<p>
	The Biden economy keeps setting new records making it clear that he will<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/28/stock-market-futures-open-to-close-news.html"> go down in history</a>. &nbsp;</p>

<blockquote>
	<p>
		Stocks fluctuated on Wednesday, after the major averages made a failed attempt at a bounce in the previous session, and as the market prepares to close out the worst first half of the year since 1970.</p>

	<p>
		The S&amp;P 500, which is down about 20% in 2022, is on pace for its worst first half of the year since 1970, when the index lost 21.01%.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>
	The news just keeps <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-s-p-500-could-slide-another-33-in-a-70s-style-inflation-environment-societe-generale-11655927721">getting worse</a>.</p>

<blockquote>
	<p>
		The S&amp;P 500 officially entered a bear market last week, falling more than 20% from its Jan. 3 record finish.</p>

	<p>
		“We have been and remain in a ‘de-risking, defensive and de-rating’ mindset for 2022, as Fed hikes in the current downturn should create collateral damage, leading us to adopt a bearish stance on U.S. Consumer, Financials and Small-caps,” said Manish Kabra, Societe Generale’s head of U.S. equities, in a Tuesday note. “But the committed fight against inflation looks set to trigger a domino effect, with the Housing and Credit markets looking like the next dominos to drop.”</p>

	<p>
		If the Fed fails to get a grip on prices, a 1970’s style inflation shock followed by a recession could push the S&amp;P 500&nbsp;SPX,&nbsp;-0.07%&nbsp;down by another 33% from its current level to trade at 2,525, Kabra said. &nbsp;</p>

	<p>
		The S&amp;P 500 falls on an average of 33% during a typical recession, but “the current 24% drop in equities suggests we have discounted 72% of an average recession (i.e. a 72% recession probability is priced in),” according to Société Générale’s report. “At 3,200 the S&amp;P 500 will fully discount a typical recession.”&nbsp;</p>
</blockquote>

<p>
	But according to Joe Biden, it's all good.</p>

<blockquote>
	<p>
		In a&nbsp;Wednesday appearance&nbsp;on the ABC late-night show “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” President Joe Biden&nbsp;made a dramatic claim&nbsp;about the US economy – and repeated himself for emphasis.</p>

	<p>
		“Look, here’s where we are. We have the fastest-growing economy in the world. The world. The world,” Biden said.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>
	If we "grow" anymore, there might not be an economy.</p>


Biden Sees Worst Half-Year Market <b>Since Nixon Administration</b>

The Biden economy keeps setting new records making it clear that he will go down in history. &nbsp;


	
		Stocks fluctuated on Wednesday, after the major

Biden Sees Worst Half-Year Market Since Nixon Administration

<p>
	If there's one place people really wanted to turn to for hot takes on the Dobbs abortion decision, it's the dystopian <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/who-chief-us-abortion-ruling-a-setback-will-cost-lives/ar-AAZ084g?ocid=BingNews">miserable failure</a> of a UN dumpster fire.</p>

<blockquote>
	<p>
		The head of the World Health Organization on Wednesday criticized the U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, saying the decision to no longer recognize a constitutional right to abortion was “a setback” that would ultimately cost lives.</p>

	<p>
		WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a media briefing that decades of scientific data prove that access to safe and legal abortion saves lives.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>
	Did the data come from China which practiced mandatory abortions? WHO's Chinese ties are as notorious as they <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/02/china-coronavirus-who-health-soft-power/">are contemptible</a>.</p>

<blockquote>
	<p>
		Most critically, Beijing succeeded from the start in steering the World Health Organization (WHO), which both receives funding from China and is dependent on the regime of the Communist Party on many levels...</p>

	<p>
		Before then, WHO was uncritically repeating information from the Chinese authorities, ignoring warnings from Taiwanese doctors—unrepresented in WHO, which is a United Nations body—and reluctant to declare a “public health emergency of international concern,” denying after a meeting Jan. 22 that there was any need to do so.&nbsp;</p>

	<p>
		WHO was keen to broadcast Beijing’s message. “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history,” WHO experts said in their February report on the mission to China.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>
	Ted and WHO are all about the science.</p>

<blockquote>
	<p>
		“We hadn't really expected this from the U.S.,” Tedros said, adding that he was concerned the Supreme Court's decision was a move “backwards." In recent years, the U.S. has supported numerous maternal health care programs in developing countries, including access to reproductive health care.</p>

	<p>
		“We had really hoped the U.S. would lead on this issue,” Tedros said.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>
	Isn't that what Communist China is for? The PRC is<a href="https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-international-news-weekend-reads-china-health-269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c"> truly leading</a> in the field of "access to reproductive health care".</p>

<blockquote>
	<p>
		The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show.&nbsp;</p>

	<p>
		After Gulnar Omirzakh, a Chinese-born Kazakh, had her third child, the government ordered her to get an IUD inserted. Two years later, in January 2018, four officials in military camouflage came knocking at her door anyway. They gave Omirzakh, the penniless wife of a detained vegetable trader, three days to pay a $2,685 fine for having more than two children.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>
	Planned Parenthood, WHO, and the Left can only dream of doing this in America. For now.</p>

<p>
	&nbsp;</p>


<b>World Health Org Kowtowing to Mandatory Communist Abortion Regime</b> Condemns Supreme Court

If there's one place people really wanted to turn to for hot takes on the Dobbs abortion decision, it's the dystopian miserable failure of a UN dumpster fire

World Health Org Kowtowing to Mandatory Communist Abortion Regime Condemns Supreme Court

<p>
	Gives Black Lives Matter some credit, they do good work. If you can describe evil as good work.</p>

<p>
	The team-up between leftists, libertarians, and black nationalists to legalize crime and destroy the criminal justice system has worked out really well. Utopia is here. Criminals roam everywhere with nothing to fear even when they commit the <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unsolved-murders-crime-without-punishment/">worst possible crimes</a>.</p>

<blockquote>
	<p>
		A review of FBI statistics shows that the murder&nbsp;clearance rate&nbsp;— the share of cases each year that are solved, meaning police make an arrest or close the case due to other reasons — has fallen to its lowest point in more than half a century.&nbsp;</p>

	<p>
		"It's a 50-50 coin flip," says Thomas Hargrove, who runs the Murder Accountability Project, which tracks unsolved murders nationwide. "It's never been this bad. During the last seven months of 2020, most murders went unsolved. That's never happened before in America."&nbsp;</p>
</blockquote>

<p>
	Criminal justice reform. This is what it looks like.</p>

<p>
	Now the same media that spent two years screaming that the police must not ever go near a black man under any circumstances are upset that the murders of black people are not being solved.</p>

<blockquote>
	<p>
		Police are far less likely to solve a murder when the victim is black or Hispanic, according to CBS News' analysis.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>
	Racism, obviously.</p>

<p>
	Lynch cops who try to do their jobs and they won't do them. Send the DOJ to terrorize police departments for investigating black suspects and they'll avoid them. And the murders of&nbsp;black people, mostly committed by other black people, won't get solved.</p>

<p>
	The media can demand that the police don't do their jobs, but they can't then also complain that the police aren't doing their jobs.&nbsp;</p>


"During the Last Seven Months of 2020, Most Murders Went Unsolved.<b> That's Never Happened Before in America." </b>

Gives Black Lives Matter some credit, they do good work. If you can describe evil as good work.


	The team-up between leftists, libertarians, and black

"During the Last Seven Months of 2020, Most Murders Went Unsolved. That's Never Happened Before in America." 

<p>
	"The <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/30/us/new-york-city-woman-shot-pushing-stroller/index.html">politics of failure</a> have failed, we must make them work again."</p>

<blockquote>
	<p>
		A woman pushing a baby in a stroller was shot in the head at close-range and killed in Manhattan Wednesday night, police said.</p>

	<p>
		The shooting happened just after 8:20 p.m. in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, police noted. Authorities are searching for a suspect.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>
	The Upper East Side. Not the Bronx. Nowhere is safe. If only the Upper East Side had been declared a gun-free zone? Stupid, yes. But also the plan.</p>

<p>
	Gov. Hochul refuses to undo any of the pro-crime policies that released criminals onto the street and eliminated bail for criminals so that there's a constant revolving door. But she's got an excitingly <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/fresh-off-primary-win-gov-kathy-hochul-dives-right-into-guns-who-can-get-them-and-where-they-can-take-them/">stupid new plan</a>.</p>

<blockquote>
	<p>
		"I've come up with a tight package," Hochul said.</p>

	<p>
		Hochul said she will ask Albany lawmakers to approve laws that will limit the places a gun can be carried and establish additional requirements to determine who should be able to have a concealed-carry permit.</p>

	<p>
		"Do you believe places like Times Square will be a gun-free zone?" CBS2's Mary Calvi asked the governor.</p>

	<p>
		"We are looking to craft language to ensure that that happens, yes," Hochul said.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>
	That'll fix that. Remember the Times Square Bombing? Hopefully, Albany Dems will also pass a bill declaring Times Square a 'bomb-free zone'. Once they pass that bill, the bombs won't be able to come in.</p>

<p>
	&nbsp;</p>


<b>Gov. Hochul Announces Plan to Make </b>Times Square a "Gun Free Zone"

"The politics of failure have failed, we must make them work again."


	
		A woman pushing a baby in a stroller was shot in the head at close-range and

Gov. Hochul Announces Plan to Make Times Square a "Gun Free Zone"

<p>
	This is going to make intersectionality really awkward.</p>

<p>
	First, there was the recent poll showing that black people are least likely to believe that <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/06/black-people-least-likely-believe-people-can-daniel-greenfield/">you can change gender </a>by thinking really hard about it.</p>

<blockquote>
	<p>
		Most Democrats say that whether a person is a man or a woman can be different from their sex at birth (61% vs. just 13% of Republicans).</p>

	<p>
		61% of white people believe that you are born a man or a woman, and 38% disagree.</p>

	<p>
		68% of black people believe it and only 31% disagree.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>
	That's one lefty cause du jour, this is <a href="https://www.axios.com/2022/06/28/abortion-views-latinos-supreme-court-roe-poll">the other one</a>.</p>

<blockquote>
	<p>
		Only 29% of Latinos who spoke only Spanish at home said abortion should be legal, compared to 63% of Latinos who spoke only English.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>
	Axios hasn't properly released its data, but its poll press release<a href="https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/axios-latino-views-on-abortion"> also mentions</a> that...</p>

<blockquote>
	<p>
		A majority of second (59%) and third (62%) generation Latinos agree that abortion should be legal, compared to less than half of first-generation Latinos (41%).</p>
</blockquote>

<p>
	Second look at getting Planned Parenthood on board for border security?</p>

<p>
	While generational time and English skills are generally seen as markers for making Latino immigrants more willing to vote Republican, on social issues they, like black people, tend to be more socially conservative the more of a minority group they are. The same is true of Jews and of a variety of other minorities. Unassimilated minorities tend to be more traditional and less woke.&nbsp;</p>

<p>
	So the results aren't surprising except that they deliver another body blow to the majority-minority premise that lefties were hoping would let them take over America.</p>

<p>
	The alliance between San Francisco cultural lefties and the Democrat minority base looks none too healthy.</p>


<b>Only 29% of Spanish Speaking Latinos </b>Think Abortion Should Be Legal

This is going to make intersectionality really awkward.


	First, there was the recent poll showing that black people are least likely to believe that you

Only 29% of Spanish Speaking Latinos Think Abortion Should Be Legal

Intersectionality and American Anti-Semitism

The term "intersectionality" has gained prominence - initially on the nation’s campuses and now well beyond academia - as signifying the supposed shared, "

