Labels: Catholic Church, Giulio Meotti, Vatican
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:21 PM
3 comments
Here's some of it. Daniel, isn't ethnic cleansing of Jews from Judea and Samaria, using political, diplomatic and economic pressure - such as denying them government land, forbidding building, abolishing town planning - illegal, constituting a breach of the settlers' human rights, as well as a betrayal of Judaism?Read the whole thing.
Unfortunately, even important Jewish intellectuals like you are sending out the message that the blood of those living on the wrong side of an imaginary line on a map is not as red as that coursing in the veins of their fellow countrymen in Tel Aviv.
Daniel, where the Israeli media will stop to use the dehumanizing, dejudaizing language to distinguish between Jewish and Arab residents of Judea/Samaria? The "settlers" are not even qualified by the adjective "Jewish", while the Palestinians are "local residents". A "settler", of course, is meant to suggest an alien interloper who will be sent back where he came from; a "local resident" is supposedly an indigenous citizen.
Daniel, why do you repeat the canard that without Israeli concessions, the "Palestinian problem" will never be resolved and the Arab-Israel conflict will continue ad infinitum? It's like Hitler Big Lie. For the Islamic world everything Jewish is “illegal”. Everything is “stolen land”.
Peace can only be true if the Jews are no longer characterized as foreign occupiers, but as native sons who have returned home.
Destroy the outposts and you will see the domino effect: all Israel will be in lethal danger. "The colonist" is a very tiny figure in the Middle Eastern conflict, but for many reasons the civilization's future lies on his shoulders.
Labels: Daniel Gordis, Giulio Meotti, Levy Report
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:23 AM
0 comments
60 Minutes has thus far offered no official comment to complaints about its Christians in the Holy Land segment, which aired ten days ago.Labels: Christians in Israel, Giulio Meotti, Soccer Dad
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:39 PM
0 comments
On Monday, I reported on 60 Minutes' report on 'Palestinian' Christians. Giulio Meotti exposes just how big a lie the 60 Minutes report was. Since the first Intifada, Palestinian Christians created a Muslim-Christian unity to portray Israel as the aggressor, colonizer and invader. They thought that the Islamic-Christian front against Zionism would help secure their position in the Arab world. Indeed, Arab Christians, and especially their judeophobic clergy, have been in the vanguard of the battle for the destruction of Israel. It was a political operation that also served to cover the crimes committed against Christians by the PLO and the Islamic groups: forced marriage, conversions, beatings, land theft, fire bombings, commercial boycott, torture, kidnapping, sexual harassment, and extortion.Read the whole thing.
The latest victim has been the Baptist Church in Bethlehem, which the Palestinian Authority just declared as illegitimate, as the US church’s message of reconciliation flies in the face of the hateful propaganda permeating Palestinian society. Arab Christians were obliged to make continual compromises, afraid to mention their own suffering for fear of irritating the Muslim authorities. Soon it became a taboo subject even in the West.
When last month Ayaan Hirsi Ali penned the Newsweek cover story on the persecution of Christians under Islam, she did not mention the Palestinian areas, where Christians dropped from 15% of the population in 1950 to just 2% today. With the PA refusing to reveal accurate statistics, the real extent of Christian emigration is unknown.
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A few days ago, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, urged William Hague, the UK Foreign Secretary, to address the “tragic situation” faced by Palestinians - not because Islamist threats, but because Arabs were “displaced” by the Israeli barrier in Beit Jala, despite the fact that in constructing the security barrier no land has been annexed by Israel, no houses have been demolished, and no-one has been required to leave their home.
In fact, the bigger truth ignored by the Western press and the Churches is that Israel’s barrier helped restore calm and security not just in Israel, but also in Bethlehem. The Church of the Nativity, which Palestinian terrorists defiled in 2002 to escape from the Israeli army, is now filled again with tourists from around the world.
