Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Dog Dave on October 26, 2006, 09:37:53 AM
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Those of you who know me personally know of my Ashkenazi Jewish heritage and that my parents are Holocoust survivors
now while I'm not religious by any means in fact I'm quite secular and skeptical of all organized religion, I am none the less proud of my history and ethnic origin, I am also nearly driven to projectile vomiting over the amount of anti-semitisim / anti-Americanism being expounded by Islamic fundies, but even more so by American and European white supremacist groups and ties between the two through out history.
Read on.
http://www.afrocubaweb.com/news/islamright.htm#AntiNazi%20sites
(This is the source of this info.)
Links
Anti-Nazi Planning Meetings, 12/6 & 9, Washington, DC
Al Qaeda and the Far Right
The Far Right and Bio-terrorism
Holocaust denial: far right - islamic fundamentalist cooperation
AntiNazi sites
Nazis, Jews, and Moslem in the Middle East
World News
AntiWar Movement
Afghan Genocide
Chechnya
Saudi Arabia
Tajikistan
Uzbekistan The Far Right and Islamic Fundamentalists
by Joseph Dietrich 11/18/01
There have been a number of reports in the world press on the links between Al Qaeda and far right groups such as neo-nazis and skinheads in Europe. Solid reports of such a linkage have yet to emerge in the US, but may still come given the intensely internationalist nature of the far right. The topic of far right alliances with Islamic fundamentalists is a complex one and naturally plays into the hands of various interest groups by providing propaganda fodder.
US and European Far Right groups, particularly the Nazi organizations, had a celebratory reaction to 9-11. In recent years, these groups have been seeking alliances with Islamic fundamentalists against their traditional enemies, Israel and the US. This trend actually goes back to World War II, when German Nazis sought alliances with various Middle Eastern countries, such as Reza Shah Pahlavi's Iran, Vichy Syria, Rashid Ali's Iraq, King Farouk's Egypt, the Mufti of Jerusalem's Palestine, and Zahir Shah's Afghanistan. Some 'experts' even speculated that this type of alliance was behind the US anthrax attacks of October and November 2001. There are reports that, if true, support the existence of such an alliance, including this one from a major Italian daily:
"A recent report in the Milan-based newspaper, Corriere della Serra, suggests the alliances may be heading to a new level. It cites German intelligence services, which claim Osama Bin Ladin has begun financing far-right groups throughout Europe to help him carry out attacks during a G-8 summit meeting that will be held in Genoa this summer." in Holocaust denial finds new home, 2/22/01, Canadian Jewish News
This report, which stems from the arrest in April 2001 of al Qaeda militants in Milano and Franfurt, is echoed on the Free Republic site, with some eerie additional details:
"Italian officials say they've been warned by German intelligence services that bin Laden is secretly financing neo-Nazi skinhead groups throughout Europe to commit acts of violence during the summit, sources told The Post. The attack could also come from the sky in the form of a bizarre James Bond-style strike by remote-control airplanes packed with plastic explosives, Germany's largest newspaper reported yesterday. The planes would fly into the compound where Bush and the heads of state of major European powers will be meeting at the July 20 G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy, the Bild newspaper reported." BIN LADEN PLOTS BUSH HIT, 6/13/01, New York Post
Some antiwar activities in certain countries, such as Germany, have been supported by neoNazi groups. This stems from the ultra-cynical nazi approach to politics, as in WWII when they complained about Soviet NKVD killings in the Ukraine or the depradations of the French and the British in their colonies.
In the US, there have been a number of official pronouncements linking far right groups to the Anthrax attacks, mostly without suggesting any actual linkage between such groups and Al Qaeda. US far right groups have taken on a new dimension in recent years thanks to the dramatic growth in the prison population and the rampant racial warfare encouraged by prison authorities in what they think is a clever divide and conquer strategy. New inmates are forced to join such groups or suffer the consequences of being without protection. Once you join, it is difficult to leave, even after you are out of jail. The impetus to the far right from millions thrown in jail by dubious drug laws is incalculable: as you sow, so you shall reap.
US far right groups have met with Islamic fundamentalists, especially in the Holocaust deniers' conferences, which have helped popularize far right ideology in the Arab world, where the hatred of Israel tends to move people beyond the bounds of reason, under serious provocation to be sure.
One has to wonder to what extent senior US intelligence and military circles, not to mention certain industrial ones, have been penetrated by Nazi elements from the US, South America, Canada, the Middle East, and elsewhere, and how that may be used against them in the current war. After all, who can forget that it was the same CIA that, after developing under Allen Dulles and working with so many "ex" Nazis in the post World War II era, funded and developed the mujahedeen and later supported the Taliban through Pakistan. Dulles himself had a long prewar record of representing US firms doing business in Nazi Germany. One of his main clients was Standard Oil of New Jersey, whose largest stockholder outside the Rockerfeller interests was IG Farben, the pro-Nazi German chemical combine. Then there's the postwar CIA relationship with the Gehlen organization, the key Nazi eastern front espionage group brought over as a unit into the postwar German government where it evolved into the BND, the German equivalent of the CIA. So many relationships...which sometimes are handed down across generations as key infiltrators in police, prison, intelligence and other groups recruit their own kind.
Links
Al Qaeda and the Far Right
Following the money 11/19/01 US News & World Report: "Huber said in an interview that by targeting Al Taqwa and Al Barakaat, Washington is doing the bidding of "Jew Zionists" who now "rule America." A 74-year-old Holocaust denier and convert to Islam, Huber says Swiss authorities searched his house near Bern and questioned him last week. He told U.S. News that he was introduced to bin Laden activists during Islamic conferences in London, Beirut, and Brussels, the last time in either 1997 or 1998."
Al Qaeda Reaching Out To Non-Islamic Militant Groups 11/16/01, Pacific News Service: Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization has already been linked to violent Islamic groups worldwide. But troubling reports from Europe link the terrorist group to a host of non-Islamic, anti-American organizations, including the continent's neo-Nazis.
ATTACK ON AFGHANISTAN ECONOMY & INVESTIGATION: Far-right has ties with Islamic extreme AL-QAEDA LINKS 11/9/01, Financial Times, UK: Mr Huber, who is based in Bern, is known in Switzerland and Germany as an Islamic fundamentalist who attempts to forge links to far-right and neo-Nazi movements. A spokesman for Germany's office for the protection of the constitution, the internal intelligence agency, said yesterday that Mr Huber "sees himself as a mediator between Islam and right-wing groups". He also belongs to the revisionist movement, which believes the Holocaust did not take place, the spokesman said. Klaus Beier, spokesman for the NPD, one of Germany's main far-right political parties, said Mr Huber has often addressed NPD events... After September 11 several far-right leaders and associations in Germany welcomed publicly the terrorist attacks... Intelligence experts say the Islamic and far-right movements often share a common hatred of the US and of Jews.
Neo-Nazis and 9/11 10/29/01, Counterpunch: details the National Alliance's William Pierce's prophecies and ravings on 9-11. Remarkably prescient.
Al Qaeda arrests in Milan, Franfurt, April 2001
This lead to information on links between Al Qaeda and European far right groups
Worldwide arrests 8/7/01 Afghan Press Agency: many details on the network, but none on the far right.
BIN LADEN PLOTS BUSH HIT 6/13/01 New York Post: details some far right links
Strikes target Bin Laden networks in Europe 4/11/01 Jane's, UK: reviews the arrest of islamic militants in Milano and Franfurt, with some organizational details, but without mentioning the links to the far right.
The Far Right and Islamic Fundamentalists
The far-right fallout 11/30 McLean's, Canada
Far-Right Recruiting Drive 11/26 Mother Jones
The Far Right and Bio-terrorism
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Abortion Clinics Hit by Second Mail Scare 11/10/01 Reuters: The Army of God
High Priority To Anti-Abortion Anthrax Mail 11/9/01 Women's eNews: interesting details here, including: - "Since Oct. 15, almost 500 anthrax threats have now been mailed to abortion rights organizations and clinics nationwide. Before that, abortion clinics had received about 80 mailed anthrax threats since 1998."
While agents continue to look abroad, they are also probing US extremist groups. 11/5/01 Christian Science Monitor: "Some even suggest that domestic extremists could be working with an international terror organization. An Al Qaeda-Aryan Nations coalition, for example, may sound unlikely, but it's not impossible, say experts, given some of their shared beliefs."
Abortion Clinics Hit by Second Mail Scare 11/10/01 Reuters: The Army of God
Anthrax attacks' 'work of neo-Nazis' 10/28 The Guardian, UK: "Neo-Nazi extremists within the US are behind the deadly wave of anthrax attacks against America, according to latest briefings from the security services and Justice Department."
The Far Right: reacting to 9-11
ADL Says U.S. -Based Anti-Semites Are Feeding Sept. 11 Rumor Mill 11/9/01 Newswire
Germans fear neo-Nazi link with Islamists 10/7/01 The Guardian, UK: "Neo-Nazi groups applauded the 11 September suicide attacks on the United States, and thanked the terrorists for 'knocking out' the 'common enemy': Americans and global capitalism. A message on the website of Horst Mahler, the former extreme-left Red Army Faction guerrilla who recently emerged as the leading ideologue of extreme-right academics, congratulated the terrorists and expressed solidarity with Islamic militants."
NEO-NAZI AMERICANS HAIL THE BUTCHERS, 10/3 New York Post
The far-right fallout 11/30/01 McLean's, Canada: "The planes that toppled the World Trade Center have helped Andrews and other self-described "racial nationalists" to advance their anti-immigrant domestic agenda. The fact that Canadian troops are serving in the war on terror in Afghanistan helps even more, he maintains. "We can bask in glory because once they lose some men over there, they'll have to come back and close the borders and look at what kind of society they want to build," says Andrews, who immigrated to Canada from Yugoslavia in 1952. "Overall, for the country's culture and preservation of the European heritage, it is a good thing."
AntiNazi sites
Anti Nazi League (UK)
adl.org - Anti Defamation League
Anti-Semitism-USA - ADL
National Alliance - ADL
Explosion of Hate: The Growing Danger of the National Alliance - ADL
Nazis Among Us
Nazi Echo - Consortium News, current global ramification of Nazis
Nazism Exposed
Pagans against Nazis
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with its SPLC Intelligence Project and White Pride World Wide page on the international white power music industry: "You kill all the niggers and you gas all the Jews," George Burdi sang with his band Rahowa, short for Racial Holy War. "Kill a gypsy and a commie too. You just killed a kike, don?t it feel right? Goodness gracious, Third Reich."
The Ties That Bind (SPLC): on far right international networks: "pan-Aryanism"
Texas Gang Investigators Association (TGIA)
White Supremacy TGIA, good listing of far right sites
Youth Leadership Support Network's antinazi page
The Far Right and US Prisons
Nazi Low Riders: A Prison Gang Emerges in California ADL
Nazi Low Riders: Law and Order Magazine
Nazi and Far Right sites
American Nationalist
www.americannaziparty.com
National Alliance - the main US NeoNazi group's web site
To the Government of Israel: 18 Demands - National Alliance - echoes demands of Palestinians, shows how the nazi National Alliance, mentioned in the Counterpunch article, Neo-Nazis and 9/11, is aligning themselves on Middle Eastern issues.
