In case I don't get to post again before the holiday starts, a Chag Kasher v'Sameyach (Happy and Kosher Passover) to all of you. And since there's still a little time left, let this Passover - and if not this certainly the next one - be celebrated with the paschal lamb being sacrificed in the rebuilt Third Temple in the Holy City of Jerusalem. There's plenty of room for a tent for all of you to stay in my backyard :-)
At Legal Insurrection, Miriam Elman reports that the loony Jewish Left, lead by 'Jewish' Voice for 'Peace' (JVP) has published a Haggada this year. I have my doubts that anyone who reads this blog is going to want it in their house, but....
I was curious to see what they do for the end of the seder, when we all say "Next year in [rebuilt] Jerusalem. Here's the answer.
Question 4. “Next Year in Jerusalem!”
We now end our Seder meal once again with the proclamation “Next Year in Jerusalem!” And so
we ask: what will we do to ensure that Jerusalem lives up to its name as a city of peace? How will
we respond as the Jewish state increasingly implements policies that claim this holy city in the
name of one people only? Do we dare to dream of a city divided or a city truly united for all its
inhabitants?
...and if we do believe that Jerusalem must be, once and for all, a true City of Peace, what are we
willing to do to make it so?
CLOSING
As we close tonight, go around your table and say goodnight and one thing that you are taking
away with you from this evening’s seder.
TOGETHER:
Next Year in Jerusalem! Next Year in al-Quds! Next year in a City of Peace!
Kumbaya.... Totally delusional. Either the Jews will control Jerusalem or the Arabs will make it Judenrein (Jew-free).
But as Miriam reports, the loony Jewish Left has done much more than publish a Haggada.
This week JVP activists have also been partnering with other Jewish activists affiliated with the recently founded If Not Now movement to field a “public Passover action” on April 19-21.
The effort is spread on social media through this week’s trending
hashtags #LiberationSeder and #IfNotNow (see samples below). It’s a five
city (Boston, NYC, Chicago, Bay Area, and Washington, D.C.) series of “seders in the streets”
and in various buildings that house major Jewish organizations in order
to appropriate the holiday’s rituals and texts for an anti-Israel
narrative.
The explicit goal of these publicly staged seders is to replace the
essential Passover themes—the retelling of the exodus from Egypt and the
Jewish people’s redemption in the land of Israel—with messages
concentrated on the “fight for Palestinian liberation”.
Let's go to the videotape.
Even more, it’s a bizarre program of anti-Jewish propaganda that has a
precedent. As I describe below, in the 1920s some deluded Jews in the
Soviet Union also enlisted in a campaign to eliminate the true meaning
of Passover.
It gets worse and there's a lot of it. Read the whole thing, but please don't let it ruin your Passover.
The picture above was on the front page of this morning's Jerusalem Post print edition (Hat Tip: Leah P).
What does each of the five women in the picture have in common aside from the fact that they all belong to Women of the Wall?
The caption says that they are 'teaching' women to put on Tefillin. There's one small problem: Not a single one of them has the Tefillin on correctly.
While I can't really see where the arm Tefillin are, the head Tefillin are supposed to go "in the place where an infant's head beats" according to the Talmud. That means that they should be in the center of the head with the front line of the Tefillin ending at the hairline.
Now look at the picture again.
From Left to Right, women 1, 2 and 5 all have their Tefillin on their foreheads (which was how the Karaite sect wore them). Women 3 and 4 have them off to one side. Yes, of course, it's the Left side.
The Haaretz piece is another exercise in poisoning the well, but it does reveal
some bits of interesting information. The article claims that Obama’s
people, including Susan Rice, are refusing to meet with the Israeli
ambassador. But they’re rather enthusiastic about meeting with assorted
Israeli leftists.
...
Looking into the records of the entry permits reveals
that several heads of leftist Israeli not-for-profit groups also visited
the White House during 2014. At the end of October there was a visit by
the head of the Geneva Initiative group, Gadi Baltiansky, followed the
next day by a visit by the head of Friends of the Earth Gidon Bromberg.
They met separately with Maher Bitar, director of Israeli-Palestinian
affairs at the White House.
On December 2, left-wing activist Danny Zeidman, whose main interest
is problems related to Jerusalem, met with adviser Gordon. On December
9, attorney Michael Sfard from the Yesh Din human rights group, met NSC
Mideast adviser Lempert.
Those are understated descriptions.
Zeidman is with Ir Amim, a radical left-wing group fighting against the Jewish presence in Jerusalem. It gets its funding from the EU and George Soros.
An Ir Amim blog entry in the Huffington Post (April 27,
2010), appeals to the United States government to, “Threaten [Israel]
with severing diplomatic ties.”
And apparently Ir Amim is much closer to the White House than anyone thought.