The Catholic and Orthodox Churches also frequently asked Israeli authorities to change the route of the fence. They simply didn’t want to live under the Palestinian autocracy. Thus, for example, the Rosary Sisters School in the Dachyat El Barid neighborhood north of Jerusalem was included on the Israeli side of the fence, in light of requests from the Mother Superior of the order.
Labels: Giulio Meotti, Palestinian Christians, security fence
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:35 AM
1 comments
Despite Jewish heroism and Israeli collectivism giving way to Western individualism, self-criticism and frivolous hedonism, Israeli happiness is much more than the American dream of a large house and a nice car. It lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning, “a nation like all other nations” but also “a light unto the nations.”Read it all.
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Israelis, which have one of the longest life expectancies of any nation in the world, are happy because their country has a history of scintillating enlightenment, with the highest production of scientific publications per capita in the world, more museums per capita and the highest worldwide publication of new books. In a war-ravaged country like Israel, the past few years saw five Israeli Nobel Prize winners.
Another reason is economic success. No other industrialized country does it better, especially for a nation that doesn’t have natural resources and has a population roughly half of Belgium’s. Israel’s high-tech industry is flourishing, making the country known as “start-up nation.”
While Israel’s social fabric is deeply divided between ultra-Orthodox Jews and “Hellenistic” Israelis, nationalists and leftists, two-thirds of Israelis believe in God, therefore maintaining the hope and feeling that there is higher meaning and purpose to their lives. There is also the attachment to the Jewish land, while love for one’s land is a nationalistic taboo in the West.
Overall, Israel’s population is very resilient. A new governmental study just found that Intifada-era violence did nothing to affect Israel’s national morale. Israelis are also happy because they know that Dimona and the IDF are there to protect them, even if the army lost some of its famous deterrence.
Finally, there is the most important reason why Israeli happiness is an enchanting and heartening mystery for all free men. When comparing the fertility rate to the suicide rate, one can see the proportion of people who choose to create new life against the proportion who choose to destroy their own. This is why the Jews will ultimately win a centennial war against an enemy ready to sacrifice all of its children in order to throw all Israelis into the sea.
Labels: Giulio Meotti, Israel
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:17 PM
2 comments
Should Israel accept support from Christians? Here's a fascinating perspective on an age-old dilemma from Giulio Meotti, who is himself an Italian Christian.Certainly, some US Evangelicals would like to convert Jews, and Israel must fight them. However, the vast majority simply wants to bless Israel because that is what they believe is the right thing to do. The origins of Christian support can be traced back to the Gutenberg press (1456), which popularized ideas of “The Promised Land” and “The Chosen People.”Read the whole thing.
The hostility toward Israel encouraged by liberal Christians, such as the World Council of Churches and the Vatican, poses a much greater near-term threat to Jews than anything the evangelicals espouse. Last week, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales offered the Palestinians a powerful tool of propaganda: The comparison with Jesus’ passion.
“We are to be freshly attentive to the needs of those who, like Jesus himself, are displaced and in discomfort, a shadow falls particularly heavily on the town of Bethlehem tonight,” Archbishop Vincent Nichols said during his Christmas Mass sermon at Westminster Cathedral. This propaganda is much more dangerous for Israel than the pro-Israel fever of the US Evangelicals.
Israel’s leaders urgently need to set up a moral platform rejecting the “Judeo-Christian” blend, which theologically fuses Jews and Christians together without protecting the Jewish faith and maintaining Israel as an independent single-faith Jewish community. But the Bible teaches also that if there is the “gentile” who is jealous and aggressive (Amalek), there is also a “Righteous gentile” who is admiring and willing to help (Jethro.)
Israel will continue to struggle against Amalek-like governments and groups that utilize terror against innocent citizens, but it will be blessed by establishing Jethro-like partnerships with those who recognize the unique role and place of the Jews and Israel in this world.
Labels: Christians, Giulio Meotti
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:13 PM
1 comments
Giulio Meotti reviews a new book by Ibn Warraq, who is known as the Bertrand Russell of Islam. His new book, “Why the West is Best”, which has just been published by Encounter, is the most generous homage to the Western values ever written by a Muslim-born intellectual.He has lots more to say, and you should definitely read the whole thing, but I want to end with his withering critique of the Arab spring.
