Not shocking at all
Over the weekend, anti-Israel rallies became anti-Semitic hatefests in
Seattle and
Boston. But while the Seattle article called it shocking, I find it anything but. Both Seattle and Boston are known as bastions of the Democratic party and the American Left - blue cities - in which the only way for a Republican to be elected dog catcher is to act like a Democrat. And acting like a Democrat these days pretty much requires being anti-Israel. Don't tell that to the 78% of American Jews who voted Obama not once, but twice.
The first link (Seattle) includes many pictures, and I urge all of you to have a look at it.
The truth
was in short supply. Many posters asserted that Israel had halted food
and medicine to Gaza during the current Hamas provoked conflagration.
While supplying one’s enemy in a time of war seems to The Mike Report to border on insanity, according to Ynet
“Israel has allowed some 200 trucks to cross into the strip, including
some 200,000 liters of fuel daily, in an attempt to prevent a
humanitarian crisis in Gaza”. Israel continues to provide medical
services to Gaza residents. “Over 20 Palestinians, including eight Gazan
children were treated at Haifa’s Rambam Medical Center, as part of
Israel’s longstanding cooperation with the Palestinian Authority”.
...
While you may have thought that blood
libel accusations are a relic of the past, in fact the slander was alive
and well in downtown Seattle this past Saturday. The [above picture]
depicts a Jew eating a gentile child along with a cup of blood to wash
it all down.
...
[The sign in the picture] accuses Israel of Genocide “Genocide is not justice” and then promotes genocide “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be free“. The river is the Jordan, the sea is the Mediterranean and the goal is a Jew free Middle East.
Meanwhile, Boston, which I left a week ago tonight, was no better. This post also has many pictures and should be viewed by one and all.
A group of pro-Israel demonstrators were attacked and verbally and
physically assaulted by anti-Israel extremists outside the Israeli
consulate in Boston on Friday.
Anti-Israel groups, led by the radical Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), organized a demonstration outside the consulate against Operation Protective Edge - Israel's military operation to stamp out rocket fire from Gaza. In 2013 the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) anti-hate watchdog listed JVP as one of the top ten most active and influential anti-Israel groups in the US.
Upon hearing about the demo, a small group of about a dozen
pro-Israel activists quickly mobilized for a counter-demonstration. But
upon being spotted by the anti-Israel group things soon turned ugly.
In a video taken by staff inside the consulate, a roughly 100-strong
crowd of anti-Zionists can be see swarming around the pro-Israel group.
Pro-Israel activists said demonstrators' chants included calls
for Israel's destruction and the establishment of an Arab state in its
stead ("From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"), and that
some hurled anti-Semitic insults like "Jesus-killers" at them.
But the abuse also turned physical.
Chloe Valdary, a senior at the University of New Orleans and founder of the Declare Your Freedom Initiative, is pressing charges after an attack by a female protester who told her that "Jews will go to hell Inshallah [G-d-willing in Arabic - ed.]" and then proceeded to physically assault her. (See video below)
Valdary, who is not Jewish, said she heard other demonstrators call for Jews to "burn in hell" and to "go back to the Dead Sea (sic)".
There is very little difference today between being anti-Israel and being an anti-Semite. Unless you're a Jew. there is no difference.
Labels: American Left, anti-Israel obsession, anti-Semitism, Boston, Seattle
Hamas holding out for one 'quality' terror attack; American Left complains no Israelis killed
Hamas is sustaining heavy casualties in Operation Protective Edge according to a key official in Israel's defense ministry. Nevertheless, it is holding out for one '
quality' terror attack after which it will declare both a cease fire and 'victory.' That result would
please certain commentators from the American Left (Hat Tip:
Memeorandum). This is from the first link.
Top Defense Ministry Amos Gilad said Thursday that Hamas
has been “badly damaged” by the IDF's campaign in response to the
terror organizations unending attacks on Israeli civilians.
Gilad, Head
of the Defense Ministry's Diplomacy-Security Department, said that Hamas
was working very hard to keep up its “victorious image,” but was
finding it much more difficult now than in the past.
“Hamas is trying very hard to make headlines,” said Gilad. “They
issue proclamations of 'victory' and time their major rocket attacks to
coincide with 'high pressure' periods,” such as Thursday morning's
attack on Tel Aviv at the height of rush hour. As tens of thousands of
commuters were driving into the Tel Aviv area Thursday morning, Hamas
terrorists fired at least four rockets at the Dan area. All four were
shot down by the Iron Dome defensive system.
Hamas also times its heavy rocket attacks for the early evening
hours, in the hope of making headlines on the evening TV broadcasts and
thus sowing panic among Israelis.
According to Gilad, Hamas is more than ready to end this round of
fighting. “They are hoping for a 'high-quality' attack that they can
point to and pronounce as a victory, and when that happens they will
immediately call a cease-fire. They are sustaining grave losses and
cannot continue at this rate,” he said.
Okay, we knew on Tuesday that
Hamas wanted a cease fire. The problem was that they had preconditions.... They just didn't mention was that one of those preconditions was to murder a few Israelis.
