No Right of Response at the Forward
Last week, the Forward published a
scathing review of StandWithUs, one of the better Israel advocacy groups out there. StandWithUs sent a response to the article, and the Forward refused to publish it. So the letter has been sent to several bloggers (at least I assume it was several), including yours truly, with a request that we publish the letter. Here it is:
On November 27, the Jewish Daily Forward wrote an article about StandWithUs that contains many inaccuracies.
StandWithUs responded with a letter that the Forward has yet to publish. You are free to print the letter.
Here's the link to the Forward article: http://www.forward.com/articles/146821/
Here is the response that they would not print:
To The Forward,
StandWithUs appreciates your recent coverage of our dynamic growth, and of our multiple educational and advocacy efforts in cities around the world.
However, we were disturbed by the bizarre angle of your article, which tried to discredit us as “right wing,” and absurdly asked whether StandWithUs should register as an agent of a foreign government even though your own sources emphatically rejected this notion. You even tried to imply that there is something suspect about our funding sources though the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles and Birthright Israel can hardly be considered suspect.
Your readers deserve to know the facts.
StandWithUs does not and has never advocated specific policies for Israel. Our work and our respect for Israel’s democratically elected government is not contingent on which parties are in power. Instead, since our founding, our mission has been to counter the vicious anti-Israel, anti-Semitic propaganda campaign that was unleashed along with the Intifada in September, 2000. Our goal is to educate the public about Israel—and empower others to educate their communities—to counter the demonizing propaganda and to make it possible to have reasonable, informed conversations about Israel’s policies on campuses and in communities.
Your readers should be informed about the virulence of the anti-Israel propaganda campaign. Israel is the only modern state whose right to exist is still questioned. If you consider support for the existence of the Jewish State a right wing position, then indeed we are right wing. Yet you repeatedly confused anti-Israel propaganda with “reasonable criticism” of Israeli policies. But the boycott movement against Israel is not just critical of Israel’s occupation and settlements as you claimed. The movement opposes the very existence of the Jewish state. Read their literature and their websites which are biased screeds that ignore ongoing terrorism and falsify facts. We objected to the Israeli soldiers’ group speaking on campuses not because they are critical of the Israeli government but because they misrepresent the IDF to vilify it and contribute to the malicious misinformation about Israel on American campuses.
Similarly, your article misrepresented why we object to J Street. It is not because J Street “criticizes” Israel's government policies, but rather because it attempts to get the American government to strong arm Israel into adopting specific policies that Israeli voters clearly rejected in their democratic elections. It is an effort to bypass Israel’s democracy. Furthermore, J Street has often supported blatant demonization of Israel, as when it tried to facilitate bringing Richard Goldstone and the infamous UN Goldstone Report to Congressional members. Even Goldstone himself has admitted the inaccuracy and bias of that report.
Indeed, it seems you had to search hard to find some evidence that would justify your criticism of StandWithUs. Though you claimed that StandWithUs has many critics, the only one you cited by name is well-known for his extremist views. Your criticism of some specific facts in our educational materials is simply erroneous . Despite your claim, Israel’s founding in May, 1948, did not cause the Palestinian refugee problem. Indeed, no responsible historian, including Benny Morris, disputes the fact that had Palestinian leaders accepted the UN Partition plan instead of launching a war to destroy the newly declared state, there would have been no refugees and a Palestinian Arab state would exist today. The Danny Ayalon video simply laid out the historical facts about the West Bank. It is disputed territory, and both Palestinians and Israelis have legitimate claims to it. What policies Israel and the Palestinians choose in light of these facts is a political question that will hopefully be hammered out in negotiations. StandWithUs does not recommend any specific policies, but rather elucidates the facts and history so there can be reasonable discussions about different policy options.
It is a shame that The Forward, while seeming to congratulate our growth and achievements during the last ten years, nonetheless chose to malign our efforts.