<div>
	Hamas is explicit in wanting to kill not only all Israelis but all Jews. The organization states as much in its charter and declares that goal a religious duty. Hamas has sought to translate the genocidal intent into action, including through innumerable missile attacks targeting Israel’s civilian population since the terror group gained control of Gaza in 2007.&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	Yet Hamas has a coterie of apologists, supporters, cheerleaders and other enablers in Congress, including those who criticize Israel and are silent about Hamas’s actions and objective.</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	Hamas missile barrages doubly fit the internationally recognized definitions of war crimes, by virtue of their objective of killing civilians and by virtue of their use of Gazan civilian areas as launching sites for their attacks, thus endangering Palestinians in Gaza. Yet this too has not dissuaded Hamas’s Congressional enablers.</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	In initiating its latest missile war against Israel, Hamas justified doing so by claiming Israel was seeking to expel Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem and also that Israel was attacking the Al Aqsa Mosque and other Muslim sites on the Temple Mount.</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	The Sheikh Jarrah issue relates to some of the Jewish property that was seized and held as “enemy property” by Trans-Jordan after it conquered the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1948 and killed or expelled all Jews living there. Following the 1967 war, Israeli courts confirmed Jewish ownership of the property but granted Arabs residing there the status of protected tenants, able to remain and even pass the right of residence on to their heirs as long as they paid rent. But the tenants have refused to pay and it is in response to this that the courts have for some years ordered the vacating of the property. This is one of Hamas’&nbsp; justifications for firing over 4,000 missiles at Israeli civilians, a justification parroted by members of Congress.</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	The other justification, that Israel was threatening Al Aqsa, has been a rallying cry for virtually a century by Palestinian leaders seeking to instigate murderous attacks on Jews. In 1929, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, then the most prominent figure among Palestinian Arabs, used the claim to choreograph assaults on Jews that took some 130 lives. According to reports at the time, such as those by Dutch-Canadian journalist Pierre van Paassen, Husseini also produced and distributed bogus photographs of a supposedly demolished Jerusalem mosque in hopes of instigating the murder of Jews in the Mandate territory and beyond.</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	Dismissed from his position by the British in 1936 after fomenting anti-British riots, al-Husseini made his way to Iraq, where he supported a pro-Nazi revolt, and subsequently to Berlin, where he remained through much of the war as Hitler’s guest - the original intersectionality - recruiting southern European Muslims for the SS and broadcasting calls to the Arab world to support the Nazis and kill Jews. He also planned with Nazi officials arrangements for the extermination of the Jews of the Mandate after what was anticipated to be Rommel’s Afrika Korps’ conquest of Egypt and advancement eastward. Al Husseini remains a revered and inspiring figure for Palestinian leaders and their followers.</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	Since Israel regained control of the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, in 1967, it has allowed Muslim authorities to administer the area and has prevented Jews from worshipping on the Mount. Yet claims that the Jews are destroying Al Aqsa have continued in efforts to spur anti-Jewish violence.</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	The events on the Temple Mount that preceded Hamas’s war-triggering missile attack on Jerusalem entailed the storing of rocks and explosives in Muslim religious sites to be used for attacking Jews in the area, including Jews praying at the Western Wall at the base of the Mount, and subsequent clashes between assailants and Israeli police. This is Hamas’s other excuse for unleashing its 4,000 plus missiles and this justification is likewise parroted by members of Congress.</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	Ilhan Omar, much given to anti-Semitic tropes, used the current hostilities to call essentially for Israel’s destruction. Rashida Tlaib characterized the Sheikh Jarrah issue as an “...attack on Palestinian families being ripped from their homes right now”; and the events on the Temple Mount as a “... a sustained campaign of harassment and terror by Israeli police against worshippers kneeling down and praying...” Omar’s blood-thirstiness and Tlaib’s lies left no room, of course, for any mention of Hamas’s missile onslaught beyond the Congresswomen’s implicit endorsement of the onslaught in their embracing of Hamas’s justifications.</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal explicitly sought to blame Israel for Hamas’s rocket attacks, claiming they were provoked by “legal fights over evictions.”</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortes suggested that Israel’s response to the Hamas missile attacks was somehow an attack on Palestinians’ “right to survive” and that Hamas’s missiles were defending that right.&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	Congresswoman Rep. Ayanna Pressley opined: “Palestinians are being told the same thing as black folks in America: there is no acceptable form of resistance.” It’s not clear if she meant the rocks and explosives stored on the Temple Mount for attacking Jews, or Hamas missiles, or both, should be recognized as acceptable forms of resistance. Congresswoman Cori Bush likewise drew an analogy between Blacks in America and the Palestinians and seemed to justify Hamas’s missile barrages as part of “the fight for Palestinian liberation,” which she saw as “interconnected” with the struggles of African-Americans. Congressman Jamaal Bowman also took up this supposed interconnection: “Enough of Black and brown bodies being brutalized and murdered...” He characterized the events in Sheikh Jarrah and on the Temple Mount as “violently evicting families from their homes...” and “A show of strong force during prayer... Destroying holy sites...,” once more echoing Hamas lies.</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	These and other Congressmen and women’s racial rhetoric draws much of its inspiration from the Black Lives Matter organization. BLM leaders have also condemned Israel in the context of the current fighting and declared the organization’s “solidarity with Palestine.” For some years they have embraced the Hamas-led Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement against Israel aimed at the nation’s destruction, and in the last year Black Lives Matter “demonstrators” have attacked synagogues and Jewish businesses in Los Angeles and elsewhere. They have done all this while playing up the “intersectionality” between African Americans and Palestinians. The organization’s justification for the linkage and for supporting Hamas in its genocidal anti-Semitism is grounded in its perceiving Palestinians as people of color and Israelis as white. Ironically, the intersectionality earlier cultivated by Palestinian leaders was with a partner, the Nazis, who insisted Jews are not white and therefore are fit for extermination. (The Nazis reserved the term “White Jews” for non-Jewish Germans and others in Europe who sympathized with and helped the Jews.) But, of course, such ironies always abound in promotions of genocidal bigotry and hatred, which are always irrational and ultimately incoherent.</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	Twenty-five members of Congress signed a letter to Secretary of State Blinken decrying what one of the letter’s two sponsors, Marie Newman, characterized as “these heinous actions by the Israeli government against Palestinian families in East Jerusalem.” The letter cites among the heinous actions the issue of the Sheikh Jarrah property as well as various spurious anti-Israel assertions. There is no mention of the war crimes being carried out by Hamas at the time of the letter’s submission.</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	Some days later, as the war still raged, Congressional Democrats blocked passage of&nbsp; the “Palestinian International Terrorism Support Prevention Act.” The act would have placed sanctions on foreign parties engaged in providing financial support to Hamas.</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	Additionally, throughout the war, members of Congress cited, and blamed Israel for, civilian casualty numbers taken from Hamas or its agents. They did so even though, in the three previous wars triggered by Hamas missile assaults against Israeli civilians, it had been shown that Hamas had inflated numbers of civilian casualties, and even though in the present conflict some fifteen percent of Hamas missiles had fallen on Gaza and caused a number of the civilian casualties that the group then blamed on Israel. Also, of course, Hamas intentionally places its missile launchers and other military sites close to civilian homes as well as schools, mosques and hospitals, knowing that doing so will either inhibit Israeli targeting of those sites or will cause civilian casualties that supporters such as those in Congress will ascribe exclusively to Israel.</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	The current Administration in Washington has stated as one of its essential goals the reassertion of American moral authority in the world. The world has witnessed for some time now a dramatic increase in anti-Semitism in America, much of it coming not from marginalized groups but from academia, cultural elites, media elites and political elites. The further, ugly phenomenon of a sizable segment of the Congressional delegation of a major American political party serving as supporters of or apologists for the criminal actions of a genocidal anti-Semitic terrorist group - a group recognized as such by much of the world, including much of the Arab world - is hardly likely to be seen as an expression of moral authority but rather as a demonstration of moral bankruptcy.&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	&nbsp;</div>

<div>
	<strong>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and is author of <em>The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege</em>.</strong></div>


Congressional Enablers of Genocidal Anti-Semitism

Hamas is explicit in wanting to kill not only all Israelis but all Jews. The organization states as much in its charter and declares that goal a religious duty

George Soros’s Multi-Front War Against Israel

George Soros, in his political pronouncements and in his characterization of the goals of his Open Society Foundations (OSF), the primary financial vehicle for

<p>
	In democracies, minority groups will often embrace one political party and cling to that attachment irrespective of changing political circumstances. This seems especially true of minorities that have experienced discrimination, marginalization, and other forms of abuse.</p>

<p>
	In America, the groups that have been most closely attached to the Democrat Party for virtually the last century are African Americans and Jews. Even consideration in the abstract of the wisdom of being predictably committed to one party would suggest likely more negative than positive consequences - for example, being taken for granted by that party while given up on and not pursued by the other - and experience has borne that out.</p>

<p>
	This would seem to be most obvious with regard to the African American experience. Consider, for example, the Democrats’ decades-long lock on control of most of America’s big cities, many with African American majorities, and the record of public education in those cities.</p>

<p>
	Little weighs as heavily on impoverished children’s potential for extricating themselves from their difficult circumstances and shaping a better future for themselves than the quality of the education they receive in their elementary and secondary schools. But the African American populations in our large urban centers have consistently been very poorly served by their schools and lag significantly behind national averages in command of basic skills.</p>

<p>
	Those in charge of the relevant cities point to lesser per student spending on their schools due to lesser tax subsidies as compared to the subsidies provided in other jurisdictions. Another argument is that the difficult family circumstances these cities’ impoverished children often face undercut the children’s ability to make full use of the educational opportunities available to them in their public schools.&nbsp;</p>

<p>
	Both factors are indeed at play in shaping the school experience of inner city children from low income families. But the history of charter schools over the past almost three decades undercuts claims that these factors render better educational outcomes out of reach. Charter schools are public schools that operate independently under public charter with greater autonomy but with increased performance expectations. They are open to students on the basis simply of application or, if oversubscribed, on the basis of lottery. The general history of such schools has been mixed but overall positive, and, as the Harvard School of Education reported in the summer of 2017, “...low income students, especially black and Hispanic, tend to benefit from charter schools most...” And, in inner cities, such schools are serving children with basically the same social disadvantages as their peers and are doing so with per capita budgets no greater than those of the public schools.&nbsp;</p>

<p>
	Not only have major cities failed to improve their schools, but their political leaders - like New York mayor Bill De Blasio, who shouted out at a campaign rally in July that he “hates” charter schools - have often worked to undercut and obstruct charter school alternatives for their constituents. They have done so even as tens of thousands of African American families, desperate for a better future for their children, have sought admission to charter schools. The politicians have taken this course to serve the interests of their backers such as teachers’ unions and others opposed to charter schools. They have chosen political expediency over the welfare of their cities’ children.&nbsp;</p>

<p>
	And yet one would be hard-pressed to find African American voters in these cities shifting their support away from the Democrat politicians who control their cities and their schools. Their attachment to the party is so ingrained that their cities’ politicians know they will pay no price for ignoring African American children’s interests in favor of, for example, those of union contributors.&nbsp;</p>

<p>
	One can come up with potential logical explanations for how the commitment to the Democrat Party, by both African Americans and American Jews, first evolved. Why it is so steadfastly embraced even when circumstances would suggest the wisdom of a more flexible approach to party preferences, an approach responsive to political changes, is the more germane question. Part of the answer is that groups that have been subjected to biased, abusive, marginalizing treatment are inclined to categorical thinking about what will make their situation better. That is, they tend to think in absolute terms about one set of choices being right and the other wrong. This inclination is driven largely by the wish to believe that making such sharp distinctions and choosing the “right” alternative will assure escape from past abuses. That wish, and the frame of mind it engenders, work against a more nuanced response to political developments.&nbsp;</p>

<p>
	The potency of this dynamic among American Jews, and its role in the American Jewish embrace of the Democrat Party, have been elucidated by polls of American Jews regarding anti-Semitism in America. Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset and co-author Earl Raab, writing in the 1990's, noted that such polls showed the overwhelming majority of American Jews believing anti-Semitism to be more rife among American conservatives than liberals, even though actual surveys of American opinion regarding Jews have not supported this assumption. The false belief, largely reflecting a wish that reality could be so simply defined, figures in American Jews’ allegiance to the Democrats, their routinely voting for Democrat candidates in numbers exceeding seventy percent.</p>

<p>
	The cost to Jews for this blind allegiance was illustrated in the Democrat leadership’s response when anti-Semitic tropes were spewed by a newly elected Democrat congresswoman, Ilhan Omar. Rather than forthrightly condemn her for her anti-Semitic comments, the Party leadership, eager to appease a Progressive wing more than tolerant of anti-Jewish voices, sponsored a meaningless condemnation of all sorts of bigotry. Its refusal to offer a simple, straightforward rebuke of the congresswoman’s anti-Semitism reflected a bowing to the sensibilities of that Progressive wing over those of their Jewish loyalists and an expectation that the cost of not appeasing the former would be greater than the cost of betraying the latter. And they were no doubt right in their calculations.</p>

<p>
	A similar calculation was reflected in the Party’s response to Israel’s decision not to allow Omar and another newly elected congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, to enter the country. House Majority&nbsp;leader Steny Hoyer, who had just returned from leading a delegation of other newly elected Democrats to Israel and assuring that nation of Democrat support, condemned Israel’s action as “outrageous.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi similarly condemned it. They suggested it was somehow an unprecedented move by a democratic ally. But the United States has repeatedly blocked figures from other democracies from entering the country, including an Israeli member of the Knesset. And, aside from anti-Semitic statements, Omar and Tlaib have endorsed the anti-Semitic BDS (boycott, divest and sanction) movement whose goal, as articulated by its founder and many of its leaders, is Israel’s annihilation. Tlaib has also advocated Israel’s destruction more directly. Is Israel really obliged to admit people who openly declare they want to see the nation destroyed?</p>

<p>
	Both Hoyer and Pelosi have been strong supporters of Israel and neither can be construed as in any way anti-Jewish. Both are well aware of the history of Israel and the falsehoods in Omar and Tlaib’s glosses on that history. That they would come to the defense of the congresswomen and not support Israel in its right to deny them entry reflected a political calculation. It reflected once again the conviction that it was politically more important to propitiate the anti-Israel circles in the so-called Progressive wing of the Party than to worry about the Jews; that confronting the former would have more negative consequences for the Party than disregarding the latter. And, again, they were no doubt right in this calculation. There has been and will be no counter-push from Jews making the point that the Party cannot automatically assume Jewish allegiance no matter what action it takes against Jewish interests. While such pushback might not change the Party’s ultimate course, it would at least force some deeper reflection, some consideration of possible cost, before Jewish interests were ignored. But no such Jewish response will likely occur.</p>

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	The two episodes above may seem of limited weight when compared to, say, the issue of schools in the nation’s major cities and the Party’s betrayal of African American children. But the episodes are reflective of a much broader problem.</p>

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	The American institution most associated with anti-Semitism today is American academia. On the nation’s campuses, dominated by the Left, faculties have widely joined in the bigoted demonization of Israel and its American supporters, have backed the BDS movement and have penalized Jewish students and others who seek to defend Israel. College and university administrators, while typically resisting cooperation in boycotts, have also typically done little to counter campus anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bigotry. The actors in this institutional anti-Semitism are overwhelmingly Democrat supporters, and the Party, once more prioritizing propitiating supporters over challenging anti-Semitism in its midst, has been essentially silent on the bigotry of the campuses. And once more there has been very little American Jewish pushback.</p>