Army of God - claim attacks on abortion and family planning clinics
Jew Watch
La Falange Espa?ola
le Front National (France)
List of Nazi sites - Nazism Exposed
The Heretical Press - UK Nazis
Vanguard News Network
Nazis, Jews, and Moslem in the Middle East
Persian Outpost: Iran History
The Farhud, the Mufti inspired Krystallnacht in Iraq, 1941 EretzIsrael.org (Greater Israel)
THE ARAB/MUSLIM NAZI CONNECTION Middle East Digest, Christian Action for Israel
Nazis planned Palestine subversion: ill fated nazi mission to Palestine which did not manage to achieve any popular support, tending to contradict assertions that Palestine was pro-Nazi just because the Mufti was.
The king of Greater Afghanistan 11/30/01 Guardian, UK: "What is interesting in the German dispatch is not so much the evidence of the Afghan king's sympathy for the Nazi regime. It is the desire for a Greater Afghanistan via the incorporation of what is now Pakistan's North West Frontier province and its capital Peshawar. Zahir Shah's return is being strongly resisted by Pakistan. They know that the king never accepted the Durand Line, dividing Afghanistan and Pakistan, not even as a temporary border. They are concerned that he might encourage Pashtun nationalism."
Holocaust denial: far right - fundamentalist cooperation
Holocaust denial finds new home 2/22/01 Canadian Jewish News: "A gathering of Holocaust deniers in Lebanon is only the tip of the iceberg in the ongoing collaboration between neo-Nazi activists from the West and Muslim fundamentalists in the Arab world, according to an expert on Middle Eastern terror groups... Emerson, who has testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee that held hearings on international terrorism and immigration policy, said there is "consistent use of neo-Nazi and Nazi propaganda in Islamic militant circles... Lately we see neo-Nazi cross-fertilization with radical Arab groups and even some mainstream groups"
Institute for Historical Review - Holocaust deniers' think tank: "Jewish and Zionist leaders, and their American servants, have predictably lost no time exploiting the September 11 attacks to further their own interests. Taking advantage of the current national mood of blind rage and revenge, they demand new US military action against Israel's many enemies." - from IHR statement on the September 11 attacks
Holocaust Deniers to Convene in Lebanon 2/11/01 Anti Defamation League
Islamic Fundamentalists in South America
This is one geographical area that is cited for its cooperation between Iraq and Nazis.
Who did it? Foreign Report presents an alternative view Jane's, UK 9/19/0: This article gives some general background on Mughniyeh, suspected in the 1992 Argentina bombing of the Israeli Embassy: "In February 1992, Israeli helicopter gunships attacked the convoy of the then head of Hizbullah, Sheikh Abas Musawi, in South Lebanon. Musawi, his wife and children were killed and the revenge attack followed a month later. According to press reports, Mughniyeh was called back into action and, in a well-planned and devastating attack, his people blew up the Israeli embassy in Argentina. The building was demolished and 92 were killed. Only last year, after a long investigation, did Argentina issue a warrant for Mughniyeh?s arrest."
World War II and the post war period
How the Vatican collaborated with fascism in Yugoslavia Flame, Ireland
New Jersey and the Nazis 1998, AfroCubaWeb, Hans Wolff
Pre World War II History
Khazaria.com A Resource for Turkic and Jewish History in Russia and Ukraine. Arthur Koestler, himself of Jewish Khazar roots, was the first to popularize the history of the Ashkenazis, the Eastern European Jewish community, which comprises 90% of Jews in the world. His book, The Thirteenth Tribe, recounts the work of historians in New York and Tel Aviv, mostly Jewish. This book is sometimes labeled anti Jewish since it does not follow the standard line that all Jews have their origins in Israel, and indeed it has become hard to find: there has been a systematic campaign to remove it from public access - it has been stolen from many libraries. See Review of The Thirteenth Tribe by Arthur Koestler. The question of the origins of various Jewish communities needs to be considered apart from 'divine' real estate implications: many communities, such as the Sephardim, the Yemenites, the Ethiopeans (Falashas), have their origins at least in part in conversions centuries back. This should be a source of pride in history, not a call to cover up evidence detrimental to certain ambitions.
Zionist Organizations
Betar: www.betar.org
Discussion Groups
Coming out of the woodwork Mother Jones: "With the nation focused on the conflict half a world away, extremist groups in the US are using the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to promote their own agendas at home. Is a nation at war particularly vulnerable to such messages of racial hatred, division, and isolationism?"
Analysis of Islamic and Christian Fundamentalisms
Mythos and Terrorism: A Response to the Events of September 11 by Barry Mills, M.D., Forensic Psychiatrist
Anti-Nazi Planning Meetings, 12/6 & 9
Friends, Here's more information on the anti-Nazi demonstration on the 15th.
PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY
Neo-Nazi's Return to DC Neighborhoods: Planning Our Communities' Response
There will be a Neo-Nazi demonstration on December 15 at the Israeli Embassy. (Please see below for details plus an article about the National Alliance).
Community Meetings: Please attend and how we can best respond with community education and visible opposition. We will demonstrate that hope is greater than hate.
Thursday, December 6, 6:30 - 9:30pm Cada Vez Conference Center, Royal Lounge, 1438 U St. NW
Sunday, December 9, 4 - 6 pm Josephine Butler Center, 2437 15th St NW, Studio Room (back entrance)
For more information call the Youth Leadership Support Network (YLSN) 202-550-7229 or email lunasol@igc.org or robin@girlswirl.net
For more, see http://www.worldyouth.org/neonazi.asp
NEO-NAZI AMERICANS HAIL THE BUTCHERS, 10/3
By BRAD HUNTER, New York Post
October 3, 2001 -- American neo-Nazis are praising
Osama bin Laden in the wake of the horrific attacks on the
World Trade Center and Pentagon.
On Web sites and in interviews with The Post, some fringe
groups are expressing sympathy - and even support - for
the terrorists who snuffed out the lives of some 6,000
Americans.
"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," said
August Kreis, a spokesman for Sheriff's Posse Comitatus
and Aryan Nations, from his compound in rural
Pennsylvania.
Kreis, who spoke of "an ideological oneness" with the
terrorists, has a Web site that attacks the federal
government, Israel and Jews, and praises the "Islamic
freedom fighters."
Billy Roper, of the National Alliance, echoes Kreis'
rhetoric. In an e-mail to NA members, which he said was
pirated by the anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center,
Roper wrote: "The enemy of our enemy is, for now at least,
our friend.
"We may not want them marrying our daughter, just as they
would not want us marrying theirs. We may not want them
in our societies, just as they would not want us in theirs. But
anyone willing to drive a plane into a building to kill Jews is
all right by me. I wish our members had half as much
testicular fortitude."
Roper said his e-mail was "stripped of context," noting
"most of the people killed in the attack were whites, the
very people the National Alliance are trying to reach out
to."
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The Peculiar Alliance
Islamists and neo-Nazis find common ground by hating the Jews.
by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
09/01/2005 12:00:00 AM
THERE HAVE BEEN rumblings of late about the developing alliance between Islamic radicals and neo-Nazis. In late May, Israeli president Moshe Katzav gave a speech before the German parliament in which he warned, "Let's not be surprised if terror organizations use neo-Nazis for carrying out terror attacks." And on August 5, WorldNetDaily reported, "Neo-Nazi skinheads are working with radical Islamists in a growing unholy alliance that has European law enforcement officials concerned about a new front in the war on terrorism."
Such an alliance seems unlikely on its face; after all, neo-Nazis view most Muslims as racially inferior, while Islamic extremists believe that neo-Nazis are just another flavor of infidel. However, a closer examination reveals that many white-supremacist groups have expressed solidarity with Islamic terrorists recently, and in turn some white supremacists and far-right Holocaust deniers have found newfound supporters among the Islamists.
THE MOST PROMINENT recent example of white supremacists' vocal support for Islamic terrorism came from August Kreis, the new head of Aryan Nations. In an interview with CNN earlier this year, Kreis said of al Qaeda, "You say they're terrorists, I say they're freedom fighters. And I want to instill the same jihadic feeling in our peoples' heart, in the Aryan race, that they have for their father, who they call Allah." Going a step further, Kreis told CNN that he had a message for Osama bin Laden: "The message is, the cells are out here and they are already in place. They might not be cells of Islamic people, but they are here and they are ready to fight."
The Aryan Nations website reflects Kreis's desire to instill a "jihadic feeling" in his followers. For example, it features an article purporting to show that the idea of jihad can be found not only in Islam but also in the Bible. The article concludes with a battle cry: "All the sons of Abraham, all descendants of his three wives, Sarah, Hagar and Ketourah, the parties of the Islamic and Aryan World, all need to understand their duty to enact Holy Jihad, we need to live this Jihad; total war, death to our enemy, the insidious, poisonous and rabid satanic jEw." [sic]
Aryan Nations also boasts a quote on its main page further reflecting its support for radical Muslims. Attributed to Obergruppenf?hrer Gottlob Berger, the quote states that "a link is created between Islam and National-Socialism on an open, honest basis. It will be directed in terms of blood and race from the North, and in the ideological-spiritual sphere from the East." The main page also touches on other issues of importance to Muslim radicals. It demands immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Middle East, and under the headline "Ariel Sharon: your typical domineering jew," the website features a picture of the Israeli prime minister with fire coming out of his mouth that ends in a mushroom cloud. Underneath, the website proclaims the photograph to be Sharon's "plan for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc . . . "
BEYOND THE ARYAN NATIONS, a surprising number of other white-supremacist websites openly sympathize with Islamic terrorists. The National Alliance, the country's largest neo-Nazi organization, published a 2002 essay by its founder, the late William Pierce, which claimed that the September 11 attacks were a salutary event. Pierce wrote that through the attacks, bin Laden "forced the whole subject of U.S. policy in the Middle East into the open: the subject of American interests versus Jewish interests, of Jewish media control and its influence on governmental policy." Because bin Laden broke the "taboo" about questioning Jewish interests, Pierce claimed, "n the long run that may more than compensate for the 3,000 American lives that were lost."
Neo-Nazi James Wickstrom has a webpage that includes a number of featured articles, the headlines of which provide a good indication of where he stands on the Islamist question. These include "Military Personnel Wounded in Iraq & Afghanistan For The JEW Neo-cons," "U.S. Slaughters People At Prayer At Baghdad Mosque," "U.S. Teachers Targeted By jews If They Teach Contrary to Israeli," and "The President and his jewish handlers LIED about 9/11!"
And the neo-Nazi ADLUSA website (a site designed to oppose the Anti-Defamation League) brands the Anti-Defamation League's call for Hezbollah TV to be designated a foreign terrorist organization as part of a campaign "of smear, corruption, and harassment," and promotes the conspiracy theory that Jewish hands were behind the 7/7 and 9/11 terrorist attacks. In case this doesn't make their position perfectly clear, the ADLUSA features a direct appeal to Muslims: "Moslems, lay down your guns and join our mission to remove Jews from positions of power from which they persecute one people after another; killing Americans misled by Jews only incites endless wars."