“Millions of people risk their lives trying to get to the West—not to Saudi Arabia or Iran or Pakistan, they flee from theocratic or other totalitarian regimes to find tolerance and freedom in the West, where life is an open book”, explains to us the English-educated Ibn Warraq. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: this triptych succinctly defines the attractiveness and superiority of Western civilization”.
Under Islam, life is a closed book. “Everything has been decided for you: the dictates of sharia and the whims of Allah set strict limits on the possible agenda of your life. A culture that engendered the spiritual creations of Mozart and Beethoven, of Raphael and Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt does not need lessons in spirituality from societies whose vision of heaven resembles a cosmic brothel stocked with virgins for men’s pleasure.
"The West does not need lectures on the superior virtue of societies where women are kept in subjection, endure genital mutilation, are married off against their will at the age of nine, have acid thrown in their faces or are stoned to death for alleged adultery, or where human rights are denied to those regarded as belonging to lower castes”.
According to Ibn Warraq, an important difference between the West and Islam lies in the use of irony. “Satire has a central place in the Western tradition of cultural self-criticism that goes back to classical antiquity. The Islamic fundamentalist with his murderous certainties cannot bear the ironic outlook. He hates to be criticized and laughed at; he will kill if he thinks you have insulted his religion, or his prophet or holy book. The Ayatollah Khomeini once famously said there are no jokes in Islam. Any civilization that cannot laugh at itself is in a state of decline, and it is dangerous”.
The same for alcohol. “The civilized pleasure of alcohol is connected with the social customs and rituals that define our society. Every liberal knows you can be lashed for drinking in Pakistan”.
“I am not at all optimistic about the future of democracy in the Middle East, the Arab Spring should be renamed ‘The Muslim Brotherhood Spring’. There is no such thing as ‘moderate Islamism’. The Islamist parties have been cleverly feeding the gullible Western journalists from Nicholas Kristoff to Thomas Friedman, and even more gullible Western governments soothing words all the while concealing their true aims, the establishment of a Sharia based constitution and a theocratic state”.Indeed.
Labels: Arab spring, Giulio Meotti, Ibn-Warraq, myth of moderate Islam
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:23 PM
1 comments
Here's a must read Melanie Phillips piece on why the European Union has failed:It was a noble vision; but it was fundamentally flawed, I would suggest, for three main reasons. First, the erosion of national self-government inescapably involved in the EU project does not enshrine democracy but results instead in rather less of it. Second, as the euro implosion has so graphically demonstrated, trying to fashion one supranational entity out of disparate nations is intrinsically incoherent and ultimately self-destructive. And third, the EU has done nothing to diminish the Judeophobia which led to the Holocaust in Europe. Indeed, the obsessional malice towards Israel has provided cover for a resurgence of the oldest hatred within the graveyard of European Jewry. As Giulio Meotti reports, Jews are being expelled from academia across Europe.Read it all.
Labels: European Union, Giulio Meotti, Melanie Phillips
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:56 PM
0 comments
In a beautiful article, non-Jew Giulio Meotti defends Israel's ultra-Orthodox Jews against the frequently leveled charge of 'parasitism.' There is a liberal witch hunt against the most pious segment of the Israeli society. It’s an eruption of anti- Orthodox vituperation. The "ultra-Orthodox" are accused of being extremist, radical, fanatic, disgraceful, medieval, benighted, corrupt and cultic.Read the whole thing.
It’s true that ultra-Orthodox Jews live with strong contradictions. On the one hand, they benefit from the successes and security provided by Israel. At the same time, they are aware they contribute less than others to the material well-being and safety of the state.
But the standard caricature which pictures ultra-Orthodox as “parasites” became an instance of blood libel.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews, like the Holtzbergs, are disdained for their “passivity” and because “they are having too many kids”; their “trust in God”, not their own might, to right every wrong; and their reliance on their rabbinic leaders for guidance on life decisions.
