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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Jewish</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>
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		<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
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		<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>The Democrats Can’t Afford to Lose Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-democrats-cant-afford-to-lose-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-democrats-cant-afford-to-lose-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 05 Nov 2014 05:55:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democratic Party]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244581</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Without Israel, the Democratic Party loses its Jewish appeal.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/184336_10150105990684863_500619862_5962078_1869452_n.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-244585 " src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/184336_10150105990684863_500619862_5962078_1869452_n-383x350.jpg" alt="184336_10150105990684863_500619862_5962078_1869452_n" width="285" height="260" /></a>Jewish leftists keep threatening to break up with Israel. They deliver a list of their demands, scribble nasty things about the Jewish State on social media and even write entire books in which they threaten to break up with it for good, but they never actually move on to stalking some other country.</p>
<p>Peter “Crisis of Zionism” Beinart, Jeffrey “Chickens__t” Goldberg act like jealous boyfriends constantly warning Israel that they are about to break up with it.</p>
<p>But the break up never happens. It can’t.</p>
<p>Stalkers use their victims to prop up their shaky identity. Without Israel, Jewish leftists who call themselves liberals become indistinguishable from the generic left.</p>
<p>They can hate Israel, but they can’t let go of it.</p>
<p>Jewish “liberal” support for Israel isn’t fading. The Jewish liberal is becoming less liberal and less Jewish. He is becoming a leftist with a Jewish last name and no amount of Israeli concessions to terrorists will convince Jewish leftists to put their Jewish identity ahead of their leftist politics.</p>
<p>Israel can’t do anything to reverse that trend. Banning more Jews from living in Jerusalem, the latest demand of Obama and J Street, won’t save them from themselves.</p>
<p>This isn’t an Israeli crisis. It’s a crisis of American Jews.</p>
<p>J Street churns out editorials urging Jewish groups to connect with young Jews by bashing Israel. And who better to lecture us on connecting with Jewish youth than an astroturfed organization backed by an 84-year-old Nazi collaborator who called his own mother a Jewish anti-Semite.</p>
<p>The left’s hatred for Israel predated its existence. The left doesn’t hate Israel because of its policies. <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/dgreenfield/how-four-influential-socialist-anti-semites-shaped-the-left/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">It hates Jews</span></a>.</p>
<p>“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money,” Marx said.</p>
<p>&#8220;The Jew is the enemy of the human race. One must send this race back to Asia or exterminate it,&#8221; said Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the Socialist economist and &#8220;Father of Anarchism.&#8221;</p>
<p>“Until they are prepared to assimilate and abandon the Chosen People idea altogether, their troubles are bound to intensify,” H.G. Wells said, as the Holocaust was underway.</p>
<p>“When we speak of Jews, we mean the Jewish spirit, the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, the spirit of commerce,” said Pierre Leroux, who coined the term &#8220;Socialism.&#8221;</p>
<p>“Every government having regard to good morals ought to repress the Jews,” said Charles Fourier, who coined the term &#8220;Feminism.&#8221;</p>
<p>None of these thought leaders of the left had ever seen an Israeli soldier in the West Bank.</p>
<p>Political extremism aligns with anti-Semitism. As American liberals become leftists, they are more likely to become anti-Semitic. A quick look at Europe shows us that this is true. There is nothing except reason and decency that prevents Jews from being anti-Semites and reason and decency are the first casualties of the political extremism of the left.</p>
<p>Marx could denounce Jews as the embodiment of filthy capitalism because he did not have a Jewish identity. There are plenty of Marx’s out there smashing the windows of Jewish stores, chanting hate outside synagogues and supporting genocidal terrorists despite their facial features or genetic markers.</p>
<p>The fake liberal Zionists warning Israel that it’s alienating them are selling the myth of a Jewish liberalism that will turn anti-Israel and yet go on existing.</p>
<p style="color: #0433ff;"><span style="color: #000000;">It’s an empty threat because <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-death-of-jewish-liberalism/">the demographics are against them</a>.</span></p>
<p>In the last election, Jewish support in New York City for Obama <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-death-of-jewish-liberalism/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">was down to 51 percent</span></a>. The odds that the city’s growing Orthodox population, most of whom have relatives living in Jerusalem, will join in with the Obama cry of “Jews get out of Jerusalem” is somewhere between zero and zip.</p>
<p>Why hasn’t Obama openly and vocally turned on Israel instead of leaking nasty quotes to his media pals? Why are the phone booths filled with spurned liberal Zionists, who are neither liberal nor Zionists, calling up Israel and breathing heavily into the phone before passing on something nasty that some anonymous person in the White House supposedly said.</p>
<p>The political connection between Jews and the Democratic Party has become tenuous over the years. Unlike other minorities, Democrats don’t actually meet the needs of the Jewish community. Their agenda of high taxes punishes Jews financially. Their hostility to religion has made it harder for Jewish families to provide a religious education for their children.</p>
<p>They plow plenty of money into non-profits with a Jewish label, but those organizations mostly benefit the same urban minority populations and leftist staffers as other leftist non-profits.</p>
<p>Subtract Israel from the equation and the linkage between Jews and the Democratic Party suddenly becomes very shaky. Democrats have a basic rule of thumb. They mention Martin Luther King at black events, Israel at Jewish events and immigration at Latino events.</p>
<p>That’s why the Democratic Party’s political establishment frantically warns against making Israel into a partisan issue. The last DNC convention showed that its delegates hate the Jewish State, but it can’t allow Israel to become a Republican issue because then it loses its only tangibly Jewish position.</p>
<p>Subtract Israel and the Democratic Party is reduced to making Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s argument that abortion is a fundamental Jewish issue. That may still play in her district, but Jewish support for abortion has been steadily falling. Last year a poll in New York showed that nearly as many Jews as White Catholics wanted to make abortion illegal.</p>
<p>Without Israel, the Democratic Party’s appeal to Jews becomes a hard litmus test over increasingly controversial social issues even as the demographics favor socially conservative Jewish communities.</p>
<p>The Democratic Party and its leftist hag riders want to avoid a crackup like that at all costs. Obama may secretly threaten and disparage Israel, he may implement flight bans and weapons cutoffs and sell out Israel at the United Nations, but a public break risks fragmenting his own political base.</p>
<p>The ranks of the Jewish left will continue to expand. New generations with weaker Jewish identities who have been indoctrinated on hatefilled campuses will be much less likely to support Israel. But this is a reality, that like leftist and Muslim anti-Semitism, exists entirely apart from anything that Israel does.</p>
<p>The American Jewish consensus is coming apart. American Jews, like Americans in general, are splitting into a left and a right. But the demographics of the Jewish left have no staying power when it comes to having children or staying Jewish. The left got ahead of the problem nationally by changing the country’s demographics, but they can’t turn millions of illegal aliens Jewish the way that they can amnesty them.</p>
<p>This isn’t a crisis of Zionism. It’s a crisis facing American Jews.</p>
<p>Beinart, Goldberg and the other jealous boyfriends threatening the Jewish State have no cards to play. The larger social trends at work in Israel and America will not be altered by what happens in the West Bank. Their real argument is not with Israelis, but with Americans.</p>
<p>American Jewry is refighting many of the same battles that tore apart Russian Jews along the fault lines of tradition, religion, socialism and radical social change. That struggle climaxed with the Jewish left’s repression and mass murder of Russian Jews under the USSR before the Communist butchers of the Jewish Section who had shut down synagogues and murdered Rabbis were themselves put down.</p>
<p>Zionism is one of the issues at stake in the battle between traditional Jews and the radical left, but it’s not the only issue. And Israel can’t determine the outcome of that battle. Only American Jews can.</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>Modern Hebrew: The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/modern-hebrew-the-past-and-future-of-a-revitalized-language/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=modern-hebrew-the-past-and-future-of-a-revitalized-language</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 18 Aug 2014 04:07:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238736</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new book unveils the importance Hebrew has played in the forging of contemporary Israeli society and culture.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/rf.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-238801" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/rf-233x350.jpg" alt="rf" width="233" height="350" /></a>Frontpage Interview&#8217;s guest today is Dr. Norman Berdichevsky, an author, freelance writer, editor, researcher, translator and lecturer of history and culture for several major cruise lines. Formerly a lecturer of Hebrew at the University of Central Florida, the Theological Faculty of Aarhus University in Denmark, and the Jews’ Free School in London, as well as an experienced translator (From Hebrew and Danish to English), he is the author of six books and lives in Orlando, Florida. He is the author of the new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Hebrew-Future-Revitalized-Language/dp/0786494921/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1408225941&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=Norman+Berdichevsky+hebrew"><em>Modern Hebrew: The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language</em></a><em>.</em></p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Dr. Norman Berdichevsky welcome to Frontpage Interview. Let&#8217;s begin with what inspired you to write this new book.</p>
<p><strong>Berdichevsky</strong>: Thanks Jamie.</p>
<p>My knowledge of Hebrew, my experience teaching the language in the Diaspora and the eleven years I spent in Israel working as a professional translator, opened up new horizons and enabled me to participate in the resilience of spirit that Israelis feel in the face of adversity. My goal in writing this book is to reach as wide an audience as possible of both Jews and Gentiles, including those with no prior knowledge of the language, to make them more aware of the importance Hebrew has played in the forging of contemporary Israeli society and culture and its function worldwide as the new Jewish international language.</p>
<p>A dynamic nation has been created with a determined belief in a common origin, destiny and struggle with a unifying common language adapted and modernized by the only people who identified with it and its ancient homeland. Anyone wishing to understand modern Israel, its history and development towards a more inclusive society for all its people including non-Jews should be familiar with Modern Hebrew and how this language grew and changed over the past mere one hundred and thirty years through challenges and dilemmas resulting in startling achievements and new prospects.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Expand for us on the transformation of Hebrew and why this book is so important in touching on this issue.</p>
<p><strong>Berdichevsky:</strong> Few subjects have commanded the attention and provoked, fascinated, excited, and enchanted so many readers as the saga of the Zionist rebirth of Israel.  Yet in this monumental literature, relatively little space has been devoted to the epic transformation of the classical language of the Bible into Modern “Ivrit”, the national language of the State of Israel, its everyday vernacular spoken by more than  seven million people. It was grafted successfully onto an older literature and longer historical continuity than Latin or Greek and is the official language of business, research, the law, and government of the dynamic State of Israel.</p>
<p>The book explores the historical background, past and current controversies, challenges, dilemmas and prospects facing the Israeli people that stem from the choice made four generations ago to create a renewed nation in the Land of Israel with Hebrew as their national language. It is a study in the politics, linguistics and sociology of language, exploring the relationship of the Israelis with the Jewish Diaspora as well as their fellow non-Jewish citizens, the largely bilingual Arabic and Hebrew-speaking Arab population.</p>
<p>Stateside, many still equate Hebrew with its rabbinical counterpart, the purview of bar mitzvahs and synagogue prayer. In Israel, the story is different. In the 1880s, early Zionists sought to adopt a modernized version of the ancient biblical language. Most believed it couldn’t be done. Today, Israeli Hebrew has become the most successful language revitalization project in history. It is used in every realm of Israeli life.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What topics do you cover specifically?</p>
<p><strong>Berdichevsky:</strong> The book is written for those with no prior knowledge of Hebrew as a national language and colloquial vernacular. It examines some of the basic “mechanics of the language,” including the many changes that have occurred in the transition to Modern Hebrew. It analyzes how it overcame many obstacles to become a spoken vernacular and its growing prestige. It deals primarily with the social and political role of the language, the role model Modern Hebrew played for other national revivals(Welsh, Irish, Basque Maltese, Catalan, Modern Greek and Turkish). Also discussed are the dilemmas facing the language arising from the fact that Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora &#8220;don’t speak the same language,&#8221; while Israeli Arabs and Jews often do.</p>
<p>Why has Hebrew declined in the Diaspora and what are the long term consequences of Jews in Israel and the Diaspora Not Speaking the Same Language? How did Hebrew become a modern language? How did it win out over Yiddish? How different are Modern and Biblical Hebrew? What has acquisition of Hebrew meant for the Arab minority in Israel? Why has study of Modern Hebrew declined in the United States? How has the Arab Spring turmoil been reflected among the Arab minority in Israel? The book deals with all of these vital questions.</p>
<p>&#8220;Modern Hebrew&#8221; does not cover literature nor is it another biography of the pioneer founder of the movement to make Hebrew into a modern spoken language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. It is the story of his vision and how it animated a large part of the Jewish world, gave new confidence and pride to Jewish youth during the most difficult period of modern history and infused Zionism with a dynamic cultural content.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What major updates did Zionists have to make to biblical Hebrew or the language of the Mishna?</p>
<p><strong>Berdichevsky:</strong> The language had to change radically. Biblical Hebrew has a vocabulary of about 7,000 words, of which maybe 1,000 or more are obscure today. It was totally unfit even for the end of the 18th century, let alone the 20th century. An educated Israeli today has a vocabulary of at least ten times that. There are also significant differences in the structure and grammar of the language. For instance, if you look at biblical Hebrew, the tenses are completely out of joint; the past and the future mix in the same sentence, for stylistic purposes. Modern Hebrew also established a standard pronunciation that didn’t exist before. It is for this reason that many students with some training for their bar-Mitzvah and able to read the prayers are unable to follow the modern language.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What has acquisition of Hebrew meant for the Arab minority?</p>
<p><strong>Berdichevsky:</strong> In spite of the current crisis over Gaza, and violent demonstrations (condemned by almost all the mayors of Arab towns in Israel), the trend among Israeli Arabs, especially those in the professions is greater educational and career opportunities through Hebrew and the rate of proficiency and even fluency among them has steadily increased. It is no accident that few Arab Israeli men seek marriage partners with women from the West Bank who are much more conservative, not likely to work outside the home, and not proficient in Hebrew.</p>
<p>It comes as a surprise to many foreign observers that nine of fourteenEgyptian universities, including Al-Azhar Islamic University, offer courses in Modern Hebrew with approximately 20,000 students, more than are studying the language in the United States! They are majoring in Middle Eastern Studies. Mounir Mahmoud, an Egyptian journalist, told the Israeli daily Ma’ariv that between two and three thousand students graduate each year with bachelor’s degrees from Hebrew studies courses. He explained that Egyptian students “are exposed to Israeli culture and history, and unlike their colleagues who see Israel as only a source of hatred and conquest, they learn about it from a different angle altogether.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0in; margin-bottom: .0001pt;">In a journalistic scoop on July 2, 2013, Israeli reporter Guy Zohar interviewed Egyptian woman journalist and political activist Heba Abu Seif on Israeli live television.  Her perfect and fluent Hebrew surprised many viewers and is an optimistic sign. Just as Israelis could now view events with direct commentary from on the spot sources in their own language, it portends a revolutionary transformation that in the future, Arab opinion about Israel will no longer rely entirely on its own traditional and highly biased accounts.</p>
<p style="margin: 0in; margin-bottom: .0001pt;"><b>FP:</b> What does the American Jewish Community miss out on by not knowing Modern Hebrew well?</p>
<p style="margin: 0in; margin-bottom: .0001pt;"><b>Berdichevsky:</b> Over the past two generations, there has been a steady decline among many American Jews in the cultural and emotional identification they feel with Modern Hebrew literature, song and dance, elements that once drew them close to the Zionist project and the emergence of a modern national Israeli culture. Many tourists in Israel miss out on much that is not available by instant translations.</p>
<p style="margin: 0in; margin-bottom: .0001pt;">All laws, debates in the Knesset, the legal cases in court, and applications for patents, are, of course in Hebrew. Israeli affairs portrayed by the media in the Diaspora are often based on highly selected and fragmentary extracts of published material translated and occasionally mistranslated from Hebrew. Although many people with an interest in Israel are aware of the importance of the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language and may recognize the name of pioneer linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, they do not appreciate the difficulties involved or what challenges were posed before the eventual accomplishment of what almost all linguists had declared impossible.</p>
<p style="margin: 0in; margin-bottom: .0001pt;">This is a remarkable story that deserves to be told to a mass audience. Moreover, it is the story of the three generations long world-wide rivalry with Yiddish and the techniques used to make Hebrew into a language capable of handling all the demands of a modern society. Not knowing Modern Hebrew, neither they, nor their children are familiar with Israeli authors, playwrights, movie directors, actors, singers, pop singers, athletes, or the standings of Israel’s football (soccer) clubs.</p>