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	The ethos of the campuses, and the lack of Democrat response, is a threat to American Jews in other ways as well. Basic American principles, principles that have figured prominently in making the Jewish experience in America so much more benign overall than the Jewish experience elsewhere, have in recent years come under attack. That attack has been primarily from the Left, starting again largely on the campuses. What is more fundamental to American Jewish well-being than the First Amendment and freedom of speech, or than the principal embodied in Martin Luther King’s vision of a more fully realized adherence to judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin? Yet both are under incessant attack in the leftist-dominated academy, where a supposed “right” to protection from distressing ideas trumps freedom of speech and where group identity trumps individual identity. (Martin Luther King would likely be harassed and pushed off campuses today for his ideas just as pro-Israel speakers are.) And this illiberal ideology is spreading from our colleges and universities to other bastions of the Left. Yet the Democrat Party has responded virtually not at all to this challenge to basic freedoms and basic principles coming overwhelmingly from its supporters. And Jews have done essentially nothing to call the Party to account.</p>

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	There is little evidence to suggest that the great majority of either African Americans or Jews is prepared to reassess its longstanding blind loyalty to the Democrat Party. The ongoing refusal to do so in the face of inimical Democrat policies will likely exact an ever-increasing price from both groups.</p>

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	<strong>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of <em>The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege."</em></strong></p>


Jews, African Americans and the Democrat Party

In democracies, minority groups will often embrace one political party and cling to that attachment irrespective of changing political circumstances. This

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	Attacks on Israel that distort the reality of the Jewish state’s past and present in the service of undermining its well-being and its very survival have become ever more widely disseminated in bastions of the Left in America. This is occurring most strikingly in academia, among both students and faculty, but also in prominent mainstream media and even within the Democrat party. At the same time, those Jews who align themselves with the Left often resort to the most contrived of contortions to mitigate the message of such attacks.</div>

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	A representative example of this phenomenon was recently provided by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA)’s editor-in-chief, Andrew Silow-Carroll. The context was his contribution to the storm of comment in response to Rashida Tlaib’s remarks in a May interview on the podcast Skullduggery. Silow-Carroll’s article was entitled, “What did Rashida Tlaib say about the Holocaust? It’s probably not what you think.” What makes the piece particularly noteworthy is that the JTA is a news service whose stories are picked up by Jewish papers around the world and the rhetoric of its articles, not least that of pieces by its editor-in-chief, is shaped to have a desired impact on the service’s Jewish readership. In Silow-Carroll’s gloss on the Tlaib interview - as in many other articles put out by the JTA having to do with Israel and its critics on the Left - the rhetoric is clearly intended to reassure readers that attacks on Israel from the Left, in this case the Democrat Congresswoman’s statements, were not so problematic and that reactions to the contrary are overwrought.</div>

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	Tlaib had been asked in the Skullduggery interview about her support for a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how she envisioned a single state that would meet both Palestinian and Israeli-Jewish national aspirations. She never answered the question. Instead, she remarked, as transcribed by Silow-Carroll in his piece, "...two weeks ago we celebrated, or took a moment I think in our country to remember, the Holocaust. And there's a kind of a calming feeling, I always tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust in the fact that it was my ancestors - Palestinians - who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways had been wiped out, and some people's passports - I mean, just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right? In many ways. But they did it in a way that took their human dignity away, right, and it was forced on them."</div>

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	In his column, Silow-Carroll first goes after Republicans who attacked Tlaib for saying she gets a "calming feeling" when she thinks about the genocide. Well, she did say that. But Silow-Carroll insists all she meant was, as she states, "...it was my ancestors... in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews... I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that..."&nbsp; Silow-Carroll next goes after those who pointed out that, far from welcoming Jewish refugees during the Nazi era, Palestinian leaders worked against their immigration to British Mandate Palestine and collaborated with the Nazis during the war. (He does note Palestinian collaboration in the war against the Allies; he could also have noted collaboration in the murder of the Jews.) Silow-Carroll particularly cites Benny Morris as erroneously accusing Tlaib of crediting Palestinians with welcoming Jewish refugees. She did say they "provided" the haven but acknowledged "it was forced on them."</div>

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	But what is Silow-Carroll's point? With regard to Tlaib's "calming feeling" on thinking of the Holocaust, he writes, "she is saying that even if the Jews did come and take [her people's] land and rights away, at least it was for the alleviation of another people's suffering." But she clearly hates Israel, feels its creation was a great injustice to her people, and wants to undo it with her one state solution that would ultimately make Jews a minority in a Palestinian Arab state..&nbsp;</div>

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	Even the descendants of people who genuinely did help the Jews during and after the Holocaust, descendants of people who often put their lives at risk to extend that help, are unlikely to have - in response to their forebearers' heroism - a "calming feeling" on thinking of the Holocaust. They are much more likely to be pained, saddened, appalled by the scale of the atrocities whenever they think of it. "Calming feeling" is a bizarre statement whose meaning, for those trying to fathom it, is no less plausibly closer to that inferred by Tlaib's critics than to the gloss Silow-Carroll struggles to put on it.</div>

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	And what is his point in his retort to Benny Morris for noting what Palestinian attitudes and actions towards the Jews actually were before and during World War II? Yes, Tlaib did not say that the Palestinians welcomed the Jews but she certainly doesn't acknowledge the murderous violence with which they opposed both Jews in the Mandate and those trying to survive in the Arab world and in Europe.</div>

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	In addition, Tlaib insists it was the Palestinians' land to which Jewish survivors came after the war. In fact, it had been Ottoman Turkish land and, in the wake of the First World War, had been given by the League of Nations as a homeland to the Jews, both those already living there - including those who had been either a plurality or majority in Jerusalem for more than a century - and those who would immigrate there. The League of Nations did so in the context of creating or recreating many nations from the lands of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires. These nations included Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Syria and Iraq, with Syria, Iraq and the Jewish national home all being held as mandates by Britain or France to foster nation-building. In every instance, there were ethnic and religious groups within the new nations that were not happy with the new situation, but nowhere else was this seen as delegitimizing the nation-building project.</div>

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	Silow-Carroll never directly addresses Tlaib's false characterization of the land on which Israel was established as appropriated Palestinian land. Nor does he note that it was in defiance of League of Nations objections and in the service of what it construed as its imperial interests that Britain severely restricted Jewish admission to the Mandate in the years before and during World War II while allowing in large numbers of Arabs from neighboring states, people who then became “Palestinians.” Nor does he address the fact that it was not Israel's establishment that led to, in Tlaib’s words, "my ancestors - Palestinians - [losing] their land and some their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways..." In fact, they would have suffered none of that if they had accepted the United Nations' 1947 division of the Mandate - all of which had been intended by the League of Nations for the Jewish homeland - into two states, one Jewish and one Arab.&nbsp; It was the Palestinians' rejection of the UN plan and their going to war to prevent its implementation and to destroy the Jewish community that led to the losses she laments.</div>

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	Even as he is silent on these truths and tries to put the best possible gloss he can contrive on Tlaib's remarks, Silow-Carroll ultimately acknowledges that that gloss still reflects her echoing the false "...anti-Zionist refrain that the Jews escaped the window of a burning house only to land on someone else's head."</div>

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	Still he is determined to put a positive spin on Tlaib's rhetoric and to take to task her critics among&nbsp; Republicans, the "Jewish commentariat and media," the Israeli press and many other voices in the Jewish world, as well as some Democrats who want "to separate themselves from the increasingly diverse insurgency on their left."&nbsp;&nbsp;</div>

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	But, again, what is Silow-Carroll’s point? What drives his strained arguments? In trying to discern the answer, it is worth noting once more that a central recurrent theme in left-leaning Jewish media, including the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, is insistence on downplaying the extremism of anti-Israel voices on the Left, to rationalize their rhetoric and arguments and even to cast them in positive terms. They do so to oppose an Israeli government and Israeli policies with which they disagree. They do so to counter Israel's supporters on the American Right and in the mainstream American Jewish community and even in the American Center-Left, and often as well to make common cause with more radical elements of the American Left even as those elements embrace increasingly strident anti-Israel positions. And they do so not least to sway a worldwide Jewish readership to be less critical of, and more receptive to, Israel’s attackers on the Left.&nbsp;</div>

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	These ideologically driven stances by a significant segment of Jewish outlets and Jewish commentators do a gross disservice to the reality of Israel's history, current situation and challenges. In prioritizing promoting their leftist allegiances over informing and educating their Jewish readership, they routinely obscure the truth-telling that is at once the most ethical and most effective response to those such as Tlaib who seek to undermine Israel and ultimately to see it destroyed.</div>


Straining to Defend Rashida Tlaib at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Attacks on Israel that distort the reality of the Jewish state’s past and present in the service of undermining its well-being and its very survival have

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		In response to the uproar over its April publication of a blatantly anti-Semitic cartoon, the <em>Times </em>first tweeted an acknowledgment that the cartoon was “offensive,” then posted an apology and finally - as the blowback continued - published a statement by the Editorial Board conceding the cartoon was “appalling” and its appearance in the paper’s international edition, at a time of resurgent targeting of Jews, was evidence “of numbness to [anti-Semitism’s] creep...”<br>
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		One can agree with that assessment of the cartoon, but there are other elements of the Editorial Board statement that are grossly misleading and reflect a refusal to come to terms with the <em>Times’ </em>sordid track record regarding anti-Semitism.</div>

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		On the Holocaust and its prelude in Germany, the statement declares: “In the 1930s and 1940s The Times was largely silent as anti-Semitism rose up and bathed the world in blood. That failure still haunts this newspaper.”&nbsp; But it has obviously not haunted the paper enough to move it from its consistent refusal over many decades - despite its intense coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict - to report on the incitement to mass murder of Jews that has long been a staple of Palestinian and broader Arab media, mosques and schools. It has failed to do so even as such incitement has in recent years become ever more widely established within the Muslim world.&nbsp; On the contrary, to the degree that the <em>Times,</em> in relatively rare moments, has noted the problem at all, it has typically done so to downplay it or even to ridicule concern with it.&nbsp;</div>

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		Emblematic is a piece by <em>Times </em>reporter William Orme published when Yasser Arafat was launching his terror war against Israel in the fall of 2000, a war that over the subsequent several years killed more than a thousand Israelis and maimed thousands more in a bombing campaign that targeted buses, restaurants, clubs and other public venues. On October 13, 2000, the day after the lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah, the official Palestinian Authority (PA) television station broadcast a sermon by Sheik Ahmad Halabaya in which the sheik declared: “Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews... They are terrorists. They are the ones who must be butchered and killed, as Allah the almighty said: Fight them; Allah will torture them at your hands, and will humiliate them... Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them. Wherever you are, kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them...”</div>

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		Orme, in his <em>Times</em> article published eleven days later, notes Israeli complaints of the PA’s using its official media for incitement, and his tone is clearly dismissive of Israel’s concerns. He writes, “Israelis cite as one egregious example a televised sermon that defended the killing of the two soldiers. ‘Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews,’ proclaimed Sheik Ahmad Abu Halabaya in a live broadcast from a Gaza City mosque the day after the killings.” This is all Orme’s piece says of the sermon; nothing about Halabaya’s exhortations to butcher Jews wherever one finds them, nothing about his invoking Allah as calling for the torture and murder of the Jews.</div>

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		Orme’s intent is clearly to make the Israeli complaints look unfounded and ridiculous. But beyond this, his omissions reflect the general <em>Times</em> policy - across the decades preceding this article and in the almost two decades since - of remaining virtually silent on Palestinian and broader Arab and Islamic anti-Semitism and its genocidal rhetoric and intent.</div>

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		The Palestinian Authority, as another tool in its promoting and incentivizing the murder of Jews, provides stipends to those who carry out such murders or are apprehended trying to do so, as well as to the families of Palestinians killed in attacks on Jews. While the PA acknowledges this policy of payments, the <em>Times</em>, in the spring of 2018, wrote that assertions of such a policy by critics of the PA were a “far-right conspiracy [theory].” In the face of criticism, it offered a correction, stating that the PA does, in fact, make such payments and that noting their doing so “is not a conspiracy theory.” Yet this spring, when Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt referenced the PA policy, the<em> Times</em> characterized Greenblatt’s remarks as merely an “accusation,” implicitly seeking to cast doubt on their veracity.&nbsp;&nbsp;</div>

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		In the domestic arena as well, the <em>Times </em>routinely seeks to downplay anti-Semitism and, insofar as it covers the subject, to give it a particular political slant. In its post-cartoon Editorial Board statement, the <em>Times</em> writes that, “The recent attacks on Jews in the United States have been carried out by men who identify as white supremacists, including the killing of 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue last year.” The claim is far too categorical regarding perpetrators and omits too much. For example, there have been many recent violent attacks on Jews in the <em>Times’ </em>virtual backyard of Brooklyn, carried out, as a May 12 op-ed in the <em>New York Post</em> noted, by assailants who were “black, white, Hispanic, Muslim, men, women.”An article in the April-May, 2017, edition of <em>The Tower,</em> “Who is Behind Anti-Semitic Attacks in the U.S.?” lists twelve “[p]lanned, attempted, or executed [violent] anti-Semitic attacks by Muslims” in the preceding twelve years. In addition, a number of imams in mosques across the United States - including at least six in 2017 - have urged violence against “Zionists” or openly called for the killing of Jews.</div>

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		In a fifteen-paragraph article entitled “Hate Crimes Increase for the Third Consecutive Year, F.B.I. Reports,” published on November 13, 2018 and covering FBI statistics for 2017, the <em>Times</em> did note that, “Of those targeted based on religion, 58 percent were Jewish.” (The second most common targets of religiously based hate crimes were Muslims, accounting for 18.6 percent.) There was no <em>Times</em> elaboration on the subject, including the perpetrators, in this piece or subsequently.&nbsp;</div>

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		The American institutional setting most associated with anti-Semitism in recent years has been the nation’s colleges and universities, where Jewish students, particularly if they express support for Israel, are commonly under attack by leftist and Muslim student and faculty groups hostile to Israel. On the scourge of Jew-baiting rife on so many American campuses, the <em>Times </em>has been essentially silent.</div>