No understanding of ultra-Orthodox Jews is possible without an appreciation of the place of Torah learning in the pantheon of Jewish values. Holtzberg’s ideal of Torah produced a holy dedication unparalleled by any other community in the world.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews are hated because they are fighting against assimilation in the United States. They are among those who kept Jewish tradition alive in a time of destruction (virtually the entire world of Torah scholarship was wiped out in the Holocaust).
Western media depicts ultra-Orthodox world as dark, narrow and archaic, while it’s a fascinating and vital piece of the Israeli mosaic. The Holzbergs were sparky, feisty individuals driven by a common cause they perceived as greater than themselves. They didn’t imagine themselves to be more worthy of divine protection than all the generations of Jewish martyrs who preceded them.
Nor are Holtzberg’s survivors are kidding themselves that their relatives were far more righteous than others.
Labels: Giulio Meotti, Haredim
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:54 PM
0 comments
Giulio Meotti asks a good question: Why is Israeli nuclear 'whistleblower' Mordechai Vanunu a hero in the West, while American spy for Israel Jonathan Pollard is demonized? Unlike Vanunu, a traitor who endangered the security of Israel at a time when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Iran’s ayatollahs, Libya’s Gaddafi and Syria’s Assad were making every effort to develop weapons of mass destruction, Pollard is recognized as the source of Israel’s preparedness for the Iraqi missile attacks during the Gulf War.Read the whole thing.
Pollard, then employed by US Naval Intelligence, realized that satellite maps of poison gas and other unconventional weapon sites being built by Israel’s Arab enemies were clearly aimed at the destruction of the Jewish state. This was six years before the Gulf War, when Syria, Libya, Iran and Iraq have all built huge “aspirin factories,” as Muammar Gaddafi called them.
The dictators stockpiled huge quantities of chemical weapons, including the Nazi-invented sarin. If Pollard became convinced that the Jews of Israel were facing a possible second Holocaust, Vanunu worked to make it possible. But if Pollard today is demonized as an Israeli right-wing “fanatic” (Robert Friedman of The Washington Post) or “an aberration” (Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg), Vanunu is celebrated as a romantic Israeli icon.
The different treatment tells us much not only about treason celebrated, but also about Western newspapers’ anti-Semitism and Israel’s fate in a time of new chemical, nuclear and biological threats. Some 29 years after Saddam’s 39 missiles landed in Israel, forcing Israelis to put on their gas masks, Iran’s Ahmadinejad promises to wipe out the "dead rats," as he called the Israelis.
Twenty years after Saddam threatened to "burn half of Israel," Pollard began his 27th year in solitary confinement, Vanunu is a symbol of good and the Jewish state remains the only "bunkered" democracy in the world, now even more relentlessly ghettoized.
Labels: Giulio Meotti, Jonathan Pollard, Mordechai Vanunu
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:02 PM
1 comments
Giulio Meotti summarizes the extreme bias that the medical NGO's display toward Israel. A case in point is how the Red Cross allocates personnel and budgets worldwide. For North Africa, the Red Cross has one office in Tunis. For “Israel/Occupied Territories/Autonomous Territories,” the Red Cross has offices in Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus, Kalkilya, Ramallah, Jericho, Bethlehem, Hebron, Gaza, Khan Yunis, Majdel Shams, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv.Read the whole thing.
Western newspapers, imbued with the ideological reports of medical NGOs, establish a comparison between the Palestinians and South Africa's blacks, who were critically injured and left to bleed to death if there was no “black” ambulance to rush them to a “black” hospital. Jewish altruism never finds its legitimate space in the global media because it doesn’t fit in with the stereotype propagated by the medical NGOs.