<p style="margin: 0in; margin-bottom: .0001pt;">While no educated person, let alone a Jew, is ignorant of Albert Einstein (he remains the Jewish figure most celebrated by the world, as determined by the number of postage stamps representing dozens of countries which have so honored him for his achievements in physics), the same cannot be said of Arik Einstein, who, until his death in November last year was certainly regarded by the Israeli public as its most beloved singer in the modern era of popular Hebrew song.</p>
<p style="margin: 0in; margin-bottom: .0001pt;">Yet, he was largely unknown among Jews abroad who are unfamiliar with Modern Hebrew language and culture. His popularity, appeal and charm have been compared to that of Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Bruce Springsteen combined. He certainly remained in the public limelight for as long as any of these three American superstars and what is more impressive, he was equally successful in all of the genres of modern popular song including traditional love ballads, patriotic expressions of love of country, its landscape and people, soulful laments, protest songs and even children’s songs and rock.</p>
<p style="margin: 0in; margin-bottom: .0001pt;">Why is such a personality so prominent in Israel’s cultural life such an unknown quantity in the Diaspora. In spite of all the oceans of ink spilt over “Jewish solidarity” and that the Jews are one people, the reality is that there is a growing cultural gap in which language plays a major role. This is the point of departure of my book that also touches upon the political divide between Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora, especially in the United States.</p>
<p><b>FP:</b> Dr. Norman Berdichevsky, thank you for visiting Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><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"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Jew-Hatred Flying Like Hamas&#8217; Missiles</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lynne-rabinoff/jew-hatred-flying-like-hamas-missiles/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jew-hatred-flying-like-hamas-missiles</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Aug 2014 04:44:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lynne Rabinoff]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237526</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, all I can say is that it is déjà vu back to 1933.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/000_Par7935171-e1405882687800.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237606" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/000_Par7935171-e1405882687800-402x350.jpg" alt="000_Par7935171-e1405882687800" width="277" height="241" /></a>I am a daughter of Holocaust survivors, and I&#8217;m sad to say, I&#8217;m glad both my parents are no longer living. What they would see, to their horror, is<em> déjà vu</em> back to 1933 with an explosion of anti-Semitism, especially in Europe, the UK and even in the U.S. and Canada. Throughout Europe, where Muslim populations have grown substantially along with a left-leaning constituency, out-of-control violence against Jews and Israel has erupted, with the perpetrators using the Israeli-Gaza conflict as an excuse for the &#8220;old hatred.&#8221; This is, in part, a direct result of the media coverage of the conflict. The openly biased written and visual reporting has created a frenzy of anti-Semitism – even though much of this reporting has been, or will be, proven incorrect and to be simple disinformation propaganda.</p>
<p>In country after EU country, there have been violent anti-Israel demonstrations with signs reading such things as “death to Jews” and “no dogs or Jews allowed” (this was a sign seen by an elderly woman in Cologne, Germany who lived through the Holocaust). In France, Jewish businesses have been torched and synagogues attacked. The trend has also been visible in the US at demonstrations in Boston, Chicago and other locations. They have become violent where left-wing constituencies and large Muslim populations prevail. There is also the element of the universities, where anti-Israel sentiment is widespread and becoming a real danger in the United States. In addition, there is almost no outrage voiced by the U.S. administration or from the EU.</p>
<p>This whole situation is not a far cry from Kristallnacht.</p>
<p>Israel left Gaza in 2005 with agricultural and other infrastructure in place. Aid began to pour in from around the world. Hamas showed its gratitude by destroying  the infrastructure left behind and using the supplies meant for new houses (i.e. building materials and cement) to construct an incredible fully-equipped underground tunnel system for attacks on Israel. Shortly after Israel left, the slow pounding of rockets began in the south of Israel – forcing citizens to live in shelters and in a constant state of terror.</p>
<p>Hamas is a terrorist organization, an arm of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood going back to the 3<sup>rd</sup> Reich, and its Charter calls for the destruction of Israel and all Jews. I won’t list all the worldwide media that have assisted in achieving this objective as that would run quite long. Suffice it to say, virtually no unbiased journalism abounds today where Israel is concerned.</p>
<p>Hundreds of rockets and missiles are shot daily directly at Israeli civilians. Hamas is using their own people as human shields, hiding and launching rockets and missiles from homes, hospitals, schools and playgrounds, knowing full well that Israel would have to strike back, increasing the amount of casualties and pressure on Israel.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Israel risks the lives of their young men to protect Palestinian civilians – warning them to leave areas, delivering aid and treating them in Israeli hospitals. No other country on earth would do this, yet the hate of Israel grows. And the media ignores these facts because they are inconvenient truths.</p>
<p>The use of words like “Holocaust” and “massacre” to describe Israeli actions underscores the anti-Semitism at play. Such word usage doesn’t seem to apply to the deaths of thousands of Muslims at the hands of allied forces and other Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc.</p>
<p>Where was the world when the rocket attacks on Israel started? Why is it only Israel that elicits this type of condemnation when it defends itself? Had outrage been voiced and the real situation on the ground noted, this may have already ended without the casualties on either side. Ceasefire after ceasefire has been broken by Hamas – yet who gets blamed?</p>
<p>This is the purest form of anti-Semitism and nothing else.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><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"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>The Power of Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Ida”</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/vladimir-tismaneanu/the-power-of-pawel-pawlikowskis-ida/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-power-of-pawel-pawlikowskis-ida</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Jul 2014 04:45:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Ida]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Pawel Pawlikowski]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Polish film]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A 2013 Polish masterpiece confronts the visible and invisible traumatic effects of the Holocaust.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ida.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-235847" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ida-262x350.jpg" alt="ida" width="262" height="350" /></a>&#8220;You are Jewish. And your real name is Ida.&#8221; These two trenchant sentences, uttered by Wanda, a Polish-Jewish communist, to her niece Anna, a twenty-year-old novitiate ready to become a nun, define the infinitely complex story captured in &#8220;Ida,&#8221; a 2013 Polish masterpiece. Historically, the film, situated in the grim atmosphere of socialist Poland in the early 1960s, deals with the visible and invisible traumatic effects of the Holocaust. Psychologically, it is a meditation on the many faces of human freedom, on what it means to be a woman, a Christian, a Jew, and a human being in a century marred by genocides and destructive ideological passions.</p>
<p>Before taking her celibacy oath, Anna follows the Mother Superior&#8217;s urge to visit her aunt, her only relative and, we find out, the only other survivor of a family that perished during the Holocaust. This encounter leads to a quest for a long-buried past, to appalling revelations, and to Anna&#8217;s final return to her monastic calling. But this is a different woman, one who has lost her original innocence by discovering, in a most concrete, material way, the existence of Evil. Anna the nun will remain forever indebted to her sinful aunt for having allowed her to recover a tragic family history, even if this confrontation with the past meant Wanda&#8217;s own breakdown. To say more about the plot in this article will spoil the experience of seeing one of the great movies of our times. Just one caveat: Do not expect simple questions in this film, and even less so simple answers.</p>
<p>Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Ida” is an entrancingly absorbing movie. A film of utmost purity, with frames that remain forever grafted in one’s mind. A film about memory, trauma, truth, and the pursuit of one’s inner self. It belongs in the same category with the great films of Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Andrzej Wajda, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Agnieszka Holland.</p>
<p>Wanda is an overwhelming character, right out of Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel “Ashes and Diamonds.” Once the horrible, dreaded, “Iron Wanda,” “Red Wanda,” a fanatic communist prosecutor asking for death penalties against alleged &#8220;enemies of the people,&#8221; she is now merely pathetic. Her first name is reminiscent of the notorious Wanda Wasilewska, Stalin’s favorite amongst Polish communists, whom he otherwise detested (see Marci Shore’s book “Caviar and Ashes”). With the utopia shattered to pieces, all that was left were the cigarettes, the one-night stands, and the vodka. In the company of her niece, she rediscovers her lost humanity. Or, at least, she hopes to retrieve it, together with the long suppressed memories of her Jewish fate.</p>
<p>Most probably, Wanda’s character is somehow inspired by the famous, or rather the grisly Julia (Luna) Brystigyer and Helena Wolynska-Brus, both active members of the repressive apparatus in the 1950s (the former as an investigator and head of the Security’s anti-clerical department, the latter as a military prosecutor). In either case, these two avatars of Polish Stalinism at its harshest were what Agata Kulesza, the actress assigned to the role, had in mind when playing the part. Pawlikowski himself told her about the case of Helena Brus. Nonetheless, what the actress went for – and I believe she succeeded in – was an attempt to summon up the human in that which was, in fact, its very opposite: “It was a challenge for my character to carry around all this past and also remain someone whom people could like.” One year before her death, the sadistic Luna converted to Catholicism. But did she ever repent?</p>
<p>Anna (Ida), played by Agata Trzebuchowska, is seemingly glacial, seraphic, Antigone-like, in a tragic-discreet way. Her gaze is reminiscent of a Vermeer painting. Aunt and niece alike, marred by the curse of the totalitarian twins – as the great Polish writer Jerzy Giedroyc called them – Stalinism and Nazism. In sum, bloodlands, to use the title of Timothy Snyder&#8217;s great book. The psychological suspense is astonishing. Not to mention the use of shadows and silence (much like in Bergman’s films). And Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony is the ideal soundtrack for Wanda’s catharsis. Just look at the window.</p>
<p>Wanda and Anna’s conversation about the funeral of the boy who had been killed twenty years before is illuminating. Anna suggests bringing a priest, whilst Wanda – putting on a sarcastic, yet melancholy smile – responds: “A rabbi, perhaps.”</p>
<p>Politics is undetectable throughout the film. The political myth is, nevertheless, present. The story takes place in a dictatorship. An atheist tyranny born (enforced, actually) on the tormented soil of a martyred Poland. The same place where the catastrophe called Shoah had occurred. Where the Nazis had tried to obliterate all Christian compassion and human solidarity. The secret remains are discovered and put to rest where they really belong, in a Jewish cemetery with derelict, shattered tombstones. Wanda has fulfilled her destiny, but she could not have done it alone, without Anna. And Anna could not have done it without becoming who she once was, namely Ida.</p>
<p>The year is 1962, we are in a courtroom where Wanda is the judge. On the wall, just above her head, the picture of the party boss Wladislaw Gomulka. The restaurant is filled with Adriano Celentano’s music and a lot of jazz (John Coltrane). Tavern scenes play a key role in Polish cinema. In the films of young Andrzej Wajda, the song <em>Czerwone maki na Monte Cassino</em> – among others – is heard playing in restaurants. For us Eastern Europeans, “Ashes and Diamonds” was our very own “Casablanca.”</p>
<p>Someone asked Pawlikowski: why doesn’t Anna choose to remain Ida? In Poland back then, Jewish identity was dubious, negated publicly and denied privately. Just five years later, after the Six-Day War, overt anti-Semitism broke out afresh, as party and state policy. Then came March 1968, the students’ revolt, the arrests, the new and last exodus.</p>
<p>Historian Jan Gross wrote about post-Auschwitz anti-Semitism. Moreover, Anna’s way back to the monastery is related to her double orphan status. She had lost her family, she is now losing it once more. In a world of utter uprooting, Anna chooses to leave all that is worldly behind. She turns to Jesus, she absconds so that she may everlastingly mourn those “killed at dawn” (Zbigniew Herbert). She will wash the statue of Christ for all eternity, hoping to learn from the Son of Man how it was possible for humanity to descend into the horror of the Holocaust. A toil of memory and a toil of mourning, “Ida” is, above all, a harrowing confession about the damaged lives (to use Theodor W. Adorno’s words) of those who inhabited what was once Central Europe.</p>
<p><strong>[This article was translated from Romanian by Monica Got.]</strong></p>
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		<title>Ignoring the Elephant</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/ignoring-the-elephant/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ignoring-the-elephant</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Jun 2014 04:45:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[kidnapped]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Settlers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[teens]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Kidnapped Israeli teens deserve what they get, according to the media, because they are Jews.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/israel-protest-abduct.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234325" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/israel-protest-abduct-450x300.jpg" alt="West Bank Israeli Teens Kidnapping" width="281" height="187" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Our-World-Ignoring-the-elephant-359675">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Three Jewish boys were abducted by Palestinian terrorists while trying to catch a ride home from school Thursday night. And as far as the foreign press is concerned, it’s their own damned fault.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Honest Reporting documented, everyone from </span>The Guardian<span style="color: #000000;"> to CNN, to Sky News to the Christian Science Monitor blamed Eyal Yifrach, Gil-Ad Shaer and Naftali Frankel for their victimization.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The boys deserve whatever they get, according to the media, because they are Jews and Jews have no right to be located anywhere that the Palestinians demand be cleansed of Jewish presence. And the Palestinians demand that Gush Etzion be emptied of Jews. So the boys, who dared to be located in Gush Etzion, had it coming.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And the blame doesn’t end with the victims. In trying to rescue them, the Israeli government is also committing an unpardonable crime – against Palestinian unity, no less.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to </span>The New York Times<span style="color: #000000;">’ Israel bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, by searching for the boys, Israel has “further destabilized Israeli-Palestinian relations, and challenged the new Palestinian government’s ability to hold together disparate political factions and reunite the West Bank and Gaza after a seven-year split.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Seth Mandel wrote in </span>Commentary<span style="color: #000000;">, “If the unity government can survive only by being permitted to carry out terrorism against Israel without response or consequences, it is not so much a government as a sadistic terrorist gang.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Mandel understated the problem. There is no conditionality. The Palestinian government is “a sadistic terrorist gang.” “The disparate political factions,” Rudoren was referring to are Fatah and Hamas.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Hamas, as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said, kidnapped the teenagers. Hamas is a jihadist movement recognized by the US State Department and the EU as a foreign terrorist organization.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Its declared goal is the genocide of world Jewry. And to advance its aim, it has murdered Jews, and incited, trained and indoctrinated Palestinians to murder Jews every single day since it was founded in 1988.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As for Fatah, since Frankel, Shaer and Yifrach were taken on Thursday night, Fatah has glorified and celebrated their capture on its official Facebook page and its official newspaper. Fatah’s Facebook page depicted the boys as rats, reeled in by a fishing pole.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Palestinian Authority’s daily newspaper </span>Al Hayat al Jadida<span style="color: #000000;">published a mock World Cup logo in which three hands held three people who held their hands up in surrender.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And Fatah activists posted a revealing directive on Facebook after the boys were abducted.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">No, Abbas’s “moderate” faction of the Palestinian unity government, so energetically supported by the US, the EU and the western media, did not call for the public to quit celebrating the abduction. Nor did it condemn the brutal assault.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Fatah activists called for shopkeepers in the vicinity of the kidnapping to destroy any footage their security cameras filmed in the 24 hours following the operation to prevent the IDF from seizing the footage and using it in its efforts to locate the boys.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">That makes Fatah an accessory after the fact to the attack. And yes, that means that the PA – which is comprised of Fatah and Hamas – is in fact one great big terrorist organization.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">When Rudoren and her colleagues in the media look in the mirror, they don’t see themselves as enablers of murderers and champions of terrorists.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They see themselves as right-minded people who seek peace.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The same of course goes for the EU, which celebrated the formation of the Fatah-Hamas unity government, and has so far refused to condemn the kidnapping.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It also goes for the Obama administration which raced the EU to recognize the Fatah-Hamas government and promised that the US would continue funding the PA in breach of the letter of US law.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They all say they just want peace, for the betterment of all.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Taking them at their word, it is mystifying why they are so unconcerned with the behavior of Palestinian leaders.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">All the two-state champions view PA President and Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas as either the head of a state or as the head of a state-in-the-making. And as such, they perceive him as someone who represents the Palestinians, and as Rudoren wrote, someone who is unifying “disparate political factions and reunit[ing] the West Bank and Gaza after a seven-year split.