This vocal neo-Nazi support for al Qaeda reaches back to shortly after 9/11. The Jewish newspaper Forward reported in November 2001 that the World Church of the Creator displayed a bin Laden quote on its website warning Americans that they needed to tend to their own interests and not those of the Jews.
Around the same time, the website for Florida-based Aryan Action displayed the message: "Support Taliban, Smash ZOG." (ZOG stands for Zionist Occupation Government, a term rooted in the idea that the Jews control world affairs.) In a perverse twist on President Bush's declaration that "either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," Aryan Action's website voiced its unequivocal support for al Qaeda: "Either you're fighting with the jews against al Qaeda, or you support al Qaeda fighting against the jews."
THUS FAR, THERE has been no proof of neo-Nazi cooperation with Muslim terrorist groups in planning attacks. Despite the lack of proof of operational links, several figures with feet in both movements have actively tried to bring them closer. One such individual is Ahmed Huber, a 77-year-old Swiss convert to Islam whose study is adorned with twin pictures of Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden.
Huber told the Washington Post that his goal is to build bridges between radical Muslims and the "New Right." He said that a prevalent view on the New Right is that "what happened on the 11th of September, if it is the Muslims who did it, it is not an act of terrorism but an act of counterterrorism." Certain far-right figures, such as German National Democratic Party theorist Horst Mahler, seem amenable to Huber's ideas. Mahler has spoken of the "sense of sympathy" and "common ground" that far-right European groups share with Islamists, and has admitted to "contacts with political groups, in particular in the Arab world, also with Palestinians."
The neo-Nazis' newfound love for Islamists is by no means unrequited. Some radical Islamic groups have--perhaps in an effort to undercut one of the justifications for the state of Israel--forged intellectual ties with right-wing Holocaust deniers.
At the forefront of contemporary Holocaust denial is the California-based Institute for Historical Review (IHR), which is dedicated to the idea that the Holocaust is a historical fiction. The IHR has been so heartened by the support it's received in the Islamic world that investigative journalist Martin A. Lee noted its journal's frenetic description of a "white-hot trend: the rapid growth of Holocaust revisionism, fueled by increasing cooperation between Muslims and Western revisionists, across the Islamic world."
A number of Middle Eastern newspapers, in countries such as Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, have published articles endorsing the Holocaust deniers' thesis. Beyond that, neo-Nazi writers who lack legitimacy in the West have increasingly found a platform in the Arab world. For example, Lee further reported that an article by David Duke was featured on the front page of the Oman Times.
Nor is the Islamic promotion of neo-Nazis confined to the Middle East. Lee reports that Muslims, a New York-based weekly newspaper, has published opinion pieces by both David Duke and William Pierce.
Even some Islamic groups with more mainstream legitimacy have promoted far-right figures as featured speakers. One such speaker is William W. Baker, author of the anti-Israel screed Theft of a Nation and former president of the neo-Nazi Populist Party. (While Baker claims that he did not know at the time that the Populist Party was racist, his own words undercut these denials. The Orange County Weekly reports that, in a speech Baker delivered around the time that he headed the Populist Party, he referred to Jerry Falwell as "Jerry Jewry" and commented that he hated traveling to New York City "'cause the first people I meet when I get off the plane are pushy, belligerent American Jews.")
Baker's current avocation is promoting "religious tolerance" by emphasizing the commonalities between Christianity and Islam. In this capacity, Baker has frequently spoken at events hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and various chapters of the Muslim Students' Association; he was also the featured speaker at the Assadiq Islamic Educational Foundation in Boca Raton earlier this year.
THERE ARE OBSTACLES to further development of the relationship between Islamists and neo-Nazis. In Europe, ethnic Muslims are frequent targets of neo-Nazi violence, and not all neo-Nazis share the sympathy for Palestinians expressed by the likes of William Baker. As one white supremacist website puts it, "I hate Jews but that doesn't mean I automatically love the Jews' victims." And countless Muslims recoil from Nazi ideology.
Nonetheless, this developing alliance is not without historical precedent. Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, famously supported Adolf Hitler during World War II, broadcasting radio propaganda on Germany's behalf and even forming Bosnian Muslim divisions of the Waffen SS. As with al-Husayni and Hitler, the current Islamist/neo-Nazi love affair is rooted in the notion that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend": Both groups are united in their hatred of the Jews, and of the United States.
Moving forward, this peculiar alliance presents the risk that neo-Nazis may collaborate with Islamist terrorist groups on attacks. But a second danger is that the far right's newfound legitimacy in the Arab world may allow neo-Nazi figures to claw their way out from the lunatic fringe to which they're currently relegated.
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a counterterrorism consultant and attorney. Kamal Ghali provided research assistance for this article.
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http://memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=938
11/24/2005 Clip No. 938
American White Supremacist David Duke Addressing Damacus Demonstration in Support of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad: My Country Is Also Occupied by the Zionists
Following are excerpts from a speech by American white supremacist David Duke, aired on Syrian TV on November 24, 2005.
David Duke: I come from the peace-loving people in America to the peace-loving people of Syria.
Crowd cheers.
Interpreter: If you please, no shouting.
Interpreter:I have come from the peace-loving American people to the peace-loving Syrian people.
David Duke: I come from the peace-loving people of America to your great peace-loving president of Syria.
Interpreter: I have come from the peace-loving American people to your peace-loving Syrian president.
Crowd: Our soul and our blood we will sacrifice for you, oh Bashar.
Our soul and our blood we will sacrifice for you, oh Bashar.
Our soul and our blood we will sacrifice for you, oh Bashar.
David Duke: It is only in America and around the world, it is only the Zionists who want war rather than peace.
Interpreter: All over the world... In America, and all over the world, it is only the Zionists who want war instead of peace.
David Duke: It hurts my heart to tell you that part of my country is occupied by Zionists, just as part of your country, the Golan Heights, is occupied by Zionists.
Interpreter: It saddens me and it hurts my heart to tell you that parts of my country are occupied, just as parts of your country, namely the occupied Golan, are occupied by the Zionists.
David Duke: The Zionists occupy most of the American media and now control much of American government.
Interpreter: The Zionists control most of the media outlets, and they also control the American government.
David Duke: It is not just the West Bank of Palestine, it is not just the Golan Heights that are occupied by the Zionists, but Washington DC, and New York, and London, and many other capitals in the world.
Interpreter: It is not just the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights that are occupied by the Zionists. Washington D.C., New York, London, and other cities and capitals around the world are occupied by the Zionists.
David Duke: Your fight for freedom is the same as our fight for freedom.
Interpreter: Just as the Europeans are fighting for freedom, the Arabs are fighting for freedom.
David Duke: I bring you a message from many Americans, from many people in Britain, and around the Western world. We say in unison: No war for Israel.
Interpreter: I have brought you a message from most of the Western world, from America, from Britain. The message is: No to war, no to Israel.
Duke: No war for Israel!
Crowd chants along with David Duke
David Duke: No war for Israel, no war for Israel, no war for Israel, no war for Israel!
Interpreter: No to a war for the sake of Israel... No to a war for the sake of Israel... No to a war for the sake of Israel...
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The Day the Mufti Came to Town
By Joe Kaufman
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 13, 2006
?Death to America? can be heard loud and clear throughout the streets of Tehran. It can also be frequently heard out of the mouth of one Ikrima Sa?id Sabri, the Grand Mufti of the Al-Aqsa Mosque located in Jerusalem. Recently, Sabri had the opportunity to visit the land that he hates so much. But why would he want to, and why would we let him?
Sabri is the sixth man to hold the title of Mufti of Jerusalem, having been appointed to the position by Yasser Arafat in October of 1994. He is the considered the highest official of religious law in the area.
The first ?Grand Mufti? of Jerusalem (and third Mufti) was Haj Amin Al-Husseini. In 1921, at the time of his appointment, Amin Al-Husseini had been considered a violent extremist. Later, he would be declared a war criminal in Nuremburg for his actions with regard to the Nazis. In his memoirs, he wrote, ?Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: ?The Jews are yours.??
Like Amin Al-Husseini, Ikrima Sa?id Sabri?s hatred of Jews is prolific. About them, he has stated, ?I enter the mosque of Al-Aqsa with my head up and at the same time I am filled with rage toward the Jews. I have never greeted a Jew when I came near one. I never will. They cannot even dream that I will. The Jews do not dare to bother me, because they are the most cowardly creatures Allah has ever created...?
Sabri?s contempt is not just limited to Jews, though. He also has vitriolic feelings towards the United States. On September 12, 1997, in a sermon he delivered, Sabri stated, ?Oh Allah, destroy America, her agents and her allies! Cast them into their own traps, and cover the White House with black!? And less than a month before 9/11, on August 24, 2001, he stated, ?Allah, destroy the U.S., its helpers and its agents. Allah, destroy Britain, its helpers and its agents. Allah, prepare those who will unite the Muslims and march in the steps of Saladin. Allah, we ask you for forgiveness before death, and mercy and forgiveness after death. Allah, grant victory to Islam and the Muslims...?
With his violent posture towards America, one would imagine that Sabri would want to stay as far from our shores as humanly possible. But that is just not the case. Sabri sightings have occurred in the United States, as recently as last month.
On March 4, 2006, Muslims Intent on Learning and Activism (MILA) sponsored ?An Afternoon with Shaikh Ekrima Sabry.? The event, which was held at the Colorodo Muslim Society (a.k.a. Masjid Abu Bakr), drew a response from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Bruce DeBoskey, the Regional Director of the ADL?s Mountain States Region, in citing Sabri?s support for such things as suicide bombings, stated, ?This is a man who has a history of spewing vicious anti-American and anti-Semitic rhetoric. We would think the Colorado Muslim community would seek to distance themselves from this man's hateful rhetoric.?
However, the Colorado Muslim Society has a history of anti-Jewish sentiment. In September of 2001, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the mosque?s spiritual leader, Ahmad Nabhan, in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News, referred to Israel as ?the first enemy.?
Colorado was not the only stop in the Sabri U.S. tour. In fact, he spent time in at least six other states ? one of which was Louisiana. On March 7, 2006, Sabri was the guest speaker at the American Legion Hall, located next door to the future home of the new Islamic Center of Baton Rouge (ICBR). A large and colorful flyer for the event is found on ICBR?s website. ICBR?s new center was a major subject in the case against KindHearts, an Islamic ?charity? recently shut down by the United States government for financing terrorism abroad.
In October of 2003, $500,000 was raised at ICBR during a KindHearts fundraiser for the new center. Yet, according to the Treasury Department, only a small part of the money went towards the building of a new Baton Rouge mosque; the vast majority of it went to Hamas. In addition, in August of 2005, ICBR acted as the Command Center for KindHearts? ?Hurricane Katrina Emergency Relief.?