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It would be enough to stroll through the corridors of Israeli hospitals to understand how false the “apartheid” charge by medical NGOs is. Large Arab families stand with Israelis in the corridors of the maternity wards where one is born and in the oncology clinics where one dies. Through the private program “Save the heart of a child,” the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon cures congenital cardiologic defects in Arab children from all over the world. About half the children it treats are from the nearby Palestinian areas and there have also been some from Iraq and Iran, both technically at war with Israel.
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Medical organizations never blamed the Palestinians for attacks on Israeli hospitals. Hadassah University Medical Center on Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus recently released a report, noting that it suffered 43 attacks by east Jerusalem Arabs in 2011. During the last “Nakba Day” events alone, 11 firebombs were thrown into the Mount Scopus campus.
The medical groups also didn’t report that 10 Gaza hospitals were used by Hamas during Operation Cast Lead to shelter weapons and terrorists.
Today Magen David Adom vehicles do not enter the Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem without police authorization and military escort. It’s not because of the “apartheid,” but rather, because terrorists tried to hit the doctors. During the Intifada, MDA had to replace the windows of its ambulances in the Jerusalem region with glass that does not shatter if hit by rocks.
Labels: Giulio Meotti, International Committee of the Red Cross
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:52 AM
0 comments
Michael Rosen reviews Giulio Meotti's new book : A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel's Victims of Terrorism. The cultural editor of Italy's Il Foglio and a Wall Street Journal contributor, Meotti spent four years in Israel meeting with the families of the fallen, absorbing their stories, and marinating in their sorrow. The book lovingly and unsparingly describes the victims and survivors of Palestinian terror attacks, making flesh the abstract newspaper headlines that antiseptically summarize (and minimize) the brutal carnage. As Meotti explains, recounting these tales is nothing less than "an act of solidarity against the abandonment and dereliction of these thousands of victims, young and old, children and infants, women and men."Read the whole thing.
Both the Nazis during World War II and the Islamists today aim to eradicate not only the Jewish people, but also the Jewish name, and hope to stamp out any sense of Jewish personhood. As the author puts it, "the silence of Chelmno and the silence after a suicide bombing, the Zyklon B of the Nazis and the suicide belts of Hamas have this in common: the total destruction of the victim." And so Meotti set about "giving a voice to Israeli families destroyed by terrorism, letting them speak as the memories are beginning to fade" as "a form of incarnation like those stark walls of names at [Yad Vashem, Israel's] Holocaust memorial," which itself means "hand and name."
A sincere non-Jewish admirer of the Jewish state, Meotti enshrines the memory of the fallen in probably the most effective way possible: by gently turning over his pen to the families themselves. Seemingly half of the book consists of direct quotations by grieving parents, siblings, and children gleaned from interviews, eulogies, and other memorial speeches. These stories are organized haphazardly, and they're often graphic and difficult to stomach—both tendencies appear to be intentional.
Now, eight years later, insulated by the remarkably successful West Bank security fence, we easily forget the extreme anguish and mortal fear in which Israelis wallowed during the Second Intifada. In the 15 years since Oslo, 1,723 Israelis—equivalent in percentage terms to 74,000 Americans, or roughly 25 9/11's—have perished in some 150 suicide attacks, while another 10,000 have suffered injuries.
Labels: Giulio Meotti, v'Hi She'amda, Yaakov Shwekey, Yonatan Razel
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:10 PM
2 comments
It's not easy to be a critic of Islam living in Europe these days. You have to move around more than Ismail Haniyeh to make sure that the Islamists don't get you. Giulio Meotti talks to some of the prominent Europeans who are on the run for criticizing Islam. Charlie Hebdo is the latest in a series of "blasphemous pencils" – European cartoonists, writers and journalists threatened with death for their criticism about Islam. They are people who need a level of personal protection unconceivable even in Israel, a country well-known for its attention to security. And it happens all over Europe.Read the whole thing.