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Abbas himself encourages this view by among other things presenting himself as the “President of Palestine,” by signing international agreements for the “State of Palestine” and by demanding that the world community pressure Israel to submit to his territorial and political demands for the benefit of “Palestine.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Yet when Israel does what he supposedly wants, and holds him responsible, as the head of the Palestinian government, for the abduction of its children by his coalition partner, Abbas cries foul and says Israel has no right to hold him responsible.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Rather than demand that Abbas take the responsibility he claims to carry, and convince his coalition partner to return the children they stole, the two-stater peaceniks blame Israel. And the kidnapped boys.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Maybe there is something else going on here.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Not to put too fine a point on it, but perhaps the media and the governments championing Palestinian unity are less motivated by geopolitical concerns than they would have us believe? In one of those ironic coincidences that happens every so often when events converge to expose patterns and relations between seemingly unrelated events, in the two weeks before the Palestinians abducted Yifrach, Shaer and Frankel, the American Jewish community discovered that the object of the largesse of many an American Jewish patron of the arts – New York’s Metropolitan Opera – has gone full-on anti-Semitic.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In its fall line-up, the Met will produce the acclaimed-by- anti-Semites opera, </span>The Death of Klinghoffer<span style="color: #000000;">. Not only will they stage the show at Lincoln Center, the Met is going to broadcast it through its HD broadcast program to 2,000 theaters in 66 countries reaching a potential audience of millions.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" />The Death of Klinghoffer<span style="color: #000000;"> romanticizes the lives and times of the PLO terrorists who hijacked the</span> Achille Lauro<span style="color: #000000;"> cruise liner in 1985 and murdered wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old Jewish American.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Among its other catchy tunes, the soon-to-be-seenworldwide opera includes this snappy ditty: “Wherever poor men – Are gathered they can – Find Jews getting fat – You know how to cheat – The simple, exploit – The virgin, pollute – Where you have exploited – Defame those you cheated – And break your own law – With idolatry.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Ah, the arts. Unfortunately, the Met isn’t operating in isolation.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Throughout elite circles in the US, opinion is moving in an aggressively anti-Jewish direction.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">University administrators and professors routinely side with anti-Semitic leftist and Muslim activists against their Jewish victims.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And led by the Presbyterian Church, mainline Protestant churches, as well as growing numbers of Evangelical churches are becoming openly hostile to Israel and the very notion of Jewish rights, including human rights.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The American elite are playing catchup with their European counterparts.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Under the guiding hand but blind eye of Europe’s elites, over the past 20 years anti-Semitism has become endemic in the political systems of EU member states as well as in the EU bureaucracy. Jew hatred serves as the one sentiment that unites leftists, rightists and Muslims.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And in Europe today, anti-Semitism doesn’t merely serve to justify Palestinian violence against Israelis. It also empowers Muslim Jew haters to believe that they can attack Jews violently with impunity on the streets of Europe. Over the past week alone, Jews in Paris were subjected to four violent attacks. Jewish teenage boys were chased by a man wielding ax. Other teenagers were sprayed with tear gas. Another Jewish teenage boy was tasered. And on Sunday, two men approached a synagogue while shooting a submachine gun and a handgun.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Outside the Jewish media, the events were barely reported. This, but a few weeks after the Belgian government refused to acknowledge that the massacre of four people at the Jewish museum in Brussels by a French jihadi was an anti-Semitic assault.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Jewish teenagers are kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists in Israel, and it’s their fault.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">A old, handicapped Jewish man was thrown over the deck of a cruise ship, and America’s premier opera house says it’s art. Jewish teenagers are violently assaulted on the streets of Europe, and Europe yawns. There is a pattern here. And it has nothing to do with peace.</span></p>
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		<title>Syrian Jihad Comes to France</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/stephenbrown/syrian-jihad-comes-to-france/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=syrian-jihad-comes-to-france</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/stephenbrown/syrian-jihad-comes-to-france/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 04 Jun 2014 04:29:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Stephen Brown]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brussels]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[France]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mehdi Nemmouche]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Syria]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226858</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[French jihadists return home.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/nemmouche534.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-226859" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/nemmouche534-450x253.jpg" alt="nemmouche534" width="322" height="181" /></a>Last February, French authorities broke up a terrorist plot they described as “imminent,” seizing nine hundred grams of explosives from the apartment building of a twenty-three year-old Islamist recently returned from Syria where he was suspected of having waged jihad. Two men escaped the police raid, in which several wills were also found, one belonging to a 25-year-old man described as “a candidate for the jihad.”</p>
<p>“This case is emblematic of that which one has always feared,” a police source close to the investigation told the French newspaper, <i>Le Figaro, </i>at the time, explaining that young French Muslims who had participated in the Syrian jihad and returned “radical, trained, hardened” with a terrorist project in mind are France’s newest terrorist threat.</p>
<p>This fear became a reality for French authorities when Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, a French Muslim and veteran jihadist of the Syrian war, was arrested Friday in southern France “in possession of firearms and large quantities of ammunition.” Nemmouche is suspected of having killed three people in a shooting rampage in Brussel’s Jewish museum on May 24. After the arrest, police apparently found a video he made, claiming responsibility for the attack.</p>
<p>The French government’s growing concern about the danger posed by returning jihadists to France (and now to other countries) manifested itself last April when Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced a plan to prevent young French Muslims from leaving home for Syria. Once there, they join the al-Qaida-connected al-Nusra Front to battle the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Some also enlist in the even more extreme terrorist group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). All of which only deepens their radicalization and hatred for the West.</p>
<p>The French government’s plan contains about 20 measures, chief among which is a “green number”, active since April 29, which people can privately inform authorities about potential jihadists. In its first ten days of operation, the anti-jihad “green number” was reported in the French media to have registered 24 cases (18 by phone and six by internet) of interest to authorities. They involved people between the ages of 14 and 34, of which eight were women and 16 men.</p>
<p>“These calls have already established five actual departures for Syria,” an interior ministry source told <i>Le Figaro</i>.</p>
<p>But opposition political leader Marine Le Pen of the National Front Party called Cazeneuve’s plan “cosmetic.”</p>
<p>“It does not attack the root of the problem, the speech in some mosques that are genuine calls to jihad,” Le Pen told a French radio station. “Nor does the plan attack recruiters and funding from foreign countries known to support terrorist fundamentalism, such as Qatar.”</p>
<p>What triggered France’s sudden concern for citizens and residents taking part in the Syrian war three years after its outbreak was not security issues but rather the deaths of two young brothers killed there last December. They were part of a group of 12 young French Muslims that had left France to fulfill their jihad duty in Syria. The brothers’ deaths and this group’s departure “unleashed a mobilization against jihadist indoctrination” in France early this year.</p>
<p>But another, perhaps more important, reason regarding the French government’s sudden interest in returning French jihadists concerns numbers. Cazeneuve revealed the disturbing fact that the number of Syria-bound French jihadists has increased 75 percent over the past few months. Security officials are calling this “an unheard of exodus.” Altogether, according to Cazenueve’s figures, 285 French Muslims are currently involved in “the Syrian quagmire,” 120 are in transit, a further 100 had returned to France and about 30 have perished in the conflict.</p>
<p>These are astonishing numbers when compared to the approximately 50 French jihadists intelligence officials identified as having taken part in the Afghanistan jihad from 2001 to 2011. In total, about 2,000 European Muslims are believed to have reached the Syrian battlefields, according to the military news website <a href="http://strategypage.com/"><span style="color: #1255cc;"><i>strategypage.com</i></span></a>. About 100 Americans jihadists are also believed to be in Syria, one of whom last week became the first American suicide bomber there.</p>
<p>And as if all this wasn’t cause enough for concern, French authorities have admitted they will not be able to keep track of the expected large numbers of returning jihadists, stating that surveillance “is going to cost a fortune.” In other words, they will be overwhelmed &#8211; if they aren’t already. One observer perhaps illuminated this unsettling situation best when, using dark humour, he commented that, at this rate, there will be so many former French jihadists from the Syrian war the government will have to build a veterans homes for them.</p>
<p>The extent of the France’s jihadist problem is actually worse than Cazeneuve portrayed. There are also French citizens waging jihad in North Africa as well as in Yemen where two French nationals were recently arrested in connection with the war al-Qaeda is waging against Yemen’s government. So the number of current and former French jihadists is actually estimated by some at about 800. But this may not include those flying under the radar and as yet unknown to authorities.</p>
<p>To give an idea of the extent of the European jihadist phenomenon, according to <a href="http://strategypage.com/"><span style="color: #1255cc;"><i>strategypage.com</i></span></a>, Turkey, a major entry point to Syria, currently has a list of about 4,000 European Muslims that their governments believe are jihad bound and have asked be detained. Turkey has caught and returned about 500 so far.</p>
<p>Some of the French jihadists have been arrested upon their return to France and put on trial for associating with a terrorist group. But, if convicted, the punishments they receive are usually light. And if they are minors, then none at all.</p>
<p>One of the problems the French legal system faces in prosecuting returned jihadists is that they have not committed a crime on French soil. It is also sometimes difficult to establish whether they actually joined a banned terrorist group when abroad. Some of the accused have said they had left France simply to go on holidays<i>. Le Figaro</i> reports that there are currently 40 cases before the courts regarding French jihadists. Some concern crimes, such as armed robbery, committed by jihadi hopefuls before leaving France to finance their trip to the Syrian battlefields.</p>
<p>Some of the reasons offered for jihad’s attraction for young French Muslims range from poor integration into French society (between 50 and 60 percent of men in French prisons are Muslim, although Muslims make up only ten percent of France’s population), testing the limits of authority of a society that has set few for young people, and the doctrine of Islamic supremacy. The latter is inculcated by radical preachers who do not like non-Islamic societies and do not accept that other religions are equal to Islam. Rather, France and other western countries must become Islamic, by force if necessary.</p>
<p>Because of the large numbers of French Muslims taking part in the Syrian jihad and the resulting danger they represent, many in France are now questioning the meaning of French citizenship. This issue may now become a burning one after Nemmouche’s arrest.</p>
<p>It is currently argued that returning jihadists may be French nationals, but are citizens only on paper. In addition, many French jihadists, like the two arrested in Yemen, possess dual citizenship, often from an Islamic state. As one observer commented, they are not French “neither by culture, nor by their mode of living, nor by any attachment to France.”</p>
<p>“They have only a French identity card,” stated another. “It is the difference between being and having.”</p>
<p>As a result, it has been proposed that French jihadists not be allowed to return to France because of the increasingly visible security risk. Some believe they should not even be prevented from leaving the country, only prevented from returning. This argument was given a boost when four French journalists, kidnapped and held eleven months by ISIL, said after their release last April that some of their captors spoke French. This topic will probably receive greater attention after the Brussel’s tragedy.</p>
<p>Gilbert Collard, a National Front federal parliamentarian, put forward the non-return argument on French television last April after the kidnapped journalists’ homecoming. He prophetically stated it is necessary to prevent the jihadists’ re-entry into France in order to avoid more killings like those committed by Mohammed Merah, a French Muslim terrorist who murdered three Jews and four soldiers in France in 2012. Regarding the danger these jihadists pose, Collard said one would have to be “completely mindless, decerebrated, not to be worried.”</p>
<p>“One is going to have …people who have left to conduct holy war return to French territory trained, equipped and who are going to be unmanageable,” he said.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, due to an unshaken belief in multiculturalism and an attachment to the Muslim vote, France’s socialist government will most likely never adopt Collard’s common-sense, life-saving proposal, especially since he belongs to the party French socialists love to hate. But this unwillingness and inability to look reality in the face and confront the danger radical Islam and jihad pose to France, insures that returning jihadists do not have much to fear in the future, while law-abiding French and European citizens, especially Jewish ones, do.</p>
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		<title>Stealth Jew-Hate in Middle School</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-cravatts/stealth-jew-hate-in-middle-school/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=stealth-jew-hate-in-middle-school</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 19 May 2014 04:40:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why exactly are our children now given Holocaust-Denial writing assignments?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Holocaust-Denial.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225606" alt="Holocaust-Denial" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Holocaust-Denial.jpg" width="284" height="160" /></a>By this week, the Rialto Unified School District school board outside of Los Angeles was in full damage control, fending off universal opprobrium over a third-quarter English Language Arts argumentative writing/research project given to 2,000 eighth-graders. The breathtakingly ill-conceived assignment asked students to “read and discuss multiple, credible articles on this issue, and write an argumentative essay, based on cited textual evidence, in which you explain whether or not you believe [the Holocaust] was an actual event in history, or merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain wealth.”</p>
<p>Most critics denounced the assignment as absurd on its face, since it asked middle school students, after reading a only handful of brief research essays, to convince a reader that the Holocaust, one of the most documented historical events in modern human history, either happened or did not happen. Even more egregious than the notion that the Shoah might not have even occurred was the statement that, as the instructions for the assignment read, “some people claim the Holocaust is not an actual event, but instead is a propaganda tool.”</p>
<p>Given that even American high school students cannot identify, as random examples, the half century during which the U.S. Civil War was fought, name a single Supreme Court justice, identify the intent of the Bill of Rights, or identify Britain on a map of the world, the notion that eighth graders could coherently disprove something that is an historical fact, not an opinion, is obviously a useless intellectual exercise. And critics of the assignment were appalled that students were even exposed to the idea that the Holocaust was a myth in the first place, a notion which only those on the lunatic fringe embrace.</p>
<p>While the shell-shocked spokesperson for Rialto school district, Syeda Jafri, assured the media that no complaint about the assignment had been forthcoming from within the district system, either from teachers or parents, the larger question is how the committee of eighth–grade teachers which conceived the critical thinking exercise in the first place had not anticipated the calamitous reaction to their choice for the essay topic. Presumably, every member of that committee had attended college; some, perhaps, even possess advanced degrees. In an education culture suffused with political correctness—and especially on college campuses where the educators studied for their profession—an enormous amount of attention is paid to who may say what about whom, and what is acceptable thought and speech on campuses where “victim” groups vie for rights and accommodations.</p>
<p>One of the groups that does <i>not</i> fare well on campuses these days, however, is Jews, particularly in the context of the debate over Israel and the Palestinians. In fact, the same careless sentiments that accuse Jewish students of being inherently racist for supporting the “apartheid” state of Israel seem to have been present in the committee room when ideas for this year’s assignment were being tossed about for consideration. Consider how classically anti-Semitic the language of the assignment itself is, suggesting in the same paragraph—not once, but twice—that the Holocaust “is a propaganda tool that was used for political and monetary gain,” and “merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain.” Who is seeking monetary gain? Who schemed to extort the West? Who has global influence over public opinion? Who seeks undeserved profit? For anti-Semites, the answer has always been the same: Jews.</p>
<p>And that is the very clear message transmitted in the essay assignment, that if one accepts the notion of a fabricated Holocaust, he or she also must hold Jews responsible for that vast, self-serving conspiracy. Professor Robert S. Wistrich, one of the world’s leading authorities on anti-Semitism, has noted that Holocaust denial by definition libels Jews, “that, by accusing Jews . . . of inventing the Shoah to extract billions of dollars and blackmail Germany or the West, the deniers add a peculiarly vile conspiracy theory to the arsenal of millennial anti-Semitism and transform the victims into superlatively cunning, fraudulent, and despicable perpetrators,” precisely what the assumption would be of any student who completed the assignment with the thesis that the Holocaust was a fraud, a “scheme,” or a “propaganda tool.”</p>