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		Myriad voices in America, from law enforcement, religious communities, academic groups, political groups and elsewhere, have written and spoken recently of anti-Semitism becoming mainstream in the nation. One would not know of the threat from reading the <em>New York Times.</em>&nbsp;</div>

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		The failure of the paper to attend to the issue, its predilection over the decades to avoid addressing anti-Semitism both in domestic news coverage and in its jaundiced, hostile coverage of Israel, is not without consequence. (The claim, in the <em>Times’ </em>post-cartoon Editorial Board statement, that “We have been and remain stalwart supporters of Israel,” no doubt elicited a disbelieving laugh from many readers.) Not only has this failure rendered the newspaper, in effect, an enabler of anti-Semitism, it has prevented the paper from playing what could be a major role in countering Jew-hatred.</div>

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		Illustration of that potential role was provided by a <em>Times</em> article in early 2013. On January 14 of that year, the newspaper took what for it was a virtually unprecedented step: Not only did it publish a story touching on anti-Semitism, but it did so on the front page above the fold. (Some suggested that it did so because it had recently been subjected to increased criticism regarding its failure to report on Palestinian and broader Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism.)</div>

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		The story (which had been published elsewhere earlier but without the impact of the <em>Times </em>piece, the <em>Times</em> still to a large degree determining by its coverage what other news outlets, as well as policy-makers, perceive to be newsworthy) concerned then Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi. It reported the recent release of tapes dating from 2010 in which Morsi - at the time head of the Muslim Brotherhood’s "political arm" - spouts what the <em>Times</em> itself characterizes as "anti-Semitic statements." It cites Morsi declaring, "We must never forget, brothers, to nurse our children and grandchildren on hatred for... the Jews... The hatred must go on for God and as a form of worshiping him." Elsewhere, Morsi, referring to "Zionists," invokes the trope of "the descendants of apes and pigs," which the <em>Times </em>article describes as "a slur for Jews that is familiar across the Muslim world," and the article notes that Morsi "echoed [additional] historic anti-Semitic themes."</div>

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		Response to the piece was dramatic. It was picked up by many other media outlets, and the Obama Administration, which had been more than supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood and was similarly supportive of Morsi, reacted by, in the words of one news provider, giving "a blistering review of remarks that... Morsi [had] made... about Jews and called for him to repudiate what it called unacceptable rhetoric. ... In blunt comments, the White House and State Department said Morsi's statements were ‘deeply offensive’ and ran counter to the goal of peace in the region."</div>

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		Morsi’s anti-Semitic comments also became the lead issue in his visit to Germany shortly after the <em>Times </em>piece. A story on <em>Der Spiegel</em>’s English website opened with, "Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi came in for some heavy criticism on his one-day trip to Berlin, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel taking him to task over his past comments describing Jews as ‘the descendants of apes and pigs’..."</div>

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		Response to the Morsi story is evidence of the potential power of the media, particularly the <em>Times</em>, in informing the public about the ugly phenomenon of incitement to Jew-hatred across the Muslim world, obliging world leaders to take note of the phenomenon and speak out against it, putting its purveyors on the defensive and making clear to the purveyors a cost to their genocidal hate-mongering. (Morsi was in Germany appealing for increased financial aid and was seeking the same from the Obama Administration.) The <em>Times</em> could have a similar impact with regard to domestic anti-Semitism.&nbsp;</div>

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		Or it can continue on its long-established, well-worn path, enabling by its silence the proliferation of genocidal anti-Semitism rather than acting as a force to challenge and counter it.</div>

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		<strong>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of <em>The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege</em>.</strong></div>
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The New York Times: Enabler of Genocidal Anti-Semitism

In response to the uproar over its April publication of a blatantly anti-Semitic cartoon, the Times first tweeted an acknowledgment that the cartoon was “

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		Twenty-five years ago, the world watched as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Palestinian leader and arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn. The Oslo process, launched with the September 13, 1993 signing of the Declaration of Principles as President Clinton looked on, was supposed to lead to genuine peace between Israel and the Palestinians. It never happened because Oslo was based on a delusion, a false belief by many Israelis that they had a partner for peace. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</div>

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		The truth was readily evident. On the evening of the White House ceremony, Arafat broadcast a speech on Jordanian television assuring Palestinians, and the Arab world more broadly, that they should understand Oslo in terms of the Palestine National Council’s 1974 decision. This was a reference to the so-called “plan of phases,” according to which the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) would acquire whatever territory it could by negotiations, then use that land as a base for pursuing Israel’s annihilation.</div>

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		Why did Oslo’s supporters deny the truth? The Arab siege of Israel had been underway for nearly half a century, since the Jewish State’s founding. Invariably under conditions of such chronic besiegement - whether involving minorities marginalized and victimized by the surrounding majority or small states whose neighbors seek their destruction - elements of the population under assault will shun reality. They will fool themselves into believing that sufficient self-reform and concessions will win relief. They do so out of desperate longing for respite and despite typically overwhelming evidence in the rhetoric and actions of their attackers that the besieged are merely indulging in wishful thinking.</div>

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		The traditional position of left-leaning Israeli parties had been that Israel needed to await a peace partner who would renounce terror and recognize Israel’s right to exist. But in the years preceding Oslo, this reasonable stance had eroded in the face of the unrelenting siege and the Left’s alienation from governments in which, since 1977, the right-leaning Likud had largely dominated. Growing numbers on the Israeli Left - including an overwhelming majority within the nation’s academic, cultural and media elites - concluded the major impediment to peace was the Israeli Right and its unwillingness to make necessary concessions. The Labor Party’s victory in the 1992 election gave the Left the opportunity to act on its delusion.</div>

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		In the wake of Oslo’s launching, Arafat and those around him continued to declare their goal was Israel’s annihilation and used their newly acquired control over Palestinian media, mosques and schools to promote this agenda. Accompanying the stepped-up incitement was an increase in terror, which the Israeli government insisted was the work of Hamas and other Islamist factions, supposedly unconnected to Arafat, but which he repeatedly praised and - as the Israelis knew - was deeply involved in propagating.</div>

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		In the twenty-two months from Arafat’s arrival in the territories as head of the Oslo-created Palestinian Authority, in July, 1994, until the fall of Israel’s Labor-Meretz government that had choreographed Oslo, in May, 1996, 152 people were killed in Palestinian terror attacks. The murder rate was more than two-and-a-half times that of losses to terror in the 26-year stretch from the 1967 war to the start of Oslo.</div>

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		Eventually, the carnage of exploding buses began to shift thinking among Israelis, even within the pro-Oslo elites. For example, in 1997, Ari Shavit, senior <em>Haaretz</em> columnist and himself an early, enthusiastic supporter of Oslo, wrote: “In the early 90s... we, the enlightened Israelis, were infected with a messianic craze... All of a sudden, we believed that... the end of the old Middle East was near. The end of history, the end of wars, the end of the conflict... We fooled ourselves with illusions. We were bedazzled into committing a collective act of messianic drunkenness.” But Shavit was broadly excoriated for his stance, and about half the Israeli electorate continued to support Oslo.</div>

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		This changed substantially only in the wake of the Camp David summit in 2000. Arafat rejected all proposals put forward by then Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Clinton, failed to offer any counter-proposals, and made clear he was not willing to sign an end-of-conflict agreement no matter what concessions he was given. A few months later he launched his terror war, which in the ensuing few years claimed more than a thousand Israeli lives.</div>

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		Anti-Oslo sentiment among Israelis was further buttressed by all that followed on Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. Proponents of the move hailed it as a major step towards peace and an opportunity for the Palestinians to build for themselves the equivalent of a Hong Kong or Singapore. Instead, Gaza was exploited by the Palestinian Authority under Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, to feed the PA kleptocracy and to advance the confrontation with Israel; and, following its violent takeover by Hamas in 2007, it was used as a base for Hamas rocket and other attacks against Israel, triggering three wars over the next seven years.</div>

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		Today, there is little prospect for true peace. The Palestinian Authority, under whose control more than ninety percent of Palestinians on the West Bank live, continues to use its media, mosques and schools to exhort its people to murder Israelis. PA leader Abbas has made clear, like Arafat before him, that he will never recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state within any borders. Hamas consistently reiterates its dedication to its charter’s calls for killing not only all Israelis but all the world’s Jews.</div>

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		The great majority of Israelis, so violently awakened from Oslo’s delusions, have reconciled themselves to basic realities. They see their only option now as ensuring the nation’s security while remaining open to whatever opportunities for genuine peace may eventually emerge.<br>
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		Oslo’s major legacy, beyond its grim cost in both Israeli and Arab lives, is a sober, potent lesson on the immense dangers of national self-deception.<br>
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Oslo at Twenty-Five: The History of a Delusion

Twenty-five years ago, the world watched as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Palestinian leader and arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat on the

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	With the coming start of another academic year, American college and university campuses will undoubtedly witness once more the screaming anti-Israel onslaught of the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) crowd. As before, it will be led by the largely Muslim ranks of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and continue their campaign seeking -&nbsp; as founders of both SJP and the BDS movement have explicitly acknowledged - the annihilation of the Jewish state.</div>

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	And, as in recent years, SJP and others in the forefront of the BDS movement will seek to win support by invoking their particular version of “intersectionality.” The term refers to the concept that all victimized groups and identities are interrelated and face shared challenges. In the BDS version, members of all such groups and bearers of all such identities ought to join together and, in particular, rally to the Palestinian cause as the world’s paradigmatic example of victimization. They ought to work with their BDS brethren for the world-repairing fix of Israel’s destruction.</div>

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	The BDS intersectionality ploy has, in fact, fallen on fertile ground in the current campus milieu. Campus groups ranging from feminist circles and LGBT advocates to ethnic and racial minorities - some African-American bodies, Asian-American associations, Hispanic organizations, Native American societies and others - have fallen in line behind the BDS pipers.&nbsp;</div>

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	Many others have pointed out obvious absurdities in this phenomenon: feminist groups supporting a cause whose chief adherents, both within Palestinian society and in the broader Arab and Muslim worlds, are overwhelmingly abusive of women, subjecting them to enforced subservience and widespread physical, not infrequently murderous, assault; LGBT advocates embracing those who uniformly mete out the most horrific treatment to LGBT individuals in their midst.</div>

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	But the incongruence also extends to ethnic and racial minority groups that sign onto the BDS version of intersectionality. The supposed reasoning behind BDS outreach to these groups, and the latter’s responsiveness, is the claim of shared victimization by Western imperialism and white supremacism. But in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, this formulation sets reality on its head.</div>

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	In fact, it was the Palestinians who were the benefactors of Western colonialism. In the post-World War I break-up of German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and creation of new states on former imperial lands, the League of Nations gave Britain a mandate for creation of a Jewish National Home on a small part of former Ottoman lands. Yet Britain, pursuing what it saw as its own colonial interests, worked to subvert its Mandate responsibilities to the Jews and advance Arab interests, not least because it believed the Arabs would be more accommodating of British colonial policy. Thus, it fostered widescale Arab immigration into Mandate territory while repeatedly blocking Jewish access. In the course of doing so, and seeking to prevent Israel’s creation, it betrayed its commitments vis-a-vis both the League of Nations and, subsequently, the United Nations charter.</div>

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	But the Big Lie at the heart of the BDS version of intersectionality and the BDS appeal for support from ethnic and racial minorities on American campuses goes beyond the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It is a lie that can perhaps best be elucidated by analogy to a ploy adopted by Imperial Japan before and during World War II.</div>

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	As it conquered huge swaths of territory from Manchuria in the north, down the eastern coastal regions of China, and then across southeast Asia, the East Indies, the Philippines, and elsewhere, Japan developed and promoted the concept of a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” That is, it sought to cast its conquests as liberating lands from Western colonial powers and opening the way for a new, shared prosperity. Japan did indeed replace Western powers - particularly Britain, France and the Netherlands - in some of the territories it conquered. But, as in, for example, myriad atrocities against local populations from Nanking in China to the Philippines, Japanese forces brought not “co-prosperity” but a cruel new imperialism.</div>

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	The BDS version of “intersectionality” is a variation on Japan’s “co-prosperity sphere,” a ploy hiding another flavor of supremacism and imperialism.<br id="m_-5381711681743268922yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1503342782767_2531" />
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	Key figures in both BDS and SJP, the major group promoting BDS on campus, have close associations with Hamas, recognized as a terror organization by the United States, much of Europe, and even parts of the Arab world. For example, Congressional testimony has documented the links between American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), likely the most important sponsor of SJP and BDS, a number of leading personalities behind SJP and BDS, and Hamas.</div>

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	Hamas, of course, calls not only for the annihilation of Israel but the murder of all Jews. In today’s campus atmosphere, that may count for very little as minority groups weigh their signing on with Hamas-affiliated BDS promoters. But consider Hamas policies beyond the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.</div>

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	Hamas leaders have stated that their ultimate objectives go far beyond the destruction of Israel and entail the promotion of their brand of Islamist supremacism worldwide. They have at times allied with ISIS in this broader agenda, at times with other Islamist groups, and have taken their fight beyond the geographical boundaries of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.</div>

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	For example, in March, 2009, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, president of Sudan, was indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, a genocide targeting the Muslim but black, not Arab, people of Darfur. Later that same month, the Arab world unanimously rallied around al-Bashir as he attended the Arab League meeting in Doha, Qatar. But among those most supportive of al-Bashir, and most closely allied with him, was Hamas. In fact, Hamas leader Moussa Abu Marzouk joined a handful of other key al-Bashir allies - the others being the speaker of Syrian president Assad’s parliament, an official of Hezbollah, and the speaker of non-Arab Iran’s parliament - in traveling to Khartoum to demonstrate solidarity with al-Bashir.</div>