The sponsor for Sabri?s Baton Rouge speech, as stated on the ICBR flyer, was the Palestinian American Congress (PAC), the American arm of the Palestinian National Authority. [The contact on the flyer for the event is PAC and ICBR dual board member, Emad Nofal.] In the past, the PAC has referred to Yasser Arafat as a ?national hero;? has celebrated the anniversary of the violent Palestinian Intifada; has condemned the Israeli executions of Hamas terrorist leaders Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi; and has commemorated ?Al-Nakbah? (The Catastrophe), the severely offensive Arabic expression for the creation of the state of Israel. [On April 29th, at its 7th Annual Convention, the PAC will continue its hatefest with a keynote speech by newly appointed Palestinian Ambassador to the U.S., Afif Safieh, who has described the Intifada as ?our peace strategy? and has labeled Capitol Hill ?Israeli-occupied territory.?]
Grand Mufti Sabri has traveled to the U.S. previously. In July of 2003, he showed up to endorse the building of the Salah Tawfik Elementary School (STEMS), in Sunrise, Florida. In a photo that was found on the school?s site, Sabri is pictured holding the plans to the school, along with and next to Zulfiqar Ali Shah, who was, at the time, Principal of the School of Islamic Studies of Broward (which is incorporated under the same address as STEMS? location). In addition to his connection to the school, Shah is the former President (Ameer) of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the American arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in Pakistan (Jamaat-e-Islami), and the South Asia Director for KindHearts.
For Sabri to be near a children?s school is a major problem. In an October 2000 interview with Egypt?s weekly Al-Ahram Al-Arabi, Sabri discussed his fascination with child martyrdom. He stated, ?There is no doubt that a child [martyr] suggests that the new generation will carry on the mission with determination. The younger the martyr - the greater and the more I respect him? They [mothers of martyrs] willingly sacrifice their offspring for the sake of freedom. It is a great display of the power of belief. The mother is participating in the great reward of the Jihad to liberate Al-Aqsa.?
By allowing sadistic hatemongers, such as Ikrima Sabri, into the country, the United States sends a mixed message to the world. It says that, while the nation is engaged in a far-reaching war on terror, it will tolerate those that spread the violent ideologies which ignite the enemy. This includes the terrorist support network within our borders. In the Denver event alone, over 400 people attended, standing room only.
Freedom of Speech is not a subject with infinite boundaries; it has its limits. One of those limits is screaming ?fire? in a crowded theatre. Certainly, another of those limits should be shouting ?jihad? in a crowded mosque. What a great ? but foolish ? country is America that she can allow a monster, who has cursed and declared war on her and her friends around the globe, to walk upon her shores.
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The Times April 24, 2006
What the neo-Nazi fanatic did next: switched to Islam
By Nicola Woolcock and Dominic Kennedy
Two faces, two converts - two Muslim extremists in Britain
David Myatt, who has changed his name to Abdul Aziz ibn Myatt, is a former leader of Combat 18; he now says Islam is the best hope for "fighting the West". Photo: BBC Panorama
A NEO-NAZI whose ideas were said to be the inspiration for the man who let off a nail bomb in Central London in 1999 has converted to an extremist form of Islam.
David Myatt, a founder of the hardline British National Socialist Movement (NSM) who has been jailed for racist attacks, has changed his name to Abdul Aziz ibn Myatt. David Copeland, who is serving six life sentences after three people died in his Soho bomb attacks, was a member of the NSM.
Myatt is reportedly the author of a fascist terrorist handbook and a former leader of the violent far-right group Combat 18. But now ? in his mid-50s and sporting a red, bushy beard ? he subscribes to radical Islamist views.
In an internet essay entitled From Neo-Nazi to Muslim, Myatt asks: ?How was it that I, a Westerner with a history of over 25 years of political involvement in extreme right-wing organisations, a former leader of the political wing of the neo-Nazi group Combat 18, came to be standing outside a mosque with a sincere desire to go inside and convert to Islam? ?These were the people who I had been fighting on the streets, I had swore (sic) at and had used violence against ? indeed, one of my terms of imprisonment was a result of me leading a gang of skinheads in a fight against ?Pakis?.?
In a later interview, Myatt supports the killing of any Muslim who breaks his oath of loyalty to Islam, and the setting up of a Muslim superstate. He describes himself as having been ?staunchly opposed to non-white immigration into Britain and twice jailed for violence in pursuit of my political aims?.
He added: ?I spent several decades of my life fighting for what I regarded as my people, my race and my nation, and endured two terms of imprisonment arising out of my political activities.?
But his belief is now that: ?The pure authentic Islam of the revival, which recognises practical jihad (holy war) as a duty, is the only force that is capable of fighting and destroying the dishonour, the arrogance, the materialism of the West . . . For the West, nothing is sacred, except perhaps Zionists, Zionism, the hoax of the so-called Holocaust, and the idols which the West and its lackeys worship, or pretend to worship, such as democracy.
?They want, and demand, that we abandon the purity of authentic Islam and either bow down before them and their idols, or accept the tame, secularised, so-called Islam which they and their apostate lackeys have created.
?This may well be a long war, of decades or more ? and we Muslims have to plan accordingly. We must affirm practical jihad ? to take part in the fight to free our lands from the kuffar (unbelievers). Jihad is our duty.?
Myatt, who briefly became a monk after his second spell in prison, said that he became a Muslim while working long hours alone on a farm. He grew up in Africa, moved to Britain in 1967 and spent time living in Worcestershire. In July 2000 Searchlight, the anti-fascist magazine, described him as ?the most ideologically-driven Nazi in Britain, preaching race war and terrorism?.
Myatt was the architect of the NSM and was involved in the leadership of Combat 18. He issued a statement in response to the Soho nail bombings saying: ?Neither myself nor anyone else connected to the NSM can be held responsible for these bombs in any way. That responsibility lies with the person who constructed them, planted them and caused them to explode. Only that person, and God, know the motive behind the attacks.?
Myatt said that ?all bombs are terrible and barbaric?, whether detonated by lone bombers, Western governments in Iraq or Zionists in Palestine.
?The NSM considered the creation of a revolutionary situation in this country as necessary since it wished to build an entirely new society, based upon personal honour, and believed this could only be done by destroying the dishonourable and corrupt society of the present.
?However, the NSM neither preached, nor sought to incite, what is called ?racial hatred?. Instead, it strove to propagate the warrior values of honour, loyalty and duty, and make the British people aware of, and come to value, their ancestral warrior culture and warrior heritage.?
Myatt said recently that he had given up hope of a breakthrough by the far Right and believed that Muslims were the best hope for combating Zionism and the West. ?There will not be an uprising, a revolution, in any Western nation, by nationalists, racial nationalists, or National Socialists ? because these people lack the desire, the motivation, the ethos, to do this and because they do not have the support of even a large minority of their own folk,? he said.
?If these nationalists, or some of them, desire to aid us, to help us . . . they can do the right thing, the honourable thing, and convert, revert, to Islam ? accepting the superiority of Islam over and above each and every way of the West.?
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Strange Allies
George Michael's "The Enemy of My Enemy" details the unlikely alliance between militant Islam and the extreme right.
by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
08/09/2006 12:00:00 AM
FOR THE PAST FEW YEARS, there have been rumblings among terrorism analysts about an unlikely alliance between Islamic radicals and the neo-Nazi far right. This union seems counterintuitive on the surface: The far right tends to see Muslims as racially inferior, while Islamic radicals disdain most members of the far right as infidels. However, the immediate urgency of a shared enemy can sometimes take precedence over long-term differences. In his new book The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right (University Press of Kansas 2006), University of Virginia professor George Michael argues at length that this is now the case for certain factions within the far right and radical Islamic movements.
In reality, this peculiar convergence of interests isn't new. There have been four distinct phases of cooperation between militant Islam and the extreme right, stretching back to Germany's Third Reich and World War II. During this time, much of the Muslim world sympathized with the Axis alliance, and Muslim Brotherhood members even prayed for the defeat of the Allies during their meetings.
Michael notes that the Muslim world's sympathy with the Axis alliance was "best exemplified by the cordial relationship between Hitler and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini." Although al-Husseini's followers had already been involved in one anti-Jewish rampage by 1922, the British appointed him grand mufti that year. During the 1930s, as the Nazi government implemented a number of ordinances abridging the rights of Jewish citizens, al-Husseini lent his support to the German project and requested reciprocal assistance in his own fight against the Jews. Eventually, as World War II progressed, al-Husseini helped organize a Bosnian Muslim division of the Waffen SS, and propagandized for the Nazi cause by writing an anti-Semitic tract entitled Islam and the Jews.
The second phase of cooperation between militant Islam and the extreme right began after Hitler's defeat. As Nazi Germany crumbled, Hitler's erstwhile officers had to flee to new homes lest they face prosecution for their role in the regime's atrocities. Given the Muslim world's support for Germany, it was natural that many of Hitler's men went to the Middle East. There, out of work Nazis proved useful to their host countries by helping develop their militaries and intelligence agencies.
After Gamal Abdel Nasser became Egypt's president, for example, a number of Nazis were given prominent positions in his government. Nazi commando Otto Skorzeny trained thousands of Egyptians in guerilla and desert warfare, and even organized early Palestinian terrorist forays into Israel and the Gaza Strip in the mid-1950s. Johann von Leers, who had been a high-ranking assistant to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, produced material for Nasser attacking the United States and Israel. Von Leers even converted to Islam during this period, adopting the name Oman Amin von Leers. Corresponding with a fellow fascist, von Leers opined that "if my nation had got Islam instead of Christianity we should not have had all the traitors we had in World War II."
The third phase of cooperation came with the rise of Palestinian terrorism in the late 1960s. After witnessing such incidents as the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the extreme right recognized a shared hostility toward Zionism--and several times tried to collaborate with Palestinians on terrorist operations.
Some neofascists did participate in anti-Israel operations. Robert Courdroy of the Belgian SS and neo-Nazi Karl von Kyna were killed in the late 1960s while fighting for the Palestinians. Some neo-Nazi groups reportedly helped the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine carry out attacks against Jewish targets in Europe, while a neo-Nazi group called Freikorps Adolf Hitler reportedly participated in the Black September war in Jordan. Yet despite these and other incidents, no enduring bonds between the two movements were forged. As Michael writes, "At best, the ties were sparse, shallow, sporadic, and ephemeral."
THE FOURTH, CURRENT PHASE BEGAN in the 1990s. The Soviet Union's fall caused the extreme right to turn away from Communism as their prime enemy, and toward the new world order (often seen as a convergence of "international corporate finance, Jewish media, and American military power"). At the same time, the Internet's rise allowed divergent extremist groups to recognize shared interests.
The extreme right and militant Islam now possess the same enemies. They both loathe the Jews and believe that the American government is controlled by a shadowy Jewish elite. Both movements also have revolutionary aspirations, seeking to replace the existing order with "monocultural states built around racial or religious exclusivity."