<p>For educators seeped in a contemporary cultural of political correctness, it is nearly unbelievable that not one person in that committee room failed to see the moral lethality of the assignment’s language. No one has accused anyone involved with the assignment of being anti-Semitic, but in the highly unlikely event that had anyone on the committee had even proposed a topic that touched upon any other intellectually or culturally incendiary topic, it would have been instantly suppressed and never would have made it out the room, let alone on the assignment of 2000 eighth-graders.</p>
<p>The assignment was meant to promote critical thinking, and there are certainly a wide range of contemporary, relevant, though controversial, topics that might have provided a rich source intellectual wrestling for those middle school minds—topics which would not require that students contradict historical fact, and which are still open to actual debate and investigation. For instance, they could debate whether African Americans are socially and culturally inferior to white people in America, a topic for which there is undoubtedly much opinion on both sides of the argument. They could, as Lawrence Summers did before he was forced to resign as president of Harvard University for having done so, question whether the reason that women fail to excel in math and the sciences, and do not therefore fill faculty slots in those fields, is due to a genetic superiority in men, a controversial but oft-debated theory. There are other relevant and current debates in the marketplace of ideas that certainly are open to opinions from both sides, such as whether when a woman undergoes an abortion she is murdering a child, or if homosexuality is mental disorder and lifestyle choice as opposed to a physiological condition predetermined at birth. If the committee wished for students to evaluate politics and theology, they might have asked if Islam is actually “the religion of peace” or instead is actually an intolerant cult that rejects modernity, requires submission by its adherents, represses women, and has a long history of terror, aggression, and jihad against the infidel world.</p>
<p>All of these topics differ from the one actually chosen by the committee in that none of them can be proven absolutely, and all can be vigorously argued from differing points of view—exactly what the assignment in question was meant to inspire. But, obviously, none of them was chosen, and the reason is just as obvious: had anyone on the committee even dared to have articulated any of the examples above, the other committee members would be apoplectic at the very thought of questioning prevailing orthodoxies or offending members of the groups involved.</p>
<p>In the rarified atmosphere of multi-cultural America culture, and particularly on campuses, where certain topics are off limits and the behavior of certain victim groups can never be questioned, the idea that abortion is wrong, or that women are inferior to men or blacks to whites, or that being gay is somehow defective, or that Islam is theologically malignant—all of these notions are essentially unmentionable, proscribed, too intellectually and emotionally volatile to ever discuss openly or debate, and especially as the basis for a homework assignment. None of these topics would ever be considered for use as a critical thinking assignment precisely because, unfortunately, every educator in that committee room would intuitively, and accurately, realize that members of the groups targeted might feel maligned, insulted, libeled, or intimidated by the ensuing discussion.</p>
<div>
<p>But when Jews, and the central horror of Jewish history, were the topic, that moral sensitivity was strangely absent, and the lesson of this incident is to be found just there: that anti-Semitism infected the student assignment completely and no one even knew it had entered the room.</p>
</div>
<p><i>Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, is president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.</i></p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss this week&#8217;s <em><strong>Gang Gang</strong></em> episode in which the guests discussed the Rialto Unified School District&#8217;s Holocaust-Denial assignment in its special feature on <em><strong>The Cancer of Common Core:</strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/5UPp3QP6_Pw" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>State Dept. Targets &#8216;Extremist Jewish&#8217; Settlers in Terrorism Report</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/state-dept-targets-extremist-jewish-settlers-in-terrorism-report/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=state-dept-targets-extremist-jewish-settlers-in-terrorism-report</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 02 May 2014 04:50:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hezbollah]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jewish]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[price tag]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Settlers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[vandalism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224649</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama administration puts Israeli petty vandals on par with Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/oooi.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-224657" alt="oooi" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/oooi.jpg" width="318" height="245" /></a>The U.S. State Department has just released its </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/crt/2013/224823.htm">2013 report on terrorism</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> around the globe, including a whole section devoted to &#8220;Israel, West Bank, and Gaza&#8221; as part of a broader chapter on the Middle East and North Africa. Coming on the heels of Secretary of State John Kerry’s despicable claim that Israel could turn into an apartheid state, his State Department’s report treated random criminal acts, mostly vandalism, by some Jewish settlers as being on the same level as rocket launchings, suicide bombing and other acts of real terrorism by Hamas, Hezbollah and other jihadist groups. For the Obama administration, Jewish settler attacks that damage Palestinian property are morally equivalent with jihadist attacks aimed at killing Jews and Christians.</span></p>
<p>Israel’s minister of communications and home front defense, Gilad Erdan, got it right when he said that the State Department report was making “a gross, incorrect generalization” in essentially equating acts of vandalism with murder. “We are not talking about acts of murder; this is graffiti. There is a difference between murder and destruction of property,” he said.</p>
<p>The small minority of Jewish settlers who drew the ire of the State Department have participated in what has become known as &#8220;price tag&#8221; attacks. The State Department report defined “price tag” attacks as “property crimes and violent acts by extremist Jewish individuals and groups in retaliation for activity they deemed to be anti-settlement.” The report expressly linked the words “extremist” and “Jewish” to describe the group of settlers involved in the attacks, while the Obama administration considers it too politically incorrect to identify those committing acts of terror in the name of jihad as Muslims.</p>
<p>The report conceded that Israeli police had set up special units to pursue the price tag cases and that the government had given authorities broader powers to act against the perpetrators. However, relying on the United Nations and unnamed non-governmental organizations as its sources, the report charged that the attacks by settlers “were largely unprosecuted.”</p>
<p>The report identified two specific examples of such attacks – both aimed at Christians, not Muslims. They involved graffiti on gravestones in a Christian Orthodox cemetery and the firebombing of a monastery.  The report then cited the pro-Palestinian United Nations Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs as the source for claiming that there were “399 attacks by extremist Israeli settlers that resulted in Palestinian injuries or property damage.” The report added that “Violent extremists, including Israeli settlers, vandalized five mosques and three churches in Jerusalem and the West Bank, according to data compiled by the UN.” There was no analysis of the data compiled by the UN or explanation of where the data came from.</p>
<p>With Christians being murdered and persecuted by Arabs throughout the Middle East and North Africa, the chapter of the State Department report dealing with that violence-prone part of the world chose to emphasize alleged Jewish settler price tag attacks against Christian, as well as Muslim, targets. The only other anti-Christian incident highlighted by the report involved assaults on Christian Coptic Churches in Benghazi, Libya and damage to a major Sufi shrine. The report actually went out of its way to praise Jordan for hosting conferences “highlighting challenges facing Arab Christians and the importance of religious tolerance.”</p>
<p>Why no highlighting of the <a href="http://www.christianpost.com/news/largest-massacre-of-christians-in-syria-ignored-109566/">gunmen who seized the Christian village of Sadad in Syria</a> and murdered 46 people, including 14 women and two children? How about the attacks on <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/video-coptic-church-set-aflame-by-muslim-brotherhood-supporters/">Egypt’s Coptic Christians and their churches</a> by Muslim Brotherhood supporters, including <a href="https://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2013/November/Egypt-Copts-Still-Threatened-by-Islamic-Insurgency/">the murder of a ten year old girl</a> as she was leaving church and an eight year old girl at a Christian wedding? Why didn’t these murders of little children leaving a church and attending a Christian wedding make the State Department report, but some graffiti allegedly placed on gravestones in an Orthodox Christian cemetery by Jewish settlers did manage to make the cut?</p>
<p>Why is the Muslim Brotherhood mentioned only a couple of times in the chapter of the report dealing with the Middle East and North Africa, and then only as a victim of the post-Morsi Egyptian government crack-down? The State Department report said there was no proof presented that substantiated the Muslim Brotherhood’s direct involvement in the terrorist attacks that followed Morsi’s removal. Is the State Department under President Obama so much in the Muslim Brotherhood camp that they ignore evidence right under their noses showing a spike in acts of violence against Coptic Christians after Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood took power, and then even more so after Morsi was removed and his supporters called for revenge? Or are they simply incapable of putting 2 and 2 together?</p>
<p>What do you expect from an administration whose ambassador to Egypt spoke favorably last year about the Muslim Brotherhood?  The Obama administration’s love fest with the Muslim Brotherhood continued earlier this year when a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood was a guest at a meeting in the White House with President Obama.</p>
<p>It’s easy for the Obama administration to pick on Jewish settlers for committing isolated acts of vandalism and destruction, including of Christian sites.  However, Muslim atrocities that spill the blood of Christians get hardly a mention at all.  Instead, we are spoon-fed taquia (lies) by the State Department about Muslim concern for the “challenges facing Arab Christians and the importance of religious tolerance,” and the further lie that the Palestinian Authority “has taken significant steps to ensure that official institutions in the West Bank that fall under its control do not create content that leads to incitement to violence.” Did anyone at the State Department bother to review any of the hateful content broadcast on official Palestinian Authority outlets, <a href="http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&amp;doc_id=11322">including children’s programs</a>, before writing such pro-Palestinian propaganda?</p>
<p>None of this discussion is intended to excuse the settlers’ price tag attacks. Such crimes committed by anyone, against anyone, are inexcusable and should be punished. Israel itself has not shied away from branding price tag attacks as a form of terrorism. Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni said that such attacks constitute acts “<i>against</i> Israel and Zionism.” (Emphasis added) She added that “As a society we must marginalize them, and as a country, we must deal with them seriously and severely and bring them to justice.”</p>
<p>However, there needs to be some sense of proportion, which is sorely lacking in the State Department’s 2013 terrorism report. Price tag attacks against primarily property are not on par with the targeting of innocent civilians for death, as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and other shadowy jihadist groups do as a matter of course with rocket and mortar fire and bombings. The Obama administration apparently does not see the difference, which is consistent with its anti-Israel, pro-Islam and pro-Palestinian bias.</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>Releasing Murderers for Peace</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/releasing-murderers-for-peace/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=releasing-murderers-for-peace</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Apr 2014 04:19:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[freed]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jewish]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peace]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prison]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[terrorists]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222237</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The insanity of the "peace process." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/abbas-released-terrorists-550x317.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222239" alt="abbas-released-terrorists-550x317" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/abbas-released-terrorists-550x317.jpg" width="283" height="221" /></a>If one believes the narrative told by the mainstream media and the Obama Administration, peace will come when Israel returns strategic parts of the Jewish homeland (which Israel won in a defensive war), releases terrorists, allows the return of millions of Palestinian Arab refugees, divides Jerusalem, abandons Holy sites to Muslim control and carries out a series of other “concessions.” Then, the Arabs will suddenly and miraculously recognize peace.  Anyone who believes this tale surely believes in flying elephants. (My </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.5wpr.com/">PR Firm in NYC</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> is selling The Brooklyn Bridge also if you are interested.)</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Most recently – it was ignored by every single mainstream worldwide media outlet – </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/pa-official-jews-have-no-right-to-western-wall/">two Palestinian Authority officials stated that Jews must be forbidden from praying at the Western Wall</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> and at the Temple Mount. Located in Jerusalem, The Temple Mount is Judaism&#8217;s holiest site, of which The Western Wall is located at the foot of the western side of the Temple Mount. It is the location of the two holy temples of Jerusalem, the latter of which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E. Currently, Jews pray freely at the Western Wall (except when being showered by rocks being thrown by Arabs), although Jewish prayer is restricted at the Temple Mount.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This week, Tayseer Al-Tamimi, former Chief Justice of the Palestinian Authority Religious Court, said, “Allah decreed that the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque is Islamic and belongs to Muslims alone. It is part of the religious belief of a billion and a half Muslims, and the Jews have no right to it… or the right to pray in any part of it. The Al-Aqsa Mosque includes all its courtyards… and specifically, its western wall.” In December 2013, on official Palestinian Authority TV, the Palestinian Authority Minister of Religious Affairs Mahmoud Al-Habbash said that &#8220;The Al-Aqsa Mosque will remain, by divine decree, a Muslim mosque, will not be shared with anyone, will not be forfeited, and no one besides Muslims will pray in it.” In the interview he said that the Western Wall is “an authentic part of the Al-Aqsa Mosque only.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">An Israeli non-government organization, Palestinian Media Watch, released translations of these comments, yet the world media has ignored this story. Publicizing these speeches would not support the narrative that media pursues &#8212; Israel is the &#8220;apartheid state&#8221; and Arabs are oppressed.  The reality is that Israel offers all citizens – and religions – freedom of prayer, and more. While Jews – until today – have limited visitation to the Temple Mount, the Arabs worship freely throughout Israel. Meanwhile, Palestinian Arabs – and the Arab world – are clear that they do not accept Jews. Now which one is intolerant?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Only two years ago, in 2012, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said, “Jerusalem is a Muslim and Christian city, and there will be neither peace nor security until the Israeli occupation, settlements, and settlers leave the city. Jerusalem’s identity is Arab, and the city’s and Christian holy sites must be protected from Israeli threats.” Abbas said, “there will be no peace or stability before our beloved city and eternal capital is liberated from occupation and settlement.” Talk of concessions and co-existence is always directed at Israel, and focused on pressuring the only Jewish State in the world.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">What is it that the Arabs have sacrificed (other than countless terrorist martyrs)? Abbas and the entire Palestinian Arab world say Jews will not be permitted to pray – or live – in Jerusalem, the holiest city for Judaism.  Despite this – and regular acts of terror – Israel is expected to continue with this absurd “peace” process?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The next step in this “peace” process is Israel being expected to release murderers in pursuit of peace. Logical &#8212; if you live in an insane asylum. These negotiations are leading nowhere and the Palestinians continue to get concessions from Israel – </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Kerry-destroy-Abbas-peace/2014/01/01/id/544682/">in a desire to destroy Israel piece by piece through this sham “peace process.”</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">  How can peace be made with people who say Jews cannot live anywhere they choose?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Murderers going free is not peace, and cannot lead to peace. </span></p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss Secular Palestinian Leader <strong>Mudar Zahran</strong> on <strong>The Glazov Gang</strong> calling out John Kerry on his “peace plan” for the Mideast:</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/i-UBjuUOBHw" height="380" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>And When He Cried the Little Children Died in the Streets</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/benjamin-jefferies/and-when-he-cried-the-little-children-died-in-the-streets/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=and-when-he-cried-the-little-children-died-in-the-streets</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2014 04:10:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Benjamin Jefferies]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[british]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221479</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The British Left's obsessive hatred of Israel -- and complacency toward genuine evil. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p itemprop="articleBody"><strong><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/20118182852498580_20.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221532" alt="Pro-Palestinian demonstration to boycott Israel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/20118182852498580_20-450x321.jpg" width="315" height="225" /></a>Reprinted from <a href="blogs.timesofisrael.com">TimesofIsrael.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">I was brought up in a secular, democratic socialist family and the values of freedom, equality and solidarity were engrained into me from an early age.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">My parents, British Labour Party stalwarts, looked to Israel in the 1960s as exemplar of the democratic and socialist ideals they maintained. Both were on the centre left of the Labour Party, and <em>as a result</em>, they and their many friends were deeply committed supporters of Israel and the Zionist cause. The commitment of those British socialists of half a century ago to the cause of the national self-determination of the Jewish people was exemplary and widely shared on the British left, Jewish and Gentile alike.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Things are very different now. The left of centre is, at least in Britain, the domain of the new antisemites of the anti-Zionist movement. BDS stalks the land, not the Spectre of Communism. The left is delivered to a lethal compromise that gets into bed with clerical fascists who demand women and gays and Jews be thrown off mountains.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">This modern red-brown Strasserite left spits on the socialists of yore that actually believed in such values as freedom, equality and solidarity — and does it in the name of a fictional “anti-imperialism” that is nothing but the cheer-leading of the evil and murderous. The great British writer and journalist Julie Burchill <a title="Don’t you dare tell me to check my privilege" href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9141292/dont-you-dare-tell-me-to-check-my-privilege/" target="_blank">has recently written</a> of her own similar upbringing and the sad, sad demise of that left of the past, that left of another country:</p>