These are difficult times for Israel. The Arab spring has created instability in the region and allowed the rise of Islamist forces that oppose Israel’s existence. Iran is racing to develop nuclear weapons and constantly reiterates that it wants to wipe Israel off the map. Hezbollah and Hamas continue amassing arms. The anti-Israel propaganda campaign, often called the “new anti-Semitism,” (for good reason) persistently tries to make inroads in liberal Western democracies. StandWithUs alerts and educates the public about these challenges, while the Forward minimizes them, doing a disservice to its readers.
Roz Rothstein, CEO
StandWithUs
So why won't the Forward publish this? Surely they are liberal and tolerant....
Labels: Forward, StandWithUs, tolerance
Shameless equating of Judaism with Liberalism
It's bad enough that they insist on supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement while ignoring its
rank anti-Semitism. 'Occupy Judaism' has
really gone overboard this time. Matthew Ackerman explains.
On Wednesday, the Forward published an op-ed by “Occupy Judaism’s” chief organizer in which without blushing he compares the clearing of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan of Occupy Wall Street protesters by the NYPD to the destruction of ancient Jerusalem by the Roman army.
You read that correctly.
One might think that however far Judaism’s occupiers might take their association of Judaism with radical politics, they would stop short at saying the shechina (the Divine Presence said to have rested in the lost Temple) was with them, or comparing themselves to Yohanan ben Zakkai who, by escaping Jerusalem when it was encircled by the Roman legions and establishing his yeshiva in Yavneh, ensured the perpetuation of Judaism even after Jerusalem’s destruction. That destruction, after all, meant the death of at least tens of thousands, the enslavement of countless others, the first forced exile of Jews from the Land of Israel in a half millennium, and represented the end of any semblance of Jewish political independence for 1,878 years. On that score, alas, you would be wrong. Shame does not seem to register in the operating paradigm of these Jews.
While not surprising, it is strange that this new low would be reached now, after “Occupy Judaism’s” leaders have done a better job than anyone of chronicling
the anti-Israelism endemic in the Occupy movement. Getting called a genocidaire for refusing to condemn the existence of a Jewish state just isn’t enough for some, I guess, to walk away from their supposed comrades.
Hey guys - God didn't hand down liberalism at Sinai, as difficult as that may be for you to accept. Liberalism isn't the Torah and it isn't mandated by the Torah.
As to the Forward, sadly, we can't expect any better from them. They may as well make Mikey Lerner the Editor-in-Chief.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Forward, liberalism, Occupy Judaism, Occupy Wall Street
Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler
Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Tuesday, November 8.
1) Cohen and history I
Roger Coehn writes in The last Jew in Zagare:
What emerged from the Holocaust — from the agony of every little Zagare — was the success of Zionism. Benny Morris, the Israeli historian, has written, “As the pogroms in Russia in the 1880’s had launched modern Zionism, so the largest pogrom of them all propelled the movement, almost instantly, into statehood.”
Through its vote of Nov. 29, 1947, calling for the establishment of two states in the Holy Land — one Jewish and one Palestinian Arab — the United Nations sought to expiate Nazi crimes by granting the Jews what Morris calls “an international warrant for a small piece of earth.”
The thing is, that piece of earth, birthplace of the Jewish people, was not empty. In fact, at the time of the U.N. vote, about 630,000 Jews faced about 1.3 million Palestinian Arabs in the Holy Land. Palestinians failed to see why they should pay for the Holocaust. Arab states, invoking Saladin’s triumph over the Crusaders, seeing in Israel a new expression of European colonialism, went to war against the U.N.’s will — and lost.
(Emphasis mine)
A few paragraphs later he writes:
Solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict begins with accepting that there is no just outcome, none. Enough Jews and Arabs have died trying to prove the rightness of their cause. Imperfect compromise is the only way out of the spiral.
Actually, I believe that there is a just outcome. But working with Cohen's premise for a moment ... even he acknowledges that in 1947 it was the Arabs who fought against "imperfect compromise." Israel has made numerous, often risky, compromises to achieve Cohen's "imperfect compromise." Those efforts have been met with disinterest or even hostility, as the Palestinians still see Israel as an "expression of European colonialism," unwilling to accept anything less than what they say justice dictates. That's why we are in "a spiral." But it isn't lack due to lack of effort on Israel's part, a point that Cohen neglects.