The American Leftists at Fire Dog Lake would be thrilled if Hamas would
kill a few Israelis. They've been keeping score and the score doesn't look so good for Hamas right now.
The Guardian reports that the U.S., which means Nobel Peace
Prize winner Barack Obama, supports without reservation the air war on a
largely defenseless population:
The White House condemned the rocket
attacks against Israel. ‘No country can accept rocket fire aimed at
civilians and we support Israel’s right to defend itself against these
vicious attacks,’ said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
Oh of course, the Gazans are vicious for killing no one, but ‘no
comment’ on the Israeli air strikes that have killed 29 civilians according to Reuters.
Israel is targeting Hamas facilities and leadership. The fact that Hamas
uses civilians as (all-too-often
willing)
human shields is
Hamas' responsibility, not
Israel's. And as to the fact that no Israelis have been killed, we thank God for that every day.
Labels: American Left, Gaza, Geneva Convention, Hamas, Operation Protective Edge, Palestinian terrorism
There's a pattern here
Caroline Glick connects the media's blame game involving the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers, the celebration of that kidnapping by the 'moderate' 'Palestinians,' the 'international community's support for the Hamas-Fatah 'unity government,' anti-Semitism in Europe and the decision of the United States' premier opera company to stage (and until
today's cancellation to simulcast) an
opera glorifying a 'Palestinian' terror attack.
As for Fatah, since Frankel, Shaer and Yifrach were taken on Thursday
night, Fatah has glorified and celebrated their capture on its official
Facebook page and its official newspaper. Fatah’s Facebook page
depicted the boys as rats, reeled in by a fishing pole.
The Palestinian Authority’s daily newspaper Al Hayat al Jadida published a mock World Cup logo in which three hands held three people who held their hands up in surrender.
And Fatah activists posted a revealing directive on Facebook after the boys were abducted.
No, Abbas’s “moderate” faction of the Palestinian unity government,
so energetically supported by the US, the EU and the western media, did
not call for the public to quit celebrating the abduction. Nor did it
condemn the brutal assault.
The Fatah activists called for shopkeepers in the vicinity of the
kidnapping to destroy any footage their security cameras filmed in the
24 hours following the operation to prevent the IDF from seizing the
footage and using it in its efforts to locate the boys.
That makes Fatah an accessory after the fact to the attack. And yes,
that means that the PA – which is comprised of Fatah and Hamas – is in
fact one great big terrorist organization.
When Rudoren and her colleagues in the media look in the mirror, they
don’t see themselves as enablers of murderers and champions of
terrorists.
...
Rather than demand that Abbas take the responsibility he claims to
carry, and convince his coalition partner to return the children they
stole, the two-stater peaceniks blame Israel. And the kidnapped boys.
Maybe there is something else going on here.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but perhaps the media and the
governments championing Palestinian unity are less motivated by
geopolitical concerns than they would have us believe?
In one of those ironic coincidences that happens every so often when
events converge to expose patterns and relations between seemingly
unrelated events, in the two weeks before the Palestinians abducted
Yifrach, Shaer and Frankel, the American Jewish community discovered
that the object of the largesse of many an American Jewish patron of the
arts – New York’s Metropolitan Opera – has gone full-on anti-Semitic.
In its fall line-up, the Met will produce the acclaimed-by- anti-Semites opera, The Death of Klinghoffer.
Not only will they stage the show at Lincoln Center, the Met is going
to broadcast it through its HD broadcast program to 2,000 theaters in 66
countries reaching a potential audience of millions.*
The Death of Klinghoffer romanticizes the lives and times of the PLO terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise liner in 1985 and murdered wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old Jewish American.
...
Jewish teenagers are kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists in Israel, and it’s their fault.
A old, handicapped Jewish man was thrown over the deck of a cruise ship, and America’s premier opera house says it’s art.
Jewish teenagers are violently assaulted on the streets of Europe, and Europe yawns.
There is a pattern here. And it has nothing to do with peace.
Read the whole thing. Labels: American Left, Caroline Glick, European anti-Semitism, Jodi Rudoren, kidnapping, New York City, Palestinian terrorism
The hypocritical Left strikes again
I suppose you have to be a liberal to understand the logic behind
this.
Labels: American Left, gays, leftists, liberalism, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Dershowitz 'doesn't understand' how Left glorifies American terrorists
Alan Dershowitz tells Newsmax TV that he doesn't understand how the Left glorifies American terrorists.
Let's go to the videotape.
Hey Alan - all those people are supported by people who admire you. All of them take advantage of the rights granted to them under US law. Look at how the Left reacted, for example, to the younger Tsarnaev brother not being read his Miranda rights. All of them support unfettered immigration to the United States from the Third World (which is how the Tsarnaev's got in). Can you convince some of your own followers to stop glorifying terrorism? Let's start with Robert Redford....
More
here.
Labels: Alan Dershowitz, American Left, illegal immigration, Islamic terrorism
Caroline Glick on Martin Peretz
For anyone who wishes to understand how the American Left - from which Barack Hussein Obama emerged - became anti-Israel,
Caroline Glick's appreciation of Martin Peretz is a must.