<blockquote>
<p itemprop="articleBody">It’s easy for me to sentimentalise those days when the trade unions held sway, chiming as they did with the calf country of my communism, but whatever their beery and sandwichy limits, they were far better than what replaced them; the politics of diversity. While working-class left-wing political activism was always about fighting the powerful, treating people how you would wish to be treated and believing that we’re all basically the same, modern, non-working-class left-wing politics is about… other stuff. Class guilt, sexual kinks, personal prejudice and repressed lust for power.</p>
</blockquote>
<p itemprop="articleBody">And blatant, overt hypocrisy.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">On March 17th, the <em>Times of Israel</em> carried <a title="UN probe likens North Korea to Nazis" href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/un-probe-likens-north-korea-to-nazis/">an article</a> about the recently published report of the UN Commission of Inquiry on human rights in DPRK (North Korea). The report is some 400 pages long and makes for harrowing reading. In its <a title="North Korea: UN Commission documents wide-ranging and ongoing crimes against humanity, urges referral to ICC" href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=14255&amp;LangID=E" target="_blank">press release</a>, the Commission asserts that</p>
<blockquote>
<p itemprop="articleBody">The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world [...] These crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation. Crimes against humanity are ongoing in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea because the policies, institutions and patterns of impunity that lie at their heart remain in place.</p>
</blockquote>
<p itemprop="articleBody">What has been the reaction of the British left to news of this thumping great big report that overtly compares the North Korean neo-monarchy with Hitler’s Germany? In short, the reaction has ranged from utter indifference to insane support for the North Korean regime. The report certainly makes uncomfortable reading for the comrades who head up Britain’s fractious and minute communist movement, for example — especially as many of them spend an awful lot of time inviting members of the North Korean embassy in London to shindigs. Hardly a surprise then that the comrades have either ignored the report, or denied its findings (for a deranged and mendacious example of the latter, see <a title="Enquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK? " href="http://www.lalkar.org/issues/contents/mar2014/dprk.html">here</a>).</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Much the same weary cynicism greets news that the situation in Darfur is continuing on its genocidal way. The indefatigable Eric Reeves, who has spent decades exposing the murderous ways of the Khartoum regime is certainly correct to condemn the inaction of the international community. In one of <a title="Khartoum: A criminal regime in its death throes lashes out with more violence" href="http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article50293" target="_blank">his most recent articles</a>, Reeves highlights the escalation in mayhem in that benighted place and the utterly abysmal lack of concrete response from the world community. Writing of the thoroughly useless and widely ignored 2011 Doha “agreement” between the Darfuri rebels and the Khartoum regime, Reeves writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p itemprop="articleBody">The international community—especially the UN and African Union—have been flogging this dead horse of a “peace agreement” since it was signed by factitious, unrepresentative “rebel groups” in July 2011, failing to acknowledge how very little support it has among Darfuri civil society and the major rebel groups (who must answer for their own severe abuses of the civilian population). This “support for the Doha process” has persisted long after all observers not part of the AU or the UN clearly have come to see that it is a failure. It was left for expedient international actors to pretend that “progress” was being made in negotiating an end to the Darfur catastrophe, thus giving the Doha process a credibility that could hardly be provided by its Qatari auspices. The U.S. has been front and center in this pretense, shamelessly asserting the potential success of the DDPD. Both previous U.S. special envoys for Sudan—Scott Gration and Princeton Lyman—were complicit in this diplomatic travesty.</p>
</blockquote>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Reading Reeves’ cataloguing of the crimes of the Khartoum regime’s <em>janjawid</em> mercenaries in Darfur, the trail of murder, rape, looting, arson, sickens one’s heart. It is truly appalling what is happening in Darfur. It is equally as unacceptable that, despite it being widely known that the Khartoum regime is committing genocide there (and elsewhere), absolutely nothing is being done to stop that vile and barbarous dictatorship of military men and religious fanatics in their tracks. Nothing. This absolute condemnation of the moral hypocrisy of the global movers and shakers is embellished by the discovery that the very “great and good” sent in to Darfur by organisations as allegedly august as the African Union to oversee resolutions to such intractable conflicts have spent much of their time fighting turf wars with each other whilst women and children die in the villages and desert fastnesses of Darfur. Thambo Mbeki, former President of South Africa, take a bow.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">This should make the British left choke with frustrated anger. Yet fear that it might interfere with the comrades’ digestion might well also mean that they defer reading on until they have finished debating the intricacies of transgender intersectionality. Let’s be honest with ourselves, many times even if the left collectively shakes its head in despair at the evil that walks on every side and the vilest men that are exulted… they will  move to propose some daft resolution demanding immediate socialist revolution in the Sahel based on the sterling work of local jihadi and condemning Zionism for the ills of the world.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">So if genocidal regimes are either to be supported, or simply ignored by those who call themselves left-wing in the UK, if the mass murder of women and children in Darfur, or the terrifying, Orwellian dystopia of North Korea does not move the brothers and sisters, what exactly does get the comrades all frothy at the chops and out on the front line where they are meant to be? — Israel and Jews. That’s what.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Sometimes I think the entire British left has dropped acid. There can be surely no other explanation for its addiction to insane, inverted political visions of a surreal quality that might suggest the left was readier for the madhouse than any sort of political power. Really though, it is not funny ha-ha. There is nothing amusing about the treachery of the modern British left, its abandonment of the values of freedom, equality and solidarity. Julie Burchill rightly rages against the modern British left’s obsessions with the hang-ups of the chattering classes; but if ever there was a collective criminal act by which the British left has betrayed its own foundational values, it is its iniquitous and venomous loathing of Israel and its denial of the Jewish people’s inalienable right to national self-determination in that land.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">It is more than a delusion to condemn the only democratic and liberal state in the entire Middle and Near East as an “apartheid state”, to vilify its supporters as “Zionazis” — it is an outright slander, a defamation of the rights of an entire people. It is despicable to knowingly and falsely assert that Israel is a land without freedom and equality, when it is the only state in the entire meta-region where religious, sexual and personal liberties are not only maintained but upheld. It is an utter disgrace that the British left, almost invariably, takes the side of mass murderers of Jews, terrorists and violent antisemitic clerical fascist thugs rather than show solidarity with the Jewish State and its people. It is a betrayal of those that die in the villages of Darfur, of those that languish in the prison-state of North Korea, about whom these so-called British socialists could clearly not give a fig.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Nick Cohen, one of Britain’s most wonderful political journalists and writers, summed it up nicely: What’s left? The answer is sad, so sad: not much – a red flag stained not with the blood of our martyrs, so much as dripping with the blood of the victims of the British left’s indifference or even naked, open support for the real sources of evil and wrong in this world. The poet W. H. Auden wrote bitterly in his poem <em>Epitaph on a Tyrant</em> of a dictator that “When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter”. When Comrade Kim laughs, the comrades in Britain stand up and deliver him a round of applause, it would seem — lackeys all of a red-handed murderer. When al-Qaradawi demands the extermination of Jews, Red Ken Livingstone invites him to a nice slap-up meal in London and calls him a “moderate”. When Hamas and Islamic Jihad slam indiscriminately missiles into Jewish towns, the British left rambles on about a fictional “siege” of Gaza. When clerical fascist murderers saw off the heads of their victims, the British left rave about the ultimate responsibility of Zionism. And woe betide the uppity Jews of Israel should they respond to suicide bombers and Khaibar missiles and snipers – because, you see, the victims of terror had it coming – just in case they are Jewish.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">I have spent plenty of time trying to get to the bottom of this evil malaise that grips the British left. I can rationalise it away as an addiction to a basically failed ideological obsession with a faulty notion of anti-imperialism, one in which the tactic of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” holds sway. Yet even accepting this, it does not explain away the sheer poisonousness and simultaneous stupidity of the British left’s hatred of Israel that seems to cut across every single value to which it claims it holds dear.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">Auden’s poem ends with a line that confronts the sheer hypocrisy of his dictator, “And when he cried the little children died in the streets”. The British left is today that dictator crying its crocodile and lethal tears. What it does shout about is the absolute inverse of what it should be screaming about. What the left does rail about is completely the opposite of what should be motivating it. It defends the evil and defies the righteous. As the Psalmist had it: evil walks on every side when the wicked are exalted. The British left have become part of the problem and not its solution.</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody">I despair.</p>
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		<title>The Anti-Zionist Challenge to the Jewish Establishment</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/the-anti-zionist-challenge-to-the-jewish-establishment/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-anti-zionist-challenge-to-the-jewish-establishment</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/the-anti-zionist-challenge-to-the-jewish-establishment/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Feb 2014 05:40:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anti-Zionism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boycott]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[J Street]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jewish]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219191</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the target of groups like J Street is not the Right, but the leftist Jewish establishment.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/jews-boycotting-israel.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219192" alt="jews boycotting israel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/jews-boycotting-israel.jpg" width="287" height="214" /></a>Originally published by the<a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Our-world-The-anti-Zionist-challenge-to-the-Jewish-establishment-341701"> Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p>There is a difference between speech and war. Both are forms of expression, to be sure. But the essence of the former is engagement, and the essence of the latter is destruction.</p>
<p>This distinction is apparently too subtle for many of Israel’s Supreme Court justices. On Sunday, the Court heard arguments on the constitutionality of the 2011 Anti-Boycotts law. The law allows targets of boycotts to sue boycotters for damages in civil courts, and empowers the finance minister to revoke the non-profit status of NGOs that engage in boycotts. It is being challenged by a consortium of foreign-funded, radical, anti-Zionist NGOs.</p>
<p>The essence of boycotts is destruction, not engagement.</p>
<p>True, boycotters express an opinion when they boycott their targets. But just so, armies express an opinion when they bomb enemy targets.</p>
<p>The question is not whether in levying boycotts, the boycotters are expressing a position. It is whether the primary purpose of a boycott is to express an opinion or to annihilate its target.</p>
<p>As a form of economic warfare, boycotts aim to harm the profitability of targeted entities and either force them to toe the boycotters’ line, or force them out of business. That is, the aim is either coercive or eliminationist.</p>
<p>As a form of cultural warfare, the goal of boycotts of cultural or academic institutions is to place their targets outside of polite society, and so annihilate them culturally, professionally and socially.</p>
<p>In other words, unlike other forms of expression, the principle aim of boycotts is not engagement, or even incitement. It is destruction. Therefore, the question of whether or not boycotts are also a form of speech is entirely irrelevant.</p>
<p>But not for Israel’s Supreme Court justices. In their hearing on Sunday, the justices insisted that boycotts are primarily a force of engagement and as such, protected speech.</p>
<p>Or at least some boycotts are.</p>
<p>As they argued it, there is a distinction between boycotts of Israeli entities within and beyond the 1949 armistice lines.</p>
<p>In maintaining faith with the absurd claim that boycotts are indistinguishable from newspaper columns, and then making a distinction between boycotts within the armistice lines and boycotts of Israeli entities operating beyond them, the Court did more than show its hand. It exposed a leftist establishment’s incapacity to deal with the anti-Zionist Left.</p>
<p>For the past 25 years, the leftist establishment has coalesced around the view that there is a distinction between Israel within the 1949 armistice lines and Israel beyond those lines. The former is entirely legitimate.</p>
<p>The latter is the bane of Israel’s existence.</p>
<p>The justices tried to convince the attorneys for the petitioners to accept their view. But the anti-Zionist petitioners would have none of it. As they see it, since Israel is a democracy, and the vast majority of Israelis do not agree with their views, the entire country is illegitimate.</p>
<p>As Dan Yakir from Association for Civil Rights in Israelexplained, all of Israel is tied up to the so-called occupation.</p>
<p>So if the justices think it is okay to boycott the areas of the country that they would like to part with, they have to accept a boycott of areas of the country they wish to keep.</p>
<p>Building on this view, Adalah’s Hassan Jabareen insisted that all of Israel is politically disputed. And as a consequence, all of it is the legitimate target of boycott.</p>
<p>The petitioners’ rejection of all of Israel, rather than just parts of it, puts the justices and the leftist establishment as a whole in a difficult position.</p>
<p>They have to make a choice between the public, which sees no distinction between Ariel and Tel Aviv, and the anti-Zionists who also see no distinction between Ariel and Tel Aviv. That is, they have to decide what is more important to them – being Zionists, when that mantle is worn by the type of Jews they have spent their lives trying to distinguish themselves from, and being anti-Zionists, and so denying their right to exist.</p>
<p>The Israeli leftist establishment’s dilemma is not unique. The American Jewish establishment faces the same brutal choice. The American Jewish establishment followed along after the Israeli leftist establishment when it embraced the PLO in 1993. Ever since, the American Jewish establishment has drawn a distinction between consensus Israel, within the 1949 armistice lines, which they supported, and controversial Israel, outside those lines, which they marginalized, or debased.</p>
<p>And just as the activist Israeli Left has joined the campaign to destroy the Jewish state and so is now forcing the leftist establishment to either side with the public it holds in contempt or with the anti-Zionist Left that rejects Israel completely, so the activist American Jewish Left has become a leading voice in the campaign to criminalize Israel. Today it is forcing the Jewish establishment to make a choice between siding with all Israelis, including the Israeli Right, or siding with the likes of J Street whose aim is to delegitimize the organized American Jewish community’s right to defend Israel.</p>
<p>On Monday, a new documentary about J Street called The J Street Challenge, debuted in Miami. The film, produced by the social action group Americans for Peace and Tolerance, shows how J Street, which claims to be pro-peace and pro-Israel, seeks to eliminate American Jewish groups on the Right and weaken overall American Jewish support for Israel by delegitimizing the American Jewish organizational structure.</p>
<p>In July 2010, as the IRS was engaged in delaying and denying the applications for the non-profit status of groups that campaigned for limited government, J Street asked the IRS to cancel the non-profit status of American charities that support Israeli entities located in or operating beyond the 1949 armistice lines.</p>
<p>Since then, a dozen completely legitimate, law-abiding charitable organizations have been embroiled in lawsuits or audits and have been forced to fight for their institutional lives.</p>
<p>The J Street Challenge provides footage of speeches by J Street leaders and founders who question Israel’s right to exist and defame the American Jewish community for supporting Israel. In one such speech, J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami used the classical anti-Semitic imagery of a Jewish hydra suffocating the world in his description of the American Jewish establishment.</p>
<p>As he put it, “I think we’re taking on much more than AIPA C. I think it is the Conference of Presidents. It’s the American Jewish Committee. It’s the lobbying structures of the Federations. It’s the network of JCRCs, the community relations councils. It’s a multi-layered, multi-headed hydra.”</p>
<p>The most outspoken critics of Israeli anti-Zionist NGOs and J Street are on the Right. And that makes sense. It isn’t hard for rightists to make the distinction between speeches and extortion.</p>
<p>But the primary target of these groups is not the Right.</p>
<p>It is the leftist Jewish establishment, in Israel and in the US. And as J Street’s nearly unchallenged rise in the US, and the Court’s self-defeating incoherence on the boycott campaign indicate, over the decades, the establishment Left has become so dependent on rejecting the Right for its own sense of identity, that it is no longer clear whether its members are capable of siding with the hated Right against their common foes.</p>