While both sides began to recognize these ideological similarities in the 1990s, 9/11 hastened the convergence of interests. After the Twin Towers collapsed, many far-right leaders exulted at both the punishment inflicted on the United States and the courage displayed by the hijackers. As National Alliance organizer Billy Roper said shortly thereafter: "The enemy of our enemy is, for now at least, our friends. We may not want them marrying our daughter, just as they would not want us marrying theirs. . . . But anyone willing to drive a plane into a building to kill Jews is all right by me."
Since then, here have been intensified efforts to build bridges between radical Islam and the extreme right. Ahmed Huber, a Swiss convert to Islam who is a self-proclaimed admirer of both Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden, jubilantly declared that 9/11 would help align the two movements: "The eleventh of September has brought together [the two sides] because the new right has reacted positively. . . . They say, and I agree with them 100 percent, what happened on the eleventh of September, if it is the Muslims who did it, it is not an act of terrorism but an act of counterterrorism."
In the United States, late National Alliance founder William L. Pierce praised Osama bin Laden prior to his death. The Aryan Nations established a Ministry of Islamic Liaison, and the group's head August Kreis declared his solidarity with Osama bin Laden during an interview with CNN. Kreis even advised bin Laden that his followers were willing to fight on al Qaeda's side: "They might not be cells of Islamic people, but they are here and they are ready to fight."
MICHAEL'S BOOK IS FAR from perfect. At some points, the reader is bombarded by page after page of block quotes, with very little analysis from the author. Moreover, the book is too long, with marginal issues explored in too much detail. This is evident from the very outset, as the book's ten-page introduction includes a six-page description of pre-9/11 debates about what direction the post-Cold War world would take, including an extended analysis of the divergent views of Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington that summarizes without adding value.
Not only do these marginal issues test the reader's patience, but they also sometimes display Michael's unfamiliarity with the subjects at hand. For example, the book erroneously refers to Hezbollah as a Salafi group (page 58), and uncritically reiterates the apparently fabricated quote from Ariel Sharon that "we the Jewish people control America" (page 48).
Nonetheless, the value of The Enemy of My Enemy can be found in its in-depth study of the on-again, off-again love affair between radical Islam and the extreme right. How the latest chapter in this romance will play out remains to be seen. It may not result in joint operational work--neo-Nazi groups, in their current state of decline, may be viewed as a liability rather than an asset by Islamic militants. Moreover, although both movements despise Israel and the United States, they may prove incapable of overcoming the vast ideological divide that separates them.
But, even if a united terror front never emerges, there may be other long-term implications to the convergence between militant Islam and the extreme right. For example, the intellectual legitimacy afforded to extreme-right Holocaust deniers within the Muslim world may ultimately prove significant. This is a trend worthy of notice, and George Michael provides the best window available for glimpsing it.
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a senior consultant for the Gerard Group International LLC. His first book, My Year Inside Radical Islam, will be published in February 2007 by Tarcher/Penguin.
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http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MWM2NGQ4MzUw...YjVhYWFhYmFlNDVlOWY=
The Swastika and the Scimitar
Anti-Semitic paranoia is alive and well among Muslims.
By Jonah Goldberg
The Jews everywhere are ?the Muslim?s bitter enemies,? said a prominent Islamic leader. Throughout history, the ?irreconcilable enemy of Islam? has conspired and schemed and ?oppressed and persecuted 40 million Muslims,? he said. In Palestine, the Jews are establishing ?a base from which to extend their power over neighboring Islamic countries.? And, he proclaimed, ?This war, which was unleashed by the world Jewry,? has provided ?Muslims the best opportunity to free themselves from these instances of persecution and oppression.?
Sound like Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah? Or perhaps Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Nope. It was the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Husseini, in 1942. An ardent Nazi supporter, Husseini delivered his speech at the opening of the Islamic Institute in Berlin, one day after the Allies denounced the Nazis for ?carrying into effect Hitler?s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.? Husseini?s address was approved by Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Joseph Goebbels was in attendance. The Reich press office widely distributed the comments.
President Bush undoubtedly didn?t have any of this in mind when he dubbed our enemies in the war on terror ?Islamic fascists.? But his comments ? analytically flawed as they may be ? added some much-needed moral clarity to our current struggle. They also helped to illuminate a much-overlooked point: Islamic fundamentalism and Nazism are historically and intellectually linked. (When the Israelis caught Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Final Solution, a leading Saudi Arabian newspaper read: ?Arrest of Eichmann, who had the honor of killing 6 million Jews.?) Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bush?s remarks seem to have struck a nerve.
The Saudi government warned ?against hurling charges of terrorism and fascism at Muslims without regard to the spotless history of Islamic civilization.? Of course, no civilization is without sin, but it takes particular chutzpah for the Saudis to preen, considering their civilization is as spotless as a leopard.
Still, the point isn?t to dredge up ancient history about Muslims and Nazis. Many Swedes got along swimmingly with the Nazis but who worries about the Swedes today? The Muslim world is another matter. Unlike the Swedes, the similarities between Nazism and Islamic fascism are not all in the past. In what may be the most important book on the Holocaust in a generation, historian Jeffrey Herf explains why.
According to the standard Holocaust narrative, the Final Solution was the product of ?hate? or racism or, often, both. Anti-Semitism became popular in the 19th century; the Nazis expanded on it, constructing a pseudo-scientific biological racism that saw the Jews as a ?cancer? on the body politic and the Holocaust as an attempt to excise the tumor. Herf does not so much debunk this version of history as cut through it.
In The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, he concedes that hatred and racism were important, but he argues that they don?t explain Germany?s unique efforts to destroy the Jews. It?s not as if no one hated the Jews until the 1930s.
The real answer isn?t hate, but fear. Poring through miles of speeches, private comments, journal entries, party memoranda and all 24,000 pages of Goebbel?s diaries, Herf concludes that the Nazis really believed that the Jews ran the world and wanted to destroy Germany. They believed that Jews controlled not only the Bolsheviks to the east but the capitalists to the west. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a mere pawn of his Jewish friends and advisors. The British Parliament, Goebbels wrote in one diary entry, was ?in reality a kind of Jewish stock exchange.? The ?Jewish-plutocratic enemy? was everywhere, benefiting from, and responsible for, every piece of bad news for Germany. In fact, the Nazis were sure that the Jews had declared war on Germany first, giving them no choice but to respond to the Jewish campaign to ?exterminate the Germans.? This paranoia led the Nazis to believe that rounding up millions of Jews and gassing them was an act of self-defense.
What is so frightening is how similar this is to the sounds from the Middle East today. Ahmadinejad ? dismissed by ?sophisticated? academics as a blowhard ? calls the Holocaust a myth. Indeed, there is no Jewish conspiracy theory too outlandish in the Muslim world. Huge numbers of Muslims ? even 45 percent of British Muslims ? believe that the Jews were behind 9/11. Theories that the Mossad is behind every bad headline, from the Indonesian tsunami to bad soccer performances, are common on the Arab street. According to Herf, this is only the second time the world has seen this sort of radical anti-Semitic paranoia. And, again, too many in the unspotless West are saying, ?They can?t be serious.?
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http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=22137_Hitler_the_Mufti_of_Jerusalem_and_Islamic_Fascism&only
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http://www.tellthechildrenthetruth.com/
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The new anti-Semitism
By Victor Davis Hanson
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Hating Jews, on racial as well as religious grounds, is as old as the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Later in Europe, pogroms and the Holocaust were the natural devolution of that elemental venom.
Anti-Semitism, after World War II, often avoided the burning crosses and Nazi ranting. It often appeared as a more subtle animosity, fueled by envy of successful Jews in the West. "The good people, the nice people" often were the culprits, according to a character in the 1947 film "Gentleman's Agreement," which dealt with the American aristocracy's social shunning of Jews.
A recent third type of anti-Jewish odium is something different. It is a strange mixture of violent hatred by radical Islamists and the more or less indifference to it by Westerners.
Those who randomly shoot Jews for being Jews ? whether at a Jewish center in Seattle or at synagogues in Istanbul ? are for the large part Muslim zealots. Most in the West explain away the violence. They chalk it up to anger over the endless tit-for-tat in the Middle East. Yet privately they know that we do not see violent Jews shooting Muslims in the United States or Europe.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promises to wipe Israel "off the map." He seems eager for the requisite nuclear weapons to finish off what an Iranian mullah has called a "one-bomb state" ? meaning Israel's destruction would only require one nuclear weapon. Iran's theocracy intends to turn the idea of a Jewish state on its head. Instead of Israel being a safe haven for Jews in their historical birthplace, the Iranians apparently find that concentration only too convenient for their own final nuclear solution.
In response, here at home the Council on Foreign Relations rewards the Iranian president with an invitation to speak to its membership. At the podium of that hallowed chamber, Ahmadinejad, who questions whether the Holocaust ever took place, basically dismissed a firsthand witness of Dachau by asking whether he really could be that old.
The state-run, and thus government-authorized, newspapers of the Middle East, slander Jews in barbaric fashion. "Mein Kampf" (translated, of course, as "Jihadi") sells briskly in the region. Hamas and Hezbollah militias on parade emulate the style of brownshirts. In response, much of the Western public snoozes. They are far more worried over whether a Danish cartoonist has caricatured Islam, or if the pope has been rude to Muslims when quoting an obscure 600-year-old Byzantine dialogue.
In the last two decades, radical Islamic terrorists have bombed and murdered thousands inside Europe and the United States. Their state supporters in the Middle East have raked in billions in petro-windfall profits from energy-hungry Western economies. For many in Europe and the United States, supporting Israel ? the Middle East's only stable democracy ? or even its allies in the West has become viewed as both dangerous and costly.
In addition, Israel is no longer weak but proud and ready to defend itself. So when its terrorist enemies like Hezbollah and Hamas brilliantly married their own fascist creed with popular leftwing multiculturalism in the West, there was an eerie union: yet another supposed third-world victim of a Western oppressor thinking it could earn a pass for its murderous agenda.
We're accustomed to associating hatred of Jews with the ridiculed Neanderthal Right of those in sheets and jackboots. But this new venom, at least in its Western form, is mostly a leftwing, and often an academic, enterprise. It's also far more insidious, given the left's moral pretensions and its influence in the prestigious media and universities. We see the unfortunate results in frequent anti-Israeli demonstrations on campuses that conflate Israel with Nazis, while the media have published fraudulent pictures and slanted events in southern Lebanon.
The renewed hatred of Jews in the Middle East ? and the indifference to it in the West ? is a sort of "post anti-Semitism." Islamic zealots supply the old venomous hatred, while affluent and timid Westerners provide the new necessary indifference ? if punctuated by the occasional off-the-cuff Amen in the manner of a Louis Farrakhan or Mel Gibson outburst.
The dangers of this post anti-Semitism is not just that Jews are shot in Europe and the United States ? or that a drunken celebrity or demagogue mouths off. Instead, ever so insidiously, radical Islam's hatred of Jews is becoming normalized.
The result is that the world's politicians and media are talking seriously with those who not merely want back the West Bank, but rather want an end to Israel altogether and everyone inside it.
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Over my Dead Bar-Mitzva boy Body!
