Israel Matzav

Friday, August 30, 2013

He had a dream, we got a nightmare

I think this sums up the United States fairly well (Hat Tip: Jack W via Suckers on Parade).

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, humor, Martin Luther King

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Martin Luther King was a Zionist

Here.

Labels: Martin Luther King, Zionist

Saturday, November 03, 2012

Is he Martin Luther King or is he Malcolm X?

Is Barack Hussein Obama really Martin Luther King or is he Malcolm X? Ruthe Blum argues that the problem is that Jews (and maybe non-Jews as well) don't really know the difference.

Though recent reports that Obama phoned Rev. Wright to ask for advice were firmly denied by the White House, an event that took place last Saturday in Georgia is on the record.

As part of a pro-Obama tour of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, two extremist icons of the African-American community spoke at the St. James Baptist Church in Forsyth Georgia. One was former mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young. The other was Rev. Dr. James Lowery.

Young was the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under Jimmy Carter. He ended up resigning when it was discovered that he was conducting covert meetings with the P.L.O. But while still holding the post, he made the following statement about the leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

“[The Ayatollah] Khomeini will be somewhat of a saint when we get over the panic. In two years, our relations with Iran will be on a pretty even keel.”

Lowery gave the benediction at Obama’s inauguration in Jan. 2009. Six months later, Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

At last weekend’s gathering, he made a comment that was eerily similar to something Michelle Obama announced as soon as she became First Lady. She had said that her husband’s election was the “first time she was proud to be an American.” Lowery said that his giving the benediction at the president’s inauguration was the first time he enjoyed hearing the national anthem.”

Even more impressive was his choice of language. "I don't know what kind of a n----- wouldn't vote with a black man running,” he jived.

The icing on the cake was his admission that in his youth, he used to say that “all white folks were going to hell.” After that, he “mellowed and just said most of them were.” Today, he acknowledged, he is back where he started.

These are Obama’s true colors, no matter how hard he and his “amen corner” in the media try to hide it.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King

Monday, March 07, 2011

Little town of lies

In this post, you will see a trailer for a movie called Little Town of Bethlehem. Here's part of what the film's web site gives as a summary.

Sami, Ahmad, Yonatan come from radically different backgrounds in a land of unending war. Yet, against all odds, including some within their Israeli and Palestinian communities, they are able to find common ground. They walk a path of nonviolence struggle in lockstep with Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. For them courage is found not in taking up arms, but setting them down once and for all and extending a hand in peace.

From the award-winning team that brought you End of the Spear (2006) and Miss HIV (2007) comes director Jim Hanon’s latest documentary, Little Town of Bethlehem. Unscripted and unrehearsed, discover the humanity lurking behind an ancient cycle of violence.

The idea that this is a 'documentary' is comical. A docudrama - playing fast and loose with the facts - is more like it.

Let's watch the trailer and then I'll explain to you why I react so harshly to this film.

Let's go to the videotape.

What's wrong here? Well, there are several things wrong. First, the comparison between the 'Palestinians' and Martin Luther King's non-violence is odious. King's campaign was genuinely peaceful. The 'Palestinians' consider throwing stones and Molotov cocktails 'non-violent,' and they consider suicide bombings to be justified. Moreover, King was not planning the overthrow of the United States government and its replacement with a black-dominated government. The 'Palestinians' are planning the destruction of the Jewish state and its replacement with yet another Arab Muslim state (or that state's incorporation into one or more of Syria, Jordan, Egypt or Lebanon).

Second, we are presented with different narratives as being 'equally valid.' They are not. Only one side sought to conduct a campaign of extinction - the 'Palestinian' (Arab) side. And the very idea of the existence of a separate 'Palestinian' (as opposed to Arab) ethnicity is, as I have pointed out many times, a fraud. Every action the Arabs have taken for the last 100 years or more has been designed to do one thing: To prevent the establishment and then to vitiate the existence of a Jewish state.