<p><em>The author’s new book, The Israeli Solution: A One- State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, will be released on March 4.</em></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>A Miracle and an Outrage in Washington</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/caroline-glick/send-stolen-iraqi-jewish-archives-back-to-israeli-owners/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=send-stolen-iraqi-jewish-archives-back-to-israeli-owners</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 23 Oct 2013 04:45:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[archives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iraq]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Jewish]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Saddam Hussein]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=208261</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Stolen Jewish archives will be headed to Iraq's dungeons in a few short months. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ShowImage.ashx_.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-208262" alt="ShowImage.ashx" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ShowImage.ashx_.jpg" width="259" height="165" /></a>Originally published by<a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Our-World-A-miracle-and-an-outrage-in-Washington-329351"> The Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p>If you happen to be in Washington, DC, between now and January, you can see a piece of Jewish history that was never supposed to see the light of day. The National Archives is now exhibiting restored holy books and communal documents that belonged to the Jewish community of Iraq.</p>
<p>In 1940, the Iraqi Jewish community numbered 137,000 people. Jews made up more than a quarter of the population of Baghdad. A 2,500-year-old community, Iraq had for centuries been a major center of Jewish learning. The Babylonian Talmud was written there.</p>
<p>The yeshivot in Karbala and Baghdad were considered among the greatest in the world.</p>
<p>According to Dhiaa Kasim Kashi, a Shi’ite Muslim interviewed in the 2008 book Iraq’s Last Jews, by the 1930s, the Jews of Iraq had become leaders in every field. “All of Iraq’s famous musicians and composers were Jewish,” he said.</p>
<p>“Jews,” he continued, “were so central to commercial life in Iraq that business across the country used to shut down on Saturdays because it was the Jewish Shabbat. They were the most prominent members of every elite profession – bankers, doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, etc.”</p>
<p>All of this began to end with the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. Due to rampant Islamic Jew hatred, Arab leaders were drawn to the Nazis. For their part, the Nazis were quick to capitalize on their popularity. The German ambassador to Iraq, Fritz Grobba, cultivated Nazi sympathizers in the Iraqi military and organized a pro-Nazi military coup in April 1941.</p>
<p>On June 1, 1941, as Jews celebrated the festival of Shavuot, the pro-Nazi government carried out a massive pogrom. Estimates place the number of Jews murdered at anywhere between 180 and 900. Nine hundred Jewish homes were destroyed. Hundreds of Jewish shops and businesses were looted and burned.</p>
<p>The pogrom, which came to be known as the Farhud, or “violent dispossession,” marked the beginning of the end of the Iraqi Jewish community.</p>
<p>Iraq was one of the five Arab states that invaded Israel on May 15, 1948.</p>
<p>The immediate victims of Iraq’s unyielding rejection of Jewish national liberation were the Jews of Iraq. In 1950, the exodus began. By the end of 1952, when the government shut the remaining Jews in, 124,000 Jews had fled Iraq, mainly to Israel. Forced to abandon their private and communal property, their possessions became hostage to the regime.</p>
<p>The few thousand Jews left in Iraq lived in utter terror. But even in their reduced state, they tried to protect the property of their phantom community.</p>
<p>In Baghdad, only one synagogue remained in operation. The Jews brought all the communal documents and holy books there for storage.</p>
<p>But as Harold Rhode, a recently retired US Defense Department cultural expert, reported in August at PJM Media, in 1985 Saddam Hussein sent his henchmen to the synagogue with several trucks. They stole the documentary history of the community in broad daylight.</p>
<p>Rhode explained that Saddam ordered the theft of the Jewish community’s property both to humiliate the Jews and Israel and to impress his fellow Arabs. As he put it, from a local cultural perspective, “Humiliation – i.e., shaming another’s personal reputation – is more important and more powerful than physical cruelty.</p>
<p>“By capturing the Jewish archives, Saddam was humiliating the Jewish people. He was showing how powerless the Jews were to stop him.”</p>
<p>From a pan-Arab perspective, Saddam demonstrated that he “was in the vanguard of protecting and regaining Arab honor, and was therefore more worthy of Arab/Muslim leadership than were the others.”</p>
<p>Rhode was deployed to Iraq shortly after the US-led overthrow of Saddam’s regime. By the time he arrived in May 2003, there were only a dozen Jews still living in Iraq.</p>
<p>Rhode was the first American official informed of the existence of the archive. It was stored in the cellar of the headquarters of Saddam’s mukhabarat, or secret police. When Rhode arrived at the building with a small detail of soldiers and New York Times reporter Judith Miller, the building had just been flooded by an unexploded shell that had punctured the water main.</p>
<p>When he realized the dimensions of the archive, now largely underwater, Rhode moved heaven and earth to save it. Due to Rhode’s action, and the support he received from Iraqi leader Ahmed Chalabi, vice president Dick Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the archive – which included everything from school records to 500- year-old copies of the Bible – was saved on Shavuot 2003 and sent to the US.</p>
<p>Once the archive was safely in the US, the State Department spent $3 million restoring the 2,700 books and tens of thousands of documents. In the meantime, back in Iraq, there are still hundreds of Torah scrolls languishing in a government cellar, inaccessible to the public, and in a horrible state of disrepair.</p>
<p>The fact that the archive was rescued from Saddam’s vault and is now being shown to the public is a miracle.</p>
<p>But if nothing changes, on Shavuot 2014, the miracle will come to a tragic and scandalous end. In an act of cultural aggression, the US government has promised to return the Jewish communal archive – stolen from the Iraqi Jewish community by the Iraqi government – to the Iraqi government by June 2014.</p>
<p>The State Department insists that the archive is Iraqi government property, since it was found in an Iraqi government building. But if that is true, then all the Jewish property stored in the Gestapo’s dungeons should have remained German government property after World War II. And even the comparison to the Nazis is too facile.</p>
<p>Jews could safely enter Germany, and even live there after the Nazis were defeated. Jews cannot safely enter, let alone live in, Iraq.</p>
<p>The difference between Jewish property stolen by the Nazis and Jewish property stolen by Arab regimes is political. It is politically acceptable to acknowledge that the Nazis were criminals. But the Arabs have never had to pay a price for their persecution and eventual destruction of their Jewish communities. No one wishes to recognize the fact that it is anti-Semitism that drives the Islamic quest to destroy the Jewish state.</p>
<p>The only lawful owners of the Iraqi Jewish archive that is being shown in Washington are the Iraqi Jews and their descendants, who are now overwhelmingly Israelis. The only place the archive should be sent is the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center in Or Yehuda, the only museum in the world dedicated to preserving the cultural heritage of the 2,500-year-old Jewish community of Iraq.</p>
<p>Yet for the American foreign policy establishment, besotted by a quasi-religious belief that the establishment of a Jew-free Palestinian state on Israeli land will cure everything from Islamic jihad to the common cold, recognizing this simple truth is a bridge too far. Restoring the Iraqi Jewish archive to its Israeli owners would be tantamount to recognizing that the cause of the Arab world’s conflict with Israel is Arab anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/Dont_let_the_Jewish_archive_go_back_to_Iraq/?copy/">petition</a> is now circulating demanding that the US government return the archive to its rightful owners in Israel.</p>
<p>At this point, it would be a great miracle if they would just agree to keep it safe in Washington until an American government comes along that decides to base its Middle East policies on the truth.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>CAIR’s Court Jew</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joe-kaufman/cairs-court-jew/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=cairs-court-jew</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Oct 2013 04:35:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joe Kaufman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CAIR]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Executive Director]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jacob Bender]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jewish]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=207715</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Jacob Bender becomes “Executive Director” of the Philadelphia office.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Jacob_Bender.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-207720" alt="Jacob_Bender" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Jacob_Bender.jpg" width="280" height="231" /></a>For the past decade or so, a strange phenomenon has taken place whereby a small group of extreme leftist Jews have willingly aligned themselves with Islamists, mainly out of a common animosity towards the foreign policies of America, Israel and other Western Capitalist societies. These Jews generally function as political pawns and stooges acting against their own best interests, but none of them have gone on to head the Islamist organizations they have teamed with. That is, until now.</p>
<p>On October 15th, the Philadelphia office of the radical Muslim group CAIR put out a press release <a href="http://pa.cair.com/pressrelease/cair-philadelphia-hires-jacob-bender-as-executive-director/">announcing that it had hired Jacob Bender</a>, a left-wing Jewish activist and filmmaker, as its new Executive Director.</p>
<p>Hiring Bender was a public relations win for CAIR. For Bender, he joins a group that, in his estimation, appears to be like-minded, especially on the issue of Israel.</p>
<p>CAIR or the Council on American-Islamic Relations was founded in June 1994 as a part of an umbrella organization led by then-global leader of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. In 2007 and 2008, CAIR was named a co-conspirator by the U.S. Justice Department for two federal trials dealing with the financing of millions of dollars to Hamas. The three original founders of CAIR, one of which is still the national Executive Director, were coming from the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), the then-American propaganda wing of Hamas. CAIR had used its website to raise funds for the then-American financing arm of Hamas, the Holy Land Foundation (HLF).</p>
<p>Jacob Bender, for his part, has spent a good portion of his life denouncing the Jewish state. He blames all problems regarding Palestinians on Israel. <a href="http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2007/10/bender-bends-it-yet-again.html">In one letter to a newspaper</a>, he writes, “The vast settlement project… is only the most visible manifestation of Israel&#8217;s four-decade long rule over Palestinian territory, an occupation that has included torture, political assassination, home demolitions and economic strangulation.”</p>
<p>And what does Bender think about “the growth of terrorism and Islamist extremism” from Israel’s enemies? He blames that on Israel, as well. He writes, <a href="http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2007/03/bend-it-like-bender.html">in another letter</a>, that they are “a direct result of its oppression of the Palestinians.”</p>
<p>One thing he does acknowledge, though, is that there is widespread “antipathy” for Jews throughout the Muslim world. He <a href="http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2007/10/bender-bends-it-yet-again.html">quotes a Pew survey</a> reporting on its findings and saying as such. But that does not give him pause from his blame-Jew-first mentality.</p>
<p>Indeed, the organization he now joins, along with a number of its representatives, has long been associated with anti-Semitism. Even today, CAIR continues to propagate hatred against Jews. On its ‘Explore the Quran’ website, the group features versions of the Quran <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/mingxrosnhtxqlq/Jews-Explore-the-Quran.jpg">that spread the worst of bigotry</a>. In English, the site labels Muslims, who take Jews or Christians as allies, “evildoers.” It refers to Jews as “men who will listen to any lie.” Of Jews and Christians, the site states, “Allah’s curse be on them.”</p>
<p>Previously, CAIR had distributed to libraries across America an English language Quran that had been banned by the Los Angeles public school system for containing numerous anti-Jewish commentaries. The initiative had been funded by Alwaleed bin Talal, a wealthy Saudi who, in April 2002, donated $27 million to a telethon raising money for Palestinian suicide bombers.</p>
<p>Jacob Bender, himself, is no stranger to bin Talal. The <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/8sulr17dfl6myrp/Out_of_Cordoba.jpg">Alwaleed bin Talal Foundation was the top donor</a> to Bender’s anti-Israel “documentary” film, ‘Out of Cordoba.’</p>
<p>Another large donor of the film was the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). In March 2002, IIIT <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/13/AR2006111301205.html">had its Virginia offices raided by the FBI</a> in a probe that targeted over a dozen businesses accused of financing terrorism. One of the groups IIIT was said to have financed was the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE), a now-defunct Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) front run by PIJ leader Sami al-Arian. The raids led to the convictions of two individuals.</p>
<p>Another donor was the Alavi Foundation, an Iranian group that had its Manhattan office tower seized by the United States, last month, in what prosecutors described as the “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/realestate/commercial/with-judges-ruling-seizure-of-650-fifth-avenue-grinds-on.html?_r=0">country’s largest-ever terrorism-related forfeiture</a>.” According to prosecutors, the foundation was engaged in money laundering for the government of Iran.</p>
<p>Yet another donor was the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Like CAIR, ISNA was named a co-conspirator by the Justice Department for two federal trials dealing with the financing of millions of dollars to Hamas. The defendants in the trials were the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and its officials. For years, since HLF was established in 1987 as the Occupied Land Fund (OLF), the group advertised its Plainfield, Indiana mailing address as the same one being used (to this day) by ISNA. ISNA’s main youth group, the Muslim Students Association (MSA), asked for donations to be sent to the address in OLF’s name.</p>
<p>ISNA took an active role in the <a href="http://interfaith2013.qatarconferences.org/pdf/topic_english/Jacob%20Bender.pdf">distribution of Bender’s film</a>, and former ISNA heads and current ISNA representatives, Muzammil Siddiqi and Sayyid Syeed, acted as advisors to the film.</p>
<p>Jacob Bender was not the first Jew CAIR-Philadelphia was able to exploit. In April 2007, the group featured Rabbi Arthur Waskow, the director of the Philadelphia-based Shalom Center, as a speaker at its first annual banquet. Soon, he would be <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq0_sQOjt2k&amp;list=FL1mjLtZhevxvve0nkt79Z-A">featured on a CAIR-National PSA</a> and would become a contributing writer for CAIR-Los Angeles’s <i>InFocus</i> publication.</p>
<p>However, while Waskow was a willing participant with CAIR’s Islamist operation, Bender has been the only Jew to become an actual leader of the group. It’s a dubious honor, as it furthers a cause that has been built on violence and bigotry against Jews and others, but it’s obviously one that he can live with.</p>
<p>Jacob Bender can sleep well with the pride of being a useful idiot for a terror front.</p>
<p><i>Beila Rabinowitz, director of Militant Islam Monitor, contributed to this report.</i></p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Jamie Glazov&#8217;s</strong> video interview with <b>Steven Emerson </b>on The Sordid World of CAIR: <strong><br />
</strong></em></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/SaNMPpgPCh4" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
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		<title>Why Bother Being Jewish?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/caroline-glick/why-bother-being-jewish/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-bother-being-jewish</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/caroline-glick/why-bother-being-jewish/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Oct 2013 04:12:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[heritage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[intermarriage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jewish]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[judaism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[secular]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tradition]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=206735</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The missing link in the American Jewish community's connection to Judaism. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ShabbatTable.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-206736" alt="ShabbatTable" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ShabbatTable-450x321.jpg" width="270" height="193" /></a></p>
<p><em>Originally published in <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Our-World-Why-bother-being-Jewish-328098">The Jerusalem Post</a>.</em></p>
<p>Why should American Jews bother to be Jewish? According to a new Pew Research Center survey of the American Jewish community, more and more American Jews have reached the conclusion that there is no reason to be Jewish.</p>
<p>Outside of the Orthodox Jewish community, intermarriage rates have reached 71 percent. Thirty-two percent of Jews born since 1980 and 22% of Jews overall do not describe themselves as Jews by religion. They base their Jewish identity on ancestry, ethnicity or culture.</p>
<p>Whereas 73% of Jews say that remembering the Holocaust is an essential part of being Jewish, only 19% said that observing Jewish law is a vital aspect of Jewish identity. Fourteen percent say eating Jewish foods is indispensable for their Jewish identity. Forty-two percent say that having a sense of humor is a critical part of being a Jew.</p>
<p>Gabriel Roth, an intermarried Jewish author, welcomes these numbers. In a column in Slate, Roth claimed that the reason most cultural Jews keep traditions of any kind is a sense of guilt toward their parents and previous generations of Jews. He believes that it&#8217;s time to get over the guilt. Keeping such traditions has &#8220;no intrinsic meaning.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;How much value can &#8216;Jewish heritage&#8217; have if it signifies nothing beyond its own perpetuation?&#8221; he asked sneeringly.</p>
<p>Obviously, the answer is no value. To do something you feel is intrinsically meaningless just because your forefathers did the same meaningless thing is a waste of time. If Judaism has nothing to offer beyond lox and Seinfeld, then there is no reason to remain Jewish.</p>
<p>The findings of the Pew survey, and indeed, sentiments like those that Roth described are no surprise to those who have been following the downward trajectory of the American Jewish community.</p>
<p>Numerous initiatives have been adopted over the past decade or so to try to reverse the trend toward assimilation and loss of Jewish identity. These initiatives, including websites like JDate that help Jewish singles find and marry one another, and Birthright, which has brought tens of thousands of young, largely unaffiliated Jews to Israel, have had a positive impact in slowing down the trend. But the move away from Judaism for non-Orthodox American Jews remains seemingly inexorable.</p>