According to Emily Schaeffer, a lawyer on Yesh Din’s
legal team, “Yesh Din was founded to use law as a tool to fight the
Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.”
Victor Davis Hansen would tell you that coordinating strategy with groups like Ir Amim and Yesh Din - which are very far from any type of Israeli consensus - is something that Obama does purposefully and as a matter of course.
But, in fact, there is a predictable pattern to Obama’s foreign
policy. The president has an adolescent, romantic view of professed
revolutionary societies and anti-Western poseurs — and of his own
ability uniquely to reach out and win them over. In the most superficial
sense, Obama demonstrates his empathy for supposedly revolutionary
figures of the non-Western world through gratuitous, often silly remarks
about Christianity and Western colonial excesses, past and present. He
apologizes with talk of our “own dark periods” and warns of past U.S.
“dictating”; he contextualizes; he ankle-bites the very culture he grew
up and thrived in, as if he can unapologetically and without guilt enjoy
the West’s largesse only by deriding its history and values.
In lieu of reading or speaking a foreign language, or knowing much about
geography (Austrians speak Austrian, the death camps were Polish, the
Indian Ocean Maldives are the politically correct name of the Falklands,
cities along the U.S. Atlantic Coast are Gulf ports, etc.), Obama
adopts, in the manner of a with-it English professor, hokey accentuation
to suggest an in-the-know fides anytime he refers to the Taliban,
Pakistan, or Teheran. Reminiscent of college naïfs with dorm-room
posters of Che Guevara, Obama mythologizes about the underappreciated
multicultural “Other” that did everything from fuel the Western
Renaissance and Enlightenment to critique Christian excesses during the
Inquisition. In truth, what he delivers is only a smoother and more
refined version of Al Sharpton’s incoherent historical riff on
“astrology” and “Greek homos.” Obama refuses to concede that Islam can
become a catalyst for radical killers and terrorists, and he has a
starry-eyed crush on those who strike anti-Western poses and have turned
their societies upside down on behalf of the proverbial people.
...
For Obama, in the struggle between the Palestinian Authority and
Israel, Israel is a Westernized colonial construct and a proponent of
Western neo-liberal capitalism. The PA and Hamas, in contrast, are seen
both as the downtrodden in need of community-organizing help and as
authentic peoples whose miseries are not self-induced and the wages of
tribalism, statism, autocracy, fundamentalism, misogyny, and
anti-Semitism, but rather the results of Israeli occupation,
colonialism, and imperialism. Obama may not articulate this publicly,
but these are the assumptions that explain his periodic blasts against
Netanyahu and his silence about the autocratic Palestinian Authority and
the murderous Hamas.
In such a landscape, the current Iranian talks make perfect sense. Obama
was in no mood in the spring of 2009 to vocally support a million,
pro-Western Iranian dissidents who took to the streets in anger over the
theocracy’s rigged elections, calling for transparency and human
rights. He snubbed them as if they were neoconservative democracy
zealots. In his eyes, their false consciousness did not allow them to
fully appreciate their own suffering at the hands of past American
imperialists. In Obama’s worldview, the Iranian mullahs came to power
through revolution and were thus far more authentic anti-Western
radicals, with whom only someone like Obama — prepped by the Harvard Law
Review, Chicago organizing, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s pulpit, and the
most liberal voting record during a brief stint in the U.S. Senate —
could empathize and negotiate. Why would Iranian idealists and democrats
be foolish enough to spoil Obama’s unique diplomatic gymnastics?
Traditional analyses deconstruct the Obama administration’s negotiations
over Iran’s nuclear program and are aghast at the naïveté — no stop to
ongoing uranium enrichment, no open or surprise inspections, no
conditions to be met before sanctions are scaled back, no prohibitions
against the marriage of nuclear-weapon technology and
intercontinental-missile development.
But that is to misunderstand the Obama worldview. He is less worried
about a nuclear Iran and what it will do to a mostly pro-Western Gulf or
Israel, or to other traditional U.S. interests, than about the
difficulties he faces in bringing Iran back into the family of nations
as an authentic revolutionary force that will school the West on
regional justice. (“There’s incredible talent and resources and
sophistication inside of Iran, and it would be a very successful
regional power that was also abiding by international norms and
international rules, and that would be good for everybody.”) Iran will
assume its natural revolutionary role as regional power broker in the
Middle East; and, almost alone, it is not beholden to any Western power.
In some sense, Obama views the rest of the world in the same way as he
views America: a rigged order in which the oppressed who speak truth to
power are systematically mischaracterized and alienated — and in need of
an empathetic voice on the side of overdue revolutionary accounting.
That's why he's meeting with the likes of Daniel Seidemann and Emily Schaeffer, while refusing to meet with Israel's Ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer. The sooner Israelis recognize that this is Obama's view of the world - and that it's not representative of the United States in general - the sooner the harmful hysteria over 'our strained relations with the United States' will die down.