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	In addition, Hamas forces trained in Sudan, working with the people conducting the genocide in Darfur. And Hamas was likewise allied with Sudan as the latter pursued its mass murder and enslavement of Christian and animist blacks in the southern Sudan, a multi-decade campaign that took the lives of some two million southern Sudanese.&nbsp; The southern Sudan gained its independence in 2011, but Darfur remains under the control of Khartoum and the slaughter in Darfur continues.</div>

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	This is Hamas’s version of “co-prosperity” even as it seeks to enlist minorities, including African-American groups, to its cause under the rallying cry of a supposed shared history, shared interests and shared aspirations.</div>

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	Are African-Americans who join the BDS bandwagon then simply BDS’s “useful idiots”? Some may well be, ignorant of the agenda of those they are embracing. But others likely don’t care about the BDS-Hamas connection and Hamas’s murderous associations and activities in, for example, sub-Saharan Africa. They are more concerned with pursuing a far-Left, anti-Western political agenda in the context of which the fate of black African targets of Islamism count for little. In this they are no different from many members of BDS’s Jewish auxiliary, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), who, rather than being BDS’s useful idiots, know BDS’s annihilationist anti-Israel agenda and actually share it. They, too, have often declared themselves hostile to Israel’s very existence, do not believe Jews should have the same right of self-determination enjoyed by other peoples, and have celebrated murderers of Israelis as social justice warriors.&nbsp; &nbsp;</div>

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	The same observation can be made of BDS’s feminist and LGBT fellow-travelers. Rather than being useful idiots, many are essentially indifferent to the treatment of women and LGBT individuals in Palestinian society, in the broader Arab and Muslim world, and, even more horrifically, in the world-view of Islamist groups such as BDS’s Hamas sponsors. Those feminist and LGBT BDS advocates, like the members of Jewish Voice for Peace, are more concerned with promoting a far-Left, anti-Western political agenda in the context of which Israelis are legitimate targets and truly victimized women and LGBT individuals are viewed at most as collateral damage.</div>

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	But for the wider minority, and feminist, and LGBT communities on American campuses targeted for recruitment by the BDS movement, it would behoove individual members to do some research. However much their college and university teachers, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, have failed to prepare them for such research, they should familiarize themselves with the history and objectives and associations of SJP and the BDS movement before subscribing to the BDS version of intersectionality and embracing the lie of the BDS “co-prosperity sphere.”</div>

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	<strong>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of<em id="m_-5381711681743268922yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1503342782767_2920"> The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege. </em></strong></div>


Intersectionality, the BDS Scam and Imperial Japan

With the coming start of another academic year, American college and university campuses will undoubtedly witness once more the screaming anti-Israel onslaught

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	The United States, even as it seeks to counter UN Security Council Resolution 2334's flouting of international law and undermining of chances for Arab-Israeli peace, may yet be able to turn elements of the resolution to something positive.</p>

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	The resolution, choreographed by the Obama Administration and passed with Obama’s abstention, is a relatively short document long on anti-Israel hypocrisy and lies. The most significant lie is the assertion, despite much international law to the contrary and nothing in international law in support of it, that all the land administered by Israel beyond the pre-1967 armistice lines is Palestinian Territory and that Israel has no legitimate claim to any of it.</p>

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	Among 2334's many hypocrisies, it declares that it is “Reaffirming... [Security Council] resolutions 242 (1967), [and] 338 (1973)...” In fact, it is an attempt to nullify those resolutions. The first calls for the negotiation of new, “secure and recognized boundaries,” does not pre-judge ultimate disposition of the territory, and makes no reference to any of it being “Palestinian,” while the second, 338, calls for implementation of the first.</p>

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	SCR2334 also states that it is “Guided by... the Charter of the United Nations...,” but it is in violation of the Charter as the Charter reaffirms Jewish rights in the territory that 2334 asserts to be Palestinian. In addition, the resolution misrepresents the contents of the Quartet Roadmap, claiming Israeli obligations that, according to the Roadmap, were only to become operative if the Palestinians took steps with which they never complied.</p>

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	But the hypocrisies associated with 2334 extend beyond the document itself. The document, while exclusively attacking, indicting, and demanding action against Israel, does refer to the Palestinian Authority’s responsibility regarding “confronting all those engaged in terror and dismantling terrorist capabilities...” And elsewhere it condemns, in addition to acts of terror, “acts of provocation, incitement and destruction,” and calls for refraining from “incitement and inflammatory rhetoric.” After the passage of 2334, a number of Western leaders justified their support for the resolution, or, in America’s case, its abstention, by noting the resolution’s supposed “balance,” its condemning terror and incitement in addition to its advancing anti-Israel declarations.</p>

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	Secretary of State Kerry reported that the United States had insisted it would withhold its veto only if the resolution were balanced and that its “references to incitement and terrorism” met that standard. Statements in a similar vein were put forward by Samantha Power, American ambassador to the UN. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson justified his nation’s vote in favor of the resolution by likewise citing its “balance,” and the prime minister and foreign minister of New Zealand defended their nation’s sponsorship of the resolution with virtually the same claim of “balance.”</p>

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	But the wording in 2334 that provides the transparent fig-leaf of “balance” may yet be put to good purpose. The resolution calls for “the Secretary-General to report to the Council every three months on the implementation of the provisions of the present resolution.” The Obama Administration and the nations that voted for the resolution clearly anticipated that these reports would consist entirely of a catalogue of any Israeli construction beyond the pre-1967 armistice lines as well as updates on the implementation of anti-Israel steps called for in the resolution.</p>

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	But the United States can insist that these quarterly reports contain a comprehensive review of Palestinian “provocation, incitement and destruction,” “inflammatory rhetoric,” and supporting of rather than “confronting of those engaged in terror” in the intervening months. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>

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	Not only Hamas but the Palestinian Authority spews forth, in its media, mosques and schools, virtually unending assertions that Jews have no legitimate claim to any of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean but are merely alien usurpers whose presence must be extirpated. It also seeks to provoke and incite violence with declarations such as the claim that Israel is working to destroy the Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount, that the Jews, in the words of Mahmoud Abbas, are desecrating the area with their "filthy feet," and the call for Palestinians to throw themselves into protecting the holy sites by any means. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>

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	The Palestinian Authority praises terrorists who have stabbed, shot and otherwise slain Israelis, insists that they are to be emulated, names public institutions in their honor, financially supports terrorists and their families, and provides lucrative government positions to those who are released from Israeli jails.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>

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	Despite Mahmoud Abbas's assertions that he will never recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state within any borders, and his oversight of a constant litany of anti-Israel invective, provocation and incitement - a record consistent throughout his leadership of the Palestinian Authority, President Obama invariably characterized Abbas as a "moderate." The man who was so fond of referring to "teachable moments," by which he meant moments he chose to invoke to instruct others, remained unswervingly ineducable when it came to listening to and learning the Palestinians' objectives as articulated and acted on by their leaders.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>

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	Nor has the general public been able to absorb as teachable moments Palestinian incitement, provocation and support for terror because almost all media have virtually ignored the subject and failed to inform the public about it. Some leading media outlets, such as the New York Times, have even ridiculed Israel for making note of the issue and suggesting it is a problem.</p>

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	But the quarterly reports called for in 2334 can be used by America's newly appointed United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley, and her staff to important effect. They can insist on the reports' inclusion of a comprehensive catalogue of Palestinian incitement, provocation and promotion of and support for terror - a catalogue that can be measured against information gleaned from monitoring sources such as Palestinian Media Watch. They can in this way use their UN platform to bring into focus, finally, teachable truths that for far too long have been ignored and gone unlearned, thereby potentially helping address the major obstacle to genuine peace.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>


Resolution 2334 and Potential Teachable Moments

The United States, even as it seeks to counter UN Security Council Resolution 2334's flouting of international law and undermining of chances for Arab-Israeli

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	At the Camp David talks in July, 2000 hosted by President Clinton, Yasser Arafat rejected the proposals for a final status agreement put forward by Israeli&nbsp;Prime Minister Ehud Barak and offering Arafat virtually all the territories beyond the pre-1967 armistice lines. He rejected as well Clinton’s suggested amendments to Barak’s offer. Nor did Arafat submit any alternative proposals.</div>

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	The reason for Arafat’s tack was not difficult to discern for anyone who had been paying attention to what the Palestinian leader had been saying and doing since the inception of the Oslo Accords in 1993.&nbsp; It was not that he was unwilling to take control of more territory and add to the forty percent of the West Bank and most of Gaza already handed him by Israel. Rather, the problem for Arafat was that the Camp David talks were cast as “end of conflict” negotiations. It was understood that any territorial agreement would be accompanied by Arafat signing away all further Palestinian claims against Israel, and this was something Arafat had no intention of doing.</div>

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	Arafat had made clear his goals for the Oslo process at its very inception. On the night of the signing of the initial Oslo agreements on the White House lawn in September, 1993, he was on Jordanian television from Washington explaining to his fellow Palestinians and to the wider Arab world that Oslo was the first phase of the Palestine National Council’s 1974 program. This was a reference to the so-called Plan of Phases, according to which the Palestine Liberation Organization would acquire whatever territory it could gain by negotiations, then use that land as a base for pursuing its ultimate goal of Israel’s destruction. Arafat made at least a dozen references to this perception of Oslo within a month of that broadcast, and he and his associates referred to it many times thereafter. Once established in Gaza in July, 1994, Arafat also became involved in promoting the increased terror to which Israel was subjected in the ensuing months.</div>

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	In the wake of abandoning Camp David, Arafat undertook a two-pronged strategy to advance his objectives. He unleashed a still more intense, indeed unprecedented, terror war against Israel, both to weaken Israeli resolve and, potentially, to win world sympathy as Israel’s response, against assailants imbedded within the Palestinian civilian population, would inevitably - he anticipated - cause large-scale civilian casualties.</div>

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	He also undertook a diplomatic campaign to win international, particularly European, support for recognition of all lands beyond the pre-1967 lines as “Palestine”; in effect, granting it all to the Palestinians without the bilateral negotiations and agreements called for in the Oslo accords and without the Palestinians having to foreswear future, additional claims against Israel culminating ultimately in her dissolution.</div>

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	But Arafat’s diplomatic gambit did not work. Most importantly, in response to Clinton’s placing the onus on Arafat for Camp David’s failure and Clinton’s opposing the recognition Arafat sought, the Europeans being solicited by Arafat would not sign on to his agenda.</div>

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	Arafat’s longtime associate and successor as head of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has continued to pursue Arafat’s course. He has insisted repeatedly that he will never recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state within any borders. He has used the media, mosques and schools under his control to promote the message that the Jews have no legitimate claim to any of the land under Israel’s aegis; that they are alien usurpers whose presence must be extirpated.</div>

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	It appears Abbas does not directly organize terror attacks on Israelis, and he has publicly opposed terror; not for ethical reasons but because he sees it as counter-productive. Nevertheless, he has indirectly promoted terror by, for example, falsely claiming that Israel is threatening the mosques on the Temple Mount and urging Palestinians to “defend” them against the “filthy feet” of the Jews. He also praises terrorists, names public institutions after them, uses his media, mosques and schools to urge others, especially the young, to emulate them, provides financial rewards to terrorists and their families, and gives lucrative public appointments to terrorists released from Israeli jails.</div>

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	Also, like Arafat, Abbas has sought to gain international recognition of “Palestine,” of the Palestinians’ claim to all territory beyond the pre-1967 armistice lines, and to do so without negotiating with Israel, without reaching a bilateral agreement, and, most importantly, without signing an “end of conflict” accord and foreswearing future claims against Israel.</div>

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	The major difference between 2000 and now is that Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton.</div>

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	On the contrary, Obama has for eight years championed the Arafat agenda. He has been virtually silent on Abbas’s refusal to recognize Israel’s legitimacy, on his refusal to negotiate with Israel, on his promotion and incitement of terror. He&nbsp;has consistently characterized Abbas as a moderate and peace-maker and has consistently blamed Israel for the absence of peace. He has either done nothing in the face of Abbas’s efforts to gain international recognition of “Palestine” without seeking an agreement with Israel or has actually abetted those efforts.</div>

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	No less dishonest than Obama’s characterization of Abbas have been his attacks on Prime Minister Netanyahu. Obama asserts that Netanyahu has accelerated the growth of settlements and that his doing so is rapidly closing the door on a possible two-state solution. In fact, there has been less settlement growth under Netanyahu than under his predecessors, notwithstanding Secretary of State Kerry’s recent claims, and there have been no new settlements founded for decades. In addition, the Israeli leader of the Oslo process, Yitzhak Rabin, in his last speech in the Knesset before his assassination, went into some detail regarding areas in the territories Israel would have to retain in a final agreement in order to have defensible borders. The areas are virtually the same as those the current Israeli government has focused on, and Rabin did not see Israel’s retention of them as precluding establishment of a viable, independent Palestinian entity, a goal he obviously favored.</div>

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	Now, using the supposed “closing door” on a two-state solution as a figleaf, Obama has choreographed and allowed to pass UN Security Council Resolution 2334. The resolution - in violation of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and the United Nations Charter, which assert Jewish rights in the relevant areas; in violation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which call for the negotiation of “secure and recognized borders”; in violation of the Oslo Accords, which call for the resolving of all issues by direct, bilateral negotiations - declares that all territory beyond the pre-1967 armistice lines is Palestinian territory.</div>

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	Clearly, Resolution 2334 resolves nothing. But with its passing, Obama can be seen as having notably advanced Arafat’s Plan of Phases.</div>

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	Whether a new American administration can redress the harm done to genuine peace efforts, it is to be hoped that it will at least reverse eight years of postures and policies favoring those whose concept of peace is pursuing for Israel the peace of the dead.</div>