<p>&#8220;We have tried a lot of different things and created a lot of wonderful programs,&#8221; explains political theorist Yoram Hazony, the founder of the Shalem Center and author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Hebrew-Scripture-Yoram-Hazony/dp/0521176670/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1381241047&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=yoram+hazony"><i>The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture</i></a>, published last year.</p>
<p>Hazony, who now heads the Herzl Institute, continues, &#8220;We&#8217;ve tried everything other than the central thing. Jews need to understand that there is an attractive and compelling idea that makes it valuable to be Jews.&#8221;</p>
<p>That idea, as Hazony explained in his recent book, is found first and foremost in the Bible.</p>
<p>Roth wrote, &#8220;If you believe that Jewish traditions are part of a covenant with God, of course you want your children to continue them.&#8221;</p>
<p>Yes, of course. But if you think that Judaism can be summed up so glibly, then you have no idea what it is that you are abandoning.</p>
<p>So in a sense, you are abandoning nothing. Because you cannot abandon what you never had in the first place.</p>
<p>And what Jews like Roth never had is basic Jewish literacy.</p>
<p>Hazony&#8217;s excellent book explains in easy, approachable language that the wisdom and philosophy imparted by the Hebrew Bible was purposely denied by the anti-Semitic philosophers of the Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel and other leading philosophers of the Enlightenment were vicious Jew haters. They sought to cleanse modern philosophy of all references to the Bible in a bid to write Jews and Judaism out of the history of ideas and the contemporary intellectual world.</p>
<p>This they accomplished by subsuming the Hebrew scriptures (like the New Testament) under a broader criticism of &#8220;work of revelation.&#8221; As a revealed text, (a divine covenant ordered by a deity with which none of us have direct dealings), the Hebrew scripture was then misrepresented as something that has no relevance for people trying to determine for themselves what it means to live a good, moral and just life. Those concepts, we were told, could only be learned from Greek philosophers, who, in turn, were falsely characterized as atheists.</p>
<p>Hazony does not simply expose the philosophical crime against the Jews undertaken by the Enlightenment philosophers. He demonstrates why the ideas found in the Bible are deeply relevant and important to our lives, and indeed, how they form the basis for man&#8217;s quest to live a good, moral life.</p>
<p>&#8220;The Jewish idea is in the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinical commentaries on the Tanach,&#8221; he explains.</p>
<p>&#8220;To the extent we care and see something worthwhile in these ideas then everything falls into place. When you take it all out, everything turns into a bagel &#8211; it all tastes good but there&#8217;s a big hole in the center where the idea is supposed to be.</p>
<p>&#8220;The Jews were the people who brought the idea that an individual was responsible for discovering truth and right and for bringing it into the world. That is the idea that freed mankind.</p>
<p>&#8220;That is the biblical idea. The Bible is about the expectation that a human being is going to take responsibility for discovering the truth and what&#8217;s right and devote his or her life to bringing what is right to the world.</p>
<p>&#8220;The fact that most Jews no longer study it, no longer remember it, means they stopped being part of the historic Jewish drama. It is being part of that great drama that makes people care whether their children receive a Jewish education and marry Jews, and that makes them support Israel. Without the great drama that we learn from the Bible, then Israel becomes meaningless and intermarriage becomes obvious,&#8221; Hazony concludes.</p>
<p>Orthodox Jews feel that the Holocaust is less essential to their Jewish identity than Conservative and Reform Jews, (66% of Orthodox, versus 78% and 77% of Conservative and Reform Jews, respectively). On the other hand, 69% of Orthodox Jews believe that being part of a Jewish community is essential to their Judaism. Just 40% and 25% of Conservative and Reform Jews, respectively, feel this way. And this makes sense.</p>
<p>The Holocaust was the most recent attempt of an oppressor to annihilate the Jews. In the 4,000-year history of the Jewish people, there have been dozens of attempts to annihilate us. The Jewish story is the story not of others&#8217; attempts to destroy us, nor even of our capacity to withstand and survive these attempts. The Jewish story is the story of the lives we lived, the culture we developed, and the life of the mind that bound us together.</p>
<p>Jews who have learned the Bible know their history did not start in 1933. They know that the Jewish story is the story of a people that believes so strongly in its mission to bring the liberating idea of personal responsibility to choose good and life over evil and death that it refused to surrender to its oppressors.</p>
<p>The Jewish drama, as set out in the Bible, is the story of a nation that from the outset and until the present day chooses freedom over submission, while maintaining allegiance to a sacred trust, and an ancient people and a promised land.</p>
<p>When you understand this, remaining Jewish is a privilege, not a sacrifice.</p>
<p>And, alas, when you fail to understand this, leaving Judaism not a tragedy but simply a natural progression.</p>
</div>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Anti-Semitism in Copenhagen</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/anti-semitism-in-copenhagen/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=anti-semitism-in-copenhagen</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Oct 2013 04:20:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Copenhagen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Europe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jacob]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jewish]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=205732</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[One victim's story.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/anti_semitic.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-205738" alt="anti_semitic" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/anti_semitic.jpg" width="312" height="193" /></a>Another day, another newspaper story about anti-Semitism in Europe. The good news, I suppose, is that there are at least some newspapers in Europe that are willing to acknowledge the phenomenon. The bad news is that there&#8217;s more than enough material to keep the stories coming.</p>
<p>The latest <a href="http://jyllands-posten.dk/indland/ECE6021176/det-vigtige-for-mig-er-at-jeg-ikke-lader-mig-skraemme-til-at-tie/%20">report</a>, in the Danish daily <i>Jyllands-Posten, </i>is about seventeen-year-old Moran Jacob, a Jewish boy who until recently lived in Nørrebro, a heavily Muslim neighborhood of Copenhagen. Back in January, Jacob agreed to testify at a hearing about anti-Semitism at Copenhagen&#8217;s City Hall, where he told about the harassment he&#8217;s been subjected to since childhood. At the time, several newspapers <a href="http://m.b.dk/?article=24410992-»Vi-skal-have-nultolerance-over-for-intolerance«">provided</a> <a href="http://politiken.dk/indland/ECE1896507/16-aarig-joede-jeg-foeler-mig-stadig-utryg-paa-noerrebro/%20">accounts</a> of his testimony. (Representatives of Islamic organizations were invited to attend the hearing, but chose not to.)</p>
<p>The son of a Muslim father and an Israeli Jewish mother, Jacob began his education at a private Muslim school, where he was bullied because of his Jewish background and had to keep his distance from the other kids during recess. When he was transferred to a regular school, the abuse grew even worse; it wasn&#8217;t even safe for him to walk home alone. In eighth grade, his teacher told him to say that he was Palestinian and that his mother was Russian. “I had to lie about who I was,” he recalls. But it didn&#8217;t work. They knew. Eventually, a group of his classmates ganged up on him and stabbed him in the leg. “You can&#8217;t go here anymore,” his teacher said. “I have scars,” he told the hearing. “Not on my body, but on my soul.”</p>
<p>Jacob, of course, isn&#8217;t alone. He was the youngest of seven Jews who told their stories at the January hearing. There was obviously a reluctance to go public. Many gave only their first names. When TV cameras swung around to show the members of the audience, a number of them covered their faces.</p>
<p>“Jews have learned to keep a low profile,” Max Mayer, president of the Danish Zionist Federation, told the hearing. “To not exist in the city.” When they come out of the synagogue, they remove their yarmulkes. And they teach their sons to do the same: wear the skullcap at school, but take it off when you leave. This, Mayer said, has become standard practice for Danish Jews: “Don&#8217;t see us, don&#8217;t notice us.”</p>
<p>It certainly wasn&#8217;t easy for Jacob, a shy kid, to testify. But he decided to do so after reading a comment made by Lise Egholm, a school principal in Nørrebro. Apparently, Egholm had privately warned Jewish parents not to send their kids to school in Nørrebro. When the news of her advice made headlines, she was irritated, insisting that the problem really wasn&#8217;t all that big a deal. The particular expression she used to make this point was one I&#8217;ve never heard before: she said that the issue of anti-Semitism in Danish schools was “<i>en fis i en hornlygte.</i>”</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a rather goofy-sounding term: literally, it translates (roughly) into “a candle in a lamp made of an animal&#8217;s horn,” <i>fis </i>being a now outdated term for <i>candle</i>. In contemporary usage, however, <i>fis </i>is one of many words in Danish (and Norwegian) for <i>fart, </i>so it sounds as if it means “a fart in a lamp.” In any event, it&#8217;s an expression used to describe (according to <a href="http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornlygte">Wikipedia)</a> “something that isn&#8217;t really anything” or (according to a <a href="http://ordforklaring.dk/ordforklaring.php?forklaring=en_fis_i_en_hornlygte">website</a> about the Danish language) “something that looks like much, but isn&#8217;t really anything special.” It was when he read Egholm&#8217;s blithe use of this term to dismiss the challenges faced by him and other Jewish schoolkids in Denmark, Jacob told <i>Politiken, </i>that he decided to take the risky step of going public about his experiences.</p>
<p>(By the way, Egholm isn&#8217;t the only educator in Copenhagen who, while clearly recognizing the dire reality of anti-Semitic harassment in the city&#8217;s schools, is possessed of a curious disinclination to draw attention to it: Linda Herzberg, who works at a school in another part of town, acknowledged in an interview with <i>Politiken </i>that she, too, had witnessed assaults on Jewish kids, but shared Egholm&#8217;s concern that the problem not be “blown up too much.”)</p>
<p>Anyhow, Jacob&#8217;s testimony was featured in the media – and, as <i>Jyllands-Posten </i>now reports, the hubbub just made his life even tougher. Some time after the hearing, two Middle Eastern men passed him in the street. “That&#8217;s him,” one of them said. “Jew pig!” shouted the other. On Facebook, strangers called him a “Jew pig” and “Nazi pig” and “Jew dog.” (Plainly, the imagination of these people is severely limited.)</p>
<p>In the wake of his moment in the media spotlight, Jacob&#8217;s mother was advised by several school officials to transfer him to a school outside of Nørrebro. She was stunned by the suggestion: Jacob had lived in the neighborhood almost his entire life; neither of them wanted to flee. But in August, he finally gave up, packed up, and moved out. He now resides in what he considers a safer part of town. Not that it&#8217;s made his life a bed of roses: a couple of weeks ago, he was on Strøget, the main pedestrian street in Copenhagen – Tourist Central, basically – when a couple of “Arabic kids” grabbed hold of him and made a serious effort to drag him away with them. Who knows what they had in mind. Fortunately, two companions of Jacob&#8217;s managed to come to his aid. (As someone familiar with Strøget, which is almost always quite a busy, bustling thoroughfare, I can&#8217;t help but notice that no passersby appear to have tried to help.)</p>
<p>Now, Jacob says, he&#8217;s considering leaving Denmark altogether. He&#8217;s quick to add that he&#8217;s determined not to allow the continual harassment to scare him into silence, and insists that Denmark has to remain a country where people have the right to express themselves and to be who they are. Still, he admits that he&#8217;s not sure the Copenhagen of the future will be such a city. “If I have children, I hope they can walk around Nørrebro without hiding the fact that they have a Jewish father and without being spat upon and assaulted. But I am beginning to doubt it.”</p>
<p>Beginning?</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Obama Appoints Radical Gay Activist White House Jewish Outreach Director</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obama-appoints-radical-gay-activist-white-house-jewish-outreach-director/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-appoints-radical-gay-activist-white-house-jewish-outreach-director</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Jul 2013 13:33:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jewish]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=196499</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Once again Obama is demonstrating that the Jewish community comes last.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2935765505_70cf999c99_m.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-196504" alt="2935765505_70cf999c99_m" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2935765505_70cf999c99_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" /></a></p>
<p>The obvious response to Matt Nosanchuk being appointed as the White House&#8217;s new Associate Director for Jewish Outreach is Huh. Matt Nosanchuk has a long history of gay advocacy. And that&#8217;s about it.</p>
<p>Matt Nosanchuk&#8217;s entire career consists of shrilly pushing gay rights through every organ of government. If he was ever involved in Jewish causes or the Jewish community, it&#8217;s not obvious.</p>
<p>He worked on gay rights at the Justice Department, under radical extremist Tom Perez and he was a leader of the LGBT Policy Committee for the Obama campaign.</p>
<p>He was the gay rights liaison at the DOJ. Not the Jewish one. He handled gay rights for Obama, not Jewish issues.</p>
<p>Once again Obama is demonstrating that the Jewish community comes last. From rescheduling Chanukah to appointing a Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism associated with an anti-Israel group who then focused on Muslims, this kind of contempt is ubiquitous.</p>
<p>Now an Obama gay rights troll gets appointed to a position he has no relationship to because who really cares about the Jewish community anyway?</p>
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		<title>Jews From Muslim Lands: The Forgotten Refugees</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/noah-beck/jews-from-muslim-lands-the-forgotten-refugees/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jews-from-muslim-lands-the-forgotten-refugees</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Jul 2013 04:14:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Noah Beck]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[1948]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jewish]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[refugees]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=194928</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Middle East's shameful expulsion of Judaism. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/jewishrefugees.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-195002" alt="jewishrefugees" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/jewishrefugees.jpg" width="263" height="201" /></a>June 20 was World Refugee Day, dedicated to nearly 60 million people worldwide who were forcibly displaced by conflict or persecution. One group of refugees rarely acknowledged is the Jews who were indigenous to Muslim lands but compelled to flee around the time that the State of Israel was established.</span></b></p>
<p>A Google search for “1948 refugees” produces about 6 million results. All but a few (at least through page six) are about the Palestinian Arab refugees, as if they were the only refugees of 1948. But it is estimated that from the beginning of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War through the early 1970s, up to 1,000,000 Jews fled or were expelled from their ancestral homes in Muslim countries. 260,000 of those refugees reached Israel between 1948 and 1951 and comprised 56% of all immigration to the fledgling state. By 1972, their numbers had reached 600,000.</p>
<p>In 1948, Middle East and North African countries had considerable Jewish populations: Morocco (250,000), Algeria (140,000), Iraq (140,000), Iran (120,000), Egypt (75,000), Tunisia (50,000), Yemen (50,000), Libya (35,000), and Syria (20,000). Today, the indigenous Jews of those countries are virtually extinct (although Morocco and Iran each still has under 10,000 Jews). In most cases, the Jewish population had lived there for millennia.</p>
<p>Few know this history because the Jewish refugees of 1948 were granted citizenship by the countries to which they fled, including Israel. By contrast, many Muslim countries refused to integrate the Palestinian refugees, preferring to leave them as second-class citizens in order to maintain a domestic demographic balance and/or a political problem for Israel.</p>
<p>Media bias also explains why so few people know about the 1948 Jewish refugees from Muslim lands. A search for “1948 refugees” on the BBC news site generates 41 articles (going back to 1999); 40 discuss the Palestinian Arab refugees of 1948. Only three of those 40 (dated 9/22/11, 9/2/10, and 4/15/04) even mention the Jewish refugees from Muslim lands, and two do so only in a single, superficial sentence that presents the issue as a claim rather than a historical fact.</p>
<p>A search for “1948 refugees Jews from Arab lands” on the New York Times site produces 497 results (replacing “Arab” with “Muslim” halves the results), while “1948 Palestinian refugees” yields 1,050 results. Consider a comparison using Sri Lanka, another war-torn, multi-ethnic country that gained its independence from Britain in 1948. The nearly 26-year ethnic conflict there began in 1983 and claimed 80,000–100,000 lives, many multiples of the total casualties from the nearly 100-year Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sri Lanka’s conflict also produced hundreds of thousands of refugees, including at least 200,000 Tamil refugees in Western Europe alone. Yet a search for “Tamil refugees” generates only 531 articles – less than 5% of the 11,300 results for “Palestinian Arab refugees.”</p>
<p>Institutionalized favoritism at the UN has also enabled the Palestinians to monopolize the refugee issue, which undoubtedly reinforces the media’s bias. All non-Palestinian refugees around the world (nearly 55 million) are cared for by the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, which works under the guidelines of the Convention on Refugees of 1951. But Palestinian refugees (whose original population was under one million) have a UN agency dedicated exclusively to them (UNRWA).</p>
<p>UNRWA’s unique definition of “refugee” includes anyone “whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict.” So, in addition to families who lived in the area for generations, UNRWA’s definition includes any migrants who arrived as recently as 1946 but were then displaced. And because the definition includes “descendants of fathers fulfilling the definition,” UNRWA’s refugee population has grown from 750,000 in 1950 to 5,300,000 today (making resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue even harder). Despite these problems, the United States continues to support UNRWA (with over 4.1 billion dollars since 1950).</p>
<p>The rest of the world’s refugees are assisted by the High Commission, which is mandated to help refugees rapidly rebuild their lives, usually outside the countries that they fled. Jewish refugees from Muslim lands did just that: they rebuilt their lives in Israel and elsewhere. But the fact that they quietly adapted and Israel granted them full citizenship doesn&#8217;t lessen the wrongs committed by their countries of origin. These Jewish refugees from Muslim lands suffered legal and often violent persecution that resulted in immeasurable emotional and physical loss. They lost billions in property and endured huge socioeconomic disadvantages when forced to rebuild their lives from scratch. Israel was unfairly burdened with the colossal social and economic cost of suddenly absorbing so many refugees. So any suggestion that Jewish refugees from Muslim lands don&#8217;t deserve compensation is resoundingly wrong.</p>