Cohen concludes with :
I went to see the grave of Mendelsonai — the last Jew in Zagare. So, I thought, Zagare is finally Judenrein. In a sense the Nazis have won.
Then, nearby, I saw a European Union flag and thought, no.
Mendelsonai, in his 89 years, lived through five Lithuanias — independent, Soviet, Nazi, Soviet and independent. The last was best, a small state, secure, in NATO, tied in economic union with its neighbors, at peace even with Russia.
Except in Zagare, the Nazis did win. Had the Nazis not murdered the vast majority of the town's Jews, Mendelsonai would not have been the last Jew there.
It’s amazing what putting the future above the past, jobs above some unattainable justice, can forge.
As I've noted before, Israel has been doing precisely that since 1993. Cohen's rational sounding analysis denies that.
2) Cohen and History II
Richard Cohen writes in Egypt struggles where Germany flourishes:
And yet what accounts for the Financial Times’ story? Culture, that’s what. Don’t ask me to define the term, but it is something within us individually and something collectively within a nation or people. It is about all that Japan and Germany were left with — no oil or gas, that’s for sure. It explains why Germany, dismembered in a vast and horrendous population exchange, and the eastern sector of it mismanaged for years afterward by knuckleheaded communists, is now Europe’s preeminent economic power. Germany may no longer be uber alles, but it’s definitely uber quite a bit.
The role of culture is often slighted. It makes us uncomfortable. It suggests racism and bigotry and cuts against the admirable liberal notion that we are all the same and can, with enough money, do better. So the zeitgeist around the Arab Spring is of great hope: Now that the nasties are gone, the Libyans and the Egyptians and, soon, the Syrians can be like us. Great importance is attached to cellphones and Twitter and other social media, and great attention is paid to the non-representative leader who is fluent in Googlespeak — as if putting an iPhone to the ear reverses polarity so that east becomes west. To utter the cautionary word “culture” is to utter an obscenity.
But the Egyptian revolution is turning out to be a counterrevolution instead — another military regime not all that different than the one that in 1952 sent King Farouk into a challenging exile of gastronomic and sexual excess. Democracy seems more and more unlikely. Something similar is probably in store for Libya, which, like Egypt, has never been a democracy and exhibited its handicrafts by apparently murdering a POW named Moammar Gaddafi. Should Bashar al-Assad depart either his nation or this life, Syria, too, is unlikely to be anything other than a military dictatorship. As for Iraq, the minute the last U.S. soldier is gone, scores will be settled.
I don't agree with all the particulars here, but overall this sounds convincing. The big omission is a lack of acknowledgment of the role that Islam plays in the Arab culture. Egypt's military seeing how Turkey progressed under the AKP's rule looks to prevent the same result in Egypt. It is the Islamists who are ascendent in Libya. With the departure of American troops from Iraq, Iraq will cozy up the Islamic theocracy of Iran. Cohen hits on an uncomfortable truth, but he doesn't follow his observation to its conclusion.
3) Centrifuge-al Force
Stephen Rademaker and Blaise Misztal write in The growing threat of Iran’s nuclear program:
More troubling still has been Iran’s foray into progressively highly levels of uranium enrichment. Last year Iran began converting uranium it had previously enriched to 3.5 percent to almost 20 percent, ostensibly to fuel a reactor that produces medical isotopes. That reactor annually uses just 7 kilograms of uranium enriched to 20 percent, and IAEA reports indicate that Iran has accumulated almost 50 kilograms of this. In other words, over the past year and a half Iran has produced enough of this material to run its medical reactor for seven years. Nevertheless, Iran declared in June that it intends to triple the rate at which it is producing this material and began transferring this work to a previously secret underground facility at Qom that is carved into the side of a mountain. In a series of reports, the Bipartisan Policy Center has been tracking the progress of Iran’s nuclear program. We calculate that, if it chooses, Iran could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear device in just 62 days using its existing stockpiles and current enrichment capability. And international inspectors examine Iranian facilities only about once every two months. This means that Tehran is approaching the ability to produce a bomb’s worth of highly enriched uranium before the international community realizes it has happened.