"Never Again"
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Interesting historic fact: Himmler, one of the masterminds of the Holocaust, loved his muslim divisions because of their hatred for Jews. Also he considered muslims to be the best soldiers, brief overview:
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/handzar/handzar.htm
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This post is not a perfect fit for this thread, but rather than start another thread here it is:
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November 24, 2006, 5:00 a.m.
Throw the Jew Joke Down the Well
Borat gets anti-Semitism wrong.
By Charles Krauthammer
Borat is many things: a sidesplitting triumph of slapstick and scatology, a
runaway moneymaker and budding franchise, the worst thing to happen to
Kazakhstan since the Mongol hordes, and, as columnist David Brooks astutely
points out, a supreme display of elite snobbery reveling in the humiliation
of the hoaxed hillbilly.
But it is one thing more, something Brooks alluded to in passing but which
requires at least one elaboration: an unintentionally revealing
demonstration of the unfortunate attitude of many liberal Jews toward
working-class American Christians, especially evangelicals.
You know the shtick. Borat goes around America making anti-Semitic remarks
in order to elicit a nodding anti-Semitic response. And with enough liquor
and cajoling, he succeeds. In the most notorious such scene (on Da Ali G
Show where the character was born), Borat sings "Throw the Jew Down the
Well" in an Arizona bar as the local rubes join in.
Sacha Baron Cohen, the creator of Borat, revealed his purpose for doing that
in a rare out-of-character interview he granted Rolling Stone in part to
counter charges that he was promoting anti-Semitism. On the face of it, this
would be odd, given that Cohen is himself a Sabbath-observing Jew. His
defense is that he is using Borat's anti-Semitism as a "tool" to expose it
in others. And that his Arizona bar stunt revealed, if not anti-Semitism,
then "indifference" to anti-Semitism. And that, he maintains, was the path
to the Holocaust.
Whoaaaa. Does he really believe such rubbish? Can a man that smart
(Cambridge, investment banker and now brilliant filmmaker) really believe
that indifference to anti-Semitism and the road to the Holocaust are to be
found in a country and western bar in Tucson?
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world.
With anti-Semitism re-emerging in Europe and rampant in the Islamic world;
with Iran acquiring the ultimate weapon of genocide and proclaiming its
intention to wipe out the world's largest Jewish community (Israel); with
America and, in particular, its Christian evangelicals the only remaining
Gentile constituency anywhere willing to defend that besieged Jewish outpost
- is the American heartland really the locus of anti-Semitism? Is this the
one place to go to find it?
In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez says that the "descendents of the same ones that
crucified Christ" have "taken possession of all the wealth in the world."
Just this month, Tehran hosted an international festival of Holocaust
cartoons featuring enough hooked noses and horns to give Goebbels a
posthumous smile. Throughout the Islamic world, newspapers and television,
schoolbooks and sermons are filled with the most vile anti-Semitism.
Baron Cohen could easily have found what he seeks closer to home. He is,
after all, from Europe where synagogues are torched and cemeteries
desecrated in a revival of anti-Semitism - not "indifference" to but active
- unseen since the Holocaust. Where a Jew is singled out for torture and
death by French-African thugs. Where a leading Norwegian intellectual - et
tu, Norway? - mocks "God's Chosen People" ("We laugh at this people's
capriciousness and weep at its misdeeds") and calls for the destruction of
Israel, the "state founded ... on the ruins of an archaic national and
warlike religion."
Yet amid this gathering darkness, an alarming number of liberal Jews are
seized with the notion that the real threat lurks deep in the hearts of
American Protestants, most specifically Southern evangelicals. Some fear
that their children are going to be converted; others, that below the
surface lies a pogrom waiting to happen; still others, that the evangelicals
will take power in Washington and enact their own sharia law.
This is all quite crazy. America is the most welcoming, religiously
tolerant, philo-Semitic country in the world. No nation since Cyrus the
Great's Persia has done more for the Jews. And its reward is to be exposed
as latently anti-Semitic by an itinerant Jew looking for laughs and, he
solemnly assures us, for the path to the Holocaust?
Look. Harry Truman used to tell derisive Jewish jokes. Richard Nixon said
nasty things about Jews in government and elsewhere. Who cares? Truman and
Nixon were the two greatest friends of the Jews in the entire postwar
period: Truman secured them a refuge in the state of Israel and Nixon saved
it from extinction during the Yom Kippur War.
It is very hard to be a Jew today, particularly in Baron Cohen's Europe,
where Jew-baiting is once again becoming acceptable. But it is a sign of the
disorientation of a distressed and confused people that we should find it so
difficult to distinguish our friends from our enemies.
(c) 2006, The Washington Post Writers Group
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MGJiYzJmY2U3MmNhMDNmNzZmNDZjZmNmOTI2ZDcxMWY=
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Roger has had a conversation going with Buzwardo over the relevance of funding scientific research on the results of the research.
In a related vein, it would appear former President (and a really bad one he was) Jimmy Carter now seems to be receiving Saudi money. :roll: :x
=======================
In hindsight, Carter book seen as part of an awkward pattern
By Neal Sher NEW YORK, Dec. 26 (JTA) --
It was the spring of 1987 and the Office of Special Investigations, the
Justice Department's Nazi prosecution unit, which I headed at the time, was
in the midst of one of our most productive and historic periods.
On April 27, as a result of an in-depth OSI investigation and despite
resistance at the State Department, Austrian President and former U.N.
Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, who had served as an officer in the Nazi
army, was barred from setting foot ever again on U.S. soil.
One week earlier, after eight years of bruising litigation, we deported to
the Soviet Union one Karl Linnas, who had been chief of a Nazi concentration
camp in Estonia. To do so, we had to outmaneuver concerted attempts to
block the deportation by Patrick Buchanan, the Reagan White House's
communications director, and my boss, U.S.
Attorney General Ed Meese.
A month later, OSI announced the loss of citizenship and removal from the
United States of a former Chicago resident. Martin Bartesch admitted to our
office and the court that he had voluntarily joined the Waffen SS and had
served in the notorious SS Death's Head Division at the Mauthausen
concentration camp where, at the hands of Bartesch and his cohorts, many
thousands of prisoners were gassed, shot, starved and worked to death. He
also confessed to having concealed his service at the infamous camp from
U.S. immigration officials.
In Bartesch's case, OSI researchers uncovered iron-clad documentary evidence
of his direct, hands-on role in the Nazi genocide. Among the SS documents
captured by American forces when they liberated Mauthausen was what we
described as the Unnatural Death Book, a register of prisoners killed, along
with the identity of the SS guard responsible for the murder.
So powerful was this evidence that, in postwar trials conducted by the U.S.
military, the book served as the basis for execution or long prison
sentences for many identified SS guards.
An entry on Oct. 20, 1943, registers the shooting death of Max Oschorn, a
French Jewish prisoner. His murderer was also recorded: SS man Martin
Bartesch. It was a most chilling document.
Bartesch's family and "supporters," seeking special relief, launched a
campaign to discredit OSI while trying to garner political support. Indeed,
OSI received numerous inquiries from members of Congress who had been
approached.
After we explained the facts of the case, however, the matter inevitably was
dropped; no one urged that Bartesch or his family be accorded any special
treatment.
Well, there was one exception -- Jimmy Carter.
In September 1987, after all of the gruesome details of the case had been
made public and widely reported in the media, I received a letter sent by
Bartesch's daughter to the former president. Citing groups that had been
exposed for their anti-Semitism, it was an all-out assault against OSI as
unfair, "un-American" and interested only in "vengeance"
against innocent family members.
It's axiomatic that the families of every person prosecuted under the
criminal or immigration laws are affected and subjected to hardship. It was
obvious, I thought to myself, that no reasonable person could genuinely
believe that the Bartesch case was worthy of special dispensation.
On the contrary, it would be a perversion of justice to accede to the
family's demands and grant Bartesch relief to which no one else would be
entitled. Not even the staunchest and most sincere devotee to humanitarian
causes could legitimately claim that an SS murderer who deceived authorities
to obtain a visa and citizenship was somehow deserving of exceptional
treatment.
That's why I was so taken aback by the personal, handwritten note Jimmy
Carter sent to me seeking "special consideration" for this Nazi SS murderer.
There on the upper-right corner of Bartesch's daughter's letter was a note
to me in the former president's handwriting, and with his signature, urging
that "in cases such as this, special consideration can be given to the
families for humanitarian reasons."
Unlike members of Congress who inquired about the facts, Carter blindly
accepted at face value the daughter's self-serving (and disingenuous)
assertions.
As disturbing as I found Carter's plea, and although his attempted
intervention has always gnawed at me, I chalked it up at the time to a
certain naivete on the part of the former president. But now, in light of
Carter's most recent writings and comments, I am left to wonder whether it
was I who was naive simply to dismiss his knee-jerk appeal as the
instinctive reaction of a well-meaning but misguided humanitarian.
His latest book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," and his subsequent defense
of it, leaves no doubt that Carter has a problem with Israel and its
American Jewish supporters. His blame-Israel approach through the
distortion of easily verifiable facts; his whining about the influence of
the pro-Israel lobby; and even the whiff of plagiarism have been exposed and
are now spread upon the public record for all to see.
Kenneth Stein, who resigned his 23-year association with the Carter Center
at Emory University, described it this way: Carter's book "is not based on
unvarnished analyses; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials
not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented
segments."
Some believe that there's a venal element at work. To be sure, Carter and
his publisher and editor knew that, if nothing else, the intentionally
provocative, misleading and insulting title would be good for sales.
Moreover, Carter and his center appear to care little about how they fill
their coffers. After all, among the most generous contributors to the
Carter Center -- at least a million dollars each, according to the center's
published accountings -- are Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz,
best known for having offered $10 million to New York City after the Sept.
11 attacks, an offer that was rejected by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani after the
prince implied that the attacks may have been justified because of U.S.
support for Israel; the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; the Saudi Fund for
Development; and, most interestingly, the Bin Laden Group.
Make no mistake, these are not simply benevolent donors looking for a good
cause; they expect something in return. And Carter gave them exactly what
they paid for: an unequivocal stamp of approval from a former, if failed,
U.S. president for their decades of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic ramblings.
It's a diplomatic and public-relations dividend that likely will far exceed
their investment.
The exposure of Carter's views on Israel and the Jewish lobby has shed a
clearer light on his attempt to influence me in the Bartesch case. We know
from his own confession that he has had lust in his heart. Unfortunately, he
has given us ample reason to wonder what else is lurking there.
Neal Sher, a New York attorney, previously served as director of the Justice
Department's Office of Special Investigations and is a former executive
director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Shelley Faintuch Community Relations Director Jewish federation of Winnipeg
C300-123 Doncaster St.
Winnipeg, MB Canada R3N 2B2 Ph. 204.477-7423 Fax 204.477-7405
sfaintuch@aspercampus.mb.ca
Live Generously. It does a world of good.
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Our Friday item about Wesley Clark brought this response from Hershel Ginsburg, an Israeli reader:
I read your posting on Clark's comments to the Huffington Post (or Puffington Host) and the comments of the "progressive" and "enlightened" anti-Semites cheering on Clark's anti-Semitic diatribe and was blown away.