Obama Advances Arafat’s Agenda

At the Camp David talks in July, 2000 hosted by President Clinton, Yasser Arafat rejected the proposals for a final status agreement put forward by Israeli

<b>Targeting Jews</b> in the Ivory Sewer

Reports of anti-Semitic acts on American campuses suggest that the nation’s universities and colleges are likely today the chief institutional repository of

Targeting Jews in the Ivory Sewer

<p>
	"Nam homo proponit, sed Deus disponit," wrote the medieval cleric Thomas a Kempis. "For man proposes, but God disposes."</p>

<p>
	The observation that human intent, however well conceived and deftly pursued, is commonly frustrated, does not require the invoking of God. One can, for example, comprehend the frustrating agent as fate, fortune or simply the exigencies of worldly existence.</p>

<p>
	But the founders of our republic considered the particular circumstance of people’s aspirations and intent being frustrated by the heavy hand of government, and in addressing this phenomenon they clearly attached importance to invoking God.</p>

<p>
	In the Declaration of Independence, they assert, of course, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." They further assert that the proper role of government, indeed the raison d'etre of government, is to secure these God-given rights.</p>

<p>
	All the signers of the Declaration were Christian, but they did not all comprehend God in the same way. Nor were the distinctions simply a reflection of sectarian theological differences. Some, including Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration, were sympathetic to Enlightenment-inspired deism, belief in a creator who does not directly intervene in the world but established it with rationally comprehensible natural and moral laws. He was critical, for example, of elements of the Gospels that he believed did not meet the test of reason.<br />
	<br />
	But whatever religious disagreements the other signers may have had with Jefferson, they were all prepared to endorse his references to unalienable God-given rights.</p>

<p>
	Their doing so reflected in large part a common desire to cast actions taken by the British monarch in opposition to the expressed will of the colonial citizenry’s chosen representatives - representatives charged by their constituents with protecting people’s rights - as a violation of, in a phrase used elsewhere in the Declaration, "the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God."</p>

<p>
	Historic claims, by rulers and by apologists for governance by royal decree, of "divine right" or of the monarch as God’s anointed, or older traditions that went further and asserted the divinity of crowned heads, were sacrilege to the founders of the republic. To them, the natural order of things was not one of man proposing, a king disposing.</p>

<p>
	But it was not simply from established authorities that the Founders saw threats to individual rights and proper governance. They recognized the ever-present potential for some in any community to seek to accumulate power and control over others, and more particularly the potential for some of those who have achieved office in government to seek to wrest for their office greater sway over affairs of state and to exercise that authority at the expense of others.</p>

<p>
	The authors of the Constitution sought to address this threat most famously via a system of checks and balances among the three constitutionally established branches of government, a system that would, they hoped, frustrate attempts to accumulate power to the detriment of basic freedoms. But a number of state ratifying conventions called for additional guarantees against potential accumulation and exercise of oppressive power by those in positions of authority within the new federal system. This ultimately led to enactment of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution. The first nine spell out individual rights as a further buttress against assaults on personal liberties, while the tenth establishes that all authority not explicitly assigned to branches of the federal government is reserved to the states or to the people.</p>

<p>
	In the subsequent history of the republic, the grasping for additional power, particularly by the executive branch at the expense of Congress and of the citizenry, has been a recurrent phenomenon. But over the past hundred years, with the gargantuan expansion of the executive bureaucracy, the potential for such encroachment has increased in ways unimaginable in earlier periods.</p>

<p>
	Still, there has been little precedent for the widespread and blatant seizure of unconstitutional authority by President Obama and by the federal bureaucracy under his aegis.</p>

<p>
	Foremost is the President's own creating or rewriting of federal statutes in pursuit of his policy goals - whether, for example, in the context of implementing Obamacare, or recasting immigration law, or signing off on far-reaching international commitments without constitutionally prescribed Congressional authorization, and even violating the provisions in the watered down Congressional oversight of the Iran deal that had become law only two months earlier.</p>

<p>
	Additional examples are the Administration's use of federal agencies such as, to name but a few, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Labor Relations Board and the Securities and Exchange Commission, to assert and exercise powers beyond those allowed them by statute. Administration transgressions also include use of the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies for political ends - punishing critics of the President and rewarding supporters - in blatant violation of federal law. Other unlawful conduct by the Administration includes the ignoring of Congressional subpoenas by, for instance, the Departments of Justice and of State.</p>

<p>
	Some of these myriad transgressions have been redressed by the federal judiciary, but most have not.</p>

<p>
	The motive driving the President and those around him has been comprehended by many as single-minded commitment to an ideological vision they regard as too grand and too important to be impeded by Constitutional niceties. A variation on the same theme articulated by others likewise perceives a determination by the Administration to impose a new system of governance. But they link this government agenda to the fact that today’s executive branch leadership, made up largely of academics, career government bureaucrats and senior figures from so-called non-profit public service organizations, is broadly hostile towards and dismissive of the work-a-day population of the private sector that comprises the vast majority of employed Americans. It sees itself as the brighter and the better part of the body politic and feels free to impose its agenda on the nation even if doing so entails circumventing whatever Constitutional obstacles stand in its way.</p>

<p>
	In his run for and ascension to the Presidency, Barack Obama was greeted by many, including many in the chattering classes, as god-like or messianic - just one example was Newsweek editor Evan Thomas’s 2009 characterization of the President, in a television discussion, as "standing above the country, above - above the world, he’s sort of God." And Mr. Obama has given ample evidence that he shares such visions of himself and his destined role. More broadly, there has been a predilection across the Administration's leadership, and among its True Believers, to ascribe to the current Executive transcending wisdom and seek to wrest for it concomitant, transcending authority.</p>

<p>
	The Declaration of Independence, in dissecting the British monarch’s "history of repeated injuries and usurpations," lists most frequently royal acts that had done violence to colonial legislatures and their enacted laws. The Constitution, in its seeking to preclude the possibility of such transgressions, granted to the federal legislature exclusive authority to enact laws and defined the role of the President and the executive branch as essentially enforcement of Congressionally established law.</p>

<p>
	This constitutionally delineated separation of powers, and the President’s obligation to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," are the arrangement that every President, in his oath of office, has pledged to uphold. But in today’s post-Constitutional America, instead of the people’s elected representatives enacting laws and the President enforcing them, we have - once more paraphrasing Thomas a Kempis - Congress merely proposing and Obama disposing.</p>


God, Obama and <b>Post-Constitutional America</b>

"Nam homo proponit, sed Deus disponit," wrote the medieval cleric Thomas a Kempis. "For man proposes, but God disposes."


	The observation that human

God, Obama and Post-Constitutional America

<p>
	The Iran deal, by President Obama’s own admission, opens the path to Iran’s acquiring a nuclear arsenal, even as Iranian leaders continue to assert their determination to annihilate Israel. While the President has claimed at times that the agreement will prevent Iran from ever developing nuclear weapons, he has on other occasions acknowledged that, in fact, after fifteen years Iran will have a clear, short path to doing so.<br />
	<br />
	Israelis across the political spectrum oppose the deal, fearful of the existential threat it represents, and most American Jews share their opposition. A significant majority of non-Jewish Americans do as well, both out of sympathy for Israel and out of fear of the apocalyptic Iranian theocrats gaining the ability to act on their threats against America as well as Israel.<br />
	<br />
	But while objections to his Iran deal go far beyond Israel and elements of the American Jewish community, President Obama insists Israel’s is the only government opposing the agreement - an outright lie, given, for example, the clear if less publicly and forcefully articulated opposition of such countries as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. He has also slandered American Jewish objectors with suggestions of dual loyalty, of mounting an expensive, unpatriotic campaign against the deal and in defiance of America’s best interests and of trying to push the nation to war. These hoary anti-Jewish canards have led many to call out the President for dabbling in anti-Semitism.<br />
	<br />
	But, while clearly not averse to such dabbling, the President appears to be motivated less by anti-Semitism than by his immovable, and uneducable, progressivist ideology, according to which foreign hostility to the United States derives from past American transgressions in the international arena, and American apologies and concessions will end that hostility and lead to a more peaceful world. There is no evidence to support this comprehension of reality, and much evidence to the contrary, including words and deeds of the Iranian leadership, but this is Obama’s conviction.<br />
	<br />
	Given the obvious risks to the nation, why would anyone in Congress go along with the President’s Iran deal? Some may share his delusional progressivist ideology. Others may support the agreement out of loyalty to the President, or to the Democrat party, or out of political calculation regarding their own career interests.<br />
	<br />
	One also sees clergy of various denominations declaring support for the Iran debacle. Again, those who do so may share the President’s progressivist world-view. They may also buy into the notion that any delay in Iran acquiring nuclear weapons - a delay at any price - is worthwhile. But this ignores the many questions about whether such a delay is really in the offing, given Iran’s history of cheating on other international commitments regarding its nuclear weapons program. In addition, what is beyond refutation is that the price being paid for the deal includes immediate triggering of nuclear proliferation by states in the Middle East that fear being a target of a nuclear-armed Iran. Similarly beyond refutation is that the price also includes providing the wherewithal for Iran to very quickly start sending even more weaponry and related support to the murderous Assad government in Syria and to terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, which will translate in short order into increased large-scale bloodletting.<br />
	<br />
	And how should one understand Jews in Congress supporting the deal, or the hundreds of Jewish clergy who have likewise endorsed it? Iranian leaders have been declaring their determination to annihilate Israel with even more frequency and ferocity since the signing of the agreement in July, and, as noted, virtually all Israelis - whatever their politics - take the threat seriously and are appalled by the agreement. (While Jews and non-Jews alike should be concerned about the potential threats a nuclear Iran presents to both countries, Iran has been even more fixated on destroying Israel than wiping out the United States, and Iranian leaders talk of being able to tolerate the losses they would incur in a nuclear exchange with Israel but would obviously face the possibility of much more devastating retaliation in the wake of a nuclear attack on America. And, of course, while Iranian funding of terrorist groups has claimed many hundreds of American lives, those groups have focused their killing particularly on Israelis and other Jews.) In the face of all the facts that point to the deal further enabling a genocidal regime, why would Jews in Congress or the clergy close their eyes to the threat and allow other considerations to sway their support?<br />
	<br />
	Broadly speaking, one can reference the centuries-old anti-Semitic indictment of Jews as being too preoccupied with Jewish interests, too particularist or parochial, and the response by many Jews of seeking to appease the bigots by demonstrating their devotion to broader causes and interests and of eschewing stances on issues of vital concern to the Jewish community. And as always when embracing the indictments of haters and seeking to accommodate those indictments - and there has virtually never been an anti-Semitic canard that did not have its Jewish supporters - the Jews who did so cast their stance not as trying to appease the haters but as embracing a more ethical, virtuous position. In this way, many Jews embraced ostensibly “universalist” causes even at the cost of Jewish lives. They did so as the defining characteristic of their Jewish identity or as an alternative to that identity. Or, in the pithy observation of Cynthia Ozick, “Universalism is the ultimate Jewish parochialism.”<br />
	<br />
	The impulse to stick to this tack is no doubt, if anything, enhanced when a President characterizes the Jewish state’s government and its Jewish supporters in America as the chief opponents to an Iran agreement that serves the interests of America and the world.<br />
	<br />
	One can also look at specific historical precedent in trying to comprehend the stances of some Jewish clergy and many Jewish members of Congress in support of the President’s Iran agreement. Consider, for example, these precedents drawn from World War II:<br />
	<br />
	With regard to Jewish clergy, the dominating figure in Jewish communal life during the war was Rabbi Stephen Wise. Wise worked to promote rescue of those European Jews for whom rescue was possible, and his efforts increased after the Nazi policy of pursuing the extermination of all of European Jewry was officially acknowledged by the government and reported in the media in late 1942. But the Roosevelt Administration refused to take steps readily available to it to save lives, and Roosevelt’s State Department consistently obstructed rescue efforts, even keeping out Jews with American visas. So unconscionable was State Department policy that four senior Treasury Department officials who had direct exposure to it - all non-Jews - on their own initiative prepared and presented to the Treasury Secretary a memorandum entitled “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.”<br />
	<br />
	The State Department’s opposition to rescue was matched by the stance of Britain’s Foreign Office. But for the Foreign Office, the objective was not simply to prevent the entry of more Jews into Britain. Britain, of course, controlled Mandate Palestine and was obliged under the terms of its League of Nations mandate to promote the immigration of Jews into the Mandate territory and foster “close settlement” of the land by Jewish immigrants. (The Mandate was part of the post-World War I establishment of many new states, from lands of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires, for peoples previously without sovereignty, a process that included, for example, mandates for establishment of Arab states in Iraq and Syria.) But, ignoring its Mandate commitments, and protests from the League of Nations, Britain had repeatedly - in the service of what it construed to be its own imperial interests - reneged on its obligations to foster Jewish admission to the Mandate territories. In 1939, despite the Nazi menace to European Jews, and again despite protests from the League of Nations, it had virtually ended Jewish entry to the Mandate.<br />
	<br />
	In the context of the war, the position of the Foreign Office was essentially to prevent the escape of Jews from the Nazi killing machine, viewing survivors as potentially increasing future pressures for a change in Britain’s Mandate policy. Thus, while the Foreign Office and the State Department might publicly refer to the difficulty of rescuing Jews from Europe, cables from the Foreign Office to the State Department conveyed a different message. One, arguing against rescue efforts, spoke of “the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued.” Another, elaborating on the same theme in the spring of 1943, expressed the concern that: “There is a possibility that the Germans or their satellites may change over from the policy of extermination to one of extrusion, and aim as they did before the war of embarrassing other countries by flooding them with alien immigrants.”<br />
	<br />
	This was the background to the Republican National Convention, in June, 1944, inserting into its platform for the upcoming election a strong pro-Zionist plank criticizing Roosevelt for not pressing Britain - then totally dependent on the United States - to open Mandate Palestine to Jews capable of being rescued from Europe.<br />
	<br />
	But Rabbi Wise, instead of welcoming the Republican stance and urging Roosevelt to intervene with the British, wrote to Roosevelt criticizing the Republicans’ indictment and conveying his support for the President. Even in the face of the worst of tragedies befalling Jews, the nation’s leading rabbi compromised the fight for rescue in the service of a catastrophically misplaced obeisance to “non-particularist” political loyalty.<br />
	<br />
	As to Jewish members of Congress at the time, historian David Wyman, in "The Abandonment of the Jews," notes that, “Only Emanuel Celler persistently urged government rescue actions. Samuel Dickstein joined the struggle from time to time. Four others [out of the total of seven] seldom raised the issue. Sol Bloom [as Wyman documents] sided with the State Department throughout.” Bloom was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and in a particularly good position to exert some pressure to promote rescue. But he appears to have been most concerned with overcoming whatever prejudice there might be toward him as a Jew, especially in the State Department, by demonstrating his capacity to rise above “particularist” issues like the fate of European Jewry.<br />
	<br />
	In view of the threat Iran presents to the United States and its allies, all members of Congress, and of the clergy who choose to take a stance on the agreement, ought to oppose it. With Israel being the object of the most explicit and obsessive genocidal threats from Iran, those interested in Israel’s well-being ought to be leading the fight against the deal. Many non-Jews in and out of Congress are doing so. That Jewish members of Congress slouch towards endorsing the agreement, and hundreds of Jewish clergy provide a supporting chorus for that endorsement, are sad if all too familiar reprises of an old, morally bankrupt pattern.<br />
	<br />
	<em>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of "The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege."</em></p>