So glad there were no "slam dunks" in the 2007 NIE.
4) 1st Jewish President redux
A few months ago, New York Magazine published an absurd article claiming that President Obama was the first Jewish president. The gist of the article was that because President Obama was pressuring Israel to make concessions for its own good, Obama, rather than Israel's defenders, was truly pro-Israel.
Now the Forward has added President Obama to its list of the 50 most influential Jews. Given that President Obama to my mind has shown no special affinity for Judaism - though he has plenty of Jewish allies and advisers - it's safe to say that these aren't religiously motivated judgments, but political ones. Both New York and The Forward know that President Obama's stances towards Israel has alienated some percentage of the Jewish community and the more general pro-Israel community. These are efforts at fixing political damage. The Blaze, Glenn Beck's online publication, shows how cynical The Forward's effort is. (h/t Jeff Jacoby)
If reports about President Obama's open mic complaint about PM Netanyahu are true this PR operation will have to step up another notch. That operation has already started. Apparently the journalists who were there have agreed to keep quiet. Once again we see the degree to which our independent media is in the service of the |President. (h/t Jonah Goldberg)
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Forward, Iranian nuclear threat, Middle East Media Sampler, Soccer Dad, Zionism
Tuches licking Forward names Obama one of the top 50 Jews of 2011
The
tuches lickers at the Forward have named Barack
Hussein Obama one of the
top 50 'Jews' of 2011.
Support him, loathe him or feel wildly ambivalent — whatever you think of Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States has done more than any other non-Jew we can think of to shape the American Jewish story in 2011. Obama, 50, rode a near-tidal wave of Jewish support toward his historic win in 2008, and quickly appointed two Jews to sit in the offices closest to his in the White House.
But his frosty relations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu soured some in the Jewish establishment and emboldened Republicans eager to chip away at Jewish voters’ stubborn loyalty to liberal politics. Sensing an opening, most of the other GOP candidates for president seem to share Mitt Romney’s assessment that Obama has thrown Israel “under the bus.” But while such sentiment was making inroads among some American Jews, the president’s vocal opposition to a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood and his administration’s unprecedented military support for Israel prompted New York Magazine to call him “the best friend Israel has right now.”
Please.... Although admittedly Obama is probably no less Jewish than some of the Forward's other choices (I have not gone through the list).
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Forward
Forward: Okay to boycott the 'right' Israelis
The Forward has a lengthy report on the boycott divest and sanction (BDS) movement on American college campuses, and concludes that the concern over BDS that exists in the Jewish community is
exaggerated.
An extensive national survey by the Forward indicates that, despite a sharp increase in the past year, significant BDS activity on North American campuses is limited to a handful of instances since 2005, the year of the official launch of the BDS campaign. The Forward counted 17 instances at 14 campuses over the past six years of a boycott or divestment effort that was significant and well-organized enough to draw an active official response from a student government or campus administrative body.
In no instance has BDS action led to a university in the U.S. or Canada divesting from any company or permanently ceasing the sale of any product.
Both BDS activists and Jewish Israel advocates argue that the small number of significant campus BDS campaigns fails to capture the importance of the movement. But the Forward’s count calls into question the dire rhetoric and far-reaching claims employed by both the proponents and critics of BDS.
The Forward notes that its report was criticized by activists on both sides of the issue. In an
editorial, the Forward hints that the BDS proponents are making 'progress.'
And the truth is, what pro-Israel activists rightfully fear is what BDS supporters want: A shift in tone, a growing acceptability that Israel’s right to exist should be questioned, or even denied.
From where I sit, that's exactly what has changed on American college campuses in the past 30 years: The tone of the debate.