I couldn't view this on the plane last night (airline WiFi doesn't allow streaming video), and I wasn't able to post either from London (way too little time) or on the plane back from there (British Airways doesn't hold from WiFi and besides - the flight was so cramped I barely had room for my knees, let alone to open a laptop).
But watch this video. Someone shows an ISIS flag to students at Berserkeley and that doesn't get them too excited. Watch what does.
B'tselem: "We'll save israel from herself by trashing her to the world." You got a problem with that? http://t.co/fkfYUi5OqG
— Richard Landes (@richard_landes) August 20, 2014
For those of you who donate money to the New Israel Fund (NIF) (how long have you been reading this blog anyway?), B'Tselem is one of the largest beneficiaries of your donations, to the tune of $255,477.23 in 2012. And the New Israel Fund is getting its money's worth: B'Tselem acts as Hamas' Israeli propaganda arm.
B'Tselem published 8 updates on casualties during Protective Edge. Under
the deniability cover of an "initial investigation," every report
compared the number of dead on the Israeli side and the number of
Palestinian side. This information was published on B'Tselem's website,
in their press releases and on social media.
Naturally, B'Tselem emphasized the number of children, minors, women
and elderly among those killed in Gaza, backed by visual aids. If
B'Tselem took care to note the number of combatants killed (by its own
definitions) in its first 6 releases, this category disappeared in the
last two releases, turning all Palestinian casualties into civilians until proven otherwise. B'Tselem explained the sudden change thus:
"the data is very initial and partial, and still being checked […] over
the next few months B'Tselem will continue to look into the events and
in this framework confirm the identity of those killed and figure out
who participated in the fighting." Why did B'Tselem repeatedly publish
partial, unconfirmed data? Didn't they care that this would serve solely
to bash Israel? Probably not. Meanwhile, while B'Tselem was coy about
identifying members of Palestinian terrorist groups among the dead, they
were consistent and clear about dividing between Israeli 'soldiers' and
'civilians'. In addition, these reports were padded with lachrymose
visual aids, of the kind meant to bypass the reader's critical
faculties, among them "tear-jerking" testimonies of Gazans,
who talk of being unable to sleep at night for fear of IDF bombardment,
how their life isn't a life and an impassioned appeal to the world not
to "stand aside." We should note that B'Tselem did indeed publish
testimonies of residents of the south of Israel who live under constant
rocket fire. But as B'Tselem itself admitted, symmetry is more important than nationality for them:
"We report more on Palestinians who are harmed because many, many more
Palestinians were harmed during the operation. This in spite of the fact
that most of the casualties did not take any part in the fighting
[note: such a categorical statement based on what they themselves call
"initial and partial data"! – A.W.] […] reporting needs to reflect
reality and reality is not symmetrical when it comes to the extent of
damage in Gaza and Israel and therefore it is presented before you in
this manner." B'Tselem even tried to launch a campaign of reading the
names of dead Palestinian children on the radio, which was banned by the
Broadcasting Authority and rejected by the Israeli Supreme Court. B'Tselem also released photo albums and video clips of the destruction in the Gaza Strip. After all, property destruction is ipso facto
against international law. Who cares if the building served as a
command or combat post? B'Tselem certainly couldn't be bothered to find
out if they were.
Your charity dollars at work.... What could go wrong?
At least I assume she's a gentile. I'd like you all to meet Chloe Simone Valdary.
Chloe took on Julia Salazar of J Street U earlier on Wednesday in a debate on Twitter. You'll only be able to read it in Chloe's Twitter feed. 'Open-minded' Julia has blocked her account.
Why is President Obama in Israel anyway? Good question. Caroline Glick goes through all the reasons why he really didn't need to come here and then takes an educated guess as to why he's here. It's not pretty.
It is possible that in addressing the unelected radical Left in
Jerusalem, Obama seeks to undermine the legitimacy of the Israeli
government. But if that is the plan, then it would bespeak an
extraordinary contempt and underestimation of Israeli democracy. Such a
plan would not play out the same way his Egyptian speech did.
There
are two possible policies Obama would want to empower Israel's radical,
unelectable Left in order to advance. First, he could be strengthening
these forces to help them pressure the government to make concessions to
the Palestinians in order to convince the Palestinian Authority to
renew negotiations and accept an Israeli peace offer.
While
Obama indicated in his interview with Channel 2 that this is his goal,
it is absurd to believe it. Obama knows there is no chance that the
Palestinians will accept a deal from Israel. PA chief Mahmoud Abbas and
his predecessor Yasser Arafat both rejected Israeli peace offers made by
far more radical Israeli governments than the new Netanyahu government.
Moreover, the Palestinians refused to meet with Israeli negotiators
while Mubarak was still in power. With the Muslim Brotherhood now in
charge in Cairo, there is absolutely no way they will agree to negotiate
- let alone accept a deal.