Obama, the Jews and the <b>Iran Deal</b>

The Iran deal, by President Obama’s own admission, opens the path to Iran’s acquiring a nuclear arsenal, even as Iranian leaders continue to assert their

Obama, the Jews and the Iran Deal

America's Institutional Enablers of the New Anti-Semitism

Incitement and indoctrination are at the heart of the Jew-hatred raging through the Arab and broader Muslim world and now infecting much of Europe.

Within the

<p><a href="/sites/default/files/uploads/2015/01/IFCJ.jpg"><img src="/sites/default/files/uploads/2015/01/IFCJ.jpg" alt="IFCJ" width="212" height="132" /></a>As parliaments in more and more European nations vote to recognize "Palestine," European politicians insist they are doing so to promote the objective of an independent Palestinian state living in peace beside a secure Israel. But both the declared aims of Palestinian leaders and the pattern of European policy vis-a-vis Israel and the Palestinians give the lie to European averments of benign intent.</p>
<p>Neither party of the divided Palestinian leadership has, to say the least, demonstrated an interest in peace with Israel. Hamas, now controlling Gaza and enjoying extensive popularity in the West Bank, openly trumpets its objective not only to destroy Israel but to annihilate all the world's Jews. The Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas repeatedly insists it will never recognize Israel's legitimacy as the national homeland of the Jewish people and will never give up its demand for implementation of the so-called "right of return" of millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees to Israel - thereby demographically destroying the Jewish state. In the same vein, it conveys it will never sign an end of conflict agreement with Israel no matter what territorial concessions the latter offers.</p>
<p>Palestinian Authority media, mosques and schools, like those of Hamas, incessantly indoctrinate their audiences in the message that the Jews are colonial usurpers and their presence, and their state, must be expunged, that Palestinians who attack and kill Israeli civilians are heroes, and that it is the responsibility of all to emulate those heroes in the struggle for Israel's annihilation. Abbas, like Arafat before him, has made clear his goal in seeking recognition of "Palestine" by European nations and by others is to force the establishment of a Palestinian state without any bilateral agreement with Israel that would require Palestinian foreswearing of additional claims against the Jewish state.</p>
<p>While declaring its support for a two-state solution, European leaders, in promoting their parliaments' recognition of "Palestine," are actually advancing the Palestinian leadership's goal of a single, Muslim Arab, state comprised of the West Bank, what is now Israel, and Gaza. But then, the policies of the European nations have long been to advance the Palestinian agenda and to undermine any possibility of a genuine, durable two-state agreement. Consider the issues touched on below, what stance on them would be taken by those truly dedicated to achieving a viable two-state accord, and what stances European nations have actually taken:</p>
<p>1) Palestinian insistence on the "right of return" obviously precludes an agreement that allows for Israel’s continued existence. Any genuine peace would require whatever resettlement there is of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to take place within the territories allotted to the Palestinians. If the Europeans were truly interested in a two state solution, they would insist that some of the largesse they now lavish on the Palestinians be dedicated to creating decent, permanent housing for those Palestinians residing in "refugee camps" within areas already under Palestinian control. But they have not done so.</p>
<p>2) The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has provided for Palestinian refugees and their descendants for sixty-five years. Every other refugee population in the post-World War II era has been cared for by another UN organ, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In addition, with all other refugee populations, whose total numbers over the decades have been orders of magnitude greater than the Palestinian number, "refugee" is defined as an individual actually displaced by hostilities or related events, not his or her descendants as well. The special status accorded the Palestinians has obviously been orchestrated by the Arab states and their allies to use as a permanent weapon in the fight for Israel's annihilation.</p>
<p>Were Palestinian refugees defined in the manner of all other refugees, they would now number at most less than 50,000 and Israel might even entertain offering those individuals the option of return in the context of a peace settlement. But the Europeans continue to support and generously fund the unique UN treatment of Palestinian "refugees" and continue to help Palestinian leaders wield this cudgel against Israel's continued survival.</p>
<p>Moreover, UNHRW schools, often employing Hamas-affiliated and PA-affiliated teachers, contribute to the indoctrination of Palestinian children in the cause of pursuing Israel's annihilation, and UNHRW facilities have served as recruiting, training and logistical centers for Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations. Yet this, too, has elicited virtually no objection, or curtailment of support, from European nations.</p>
<p>3) As noted, PA media, mosques and schools are focused on indoctrinating their audiences in anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred and on the necessity of pursuing Israel's destruction. Yet many of the relevant PA institutions enjoy European financial support.</p>
<p>4) The PA provides extensive financial support to the families of Palestinian terrorists- both of those killed and of those imprisoned by Israel - and the European states have done little to prevent the use of European funds for this purpose.</p>
<p>5) Genuinely moderate Palestinian voices, those who would support a viable two-state solution, are an endangered lot. After twenty years of indoctrination by PA and Hamas media, mosques and schools, the great majority of Palestinians, according to opinion polls, support anti-Israel violence and the objective of Israel, and its Jews’, annihilation. What moderates remain in the territories are either cowed into silence by the PA and Hamas, or are subject to harassment, assault and arbitrary arrest. This has been the fate, for example, of Palestinian journalists who have dared to report on PA corruption or to question PA policies that preclude a peaceful settlement with Israel. European nations have done virtually nothing to come to the aid of Palestinian moderates, to support the different, often genuinely peace-promoting, course they seek to advance, or even to pressure the PA to end its abuse of them.</p>
<p>6) European states directly finance a plethora of anti-Israel NGO’s, including NGO’s that openly call for Israel’s destruction. (The proliferation and broadened reach of such organizations, particularly in the wake of the openly anti-Semitic, ironically titled, 2001 "World Conference Against Racism" in Durban, has been most extensively chronicled by Gerald Steinberg’s "NGO Monitor.")</p>
<p>7) Areas Israel has not already ceded to the Palestinians - either via agreement, as in Areas A and B now governed by the PA, or unilaterally, as in Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza - have the status in international law of disputed territory. UN Security Council Resolution 242, unanimously passed in the fall of 1967, calls for the negotiation of new "secure and recognized boundaries," and the authors of 242 argued that the pre-1967 lines were merely armistice lines, were indefensible, and left Israel vulnerable to future aggression. Yet many European states insist on referring to those lands as Palestinian, precluding the negotiated agreement on boundaries envisioned in Resolution 242 and seeking to deprive Israel of defensible borders.</p>
<p>In a similar vein, European states routinely attack any Israeli construction in the disputed territories. One can argue that creating such facts on the ground does prejudice ultimate agreement on the land’s disposition. But the same European states are not only silent on no less prejudicial Palestinian building in the disputed areas but actually support and fund it. Since Palestinian construction has largely been focused on reinforcing claims to areas that would leave Israel more strategically vulnerable, European states are in this manner as well working against the Jewish state’s achieving an agreement that would provide it with defensible borders.</p>
<p>8) The recognition of "Palestine" by European parliaments obviously violates prior endorsement by European states and the European Union of agreements calling for resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict via bilateral negotiations. At the same time, in a further demonstration of shameless European anti-Israel hypocrisy, Europe threatens measures against Israel if it does not re-engage in bilateral negotiations with the Palestinians. In fact, it is Israel that has most sought to advance such negotiations and the Palestinians that have shunned them. It is Israel that has - in, for example, 2000, 2001, and 2008 - made repeated concrete offers of a territorial settlement and the Palestinians that have rejected all of them without providing any counter-offers. Rather, they have sought to pursue an agenda of advancing their cause - the cause of replacing Israel - by means other than bilateral negotiations, as in their seeking recognition of "Palestine" by European states and international bodies. And the Europeans at once help them move forward on their alternative path while excoriating Israel for ostensibly rejecting direct negotiations.</p>
<p>For all the self-righteous doubletalk from Europe about seeking to promote a peace that will serve both the Palestinians and the Jewish state, what the Europeans are promoting by their actions is the exterminationist agenda of the Palestinian leadership and reeks of age-old, murderous European anti-Jewish bias.</p>
<p><em>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege.</em></p>


Europe Offers Israel the Peace of the Dead

As parliaments in more and more European nations vote to recognize "Palestine," European politicians insist they are doing so to promote the objective of an

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


The Al Aqsa Libel: A Brief History

Repeated claims in recent weeks by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas that Israel was attacking or otherwise threatening the Al Aqsa mosque on the

Israel and the Other PA: Perfidious Albion

"There is a possibility that the Germans or their satellites may change over from the policy of extermination to one of extrusion, and aim as they did before

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


Israel and a Tale of Two British Exports

Arguably the UK’s most successful domestically produced export to Israel has been parliamentary democracy. Arguably its most successful domestically produced