The Forward then goes on to say this:
That threat is real, and it must be addressed, but it also must be kept in perspective. Fighting BDS cannot be turned into a cottage industry for the fearful and anxious. And these efforts must recognize that all calls to boycott are not the same. A group can support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state and still believe that buying products made in the occupied territories helps perpetuate an untenable, immoral situation. Boycotts are peaceful, legitimate tools of economic leverage, and don’t automatically lead to delegitimization.
The black citizens in Montgomery, Ala., who refused to ride segregated buses didn’t believe that their city shouldn’t exist. They were simply using economic clout to challenge and try to change an unjust system.
The real affront is when BDS is targeted against all of Israel, or against its legitimate means of defense. Then it is no longer challenging an unjust system, it is challenging the very right of Jews to govern themselves in their internationally-recognized homeland. That movement must be countered at every turn.
There it is again: The inability of some Americans to see Israel in any terms other than those of the American civil rights movement. Where have we seen that before? Oh yes,
here.
In a comment on the Forward's page, Alex Joffe has it right.
1. The report minimizes the extent to which campus BDS is embedded in larger community, church, and corporate BDS efforts, as well as situated a larger campus atmosphere that indulges anti-Israel groups and their hateful rhetoric.
2. Ironically, if perhaps unwittingly, the report give ample space to BDS advocates to make their case regarding the delegimization of Israel as a strategic goal. But it fails to emphasize that the 'one state' solution is the ultimate goal of most BDS groups.
3. The report, and especially the egregious and patronizing editorial, also minimize the enormous efforts necessary to achieve the level of pushback against BDS that has been realized. National and local groups, and especially students on the ground, are routinely called upon to craft responses and create campaigns on short notice, with minimal resources, and in an atmosphere of flamboyant and self-righteous vilification concocted by BDSers. These efforts typically occur on Friday evenings and Jewish holidays when votes on BDS are coincidentally scheduled.
4. The editorial makes it clear that the Forward believes that boycotting the 'right' Israelis is acceptable. Unfortunately, most of the BDS movement regards all Israelis as legitimate targets for boycotts and worse. American Jews do not prove their devotion to a peaceful, negotiated solution by supporting those who vilify other Jews. By doing so, however, they do prove their primary devotion is to transnational progressivism rather than other Jews, or to peace.
5. The insulting slap at the antiques who harken back to the 'heady days' of military triumph' and their inability to communicate with the nuanced youth of today who grew up in the age of terrorism and intifada is bad enough, but is complicated by the laudatory reference to the equally bygone civil rights movement. That, too, was the product of another generation (the military triumph generation, in fact), who had a more realistic understanding that hard and soft power go together. Maybe referring to the civil rights movement is a mere reflex, or keyboard macro on the Forward editor's computer. It is not persuasive.
Indeed.
Labels: BDS, Forward
More on the Forward article on Richard Goldstone
Over at Contentions,
Omri Ceren talks a bit about the Goldstone Report Watch website I mentioned
here.
And here is a screenshot of “Understanding the Goldstone Report,” a project spearheaded by Richard Landes of Pallywood fame, where more than a dozen journalists and bloggers (myself included) picked apart the report paragraph by paragraph and often sentence by sentence. I’ve unscrolled the “Case Study” category on the menu bar to show where some of the distinct accusations — “the contents of the report” — were dealt with specifically.
There are also pages documenting the broad procedural flaws of the investigation, the caliber of individual witnesses, the importance of concealed evidence, the role of anti-Israel mediators, the dynamics of human-shield accusations, plus about 30 other issues. Yet another section, maintained by Daled Amos, served as a clearinghouse for criticisms posted on related blogs, like Elder of Ziyon, which alone had more than 25 Goldstone-related posts digging through the text of the report.