This leaves another
glaring possibility. Through the radical Left, Obama may intend to
foment a pressure campaign to force the government to withdraw
unilaterally from all or parts of Judea and Samaria, as Israel withdrew
from the Gaza Strip in 2005. If this is Obama's actual policy goal, it
would represent a complete Europeanization of US policy toward Israel.
It was the EU that funded radical leftist groups that pushed for
Israel's unilateral withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005.
And in the past week, a number of commentators have spoken and written in favor of such a plan.
The delegation led by J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami
included donors to the organization and spent six days in Israel meeting
with Israeli and Palestinian officials and activists. The congressional
delegation consisted of Reps. Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), Hank Johnson
(D., Ga.), Raul Grijalva (D., Ariz.), and Jan Schakowsky (D., Ill.). All
except Johnson are members of the House Progressive Caucus. None sit on
the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Details of the February trip were provided to the Free Beacon by sources in the Israel Defense Forces and Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Lee, a former Black Panther volunteer, was the only member of
Congress to vote against a resolution authorizing President George W.
Bush to use force against terrorists after the Sept. 11th, 2001,
attacks. At the time Lee said, ”We must not rush to judgment,” and warned, “Let us not become the evil that we deplore.”
Johnson sought formal congressional punishment of Rep. Joe Wilson (R., S.C.) for his “You lie!” outburst during President Barack Obama’s 2009 address to a joint session of Congress. If Wilson went unpunished, Johnson said, “We will have people with white hoods running through the countryside again.”
Johnson achieved his greatest notoriety in 2010 when, during a congressional hearing, he told the
admiral in charge of the U.S. Pacific Command, “My fear is that the
whole island [of Guam] will become so overly populated that it will tip
over and capsize.”
Grijalva, according to GovTrack,
is the single most left-wing member of Congress. (Lee is ranked as the
second-most liberal.) Grijalva, who in college was a leader of several
radical Hispanic groups, favors United Nations monitoring of United
States elections and blamed the Gabby Giffords shooting on Sarah Palin.
Anyone still want to argue that J Street is mainstream?
For more on Schakowsky (pictured, but not discussed in the article), go here.
Time Magazine's Joe Klein stopped by Morning Joe on Wednesday to express his 'disgust' with Prime Minister Netanyahu and Knesset Speaker Rivlin, accusing them of trying 'brazenly' of trying to push the United States into war with Iran and to influence the outcome of the US elections.
There's a partial transcript of Klein's remarks here (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).
I don't believe Netanyahu is trying to influence the American election and I don't think he could even if he wanted to. In fact, if Israel attacks Iran before the election and the United States is drawn in or backs us up, I believe that it will only help Obama's reelection bid.
So what's Bibi up to? I believe that Bibi (a) is repeating Menachem Begin's 1981 behavior in the lead up to the Iraq attack. Begin warned everyone over and over again that the sky was falling so that no one could say after he attacked Iraq that they weren't warned, (b) genuinely believes that his one and only shot at attacking Iran is before the US elections, because (x) he genuinely does not trust Obama to protect us or to back an Israeli strike before it is too late if Obama is reelected (and with good reason) and (y) he genuinely believes that Fordow will be finished in the next 3-6 months and Israel will no longer have the means to attack it.
And if Bibi's actions happen to throw the election into Romney's hands? Well, turnabout is fair play. Beginning with George Bush senior's blatant backing of Yitzchak Rabin against Yitzchak Shamir in 1992, our allies, especially the United States, have felt free to interfere in our elections in a manner that does not happen in any other country in the world. In 1996, Binyamin Netanyahu - who grew up in the United States and who was widely regarded as having very little chance of winning an election against Shimon Peres six months after Yitzchak Rabin's assassination - hired Arthur Finkelstein to work for him and won. Three years later, Bill Clinton dispatched James Carville to help Ehud Barak defeat Netanyahu. And so it has continued.
There's a rumor going around pro-Israel circles that Tom Friedman was furious at his bosses at the New York Times for allowing Yesha Council Chairman Dani Dayan access to the Times editorial pages. An op-ed appears in Sunday's Times that is so dripping with hatred for traditional Judaism and the Jewish state that one cannot help but wonder whether the Times published it to mollify Friedman, who is, after all, considered one of their top editorial writers (which is a sad comment on the Times' editorial page). The op-ed was written by former Knesset Speaker Avrum Burg, who acquired French citizenship in 2004 (but according to Wikipedia currently lives in Israel).
Mr. Netanyahu’s great political “achievement” has been to make Israel a partisan issue and push American Jews into a corner. He has forced them to make political decisions based on calculations that go against what they perceive to be American interests. The emotional extortion compels Jews to pressure the Obama administration, a government with which they actually share values and worldviews, when those who love Israel should be doing the opposite: helping the American government to intervene and save Israel from itself.
