progressive People&#8217;s Party.</p>
<p>Mr. Chishimba told the Sderot rally supporters that &#8221; There is no single nation in the world that would allow a single rocket to be fired onto her soils and just watch without retaliation. Israel has a right to defend her territorial integrity and the right to exist. Hamas is a terrorist group, which should not be given power to govern anywhere in the world.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;It is time that Africa stand up with Israel,&#8221; Mr. Chishimba concluded.</p>
<p><em>Anav Silverman works as the International Correspondent for Sderot Media Center, </em><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.sderotmedia.org.il/" target="_blank"><em>www.SderotMedia.org.il</em></a><em> a social media organization based in Sderot, Israel that reports on the human reality in the Sderot region.</em></p>
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		<title>Jimmy Carter and the Politics of Apology – by Jacob Laksin</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/jimmy-carter-and-the-politics-of-apology-%e2%80%93-by-jacob-laksin/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jimmy-carter-and-the-politics-of-apology-%25e2%2580%2593-by-jacob-laksin</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Dec 2009 05:11:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The ex-president never meant to stigmatize Israel – except when he did. 
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				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-43911" title="jimmycarter" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/jimmycarter1.jpg" alt="jimmycarter" width="533" height="342" /></p>
<p>When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1655">Jimmy Carter</a> is no stranger to apologies. The former president has spent years making excuses for Hamas, championing the Palestinian jihadists as the embattled victims of Israeli aggression – the group’s exterminationist founding charter and record of terrorism notwithstanding. Now it’s Israel’s turn to profit from Carter’s dubious public relations tactics.</p>
<p>After years of demonizing the Jewish state on the world stage, Carter at last has seen the error of his ways. Or so he says: Last week, Carter issued a statement to the Jewish community in which he <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/12/23/carter-says-sorry-jews-apology-linked-grandsons-political-ambitions/?test=latestnews">apologized</a> for his role in tarnishing Israel’s image and, invoking a traditional Jewish prayer, asked for forgiveness.</p>
<p>“I never intended or wanted to stigmatize the nation of Israel, even though I have disagreed with the settlement policy all the way back to the White House,” Carter reportedly said. He also urged that “[w]e must recognize Israel&#8217;s achievements under difficult circumstances,” and that “we must not permit criticisms for improvement to stigmatize Israel.”</p>
<p>In completely unrelated news, Carter’s grandson, 34-year old Atlanta attorney Jason Carter, is <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/12/23/carter-says-sorry-jews-apology-linked-grandsons-political-ambitions/?test=latestnews">running for a state senate seat</a> in a suburban Georgia community that just happens to be home to a proportionally small but politically significant Jewish population.</p>
<p>If Carter’s conversion to nuance on the issue he has long viewed through a thoroughly anti-Israel lens seems more than a trifle expedient, it is. This after all is the man whose 2007 book, <em><a href="http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=25478">Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid</a></em>, notoriously equated democratic Israel with South Africa’s regime of racist discrimination. The author now suggests that he overstated his case, and that he regrets the book’s inflammatory title. Carter remains critical of Israeli settlements, but he now allows that Palestinians aren’t actually suffering under the yoke of racist apartheid. His mistake</p>
<p>For Israel’s supporters, that concession, however self-evident, could still be welcome. Yet it’s difficult to see Carter’s mea culpa as a genuinely good-faith effort to undo the damage his campaigning has done to Israel’s reputation. Most conspicuously, there is the convenient timing of his contrition, which comes as his grandson aims to fill a post vacated by Jewish politician – David Adelman, now the Obama administration’s nominee for ambassador to Singapore – in a <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1209/Carter_grandson_courting_Jewish_voters.html?showall">district with an influential Jewish community</a>. In such circumstances, having one of the world’s preeminent detractors of the Jewish state as a direct relative is not exactly a selling point.</p>