What are this film's messages? The friend who sent me the link says that film maker Sami Awad has four messages:

(1) Jewish settlements and Occupation are pushing Christians out of the Holy Land. I consider this the Christian equivalent of Mark Perry's blood libel that building in Ramat Shlomo is getting American boys and girls killed in Afghanistan. It's that serious.

(2) Palestinian resistance is Christian resistance, i.e. the Muslims are behaving non-violently and comporting themselves to Christianity (he actually goes so far as to say that he's proselytizing while standing with them at protests, as if that could be true without him getting killed)

(3) Muslim and British rule saw Christians, Jews, and Muslims living together in harmony.

His goal, as he explicitly articulates it, is that de facto one-state equality ("one-state" my description; "equality" his) should precede a negotiated settlement.

Let me answer those points.

First, the fact that Israel is the only country in the region where the Christian population has increased over the last 100 years and continues to increase puts the lie to the claim that Jewish 'settlements' and 'occupation' are pushing Christians out of the Holy Land. Look at what's happening to Christians in Egypt, in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Syria and in Iran, and compare that to the status of Christians in Israel. We're the only country in which Christian lives are not in constant danger because they are Christians.

As to my friend's second point, see the first paragraph after the video. The differences between the 'Palestinian' suicide bombers and Martin Luther King's philosophy of non-violence are obvious to anyone who has their eyes open.

Third, Muslims, Jews and Christians did not live together in peace under Muslim or British rule. See, for example, Hebron 1929, or the riots of 1936 and 1937. Under Muslim rule, Jews were treated as dhimmis and could not get too close to the Western Wall or enter Hebron's Machpeila Cave - the two holiest sites to Jews in Israel.

As to the possibility of everyone living together in one state, there are 22 Arab Muslim states in this region, but only one Jewish state. Why should we ever agree to allow the one Jewish state to become a non-Jewish hodgepodge?

Yisrael adds:

The "Hagana attacks" and a "sniper kills" but not a word, at least in this trailer, that the Arabs had been conducting a violent terror campaign against Jewish civilians since 1920, killing hundreds and ethnically-cleansing several residency locations. Nothing about the Mufti, the pre-eminent local Arab leader, collaborating with Hitler. Not a word that the violence of 1947-49 was initiated by the Arabs, first by rejecting any compromise as proffered by the UN's Partition Plan, second by engaging again in violence directed at civilians beginning on December 1, 1947 and last by the invasion of Israel by seven Arab states on May 15, 1948. Not a word about that 1950s' fedayeen and that the PLO's Fatah began in 1964.

Scenes of Israeli police breaking up Arab demonstrations are paralleled to and almost superimposed on police in the American South beating Blacks during the 1960s. The film claims there's a "Palestinian no-violent struggle for liberation". Really? Where? Every single Friday, at a half-dozen locations, Arabs gather to protest and - yes, throw rocks and there are Western media sympathizers who describe that as non-violent.

I hope my Christian readers and friends will not be taken in and will respond critically to this pack of lies.

Labels: Arab obsession with Israel, Arab terrorism, Christians in Israel, Christians in Muslim countries, Little Town of Bethlehem, Martin Luther King

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Ambassador Oren on Martin Luther King

Here are remarks from Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, about Dr. Martin Luther King, which were made on Monday, Martin Luther King day.

Recently, I had the great honor on behalf of the State of Israel of laying a wreath on the grave of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King in Atlanta, Georgia. On the occasion, I recalled the inspiration this great leader provided to me, growing up on the outskirts of riot-ravaged Newark in the 1960s. My father dedicated his life to building bridges between the Jewish and African-American communities of the city, and for him as well, Dr. King was a sterling example.

Dr. King offered his unequivocal support to the State of Israel. He held Israel’s story as a precedent for the freedom, equality, and national liberation for which African-Americans strived.

On this Martin Luther King Day, we in Israel—home to the Middle East’s only memorial to Dr. King—recall his unflagging courage and undaunted vision of a better world.