<p><a href="/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/07/prop.jpg"><img src="/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/07/prop.jpg" alt="prop" width="333" height="211" /></a>Once again, in warfare between Israel and its neighbors, Israel’s critics note the many more dead and wounded among the Jewish state’s adversaries than among Israelis and attack Israel for disproportionate use of force. While photos of dead and wounded civilians, or of non-combatants desperately fleeing fighting around their homes, should elicit everyone’s sympathy, the translating of that sympathy into a "proportionality" argument with which to beat Israel is less an expression of humane sensitivity to the plight of innocent victims than a display of sanctimonious depravity.</p>
<p>International law includes a concept of proportionality as it applies to warfare. Intentionally targeting civilians constitutes not simply a criminal act but a crime against humanity. It is also considered a crime to attack a military target when it is clear that the likely incidental civilian injuries and deaths will be disproportionate to any likely military advantage to be gained as a result of the attack.</p>
<p>Consider the nature of the conflict between Hamas and Israel. Hamas is explicit in its genocidal intent, stating in its charter and in myriad declarations by its representatives that its goal is not only the annihilation of Israel but the slaughter of all Jews. It makes clear that it has zero interest in the establishment of a Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel.</p>
<p>Apologists for Hamas’s Gaza regime claim that Israel, by blocking open access to Gaza, has, in effect, created an open-air prison in which Gazans suffer constant deprivation and so the organization has the right to try to break the Israeli siege. But from the time that Israel pulled all its citizens and troops out of Gaza, in 2005, the Palestinian leadership in the territory has pursued rocket attacks into Israel, and those attacks only escalated after Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007. To the degree that Israel has limited access to Gaza, it has done so in response to these incessant bombardments and other assaults. In addition, its doing so is consistent with international law regarding states of belligerency and, for example, the United Nations has upheld the legitimacy of Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza.</p>
<p>Moreover, the Israeli "siege" is typically overstated as totally cutting off Gaza from the wider world. In fact, one of Gaza’s borders is controlled by Egypt, not Israel. Further, huge amounts of goods enter Gaza on an almost daily basis from Israel and many Gazans cross back and forth between Gaza and Israel. Even during the current war, Israel continues to supply electricity and water to Gaza and continues to allow the daily passage of tons of goods, including food and medicine, into Hamas-controlled territory.</p>
<p>Also noteworthy is that Israel not only fully withdrew from the territory but left behind assets that could have contributed to Gaza establishing itself on a sound economic foundation. With the extensive financial support poured into Gaza by the international community, it could have become a Middle East Hong Kong or Singapore.</p>
<p>But Hamas has chosen to pursue its war of annihilation against Israel rather than create a prospering polity. It destroyed many of the economic assets left behind by Israel and devoted the huge influx of money provided by the Arab world and others in the international community to killing Israelis and trying to expunge the Jewish state instead of seeking to improve the lives and welfare of its people.</p>
<p>A major element of the current fighting is Israel’s effort to dismantle the extensive and highly sophisticated tunnel system built by Hamas to infiltrate and attack Israelis and to protect rocket launch sites and command and control centers. Israel had for a time, in the wake of earlier hostilities with Hamas, withheld deliveries of cement out of concern that it would be used to build underground military installations rather than houses and public facilities such as schools and hospitals. It subsequently bowed to international pressure and allowed extensive transfer of cement and related construction materials from Israel to Gaza, and its worst fears proved prescient. For Hamas, the well-being of Gaza’s civilians counts for nothing when measured against the murder of Israelis and extermination of their state.</p>
<p>Hamas initiated the recent conflict with indiscriminate rocket fire into Israel, targeting towns and villages and aiming - consistent with its broad genocidal objective - to kill as many Israelis as possible. It pursued its attacks with its leaders, its fighters, its caches of rockets, its launchers and its command and control centers, imbedded in heavily populated areas of Gaza, amid civilian houses and often within or in close proximity to hospitals, mosques and schools.</p>
<p>Hamas is thus doubly guilty of crimes against humanity as conceived in international law, guilty both in its targeting of civilian populations and in its use of civilian populations as human shields. (Regarding the former, even the Palestinian representative at the UN Human Rights Council acknowledged earlier this month that "[t]he missiles that are now being launched against Israel - each and every missile constitutes a crime against humanity whether it hits or misses, because it is directed at a civilian target."</p>
<p>Israel, in turn, is faced with the choice of simply tolerating the onslaught, resigning itself to a large majority of its population living under the threat of recurrent rocket attack and forced repeatedly to flee to shelter or to spend hours in safe rooms, or of responding and attacking Hamas in an effort to end the threat. No nation would choose the former.</p>
<p>Any honest observer would acknowledge that Israel, unlike its enemies, does not intentionally target civilians. Moreover, in its targeting of Hamas operatives and assets, it goes to unique levels to avoid civilian casualties. This includes telephoning and leafleting civilians, and taking other measures as well, warning them to leave areas about to be struck. Israel does so despite the fact that it is thereby giving advanced notice to those it is targeting. Commonly, Hamas urges their human shields not to act on the warnings but to stay where they are, and the civilians, either out of devotion to Hamas or out of greater fear of Hamas than of the Israelis, do not leave. Israel also frequently aborts attacks, even on high-level Hamas military personnel, when civilians are nearby. Hamas sees itself as winning whatever Israel does: If Israel aborts attacks or gives sufficient warning so that operatives can escape and assets be moved, Hamas gains by maintaining its war machine. If Israel attacks despite the presence of civilians, Hamas can cynically use the death of innocents as propaganda tools against Israel and will have willing accomplices among the world’s political leaders and media outlets to promote its propaganda message.</p>
<p>At times, of course, Israel does err in a military strike, as is inevitable in warfare. It may have faulty intelligence about who is at a location. It may, rarely, mistake innocents for combatants (and Hamas combatants do not wear uniforms, largely to be able to blend into the civilian population and make it more difficult for Israel to distinguish them). Its ordinance may misfire and land somewhere other than the intended target. It may hit depots that contain much more explosives than anticipated and set off extensive secondary explosions that engulf innocents.</p>
<p>But while Israel’s critics may at times latch onto errors of this sort, particularly if their tragic consequences provide, for Hamas propaganda, good photo opportunities, their accusations of disproportionality against Israel rest more broadly on the point of Palestinian casualties far exceeding in number Israeli victims.</p>
<p>Again, however, the issue of proportionality in terms of international law refers not to numbers but to the obligation not to take military action when the likelihood of civilian casualties outweighs the military significance of the target.</p>
<p>Yet, since Hamas so thoroughly imbeds its personnel and materiel within civilian populations, it is inevitable that - in situations where Israel is able to defend its own population despite intense and indiscriminate attack, as in the current conflict with use of the Iron Dome system - Palestinian casualties will be much higher than Israeli casualties. The accusation of disproportionality based on numbers of dead and injured routinely leveled against Israel, despite its efforts to minimize the harming of civilians, becomes then essentially an argument that there is no Hamas military asset Israel can target that justifies the endangerment of civilian lives.</p>
<p>It becomes, in effect, an argument that Hamas should be free to pursue its genocidal campaign against Israel without Israel being allowed to defend itself.</p>
<p>The disproportionality accusation is ultimately an argument in support of the destruction of Israel. This is the ultimate thrust of, for example, British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s accusing Israel of "a disproportionate form of collective punishment," and complaints of Israel’s use of disproportionate force by the prime ministers of Belgium and Finland, and the declaration issued by the EU that Israel "must act proportionately," with its implication that Israel has not been doing so, and the promotion of such indictments by myriad voices in the world’s media.</p>
<p>To be sure, many such accusations are accompanied, at least in the political arena, by criticism of Hamas for its rocket attacks. Nick Clegg’s statement is certainly different in tone from that of his fellow Liberal Democrat MP, David Ward, who wrote that if he lived in Gaza he would likely join in Hamas’s crimes against humanity by firing rockets targeting Israeli civilians. But any accompanying criticism of Hamas is little more than <em>pro forma </em>when Israel is, in effect, being taken to task for any effort to strike back at her attackers and end the onslaught against her. The thrust of the disproportionality argument is to deprive Israel of effective self-defense and is a display of moral perversion on the part of its purveyors.</p>
<p><strong>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of <em>The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege.</em></strong></p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don't miss <strong>Dr. Anna Geifman</strong> on <strong>The Glazov Gang</strong> this week discussing "Life in Israel Under Siege," "<a href="/2014/anna-geifman/who-is-killing-palestinian-children/">Who is Killing Palestinian Children</a><span>?",</span> and much <span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span>more: </span></span><strong><br />
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Promoting 'Proportionality' in the Service of Genocide

Once again, in warfare between Israel and its neighbors, Israel’s critics note the many more dead and wounded among the Jewish state’s adversaries than among

<div>
<p><a href="/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/03/obama-looks-at-netanyahu-during-talks-at-oval-data.jpg"><img alt="obama-looks-at-netanyahu-during-talks-at-oval-data" src="/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/03/obama-looks-at-netanyahu-during-talks-at-oval-data.jpg" width="270" height="199" /></a>In his recent hour-long White House interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, President Obama once more unleashed a biased, dishonest attack on Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu. Goldberg, like all too many high-profile writers and commentators, gave the president a pass on his anti-Israel riff and even seconded it. A striking contrast, demonstrating incisive, reality-based coverage of Obama’s anti-Israel slant and its inevitable negative consequences, has been provided over the past five years by the <i>Washington Post</i>’s Jackson Diehl.</p>
<p>Goldberg’s interview received wide attention for the president’s warnings to Netanyahu that he must quickly reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians or Israel could face dire consequences from a world impatient with the Jewish state’s supposed foot-dragging in ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, now in the tenth year of a four-year term, the president had only positive things to say, including definitively characterizing him as ready for a peace deal.</p>
<p>The Goldberg interview, broadcast on Bloomberg News, was wide-ranging, touching extensively on Iran and Syria as well as Israel, and Goldberg has been praised by some for his handling of the hour. Elliot Abrams, on <i>The Weekly Standard </i>website, wrote: "... kudos to Goldberg; he pressed Obama repeatedly, challenging vague formulations and seeking clarity. Goldberg pushed Obama hard, especially on Iran and Syria.</p>
<p>But on Israel Goldberg pushed Obama not at all, even when the president made assertions untethered from reality.</p>
<p>Abbas has said that he would never recognize Israel as a Jewish state, a recognition that Obama has himself acknowledged is necessary for any meaningful peace. Abbas has said he will not give up the so-called "right of return" of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to Israel, a formula for the dissolution of the Jewish state. He has denied any Jewish connection to the land and insisted the Jews are mere colonial interlopers whose state is illegitimate. He has praised murderers of Israeli civilians as heroes who should be emulated and has overseen the naming of schools, sports teams, and other public entities in their honor. He has presided over an education system that teaches all of "Palestine" - meaning the West Bank, Gaza and Israel - properly belongs to the Palestinians and that Palestinian children must dedicate themselves to liberating it from the Jews and eradicating the Jewish state.</p>
<p>Yet when Obama declared, "I believe that President Abbas is sincere about his willingness to recognize Israel and its right to exist," and offered other comments in the same vein, Goldberg mustered no question invoking the counter-evidence. On the contrary, he essentially endorsed the president’s ludicrous assessment and only raised the question of whether Abbas could deliver, despite his good intentions: "Abu Mazen [Abbas] - all these things you say are true, but he is also the leader of a weak, corrupt and divided Palestinian entity... Do you think he can deliver more than a framework agreement?"</p>
<p>In contrast to Goldberg’s meekly echoing the president’s distortions, <i>Washington Post </i>editor and columnist Jackson Diehl has repeatedly offered clear-eyed assessments of Obama’s anti-Israel bias and misguided views on the path to peace.</p>
<p>In May, 2009, in an op-ed entitled "Abbas’s Waiting Game," Diehl observed, "[President Obama] has revived a long-dormant Palestinian fantasy: that the United States will simply force Israel to make critical concessions, whether or not its democratic government agrees, while Arabs passively watch and applaud." To Diehl, the president’s tack was obviously wrong-headed and counter-productive.</p>
<p>At the time, the Obama administration was already focusing on a settlement freeze as the key to moving the peace process forward. In subsequent weeks, the administration ratcheted up this demand, and defined the insisted upon "freeze" in all-inclusive terms that were unprecedented either for any American administration or in the context of any previous Israeli-Arab or Israeli-Palestinian agreements. In addition, Obama did so without mention of need for a single concession on the part of the Palestinians.</p>
<p>Once again Diehl was direct and clear, in an article written a month after the previous piece and entitled "End the Spat with Israel." Diehl points out how unprecedented the demands regarding settlements were, and how unnecessary given previously agreed upon limitations to settlement growth, limitations to which the Israelis were adhering. He also notes concessions Netanyahu had made in recent weeks, including for the first time agreeing to Palestinian statehood. He reiterates that Obama’s stance was allowing the Palestinians, and the Arabs more broadly, to avoid making any necessary concessions of their own. His point once more was how Obama’s anti-Israel approach, if left unmodified, was doomed to fail.</p>
<p>In fact, when Netanyahu did subsequently agree to a ten month moratorium on all settlement construction, Abbas refused to restart negotiations until two weeks before the moratorium’s end, persisted in offering no concessions of his own, and demanded an extension of the building freeze as a pre-condition to continuing negotiations. Diehl was, of course, proved right in his criticism of Obama’s strategy.</p>
<p>Yet again, two years later, in a May, 2011 op-ed entitled "Mahmoud Abbas’s Formula for War," Diehl takes Obama to task for his ongoing, wrong-headed bias. He notes the president was still focusing on pressuring Israel, while "short shrift is given, as usual, to Netanyahu’s putative partner. Yet the leader of the Palestinian ‘moderate’ branch, Mahmoud Abbas, is not only refusing to make any concessions of his own but is also turning his back on American diplomacy - and methodically setting the stage for another Israeli-Palestinian conflict."</p>
<p>Diehl goes on to cite Abbas’s recent public commitment to seek a UN General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood the following fall. Diehl quotes Abbas to the effect that, rather than pursuing a state through a negotiated peace with Israel, "Palestine would then be negotiating from the position of one United Nations member whose territory is militarily occupied by another."</p>
<p>This tack is consistent with what had always been Yasser Arafat’s intent. Arafat was never going to sign an "end-of-conflict" agreement, and neither will his long-time friend and ally Abbas. It was because such an agreement was demanded of them in return for the far-reaching Israeli territorial concessions offered by Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton in 2000 and 2001 and by Ehud Olmert in 2008 that Arafat walked away from the former and Abbas from the latter. Arafat then launched his terror war and at the same time sought international recognition of "Palestine" without committing to a final status agreement and without closing the door to ongoing pursuit of Israel’s annihilation. Abbas is intent on following the same playbook.</p>
<p>Diehl, writing in 2011, notes that "the Obama administration and its allies appear suitably alarmed by [Abbas’s UN strategy]. But their principal reaction so far might be summed up as, ‘Now we really have to put the screws to Netanyahu.’"</p>
<p>In the context of giving Secretary of State Kerry his requested nine months to solve the conflict, Abbas agreed to forego returning to the UN last fall to seek additional trappings of nationhood there. But he is clearly determined to continue avoiding concessions to, and an end-of-conflict agreement with, Israel, and instead to seek international recognition of statehood in all of the West Bank and Gaza and the freedom to use those territories for pursuing Israel’s destruction.</p>
<p>President Obama, in his Jeffrey Goldberg interview, has now essentially legitimized the Arafat strategy. Abbas, Obama insists, is committed to an agreement with Israel. The problem is the settlements built in support of Israeli claims to areas of the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. If Israel fails to meet Palestinian demands, Obama continues, it is hard to see how the United States can go on protecting Israel from anti-Israel measures taken by, for example, the United Nations and the European Union.</p>
<p>In a subsequent interview with talk show host Charlie Rose, Goldberg said he took Obama’s comments <span>"</span>...to be a little bit of a veiled threat, to be honest... It’s almost up there with, you know, nice little Jewish state you got there, I’d hate to see something happen to it."</p>
<p>But when it counted, during the interview, Goldberg did not challenge Obama on his threat. Nor did he raise the issue of Israel’s legitimate security concerns and its right to claim in negotiations strategic areas of the West Bank, as acknowledged, for example, in UN Security Council Resolution 242. Nor did he refer to the Palestinians’ continuing refusal to recognize Israel’s legitimacy within any borders, or their indoctrinating their children to wage war on Israel until it is annihilated. No; he essentially let Obama’s biased attack on Israel and apologetics for the Palestinians stand unchallenged.</p>
<p>There are many more Jeffrey Goldbergs than Jackson Diehls among Middle East commentators inside the Beltway. Their obsequiousness to Obama and to his hostility vis-a-vis Israel helps assure that, in the administration’s remaining three years, the Jewish state will endure additional besiegement and the prospect for genuine peace will only recede further.</p>
<p><em>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of "The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege."</em></p>
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Jeffrey Goldberg, Jackson Diehl and Obama’s Targeting of Israel

In his recent hour-long White House interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, President Obama once more unleashed a biased, dishonest attack on Israel and Prime

Frontpage Mag

kenneth levin