Set aside Clark's coming out of his bigotry closet (where are all those who jumped on Senator George Allen's comments?); set aside Huffington's publishing this stuff (would she also publish some other failed politician's diatribe calling all Muslims terrorists?); what blew me away was the statement by one of the "talkbackers" saying it was time for "Jewish mothers, instead of American mothers, to mourn the loss of their sons for a while."
I will give him the benefit of the doubt. This turkey must have been busy hiding his head from the Thanksgiving hatchet to be totally ignorant of the losses in both military and civilian lives (and many times as many injured) just during these past six years of the Oslo Accords war and the Lebanese War of this past summer--about 1,200 or so. If the U.S. had suffered proportionally similar losses, the total would be over 50,000 dead and several times that in injuries. So believe me, we Israelis have mourned more than our share of dead, and will continue to do so.
For the record, I write this as the father of a reserve combat medic in the Israel Defense Forces, who served three years in regular IDF service (as a draftee, not a volunteer) and saw some of his buddies killed including a fellow medic who literally died in my son's hands as he was struggling to save his life from a sniper bullet. My son also served in Lebanon this past summer as a reservist. And indeed all my kids had the distinct "pleasure" of burying someone they knew who was a victim of Palestinian terrorism during the Oslo war.
Furthermore, Israel always has and always preferred to deal with its own security problems on its own at the risk of its own soldiers' lives but gets condemned when others just can't see what we see. The best example was the 1981 bombing of the Iraqi reactor at Osirak. It took 10 years until others, including the U.S., (although I don't know if the lefties ever "got it") recognized the necessity of bombing Saddam Hussein's French-built reactor.
During the 1991 Gulf War, when Saddam was raining missiles on Tel Aviv, Israelis wanted to retaliate, but Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir, in a very controversial (here in Israel) move, gave in to American entreaties not to fight back and let the coalition do the work. There are many here who still think that was a grave mistake.
Now Israel is faced with a worse situation with Iran and Mad Mahmoud, who explicitly states he wants to wipe Israel off of the map and is backed by the "moderate" Hashemi Rafsanjani, who muses about Iran absorbing a 50% loss of its population as the bearable price for wiping out Israel in a nuclear exchange. On the one hand we have been waiting for the all-powerful and all-wise "international community" to work its magic and impose meaningful sanctions on Iran. To date, that is still a joke. So now we are facing a threat against our existence on the one hand, and grave warnings on the other hand from the "progressive" types not to expect the U.S. to do the job but not to do it ourselves either lest it upset the Muslim street. In the end we will have to deal with Iran ourselves and bear the consequences because ain't no one else going to do it.
And so this turkey says that its time for Jewish mothers to mourn the loss of our sons? Man, we wrote the book on it.
On a personal note, we were vacationing in Israel when Hezbollah began the war last July, and as we passed through Tel Aviv before heading for home, we phoned a few of our older cousins to see if they wanted to get together. None of them felt up to going out, because all were worried about children or grandchildren who were in the military. Israel has always seemed to us to be a country very much like America, but here we were struck by the difference: In Israel, the threat of war is constant and nearby; and having loved ones in the military is the norm rather than the exception.
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Nobel prizewinner, author attacked at S.F. hotel
Matthai Chakko Kuruvila, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, February 9, 2007
Elie Wiesel, the renowned Holocaust author and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was attacked and dragged out of a San Francisco hotel elevator last week, possibly by a Holocaust denier who claims to have stalked Wiesel for weeks, police said Friday.
Wiesel, 78, was at the Argent Hotel on Feb. 1 for an interfaith conference when he was confronted around 6:30 p.m. in an elevator by a man insisting that he wanted to interview the author, said police spokesman Sgt. Neville Gittens.
Wiesel said he would do the interview in the lobby of the Third Street hotel, but the man insisted on going to Wiesel's room. The man then stopped the elevator at the sixth floor, dragged Wiesel out and tried to force him into a room on that floor.
"That's when (Wiesel) started yelling," Gittens said. The man fled, and Wiesel went down to the lobby and called police.
Wiesel was not injured. He decided to leave the conference on "Facing Violence: Justice, Religion and Conflict Resolution," and police escorted him to the airport.
On Tuesday, a man identifying himself Eric Hunt and claiming to be the attacker posted an account of the incident on a virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Israel Web site. The account matches the description of the attack that police later released.
"After ensuring no women would be traumatized by what I had to do (I had been trailing Wiesel for weeks), I stopped the elevator at the sixth floor," Hunt wrote. "I said I wanted to interview him. He protested, grabbed at his chest as if he was having a heart attack. He then screamed HELP! HELP! at the top of his lungs.
"I told him, 'Why, you don't want people to know the truth?' " Hunt wrote. "After pulling him about fifteen feet out of the elevator ... I decided that it was time for me to go."
Gittens said that police were aware of the Web site and that they had a suspect in mind, but would not confirm that they were looking for the person who posted the account online.
"We're not commenting on statements made on the Web site," Gittens said.
The site has articles on a number of topics, some of which repeat centuries-old slurs against Jews. It is registered to Andrew Winkler of Sydney, who also writes on the site. Phone calls and an e-mail to Winkler were not returned Friday.
Wiesel did not return calls made to his offices in New York and at Boston University, where he is a professor in the religion and philosophy departments.
Wiesel, a native of Romania, was sent by the Nazis in 1944 to Auschwitz, where his mother and three sisters were killed. His father died on a forced march to Buchenwald, another concentration camp, three months before the camp was liberated in 1945.
Wiesel has written more than 40 books based on his Holocaust experiences. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter named him to lead the effort to build the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 1986, Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Hunt said in his posting that he had intended to corner Wiesel and force him to admit that the Holocaust never happened.
"I had planned to bring Wiesel to my hotel room, where he would truthfully answer my questions regarding the fact that his non-fiction Holocaust memoir, 'Night,' is almost entirely fictitious," Hunt wrote on the site.
E-mail Matthai Chakko Kuruvila at mkuruvila@sfchronicle.com.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/09/BAGC2O21IL4.DTL
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Poland honors woman who saved 2,500 Jews
Sendler, 97, was tortured by Nazis, but refused to disclose children's names
The Associated Press
Updated: 9:06 a.m. ET March 14, 2007
WARSAW, Poland - A 97-year-old woman credited with saving 2,500 Jews during the Holocaust was honored by parliament Wednesday at a ceremony during which Poland's president said she deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
Irena Sendler, who lives in a nursing home in Warsaw, was too frail to attend the special session in which members of the Senate unanimously approved a resolution honoring her and the Polish underground Council for Assisting Jews.
The group's members, mostly Roman Catholics, risked their own lives to save Jews from the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Sendler was cited for organizing the "rescue of the most defenseless victims of the Nazi ideology — the Jewish children."
President Lech Kacyzinski said in an address to senators that Sendler is a "great hero who can be justly named for the Nobel Peace Prize."
Sendler led about 20 helpers who smuggled Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto to safety between 1940 and 1943, placing them in Polish families, convents or orphanages.
Tortured by Nazis
She wrote the children's names on slips of paper and buried them in jars in a neighbor's yard as a record that could help locate their parents after the war. The Nazis arrested her in 1943, but she refused — despite repeated torture — to reveal their names.
Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being summarily shot, along with family members.
"I think she's a great lady, very courageous, and I think she's a model for the whole international community," Israeli Ambassador David Peleg said after the ceremony. "I think that her courage is a very special one."
In 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial awarded Sendler one of its first medals given to people who saved Jews, the so-called "Righteous Among the Nations."
She was given the honor in 1983, after Poland's Communist authorities finally agreed to allow her to travel abroad.
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NY Times
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By RICHARD J. EVANS
Published: June 24, 2007
In 1997, Saul Friedländer published “The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939,” the first of his projected two-volume history of “Nazi Germany and the Jews.” In the introduction to that volume, he announced his intention of “establishing a historical account of the Holocaust in which the policies of the perpetrators, the attitudes of surrounding society and the world of the victims could be addressed within an integrated framework.” Such a framework has indeed been missing from most historical accounts of this most difficult and challenging of subjects. They have focused either on the processes of decision-making and their implementation or on the world of suffering and death experienced by the victims. Friedländer’s first volume stood out from most other work in this field because it successfully combined both of these aspects. And his second volume does so as well. It now establishes itself as the standard historical work on Nazi Germany’s mass murder of Europe’s Jews.
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Jean-François Martin
THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION
Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.
By Saul Friedländer.
870 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $39.95.
And yet “The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945” is no ordinary academic book. True, Friedländer seems to have read virtually every printed source and secondary work on his vast subject in English, German and French. His judgments are scrupulous and levelheaded. And he treats the historical controversies that have raged around so many of the topics he covers with untiring fair-mindedness. He writes without a trace of polemic or of facile retrospective moralizing. The book meticulously satisfies every requirement of professional historical writing.
What raises “The Years of Extermination” to the level of literature, however, is the skilled interweaving of individual testimony with the broader depiction of events. Friedländer never lets the reader forget the human and personal meanings of the historical processes he is describing. By and large, he avoids the sometimes unreliable testimony of memoirs for the greater immediacy of contemporary diaries and letters, though he also makes good use of witness statements at postwar trials. The result is an account of unparalleled vividness and power that reads like a novel.
Friedländer’s witnesses run into scores if not hundreds, and range from well-known figures like Anne Frank and Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Jewish administration of the Warsaw Ghetto, to more obscure individuals like Mihail Sebastian, a Romanian writer in his 30s, who recorded the descent of his country into its own barbarous version of genocide, and Raymond-Raoul Lambert, an Alsatian veteran of the French Army in World War I. Their haunting words chronicle the horror and disbelief of European Jewry as it slid down through discrimination and persecution to deportation and death. “If my life ends,” the Warsaw religious teacher Chaim Kaplan wrote not long before he was taken away to perish in the gas chambers of Treblinka, “what will become of my diary?” Like many others cited in this book, it survived not least by chance, having been smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto into the hands of the Polish underground resistance movement, from where it eventually found its way to New York and publication in the 1960s. The writings of diarists like Kaplan, committed to paper in conditions of terrible adversity, provide much of the human dimension of this remarkable book: they did not write in vain.
These people were the victims, Friedländer argues, not of anonymous processes generated in the machinery of Nazi and SS administration, but of one man above all: Adolf Hitler. Friedländer is critical of the recent, voluminous literature, mainly by a younger generation of German historians, that attempts to depict the extermination program as the outcome of coldly rational processes of decision-making by administrators, “experts” and officials in the German-occupied areas of Eastern Europe, who decided that the Jews would have to be killed so that the limited food supplies available in the area could go to the Germans, or to make room for German settlers or Germans left homeless by Allied bombing raids.
Such arguments do not explain the manic obsessiveness with which Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the man in charge of implementing the extermination program, tracked down Jews to arrest and kill, even traveling to Germany’s ally Finland to try and persuade its government to surrender that country’s tiny Jewish population, which was of no objective economic or strategic importance to Germany at all. Nor do these arguments do justice to the virulent language of hatred used by the Nazi leaders, Hitler and Goebbels in particular, when they spoke, as they did almost unceasingly, of the Jews.