<p>On the recent World Refugee Day, the Israeli Knesset member Shimon Ohayon, whose family fled Morocco in 1956, called on the Arab League to “accept their great responsibility for driving out almost a million Jews from lands [in] which they had lived for millennia.” He explained that “In 1947, the Political Committee of the Arab League drafted a law that&#8230;called for the freezing of bank accounts of Jews, their internment and [the confiscation of their assets]. Various other discriminatory measures were taken by Arab nations and subsequent meetings reportedly called for the expulsion of Jews from member states of the Arab League.” Ohayon challenged the League to accept responsibility for “the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish population from most of the Middle East and North Africa&#8230;[and] to provide redress to the Jewish refugees.”</p>
<p>A just and comprehensive Mideast peace is possible only when Muslim states recognize their role in two historic wrongs: 1) displacing one million indigenous people only because they were Jews, and 2) perpetuating the plight of Palestinian refugees by denying them citizenship. The first wrong requires financial compensation to the families of Jewish refugees from Muslim lands, which reparation can be administered by the states that absorbed them. The second wrong should be remedied by granting full citizenship to Palestinian refugees (and their descendants) who have resettled in Muslim lands. Both wrongs have festered for too many decades.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>. </strong></p>
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		<title>The Church of Scotland Takes the Low Road</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/the-church-of-scotland-takes-the-low-road/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-church-of-scotland-takes-the-low-road</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2013 04:20:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Abraham]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bible]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[christianity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Church of Scotland]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[holy land]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jewish]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=189321</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Delivers a report of the most anti-Semitic kind. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/church-of-scotland-logo1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-189415" alt="church-of-scotland-logo1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/church-of-scotland-logo1-450x338.jpg" width="270" height="203" /></a>Even if you&#8217;re in the habit of thinking a lot about Europe, it can be easy to forget about Scotland. This is curious, perhaps, given that Scotland arguably played at least as significant a role as England in shaping the culture of the thirteen colonies and of the early American republic. The Western world owes a major debt to such seminal Scottish thinkers as Adam Smith and David Hume (not to mention that great theorist of liberty, John Stuart Mill, who, while born in London, was the son of a Scotsman). Scotland was a hub of the Industrial Revolution, and the homeland of some of the most beloved writers in English, from Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle.</p>
<p>Yet the recent history of Scotland, like that of Quebec, has been dominated not by great authors or thinkers or businessmen but, rather, by mischief-makers who have kept themselves busy agitating for Scottish independence. Although it could be argued that modern capitalism was born in Scotland, today it&#8217;s a firmly socialist country, where the Parliament currently includes 41 Labourites and only one Tory, and where the welfare state is even more comprehensive than in England.</p>
<p>Then there&#8217;s the Church of Scotland. Unlike the Church of England, which was shown off, in all its glory, at the Margaret Thatcher funeral – and which is, of course, the Mother Church of the Anglican Communism, to which to the American Episcopal Church belongs – the Church of Scotland is Presbyterian. It is, moreover, one of those churches that have taken it upon themselves to be very active in international leftist activism. For years, its longstanding habit of expressing poisonous hostility toward Israel and mindless sympathy for the “Palestinian cause” didn&#8217;t distinguish it significantly from any number of other left-leaning ecclesiastical bodies around the world. That changed a few days ago, with the publication of a report – intended to be discussed and voted upon at the Church&#8217;s general assembly, which begins on May 18 – that was so blatantly anti-Semitic that it truly separated the Church of Scotland from the rest of the Israel-bashing pack.</p>
<p>Indeed, “The Inheritance of Abraham: A Report on the Promised Land” proved to be an instant classic of the most reprehensible kind – a brand-new core text in the annals of Christian Jew-hatred.</p>
<p>The report takes on supporters of Israel – both Jewish and Christian – who justify their Zionism by citing passages from Genesis in which God promises the Holy Land to Abraham&#8217;s descendants.  It challenges these biblical arguments from many directions – arguing, for example, that they&#8217;re irreconcilable with the warnings by prophets against the “pursuit of power and wealth” and that Israel has betrayed the justice that “is a major theme in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.” Quoting a famous line from Micah – “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” – the report essentially maintains that Israel isn&#8217;t living up to the mandate of Jewish scripture, and that the Jewish state doesn&#8217;t deserve the support of Christians who seek to live up to the mandate of Christian scripture. For good measure, the report mocks the very idea that the creation of modern Israel is a “miracle,” sneering: “What is meant by ‘miracle’? Was Al Nakba a ‘miracle’ – driving people from their ancestral land and property with no right of reclaim; the creation of the Gaza Strip; all the refugee camps; the occupied Palestinian territory with the destruction of community life; and the impoverishment of the Palestinian people?”</p>
<p>The thrust of the report is crystal clear: “To be critical of Zionism is not anti-Semitic.” It quotes Christian theologians who oppose Israel – and one Jew, Mark Braverman, who rejects Zionism.  Obviously because the report&#8217;s authors think that by citing a Jew they&#8217;re insulating themselves from the charge of anti-Semitism, they place Braverman front and center in outlining their core argument, noting, in short, that:</p>
<blockquote><p>Braverman is adamant that Christians must not sacrifice the universalist, inclusive dimension of Christianity and revert to the particular exclusivism of the Jewish faith because we feel guilty about the Holocaust. He is equally clear that the Jewish people have to repent of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians between 1947 and 1949. They must be challenged, too, to stop thinking of themselves as victims and special, and recognise that the present immoral, unjust treatment of Palestinian people is unsustainable.</p>
<p>Braverman challenges, too, what he calls “revisionist Christian theology,” more widely known as Western post-Holocaust theology, i.e. theology which takes away Jesus’ radical critique of Jewish theology and practice in order to provide no excuse for Christian anti-Semitism. In this approach, he claims, the Jewish people are and remain God’s chosen. This gives them the right to land, to triumph over enemies and a sense of specialness.</p></blockquote>
<p>After a while the report sets Braverman aside, but continues along the same lines:</p>
<blockquote><p>Jesus offered a radical critique of Jewish specialness and exclusivism&#8230;.If Jesus is indeed the Yes to all God’s promises the promise to Abraham about land is fulfilled through the impact of Jesus, not by restoration of land to the Jewish people. Jesus gave a new direction and message for the people of God, one which did not feature a special area of land for them&#8230;.Jesus’ vision of the kingdom is not for one limited area of territory, it is a way of anticipating how things can be if people are obedient to God&#8230;.  Our Church points to the Kingdom, which cannot be tied to any earthly kingdom. Jesus said before Pilate that he was indeed a king but “my kingdom is not from this world.”</p></blockquote>
<p>There&#8217;s much more in the report, but suffice it to say that every single word of it is intended to bolster a theological case for the dissolution of Israel.</p>
<p>In short, it&#8217;s a breathtakingly offensive piece of work. Yes, all the stuff about Jesus&#8217; message and vision and so forth is a fair enough representation of the Christian understanding of the New Testament. But as a statement about Israel and Jews in the twenty-first century, it&#8217;s beyond offensive. In its blithe, supercilious application of Christian theology to a contemporary Jewish situation, it&#8217;s breathtakingly arrogant, and – yes – cold-bloodedly anti-Semitic. Early in the document, its authors make a point of spelling out their opposition to Western colonialism and imperialism; but their smug articulation, in connection with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of the doctrine of supercessionism (also known as replacement theology) – which posits that the New Covenant under Jesus replaces Jehovah&#8217;s covenant with the Hebrew people – is offensive in <i>precisely</i> the same way as colonialism and imperialism, only on a far larger scale. Although the report, like most such products of left-leaning churches today, is full of pretty language about mercy, kindness, reconciliation, and “God&#8217;s universal, inclusive love,” it resurrects official Christian attitudes toward Jewish people and Jewish belief that one would have hoped were buried with the Holocaust.</p>
<p>Gratifyingly, the Church of Scotland got hammered for issuing this disgusting document. Israel&#8217;s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Daniel Taub, thundered that it “belittles the deeply held Jewish attachment to the land of Israel in a way which is truly hurtful.” Ephraim Borowski, head of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities (there are about 6000 Jews in Scotland), complained that the report “reads like an Inquisition-era polemic against Jews and Judaism&#8230;.The picture it paints of both Judaism and Israel is barely even a caricature. The arrogance of telling the Jewish people how to interpret Jewish texts and Jewish theology is breathtaking.” Abraham H. Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League called the document “stunningly offensive&#8230;an affront to Jews around the world and to the State of Israel.” And the <i>Jerusalem Post</i> said that the Church of Scotland “owes the Jewish people an apology for this incendiary text that is more fitting to the 13th Century than to this one.”</p>
<p>In response to this chorus of outrage, the Church quickly buckled, yanking the report from its website and agreeing to meet with Jewish community leaders. After the meeting, the Church described the dialogue as “very positive,” insisted that its report had not been intended to deny Israel&#8217;s right to exist, and promised that “a new introduction” would be added “to set the context for the report and give clarity about some of the language used.” Scotland&#8217;s Jews seemed satisfied. They shouldn&#8217;t be. No sensible person who has read “The Inheritance of Abraham” in its entirety report would find the mere addition of a new introduction (whatever its contents) sufficient to render this monstrosity inoffensive; the only decent move for the Church would be to withdraw the entire document, apologize for it profusely, and commit itself to an intense examination of its own collective conscience vis-à-vis Israel and the Jewish people. But that, apparently, isn&#8217;t about to happen. The stink of Jew-hatred, then, remains – no more fetid in Scotland, alas, than in many other corners of today&#8217;s Europe.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Winds of Anti-Semitism Blow from Europe to U.S.</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-puder/winds-of-anti-semitism-blow-from-europe-to-u-s/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=winds-of-anti-semitism-blow-from-europe-to-u-s</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 01 May 2013 04:17:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jewish]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stephen Stowe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Subway]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=187386</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why rising Muslim populations are the common denominator. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/0202121.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-187463" alt="0202121" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/0202121-450x296.jpg" width="270" height="178" /></a>The winds of anti-Semitic hate are clearly blowing westward from Europe to the Americas, particularly as more Muslims arrive in America and as Europe becomes increasingly Muslim.  A clear sign of European style anti-Jewish harassment occurred in a Brooklyn, NY subway on April 15, 2013.  An African-American teenager, Stephen Stowe (17), along with a group of friends, spat anti-Semitic epithets at a kippa-wearing Jewish man, in what amounted to an unmistakable hate crime.  According to <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/04/brooklyn-wild-melee-erupts-as-nypd-arrests-muslim-teen-for-allegedly-taunting-jewish-subway-rider.html">Jihad Watch</a>, Stowe is a Muslim.</p>
<p>Court records and police testimony indicate that Stowe shouted at the Jewish man “I am going to <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/melee-erupts-cops-arrest-muslim-teen-taunting-jewish-subway-rider-article-1.1320655#ixzz2RK6q2zgF">kill you</a> right now,” and then added, “They should have killed all of you,” a rather transparent reference to Hitler’s Holocaust against the Jews.</p>
<p>The subway incident in Brooklyn was reminiscent of a similar occurrence on March 14, 2013, in Vitry-Sur-Seine, France.  Three men accosted a Jewish kippa-wearing teenager on the subway (Metro in Paris) and threatened to do to him what Mohammed Merah, the cold-blooded Muslim murderer of a rabbi and three Jewish school children, did in Toulouse. France. The three Muslim men added that what Merah did “was <a href="http://www.adl.org/anti-semitism/international/c/global-antisemitism-2013.html">right</a> … We will kill all of you Jews &#8211; one day we will kill a Jew.”</p>
<p>Earlier this year, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Global Human Rights and co-chair of the house Bipartisan Coalition for Combating Anti-Semitism, called a hearing in response to increases in anti-Semitic violence in European nations, much of it perpetrated by Muslims.  Testifying before the Subcommittee, Rabbi Andrew Baker of the American Jewish Committee stated, “Some European governments willfully do not want to know, and they have limited their monitoring tools so that they will not be confronted with facts.  This may be a reflection of <a href="http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/kouri/130228">political correctness</a> or a fear that such data are likely to increase anti-Muslim sentiments.  Either way they contribute to the problem.”</p>
<p>Charles Knudsen, former police commander and military officer who also testified, noted that, “It is a sad state of affairs when nations bend-over-backwards to avoid the tiniest slight against Muslims but tolerate the assaults and killings of Jews in the streets of otherwise liberal democracies.” Knudsen added, “Even here in the United States on college campuses, some of the most vile, anti-Semitic language is tolerated, even heralded, by students and some faculty members.” Knudsen has been an experienced hate crime investigator.</p>
<p>The U.S. Congressional hearing on anti-Semitic violence in Europe follows a report submitted by the French Jewish community to France’s Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault on anti-Semitic incidents.  The report presents figures that show an almost 60% increase in anti-Jewish incidences during 2012.</p>
<p>Abe Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League in New York, pointed out that Muslim immigrants bring with them the anti-Semitic religious and political <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/anti-semitism-europe-2012-4#ixzz2RP6kwLgY">teachings</a> from the Middle East.  Foxman contended, moreover, that not all European countries perform satisfactorily when it comes to public awareness on the issue of anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>He considered the problem to have been the lack of anti-Semitism being catharsized out following WWII; instead there was a denial about it.</p>
<p>Fritz Bolkestein, a senior Dutch conservative politician in the VVD (Peoples Party for Freedom and Democracy) Party, former cabinet minister and European Commissioner, claimed that there was no <a href="http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2010/general-analysis-10.pdf">future</a> for practicing Jews in the Netherlands because of anti-Semitism among Moroccan immigrants.  In the Swedish city of Malmo, which has a sizable Muslim population, 54% of the Jewish residents reported that they have been subjected to anti-Semitism.  And in Belgium, Orthodox Jews in particular were subjected to physical attacks and harassment, especially in the city of Antwerp.  In Germany, the Jewish community of Berlin blamed young Muslim Turks and Arabs for anti-Semitic attacks. And, in Manchester (UK), two men approached an unmistakable Jewish man, ripped off his kippa, and punched him to the ground.</p>
<p>Back in the U.S., on April 10, 2013, police arrested a man charged with 12 counts of hate crime, 12 counts of arson as a hate crime and 12 counts of criminal mischief as a hate crime.  According to the police in Brooklyn, a borough of New York with the largest Jewish population, the man, Ruben Ubiles, 35, set fire to a dozen mezuzahs outside front doors of residents in the Taylor-Wythe House, a public housing complex.  A mezuzah is a parchment containing sacred text from the Torah affixed to the doorpost of a Jewish home.</p>
<p>According to the FBI Table 4 statistical chart on hate crimes in America, anti-Jewish hate crime tops the list with <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2011/tables/table-4">820</a> incidents for the year 2011.  By comparison, there were 175 anti-Muslim hate crimes.  Hate crime against Jews exceeds all other religious and ethnic groups.</p>
<p>Europe’s economic difficulties, and increased awareness of the threats (security, demographic, and political from radical Islam) by European institutions and governments have changed the direction of Muslim immigrants and jihadi infiltrators.  They are focused increasingly on entering North America.  The Pew Forum on Religion and Public life research reveals that the Muslim population in the United States is projected to more than double in the next 17 years, from nearly 2.6 million in 2010 to about <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/">6.2 million</a> in 2030, in large part because of immigration and higher-than-average fertility among Muslims.</p>
<p>The Pew Forum projects that Muslims are expected to account for 1.7% of the total U.S. population. It means that Muslims will constitute a larger share of the U.S. population than Jews. The implications of continued Muslim immigration into the U.S. are therefore not just demographic but political as well, and not only for Jews.</p>
<p>Although there is some correlation between events in the Middle East (such as in the aftermath of Cast Lead Operation conducted by Israel against the Palestinian Hamas terrorists) and the rise in anti-Semitic incidents, the basic explanations of anti-Semitic hatred have not changed.  They include a combination centered on negative stereotypes of the Jew, the perception of the State of Israel as assuming the individual negative Jewish stereotypical characteristics, and the adoption of such stereotypes by both neo-Nazis and radical Muslim youth.</p>
<p>It would be unfair to malign all Muslims in negative terms.  There are numerous Muslims that are law abiding citizens who believe in the U.S. Constitution.  It is, however, becoming clear that just as many of the Muslim immigrants to the West, including the U.S., would prefer Sharia (Islamic) law over secular Western law.  It is also apparent that many Middle Eastern Muslims arriving in the U.S., whether from Europe or the Middle East, tend to be radicalized by Islamic institutions, and in mosques where the imams are Saudi (Wahhabi) funded, or alternatively funded by the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Stephen Stowe’s provocative gesture using the traditional Muslim greeting of “Assalamu Alaikum” was not said in peace, it was an expression of hate. It reflects the rising level of Muslim anti-Semitism in the West as well as in America.</p>
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