Kurt Westergaard is the most famous of them. I spoke with him immediately after the attack in Paris. Westergaard is the Danish artist who created the controversial cartoon of the Prophet wearing a bomb in his turban: "Few days ago the police discovered another terrorist plan to attack my newspaper, the Jyllands Posten," Westergaard said. "My house is protected as a bunker with cameras. I am always guarded by the policemen. Few months ago I had to attend a book presentation in Oslo. But the day before the Norwegian police asked me to cancel the event due to the terrorist threats."
Five years after the publication of the cartoons, Westergaard still needs the same level of security of a Danish prime minister. "I am not a brave man, but I am 76-years-old and have less fear of dying", the cartoonist said. "The terrorists won’t silence me in the battle for the freedom of expression."
Visiting the Jyllands Posten’s office is like entering a US embassy in an Arab country. The newspaper had erected a 2.5-metre high, one-kilometer long barbed-wire fence, complete with electronic surveillance, around its headquarters in Visby. Mail is scanned and newspaper staff members need ID cards to enter the buildings and the various floors.
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The office of Geert Wilders, the Dutch MP famous for his critics of Islam, lies in the most isolated corner of Parliament. It was chosen because potential terrorists can get through only one corridor, making it easier to protect him. Even the pencils of visitors are searched by the police. Wilders’ entourage is anonymous. He even slept for a while in a military barrack for security reasons. When the alert level is high, Wilders doesn’t know where he will spend the night.
"I could go to a restaurant, but the police should empty it before my arrival," Wilders once told me.
At the University of Leiden, Rembrandt’s famous city, the office of Professor Afshin Ellian is protected by bulletproof walls and policemen. "In Holland Rousseau, Locke, Sade and Spinoza were able to publish their books," Ellian said during our meeting in Leiden. "Holland was the hope of Europe. But it’s no more. Now there is an atmosphere of fear if you criticize Islam."
Labels: Eurabia, Geert Wilders, Giulio Meotti, Islamist, Kurt Westergaard
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:59 AM
1 comments
Shavua tov u'Moadim l'simcha - a good week and a happy holiday to all of you.The Israeli government is saying to these families: “We are sorry, the social pressure was too high, the Arab spring gave us a chance for a deal, this is a political game”.To answer the question, perhaps it's because we as a nation do not honor the dead.
Next week, when most of the Israelis will share Shalits’ joy and concern about the mental health of their son, let’s hope that many others will remember the aftermath of the suicide attacks: the victims arranged near the carcass of the bus, the bodies placed in black bags, the Polaroid photos, the remains of a stroller, the scattered gray matter on the windows nearby, the Nazi number tattooed on the burned arms, the acrid odor of burned flesh and hair, the teeth and the DNA by which the victims were identified, the little pieces of jewelry that were everything a mother found at the morgue, the school notebooks, the military berets, the tennis shoes, the kippot of every color and the officers’ insignia.
Next week someone should lay a flower near the thousands of plaques bearing the names of innocent Jews displayed along streets, schools, synagogues, cafes, restaurants, markets, parks and gardens.
Despite the war for survival, Israel’s economy is booming, democracy is solid, immigration is growing and demography is thriving.
But the State of Israel betrayed its victims. It's a process that began when Yitzhak Rabin called Ofra Felix, a wonderful Israeli girl killed by the terrorists in 1995, "a victim of the peace process".
The Talmud says that in Israel, the dead protect the living. Today it's less true.
The question everybody has to answer is: why?
Labels: Giulio Meotti, terror victims, terrorists for Gilad trade
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:14 PM
2 comments
Some of you may recall a post I wrote last week about Juliano Mer Khamis, the pacifist son of an Arab father and a Jewish mother who was murdered on the streets of Jenin by Arabs who didn't like his theater.Mer’s lineage comprises the entire history of Israel’s anti-Zionist Left. He was the son of an Arab Christian who was among the founders of the Communist Party, the Red Bolshevik utopia that rejected the Zionist plan, was loyal to Moscow and pushed for a bi-national state.I consider myself pretty jaded. There is very little about this region that surprises me. That five out of six statistic surprised me greatly. It probably tells you all you need to know.