It's not Netanyahu's achievement. It's Barack Obama's and the American Left's. It used to be that support for Israel was a given for both parties. Survey after survey has shown that in the Democratic party support for Israel has dropped significantly. In fact, the party's Left flank is openly hostile to Israel. This confronts at least some American Jews with a dilemma: Support the party that overwhelmingly supports Israel or support the party that supports unrestricted abortions and redistribution of wealth. And for those American Jews to whom Israel really matters, but who still have otherwise 'liberal' views, this poses a dilemma. But not the one that Burg is expounding.
Israel arose as a secular, social democratic country inspired by Western European democracies. With time, however, its core values have become entirely different. Israel today is a religious, capitalist state. Its religiosity is defined by the most extreme Orthodox interpretations. Its capitalism has erased much of the social solidarity of the past, with the exception of a few remaining vestiges of a welfare state.
Much of that is true (although I would vehemently contest the phrase 'most extreme Orthodox interpretations). But it's a function of who has come to live here. Most of those who have come here out of choice rather than necessity are Orthodox Jews. No one else is interested, except of course the non-Jewish Russians who wanted to improve their economic status. And as to capitalism, Burg was fine with capitalism so long as it benefited the Labor party and its cronies. Why can't others benefit as well? Should we go back to the situation where the Histadrut shuts the country down once a week instead of once every six months?
In the early years of statehood, the meaning of the term “Jewish” was national and secular. In the eyes of Israel’s founding fathers, to be a Jew was exactly like being an Italian, Frenchman or American. Over the years, this elusive concept has changed; today, the meaning of “Jewish” in Israel is mainly ethnic and religious.
No, it was never 'national and secular. Here and there, there were people who showed up who wanted to convert, but they would never want to live in Israel as non-Jews. Unless they were Arabs.
The winds of isolation and narrowness are blowing through Israel. Rude and arrogant power brokers, some of whom hold senior positions in government, exclude non-Jews from Israeli public spaces.
Anyone know to whom he's referring?
Graffiti in the streets demonstrates their hidden dreams: a pure Israel with “no Arabs” and “no gentiles.”
Well, that's real authoritative. People who are 'rude and arrogant power brokers' are writing graffiti in the streets? Telling others to write graffiti in the streets? Graffiti represents a country's political ethos? Huh?
But there is another option: an iconic conflict could also present an iconic solution. As in Northern Ireland or South Africa, where citizens no longer spill one another’s blood, it will eventually become clear that many Israelis are not willing to live in an ethnic democracy, not willing to give up on the chance to live in peace, not willing to be passive patriots of a country that expels or purifies itself of its minorities, who are the original inhabitants of the land.
Is this what he learned in Netiv Meir (the local religious Jerusalem high school that he attended) - that the 'Palestinians' are the original inhabitants of the land? His father must be rolling over in his grave. And while I've never compared Israel to South Africa (which I don't believe is quite the utopia he makes it out to be), I have compared it to Northern Ireland and explained why the comparison is totally inappropriate.
Someone please take Avrum Burg off the list of 'pro-Israel' writers and speakers. He's definitely neither of those.
Der Spiegel lied? Leftists, not neo-Nazis, helped Munich Olympic massacre
Last week, the German magazine Der Spiegel reported that neo-Nazis helped the 'Palestinian' terrorists who carried out the Munich Olympic massacre. But JPost is reporting that a prominent German political scientist is accusing Der Spiegel of lying - and implying that it is doing so to further the German Left's political agenda. According to Dr. Wolfgang Kraushaar, it was the German Left that helped the 'Palestinians.'
Writing in the current edition of the German Jewish newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine Wochenzeitung, Dr. Wolfgang Kraushaar sharply disputed a recent Der Spiegel article’s emphasis on the role of neo-Nazis in the attack, calling the news item “blown up” and nothing new.
“It was not ‘Brown [Nazi] help,’ as Der Spiegel writes, but rather a joint work of German Left radicals and Palestinian terrorists.”
Kraushaar, who has written extensively on the German Left’s involvement in attacks on Jews and Israelis, argued in his commentary that though the Munich murders were part and parcel of a merger between German Leftists and Palestinian terrorists, Der Spiegel aimed to portray them as series of murders by the extreme Right.
He criticized the news weekly for pushing a false narrative that ignores the close contacts between German Left radicalism and Palestinian terrorism.
According to Kraushaar, the Spiegel report lacks journalistic accuracy because it identifies the Palestinian-German Left connection as a myth.
Kraushaar is affiliated with the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and authored a widely acclaimed book on the German Left’s role in a plot to bomb the Berlin Jewish community center in 1969.