In size and scope, the site rivals the IDF’s comprehensive Goldstone rebuttal — another document that, by the by, directly rebutted “the contents of the report.” It has so much material and is so on-point, in fact, that it’s the top result on Google for “goldstone report.” It ranks higher than the .pdf of the actual Goldstone Report, which continues to be the focus of an international anti-Israel feeding frenzy. SEO tricks might give a site a slight advantage on Google, but nothing can push irrelevant content to the very top of a very crowded field.
As some of you know, I am also one of the bloggers who contributed to
Understanding the Goldstone Report.
So what motivated Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who wrote the Forward article?
This article from 2008 by Phyllis Chesler sheds some light on that question?
Pogrebin, a founding editor of the original Ms. and a friend and ally of Gloria Steinem, feels she has been "forced" to choose between her feminism and her Zionism, between the preservation of her own feminist legacy and her pro-Israel and pro-Jewish principles.
The AJCongress is a liberal Jewish organization that - finally feeling desperate enough about all the defamatory anti-Israel propaganda - was willing to pay Ms. to run a neo-feminist pro-Israel ad featuring three powerful Israeli women over the headline: "This is Israel." Ms. decided not to run it, at which point the AJCongress held a press conference that challenged Ms.'s decision.
(Full disclosure: I was one of the speakers and letter-writers whose words and ideas Pogrebin characterizes in her column as "hysterical rants." The others include Blu Greenberg, Susannah Heschel, Francine Klagsbrun and Cynthia Ozick.)
Subsequently, The Nation - a far-left, relentlessly anti-Zionist publication - accepted the ad.
In her new Moment column, "The Ad War: American Jewish Congress vs. Ms. Magazine," Pogrebin concludes that "Ms. was right to reject the ad not just because it was nationalistic but because it violated truth in advertising."
...
In his 2006 book The Wicked Son, playwright David Mamet analyzed not only the opportunism and cowardice but the religious hunger gone awry that may account for the ways in which many progressive secular Jewish men savagely critique - or at least spurn - too close an association with Israel or with religious Judaism. He likened this syndrome to that of the "wicked son" at the Passover seder who does not think that the story of Jewish slavery and redemption has anything to do with him.
Pogrebin does not fit that mold. She is far from being a self-hating Jew. Her leftward shift, both in general and in her column, is therefore even more troubling - it is certainly more heartbreaking to me. Pogrebin may not believe that her current ideological point of view has deadened her to certain "Jewish Sorrows." But based on her column, one can fairly conclude that Israel's life-and-death struggle has little resonance with her. She magnifies serious social inequalities in Israel (which exist everywhere, even more so in Muslim countries) and minimizes Israel's unique existential struggle for survival.
Pogrebin focuses mainly on the suffering of Israel's women at the hands of Israeli and Jewish patriarchy. The women are suffering. Pogrebin is not wrong about this. But I despair when her emphasis suggests that only such evils are worthy of her deepest concern. To her, there is no "larger" jihadic war that has targeted Israel, Jews and the West, there is only the war against women waged mainly by - men? Jewish and Israeli men? American, Republican, warmongering men?
Pogrebin speaks for many American Jewish feminists who wish to escape the burden of being associated with an increasingly defamed Israel - with an Israel that has, in their eyes, failed to hear the cries of its most vulnerable female citizens.
Such Jewish left-feminists are reluctant to criticize the far greater barbarisms of the Islamic world, including its system of gender and religious apartheid, lest they be viewed as "racists." But if Hamas, Hizbullah, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, and al Qaeda have their way, the secular feminists of Haifa and Tel Aviv will be blown to smithereens together with their haredi and right-wing opponents.
To Pogrebin I say: Let us agree to balance our feminist criticism of Israel with similar criticism of other countries - and to never forget that such criticism will invariably be used against Israel.
Hmmm.
Labels: Forward, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Understanding the Goldstone Report
Last week, the Forward published a scathing review of StandWithUs, one of the better Israel advocacy groups out there. StandWithUs sent a response to the article, and the Forward refused to publish it. So the letter has been sent to several bloggers (at least I assume it was several), including yours truly, with a request that we publish the letter. Here it is: 