יהי זכרם ברוך

May his memory be blessed forever.

Is the black community in the US even aware of the fact that the only memorial to Dr. King in the Middle East is in Israel?

Labels: Martin Luther King, Michael Oren

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Helen Thomas' boss and the difference between a Zionist and a Jew

Nicholas Benton, Helen Thomas' new boss at the Falls Church (Virginia) News Press, has a classic anti-Semite's answer to charges that Thomas is an anti-Semite.

Benton's editorial last week welcoming Thomas to his paper appears to gloss over the journalist's past diatribes.

In the piece, Benton fiercely condemns Thomas' initial remarks at the White House in May -- when she said that Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go home" to Poland, Germany and the United States -- but rationalized that they "reflected her personal anger arising from the news that Israeli commandos had boarded a ship on a humanitarian mission to Gaza and had killed more than a dozen volunteers." (That raid, however, took place several days after Thomas' remarks; additionally, individuals on the ship had weapons, and some admitted they were seeking a confrontation with Israel.)

Benton added that "her personal views have not tainted her highly professional work for 50 years as White House correspondent" and said that her White House comments were not directed at Jews, but at Israel.

For Paul Freedman, a 59-year-old Falls Church resident, Benton's editorial "doesn't make all that much sense given what [Thomas] said."

Portraying Zionists as nefarious power brokers, Freedman said, is still anti-Semitic.

"I feel very uncomfortable living in a city" where one's offensive behavior is rewarded with gainful employment. "It's a very small town."

Thomas, however, is unapologetic.

To those with hurt feelings, she said, "Let them be hurt. How many days are Palestinians being hurt and deprived?"

As if there's a difference between hatred of Jews and hatred of Israel....

Martin Luther King, whose birthday is celebrated in the United States on Monday, wrote:

". . . You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely 'anti-Zionist.' And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God's green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews--this is God's own truth.

"Antisemitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: anti-Zionist is inherently antisemitic, and ever will be so.

"Why is this? You know that Zionism is nothing less than the dream and ideal of the Jewish people returning to live in their own land. The Jewish people, the Scriptures tell us, once enjoyed a flourishing Commonwealth in the Holy Land. From this they were expelled by the Roman tyrant, the same Romans who cruelly murdered Our Lord. Driven from their homeland, their nation in ashes, forced to wander the globe, the Jewish people time and again suffered the lash of whichever tyrant happened to rule over them.

"The Negro people, my friend, know what it is to suffer the torment of tyranny under rulers not of our choosing. Our brothers in Africa have begged, pleaded, requested--DEMANDED the recognition and realization of our inborn right to live in peace under our own sovereignty in our own country.

"How easy it should be, for anyone who holds dear this inalienable right of all mankind, to understand and support the right of the Jewish People to live in their ancient Land of Israel. All men of good will exult in the fulfilment of God's promise, that his People should return in joy to rebuild their plundered land.

This is Zionism, nothing more, nothing less.

"And what is anti-Zionist? It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord all other nations of the Globe. It is discrimination against Jews, my friend, because they are Jews. In short, it is antisemitism.

"The antisemite rejoices at any opportunity to vent his malice. The times have made it unpopular, in the West, to proclaim openly a hatred of the Jews. This being the case, the antisemite must constantly seek new forms and forums for his poison. How he must revel in the new masquerade! He does not hate the Jews, he is just 'anti-Zionist'!

"My friend, I do not accuse you of deliberate antisemitism. I know you feel, as I do, a deep love of truth and justice and a revulsion for racism, prejudice, and discrimination. But I know you have been misled--as others have been--into thinking you can be 'anti-Zionist' and yet remain true to these heartfelt principles that you and I share.

Let my words echo in the depths of your soul: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews--make no mistake about it."

Yes, I know that there have been questions raised about the authenticity of that letter, but the sentiments are definitely King's sentiments.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: Helen Thomas, Martin Luther King, Nicholas Benton