During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama claimed not to be connected to domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. At Breitbart.com, Joel Pollak has discovered that then Senator Barack Obama attended a barbecue at the home of Ayers and Dohrn during on July 4, 2005. Here's the blog post he found:
Almost one year after Kent State professor Julio Pino shouted “Death to Israel!” at a public lecture by a former Israeli diplomat, people are beginning to question why no disciplinary action has been taken against him by the university.
Pino, who has been a controversial figure on campus for years, disrupted a lecture in October of 2011 by demanding that Ishmael Khaldi, the first Muslim diplomat in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, answer how his country justified giving relief aid to Haiti and Turkey, which Pino characterized as “blood money.”
According to witnesses, before shouting his anti-Semitic remarks, Pino distributed anti-Israel fliers in the back of the conference room.
That incident did not seem surprising to students and other faculty attending the lecture, as Pino’s “outspoken” support of Islamic terrorism throughout the years seems to be well-documented.
...
Pino defended his actions to Inside Higher Education magazine, writing that “the only politics I have are ‘there is no God but God, and Mohammed is His Messenger.’”
However, on his Facebook page, Pino writes in support of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, noting that “to be an urban guerilla [sic] means to launch an offensive against imperialism. The Red Army Faction is striking the connection between the legal and illegal resistance; between national and international resistance; between national and international struggle; between the strategic and tactical requirements of the international communist movement.”
The Facebook note features a picture of a female Maoist soldier dressed in Unified Communist Party of Nepal military garb dating to that country’s civil war, from 1996 through 2006. In that conflict, Maoists attempted to overthrown the monarchy, but settled in 2006 for a partial nationalization of state resources, among other concessions made by the government.
In another Facebook note, he writes that “there is a Communism which is dangerous and a Communism that is not dangerous. Comrades, let us dare to make Communism dangerous again!” This post is titled “Bandeira Rossa,” which is the name of a popular Italian labor movement anthem, and features a photo of Pakistanis burning the American flag.
Sara Kilpatrick, executive director of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors, declined to comment on whether she supported national director Cary Nelson’s remarks that Pino’s calls for genocide were more akin to academic discourse than hate speech.
Colleen Casey, Kent State University Chapter Coordinator for the AAUP, refused to answer any questions about Pino, saying that the chapter had “no comment.”
Something is REALLY wrong on the farm if calls for genocide are treated as 'academic discourse.' They are clearly not.
But something tells me that if Pino were attacking Muslims he would not be there anymore.
I have to post my Kent State memory - those of you who are over 50 or so will get it.
Let's go to the videotape.
They may now be with the radicals rather than against them, but the administration at Kent State hasn't gotten any smarter in the last 42 years.
By the way, the picture of the girl in black with the white scarf around her neck leaning over the dead body (his name was Jeffrey Glenn Miller if I recall my '60's and '70's correctly) is famous. The girl turned out to be a teenage runaway from Florida. And based on the names of the dead (which were a much more reliable indicator of religion then than they are today), all four of those kids were Jewish.
The 'open-minded' students of George Washington University
Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, attempted to speak at George Washington University on Monday night. What happened?
Let's go to the videotape.
According to GW Hillel Executive Director Rabbi Yoni Kaiser-Blueth, Oren asked the students to stay and participate in dialogue, but they formed a small protest outside the event. Kaiser-Blueth said the protest did not disrupt the event and told JTA that it was a “wonderful evening.”
While no student group has identified itself with the protest, GW does host a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. A Muslim Students’ Association also exists at the university; Kaiser-Blueth said Hillel has strong, friendly relations with the group.
The Left is completely incapable of hearing any other point of view. One can only wonder what will happen as these 'students' become 'adults.'
Your tax shekels and dollar donations at work at Ben Gurion University
You all remember Ben Gurion University where they can't find the traitors to whom your donations and our tax shekels are going. Now, there's a new one.
Meet 'Chemistry Professor' Eyal Nir. Mr. Nir has called for 'breaking the necks' of Right wing Israelis.
For months the cabbagehead president of Ben Gurion University, Rivka Carmi, has been telling everyone and anyone willing to listen that there are no tenured traitors at all at her university besides Neve Gordon (SHE calls him a traitor!). She insists she is unaware of any problem at her university besides Gordon. She has never heard of the scores of other anti-Israel extremists on the faculty of her university. She does not know about any of the BGU faculty cheering on Hamas terror, cheering on the Qassam rockets fired into the Negev by the terrorists, denouncing Israel as a fascist apartheid regime, nor about the many BGU faculty supporting the “BDS” (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement of economic aggression against Israel. She does not know about BGU faculty members who have called for Israel to be annihilated. She does not know about BGU faculty members who penalize and harass students when they fail to toe the anti-Israel ideological mark of their professors. She does not know about entire departments at BGU in which non-leftists and Zionists may not teach. She does not know about indoctrination courses, where the entire course consists of anti-Israel propaganda. She cannot find any one-sided anti-Israelpropaganda on campus either. She does not know about BGU faculty who have gotten hired and promoted and tenured on the basis of churning out anti-Israel hate propaganda. There are no problems at all at BGU, insists Madame Cabbagehead, other than Little Neve.