The reason I entitled this post "Martin Peretz, an appreciation,"
is not for what he wrote in 1967, but because of what has happened to
the Left, the Jewish Left and to Peretz in the 46 years that have passed
since he wrote that article.
In the late
1960s, Peretz wasn't alone in defending Israel against the radical Left -
white and black. In 1967, even Jewish Communists were willing to break
ranks to support Israel. And as the 1968 New York Teachers Strike
showed, at the time, liberal Jews in general were willing to defend
themselves from attacks by black anti-Semites.
But
in the intervening years, fewer and fewer voices on the Left, and
specifically on the Jewish Left were willing to take such positions and
pit themselves against their movement. And so as the decades passed,
what were the positions of the radical Left in the 1960s became
increasingly the positions of the mainstream Left, until by last summer,
they became the positions of the majority of delegates at the
Democratic National Convention.
When I was growing up in Chicago, the local Jewish establishment's
refusal to support Israel in the 1982 Lebanon War is what made me decide
to make aliyah. By the time I arrived at Columbia in 1987, and the
Palestinian uprising broke out, it was hard to find Jewish leaders who
were willing to stand up for Israel without stuttering.
Today
the situation has become simply untenable. Suffice it to say that Bill
Ayres's political protégé Barack Obama's success in garnering 70 percent
of the Jewish vote is not an aberration.
Yet
through it all, Martin Peretz has rarely wavered. Despite his attempts
to support the Palestinians, he has not allowed his desire to see the
Arab conflict with Israel resolved diminish his support for Israel. He
has remained a staunch, loyal defender of Israel. When I was growing up,
I relied on his New Republic for its reporting on Israel and the Middle
East. Peretz was one of my intellectual heroes.
In
recent years, I've felt more bemused by than respectful of Peretz. A
colleague of mine quipped some years back that Peretz and Allan
Dershowitz live in an intellectual universe populated only by Peretz and
Dershowitz and they refuse to acknowledge that they are alone. That
quip has probably anchored my thinking on both men ever since.
But even if my colleague's remark was more true than false, reading
the FBI report, I decided I should discard its snide diminution of
Peretz. The fact is, he has been fighting this fight for nearly fifty
years. As a man of the Left, he has fought the fight for Israel and
Jewish rights, increasingly alone for nearly fifty years, and has done
so despite what must have been enormous personal costs as his comrades
all jumped ship, and in many cases, joined the cause of Israel's
enemies.
Read the whole thing.
As someone who grew up half a generation ahead of Caroline (I arrived at Bir Zeit on the Hudson in 1974, decided to make aliya while in yeshiva in 1980, and actually spent the summer of 1982 in Chicago watching Ted Koppel and Bibi Netanyahu every night), what bothers me is why so many American Jews were so swept up by the civil rights movement that they failed to notice or care when it turned against their Jewishness. One could place the blame for that on a lack of Jewish education.
Quite simply, 40-50 years ago. there were much fewer Jewish schools and a much smaller percentage of Jews were educated to care about our people. That wasn't done intentionally. It was just assumed by our parents' generation that we would stick together, even if we didn't have strong Jewish upbringings. We were in the goldener medina and therefore there was no need for that 'old' Jewish education to keep us in the fold (many Zionists made a similar mistake in Israel in the 50's and 60's), and we didn't want to do anything that would harm our college or job prospects. There was also a feeling that Jewish schools weren't 'good enough' academically, partly because of the quota systems that were in effect at the elite universities in the 50's and 60's.
As to how this influenced President Obama (a story to which Caroline only alludes), I discussed that at very great length
here.
Labels: American Left, Barack Hussein Obama, Leftist Jews, Martin Peretz
The Israeli and American Left
Caroline Glick finds that the Israeli and American Left
have an awful lot in common.
In Israel, leftist appeasement of Palestinian terrorists has led to
a horrific death toll and the obvious absence of peace. So the Left
must silence those who have the temerity to oppose that failed policy.
The Right's most visible members are the religious Zionists, who are
disproportionately situated beyond the 1949 armistice lines, and so the
Left must destroy them through expulsions, no matter what the cost to
Israel.
In America, the Left's most conspicuous
failure is its claim to promote women's rights, equality and civil
liberties in the culture war, even as it defends the Islamic world's
addiction to female genital mutilation, forced marriages, honor killings
and executions of homosexuals for the "crime" of being gay. So the Left
must silence critics of jihad and Islamism, and hope no one will notice
its hypocrisy.
The upshot of all of this is
that the Left must be denied its ability to dominate national
discourses. Because Abbas and the pathologically Jew-hating society he
leads is a threat to the Jewish state, while religious Zionists are not.
And the assaults on American embassies throughout the Islamic world are
not due to Internet movies, but to the savagery inherent in jihadist
Islam.
In these perilous times we cannot permit ourselves to be led astray by those who insist we are our worst enemies.
Read the whole thing. For those who don't recall the picture above (it's not in Caroline's post), it's Machsom Watch's Raya Yaron - a card-carrying member of Israel's Left - comforting Shama Awad, the mother of one of the murderers of the Fogel family of Itamar a year and a half ago.
Labels: American Left, Israeli Left