<p>Even if opportunism doesn’t fully explain Carter’s apology, his second thoughts remain deeply suspect. Just days before airing his regrets, Carter published an <a href="http://cartercenter.org/news/editorials_speeches/gaza-121909.html">op-ed</a> in London’s <em>Guardian </em>that rehearsed many of the anti-Israel tropes for which he now purports to be sorry.</p>
<p>In making a case for a renewed Middle Eastern peace process, Carter excused Arab intransigence (“no Arab or Islamic nation will accept any comprehensive agreement while Israel retains control of East Jerusalem”); whitewashed Palestinian terrorism (Carter made only an oblique reference “Palestinian recalcitrance”); and blamed Israel and Israeli leaders for the failure of past negotiations even as he exempted Palestinians from comparable scrutiny.</p>
<p>Equally deplorable, if typical, was Carter’s one-sided and selective account of the background of the conflict. Though lamenting the “intense personal suffering” of Palestinians living “under siege in Gaza” in the aftermath of last year’s war, Carter never mentioned the relentless eight-year rocket bombardment of Israeli cities and villages that forced the Israeli offensive. Similarly, Carter denounced Israel’s reluctance to allow the shipment of construction materials like cement into Gaza, but failed to note both that Israel has indeed <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1103770.html">allowed some limited shipment of materials</a> and the reason why it has to screen such shipments in the first place: Construction materials are routinely used by Palestinian terrorists to build rockets and fortifications. In yet another revisionist flourish, Carter accused Israel of destroying Palestinian <a href="http://www.israeltoday.co.il/default.aspx?tabid=178&amp;nid=17984">schools</a> and <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1054569.html">hospitals</a> with “precision bombs missiles” during the Gaza war, while omitting the critical fact that they often served as <a href="http://www.israeltoday.co.il/default.aspx?tabid=178&amp;nid=15634">havens for Hamas gunmen</a> who tried to exploit the Israeli military’s restraint and its reluctance to strike civilian targets.</p>
<p>But nothing betrayed Carter’s biases as plainly as the one concrete proposal he offered to begin the peace process: urging the United Nations Security Council to pass <em>even more</em> resolutions condemning Israel. It was precisely the kind of stigmatization of Israel for which Carter would reject within days. Apologizing for such attacks apparently did not mean abandoning them.</p>
<p>Unfairly singling out Israel for criticism is not the worst of Carter’s sins. After all, the United Nations, whose <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704500604574480932924540724.html">Goldstone report</a> is only the most recent example of the agency’s anti-Israel animus, has long made a habit of doing just that. Far more harmful to the interests of enduring peace in the Middle East is the ex-president’s longtime courtship of Hamas terrorists.</p>
<p>Carter has made no secret of that sinister partnership. On his travels to the Palestinian territories, Carter routinely sings the terrorist group’s praises, assuring all who will listen that, were it not for Israel’s belligerence, Hamas long ago would have accepted a ceasefire and laid down its arms. At times, Carter’s apologetics have gone from the merely credulous to the pernicious, as when he claimed that the tunnel networks that Hamas used to attack and kidnap Israeli soldiers were really “defensive” structures.</p>
<p>That the United States and Europe consider Hamas a terrorist group has not dampened Carter’s enthusiasm for the jihadists. In January 2006, he called on the international community to defy laws on terrorism financing and launder money to Hamas in the form of relief aid. Not even Hamas leaders themselves can convince Carter that peace is the furthest thing from their intentions. Hamas leader-in-exile Khaled Meshal has never hidden his support for suicide terrorism and has called destroying Israel the “destiny” of the Palestinian people. That didn’t keep Carter from <a href="http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=30596">seeking out Meshal</a> for a friendly chat about peace negotiations in the spring of 2008.</p>
<p>If Carter truly feels that an apology is in order, he might consider atoning for his role in promoting a terrorist organization that has murdered thousands of Israelis, <a href="http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=33619">brutalized its fellow Palestinians</a>, poisoned the political climate in the region, and destroyed any hope for a present-day peace settlement. But that sorry contribution to the peacemaking that Carter still claims as his life’s work would require something more substantial than a bankrupt and cynically proffered apology.</p>
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