Well, let us introduce you to Dr. Eyal Nir, who teaches chemistry at BGU, at least when he is not busy as an activist in the HADASH Stalinist Party and other anti-Israel groups. Over the weekend, the YNET news web site, run by Israel’s largest daily Yediot Ahronot, reported that Nir issued a call for murdering Israelis who fail to support his far-leftist communist political positions. Specifically, he called for the breaking of the necks of Israelis who march with Israeli flags and support the right of Jews to live in neighborhoods of East Jerusalem where Stalinists like Nir think that Jews do not belong.
Alex Joffe does a nice job of summarizing the lessons we should derive from the Tony Kushner affair.
At least three lessons may be learned from this affair. The first is that for the New York cultural elite, which may be caricatured in this case as an interlocking directorate of playwright, pundits, and professors, the presumption of impunity is absolute. Academia, in particular, has a "sacred mission," to be defined solely by the faculty and under no circumstances to be questioned. That the faculties themselves tend to be monolithic in their political and ideological orientation may help to explain their wild overreaction in the present instance and others like it. Delusions of infallibility combined with well-deserved insecurity and profound authoritarianism make for a potent brew.
Then there is the key role played by the media, and preeminently by the Times, which no longer bothers to make even a pretense of dividing news from opinion, or opinion from insult, misrepresentation, and naked advocacy. On certain subjects, anyone getting the "news" from such a source might as well be reading leaflets handed out by the crank on the street corner. Only through a constant process of reading and tacking among multiple sources can one establish even the basic facts of who said what to whom.
But by far the most important lesson is the degree to which the state of Israel has indeed become the third rail of American cultural and intellectual politics. An individual wishing to be considered respectable by the interlocking directorate and its ancillary institutions and adjuncts is permitted only an extremely narrow slice of views on the Jewish state: the spectrum ranges from, roughly, seeing the country as basically legitimate but uniquely flawed to seeing it as wholly illegitimate and irretrievable. To wander from these parameters is to court the dreaded epithet of "right-wing," and to question the playwrights and professors who hold such views, or even to decline to honor them, puts one decisively beyond the pale.
In the end, the Kushner brouhaha also shows exactly who is responsible for placing the Israel "question" at the forefront of the American agenda. The answer is not evangelical Christians, or AIPAC, or "neoconservatives." It is the academic and cultural Left, along with its bedfellows on the isolationist Right, for whom the demonization of Israel is the cause of the day. There is cause for gratitude that, outside those precincts, the Kushner affair seems to have had no resonance whatsoever. There is cause for profound anxiety that the demonization has proceeded so far and infected so many in positions of power and influence.
James Lewis decries the silence of the Jews and other people of understanding in the face of what he calls the totalitarian Left.
But in a democracy, people like us take back power at the polls -- if -- and only if -- they can to face the truth. If we do not act, it's because we lack the simple moral fiber our parents and grandparents had. It's not hard and dangerous for us to act. All it takes is concerted action by all the people who are ashamed and embarrassed by the moral depravity of our political leadership. We can stop paying corrupt corporations that control morally depraved celebrities. We can stop paying advertisers who collude with the corrupt and mendacious media. We can start telling them exactly what we think about them. You have free speech. Nobody has beaten you up or thrown you in jail, the way they do in other places. You have freedom, but if you do not exercise it you might as well be living in the gruesome little tyranny of Myanmar.
Our general gutlessness is even more deplorable for those who know the past so well, including American Jews, who can see Israel being more and more surrounded by morally backward reactionaries armed with rockets and missiles (and nukes in another year). We are doing nothing, while America and Israel, and decent Europeans wherever they still exist, are being slandered and scapegoated. No wonder they think they are winning.
Saddam Hussein, Kaddafi, Ahmadinejad, every sleazy little upstart generalissimo in the world gets to spit in the face of the two most decent nations in the world: America and Israel. Why is that? Where is our self-respect? Why do the worst abusers get endless chances to rip the most decent and peaceful people in the world? And our media morons collude with them?
The Democrats command the loyalty of most American Jews. But the Democrats have been penetrated by those who hate tolerance, democracy, and respect for sovereign nations. The Left has played American Jews for suckers. Obama is no exception -- he is supported by an inner circle of ideological fanatics some of whom were born into Jewish families, but somehow never got the point of civilized behavior. Part of that point is: It doesn't matter who you are. It matters how you act. If you collude with evil, you are a criminal in your heart, and perhaps in fact. Civilized nations repudiate criminals no matter who they are.