The director’s Jewish mother was a pacifist icon, Arna Mer, who during the Intifada went to Jenin to create the “Theater of the Stones”, an experimental group for Palestinian children where Mer-Khamis also worked.
Arna Mer won the “Alternative Nobel Prize” given annually by the Swedish Parliament to humanitarian activists. She preferred to be called “Palestinian,” not Jew or Israeli. She was arrested several times during riots protesting Israeli policy in the Territories. She said that “Zionism is a racist ideology.”
Yet all of Mer-Khamis' pacifism, idealism and radicalism did not protect him from the genocidal ideology that Israel had to confront since its foundation. Just like Massoud Mahlouf Allon, an observant Jewish immigrant from Morocco, wasn't spared by the terrorists because he was giving blankets to poor Palestinians. And how can we forget all the Israeli kibbutzniks and pacifists decimated in buses and cafés during the Second Intifada?
The above attacks were all the more chilling because the victims were people willing to give up land for the sake of coexistence; they believed in a moral, just, democratic, egalitarian, better Israel.
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When Arna Mer-Khamis started her experimental theater, it comprised six Palestinian boys. Five of them have died as suicide bombers and “martyrs.” Now the black hole of hatred has also swallowed up the beautiful Israeli son of this dark utopia.
Mer-Khamis' body was transferred through a checkpoint to Israeli authorities. It was his sad return to reality. The ancient Greek Thucydides said that it is normal for children to bury their parents, but parents burying children contravene the laws of nature and anger the gods. That's the most important and saddest difference between Israel and the rest of the "civilized world." Hatred doesn't differentiate among Jewish targets.
Labels: Giulio Meotti, Juliano Mer Khamis
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:18 PM
1 comments
Kathryn Jean Lopez has a lengthy interview with Giulio Meotti. Meotti is an Italian reporter who, as you may recall, has written a book about the victims of the 'Palestinian' terror war against Israel. I've posted about it previously here and here. ‘The victims were sleeping as the killer came in. The paramedics described children’s toys right next to pools of blood. It’s the worst single attack in Israel’s recent history.”Read the full interview here.
That’s Giulio Meotti, describing the slaughter last week of five members of the Fogel family on the West Bank. They were killed “while they were sleeping in their home on the Sabbath evening,” as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in denouncing the act of terrorism.
In truth, as horrific as it was, the attack was far from foreign to the lives of Israelis. As is the widespread lack of outrage internationally.
As Meotti tells me, “Those who profess to deplore violence on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian equation have remained relatively silent on the slaughtering of this Israeli family. No words of condemnation about the killing of these innocents have been heard from the human-rights groups, the same faction that is so quick to vilify Israel for defending itself from terrorist attacks, especially when Palestinian citizens lose their lives during a retaliatory foray by Israel. There is no other conclusion to draw: When the deaths of Jewish innocents go unmourned and unacknowledged, it is because Jewish lives do not count. Where’s the outrage? Why is the world silent about the beheading of a Jewish infant? The silence has been telling.”
Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist, is the author of the haunting book A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism, dedicated to making sure that these victims are known and not forgotten.
Meotti does a thorough, moving job of introducing the reader to the victims of Islamic, anti-Jewish terrorism. Some of those we meet are Americans. All of them were human. And none of them deserved their fate. Reading Meotti, you come to miss every single one of them, although you probably never physically met them. Meotti talked to me this week about these people who have become victims of what he calls the New Shoah, and what their lives tell us about our own.
Labels: Fogel family massacre, Giulio Meotti, Itamar, Palestinian terrorism, terror victims
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:19 AM
1 comments
At first glance I thought his title might be over-the-top. Orders of magnitude more people were murdered in the Shoah—the Nazi Holocaust—than by terrorists in Israel, but that isn’t the point. What Israel’s victims of terrorism have in common with the victims of the Nazi genocide is that they were Jews who were murdered for being Jews.Read the whole thing.
Labels: Giulio Meotti, Holocaust, Oslo War
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:08 PM
1 comments
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
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