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Conservatives keep asking why Jews vote for the Left. Part of the answer seems to be that Jews get suckered by utopian promises. If only we elect a clean-looking black Democrat from the Chicago Machine to the American presidency, all the problems of the Middle East will be solved! Jews may yearn for peace because they have felt the ravages of war and persecution. They may easily be taken in by false hopes that all it will take is a little bit of compromise, a little peace talk, for everything to turn out all right in the Middle East.
But there is no excuse for willing stupidity. I don't care how good your intentions are, if you do not have the courage to open your eyes you are colluding with evil.
Even before Obama, Israel was the only nation in the world directly threatened by nuclear proliferation to mad regimes -- covered up by UN criminocrat Mohammed El Baradei, who naturally received a Nobel Prize for his collusion with the nuclear maniacs in Tehran. Just a few days ago El Baradei came out of the closet by calling for Egypt to go to war against Israel if it defends itself against rocket barrages from Gaza. It's part of his election campaign in Egypt, believe it or not. Was anybody surprised? If you were, you haven't been paying attention. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, and ignorance of malignant evil is much, much worse.
Has anybody noticed these facts at the New York Times, where Baradei was butt-kissed while he was peddling lies about Iranian nukes? Is anybody over there waking up? I don't see it.
Ahmadinejad is celebrating a nuclear Armageddon to come, and the Left is getting panicked by the American Tea Party.
Please. It is beyond belief.
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Meanwhile Obama is running for reelection, and I'll bet that a majority of brain-dead liberals will vote for him again. Obama has made nice with the most dangerous tyrants in Iran and North Korea, and now he is doing the most amazing thing any American president has ever done: He is deliberately pushing unstable allies into collapse.
Rumor has it that even Hillary is ready to leave. I wonder if she has the guts to tell the truth? If so, I might even vote for her. My standard is now truth-telling: Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Hillary, I don't care. We are suffering from toxic lies, and a refreshing breath of truth reminds us that truth exists.
Ordinary Americans have allowed one of our political parties to be taken over by the totalitarian Left -- the people who instantly try to control your free speech, because they know that if you can be made to shut up about politics you can be rendered helpless. That is why there are speech codes on American campuses and in our news rooms. Speech codes are inherently totalitarian. The Left has totalitarian swings. Since the "Berkeley Free Speech Movement" of the 60s the Left has slammed the free speech door shut. We now have Forbidden Speech from the Left. That is why they are attacking the free web through the lie of "net neutrality."
We live in an age of corruption, and an age of cowardice among free peoples.
But the silence of American Jews on the fate of Israel is the most ominous reality today.
I first wrote about the Red-Green alliance - the alliance between the Left and radical Islam - here. Now, Lisa Graas publishes an exhaustively researched piece that profiles the five groups that are the biggest promoters of the alliance. This one surprised me:
The ACLU letter, signed by the ALA, rejects the idea that there is reason to suspect an Islamic element in terror attacks.
[T]he Committee should rely on facts and scientifically rigorous analysis, not biased opinions or unsupported theories positing a discernable “radicalization” process that are belied by available evidence.
Though the claim is that “rigorous analysis” is important in determining if a terror threat exists, the ALA vigorously stands in the way of any attempt to conduct such analysis through America’s libraries.
Following ALA policy, more than 225 libraries across the United States have chosen to defy the mandates of Section 215 [of the Patriot Act]. For instance, the Santa Cruz, California library has chosen to shred all records of its patrons’ book use on a daily basis. Anne M. Turner, Director of that city’s library system, explained, “The basic strategy now is to keep as little historical information as possible.”
ALA receives dues from libraries, librarians, students and others nationwide, and funding from a long list of leftist organizations. Notably, ALA spent $1.7 million on a legal battle to ensure that libraries have a First Amendment right to allow children to view pornography. If you are providing support for your local library, you may want to check to see if they are supporting ALA. Your money could be used by this organization to undermine America’s efforts to prevent terrorism.
This hit home because my late mother was an ALA member, and saw which way the organization was heading. When I googled my mother's name with the ALA, I found two local publications of the Boston chapter, one announcing her initial employment by the Boston Public Library, and the second announcing her transfer to a different branch.
My mother was a big supporter of local libraries and was forever advocating for our local suburb to build a good public library - which they did long after my brother and I could have benefited from it. But for the last 25 years or so of her career, she was employed at a local community college, where she was constantly spending money from her own pocket to buy books that gave a more balanced view on Israel to counteract her radical Leftist boss who was constantly buying pro-'Palestinian' books using the library's budget.
I've mentioned before on this blog that both my parents were (and my father still is) knee0jerk Democratic voters. But the ALA is obviously much more radical since my parents were Democrats but were (and my father still is) strongly pro-Israel. I guess Mom's boss was much more in line with the librarians' thinking.
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