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Friedländer devotes a good deal of space to quoting Hitler at length, showing clearly his personal obsession with the forces of international Jewry that, in his mind, lay behind the actions of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. It was the Jews, he believed, who had fomented the war launched (in reality by himself) in September 1939. As the United States committed itself ever more firmly to the Allied side in the summer and fall of 1941, Hitler delivered one tirade after another against the Jewish conspiracy he thought lay behind Roosevelt’s policy. It was at this point that he escalated his persecution of the Jews first to deportation to the East and then to mass murder and total extermination.
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THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION
Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.
By Saul Friedländer.
870 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $39.95.
The German defeat by the Red Army at the Battle of Stalingrad in February 1943, blamed by Hitler yet again on the Jews, raised his anti-Semitic fury to fresh heights. The Jews, he declared, were driven by their innate racial instinct to subvert civilization everywhere. “The modern peoples have no option left,” he said in May, as the genocide was reaching its height, “but to eliminate the Jews.” Millions of entirely innocent and largely unsuspecting people across Europe paid for such violent fantasies with their lives.
The diaries and letters cited in the book show graphically how even as the prospective Jewish victims began to fear the worst, they continued to hope for the best; only a small minority found their way into hiding or resistance. As for the mass of non-Jewish citizens in Germany and other parts of Europe, indifference was the commonest reaction. Police and other state officials in most occupied countries cooperated willingly in the roundups and deportations; in some parts of Europe, notably Poland, Romania and Croatia, native anti-Semitism made its own brutal contribution to the genocide.
Friedländer’s narrative sweeps across an entire continent, encompassing every country affected by the Nazi drive for domination. In Bulgaria and Slovakia, popular outrage at the genocide forced governments initially willing to collaborate to change their stance. Leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in a number of countries played a part in articulating such feelings, and individual priests in Germany and elsewhere sometimes paid for their courageous opposition with their lives. But Friedländer makes it equally clear that many clerics, particularly senior church leaders who feared that open criticism of the genocide would bring down the wrath of the Nazis on them, remained silent and inactive, except where Jewish converts to Christianity were concerned. In some areas — particularly Croatia — nationalist clergymen egged on the murder squads with their own brand of religiously inspired anti-Semitism. Pope Pius XII, the subject of an earlier book by Friedländer, does not come out well, but what strikes the reader yet again is the exemplary evenhandedness with which Friedländer weighs the arguments on both sides in an area that has become more controversial than most in recent years.
The book’s chapters are organized chronologically, each covering a period of several months. This has the disadvantage of breaking up many of the narratives, so that, for example, if one wants to follow what happened in the Netherlands, or in Romania, or even in Germany itself, one has to search through several different chapters to piece the story together. But for the reader who persists from beginning to end, this structure has the benefit of enabling one to see the connections between what was happening at any one time in different parts of the Continent, to link it to the state of play of military affairs during the war (which Friedländer usefully sketches in at various points) and to follow the slow development of Nazi policy and its implementation as it unfolded over time.
In a celebrated exchange with the German historian Martin Broszat many years ago, Friedländer argued that, faced with such events, no historian could or should remain neutral. Born in Prague into a Jewish family in 1932, Friedländer grew up in hiding in France during the war, and his personal history gives him an unusually strong identification with his subject. Broszat, who had spent much of his career compiling or overseeing expert witness reports in German war crimes prosecutions and had a vested interest in preserving the appearance of neutrality, disagreed.
The practical consequences of Friedländer’s stance are apparent: the personal testimonies of Hitler’s Jewish victims create an overwhelming impression of suffering and cast a lurid light on the policies and actions of the Nazis and their helpers. The downside of this is that the experiences of the perpetrators are presented perhaps less fully than they might have been. Their testimony is generally used to describe the conditions they created rather than (with the obvious exception of Hitler himself) to chart their personal beliefs, motives or impressions. The attitudes and behavior of the German people also remain unexplained, and are presented in a sweeping and undifferentiated way that does scant justice to the nuances and complexities that recent historical work has uncovered.
And the book’s focus on the sufferings of the Jews pushes the broader context of Nazi racial policy — which includes the mass murder of millions of Soviet prisoners of war, the systematic extermination of the Polish intelligentsia, the killing of about 200,000 mentally ill or handicapped Germans, the annihilation of a large part of Europe’s Gypsies — possibly too far into the background. For as a good deal of recent work has shown, the Third Reich’s genocidal policies toward the Jews have to be understood as part of a larger policy aimed at the ethnic reshaping of Europe. Comparisons with these other victims would have made it evident that the Jews occupied a special place in the exterminatory mentality of the Nazis; they were perceived not as a regional obstacle but as a global threat, not as inferior beings like insects but as powerful enemies, whose very existence anywhere was a terrible danger to the future of the German race.
Still, to have broadened the focus too much would have made this already very lengthy and complex book almost unmanageable. Friedländer succeeds in binding together the many different strands of his story with a sure touch. He has written a masterpiece that will endure.
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NY Times
By CRAIG S. SMITH
Published: July 12, 2007
KRAKOW, Poland — There is a curious thing happening in this old country, scarred by Nazi death camps, raked by pogroms and blanketed by numbing Soviet sterility: Jewish culture is beginning to flourish again.
“Jewish style” restaurants are serving up platters of pirogis, klezmer bands are playing plaintive Oriental melodies, derelict synagogues are gradually being restored. Every June, a festival of Jewish culture here draws thousands of people to sing Jewish songs and dance Jewish dances. The only thing missing, really, are Jews.
“It’s a way to pay homage to the people who lived here, who contributed so much to Polish culture,” said Janusz Makuch, founder and director of the annual festival and himself the son of a Catholic family.
Jewish communities are gradually reawakening across Eastern Europe as Jewish schools introduce a new generation to rituals and beliefs suppressed by the Nazis and then by Communism. At summer camps, thousands of Jewish teenagers from across the former Soviet bloc gather for crash courses in Jewish culture, celebrating Passover, Hanukkah and Purim — all in July.
Even in Poland, there are now two Jewish schools, synagogues in several major cities and at least four rabbis.
But with relatively few Jews, Jewish culture in Poland is being embraced and promoted by the young and the fashionable.
Before Hitler’s horror, Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe, about 3.5 million souls. One in 10 Poles was Jewish.
More than three million Polish Jews died in the Holocaust. Postwar pogroms and a 1968 anti-Jewish purge forced out most of those who survived.
Probably about 70 percent of the world’s European Jews, or Ashkenazi, can trace their ancestry to Poland — thanks to a 14th-century king, Casimir III, the Great, who drew Jewish settlers from across Europe with his vow to protect them as “people of the king.” But there are only 10,000 self-described Jews living today in this country of 39 million.
More than the people disappeared. The food, the music, the dance, the literature, the theater, the painting, the architecture — in short, the culture — of Jewish life in Poland disappeared, too. Poland’s cultural fabric lost some of its richest hues.
“Imagine what it would mean for the culture of New York if all Spanish-speaking New Yorkers disappeared,” said Ann Kirschner, whose book, “Sala’s Gift,” recounts her mother’s survival through five years in Nazi labor camps.
Sometime in the 1970s, as a generation born under Communism came of age, people began to look back with longing to the days when Poland was less gray, less monocultural. They found inspiration in the period between the world wars, which was the Poland of the Jews.
“You cannot have genocide and then have people live as if everything is normal,” said Konstanty Gebert, founder of a Polish-Jewish monthly, Midrasz. “It’s like when you lose a limb. Poland is suffering from Jewish phantom pain.”
Interest in Jewish culture became an identifying factor for people unhappy with the status quo and looking for ways to rebel, whether against the government or their parents. “The word ‘Jew’ still cuts conversation at the dinner table,” Mr. Gebert said. “People freeze.”
The revival of Jewish culture is, in its way, a progressive counterpoint to a conservative nationalist strain in Polish politics that still espouses anti-Semitic views. Some people see it as a generation’s effort to rise above the country’s dark past in order to convincingly condemn it.
“We’re trying to give muscle to our moral right to judge history,” said Mr. Makuch, the festival organizer.
Mr. Makuch was 14 when an elderly man in his hometown, Pulawy, told him that before the war half of the town was Jewish. “It was the first time I had ever heard the word ‘Jew,’ ” Mr. Makuch recalled.
He became a self-described meshugeneh, Yiddish for “crazy person,” fascinated with all things Jewish. When he moved to Krakow to study, he spent his free time with the city’s dwindling Jewish community. There were about 300 Jews, compared with a prewar population of about 70,000. There are even fewer today.
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While few Jews have returned to the city, Jewish culture has, largely because of Mr. Makuch. In 1988, together with Krzysztof Gierat, he organized the city’s first Festival of Jewish Culture, a one-day affair in a theater that held only 100 people. In 1994, it became an annual event. There are now smaller festivals in Warsaw, Wroclaw and Tarnow.
In Poland, a Jewish Revival Thrives — Minus Jews The Krakow festival has helped revitalize the city’s old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, which deteriorated after the end of the war.
Today, quaint carved wooden figurines of orthodox Jews and miniature brass menorahs are sold in the district’s curio shops and souvenir stands. Klezmer bands play in its restaurants, though few of the musicians are Jewish.
Along one short street, faux 1930s Jewish merchant signs hang above the storefronts in an attempt to recreate the feel of the neighborhood before the war. Many Jews are offended by the commercialization of their culture in a country almost universally associated with its near annihilation. Others argue that there is something deeper taking place in Poland as the country heals from the double wounds of Nazi and Communist domination.
“There is commercialism, but that is foam on the surface,” Mr. Gebert said. “This is one of the deepest ethical transformations that our country is undergoing. This is Poland rediscovering its Jewish soul.”
This year, the festival had almost 200 events, including concerts and lectures and workshops in everything from Hebrew calligraphy to cooking. More than 20,000 people attended, few of whom were Jewish.
At a drumming workshop in Jozef Dietl primary school, Shlomo Bar, from Israel, led an elderly woman, a young boy in a Pokémon T-shirt and shorts, a young man in dreadlocks and two dozen other, mostly non-Jewish participants in a class on Sephardic rhythms.
Outside, Witek Ngo The, born in Krakow to Vietnamese immigrants, worked as a festival volunteer, directing visitors to other workshops in nearby schools.
In one, Benzion Miller, wearing a black yarmulke, white T-shirt, black suspenders and pants, taught 40 people Hasidic songs, a wood-and-silver crucifix high on the wall behind him.
Half of the festival’s $800,000 budget comes from the national and local governments. The rest is contributed by private donors, primarily from the United States, including the Philadelphia-based Friends of the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival.
Tad Taube, a businessman whose Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture is one of the festival’s biggest donors, was born in Krakow and left shortly before the war.
Together with other donors, Mr. Taube’s foundation has spent more than $10 million to help revive Jewish culture in Poland. He attended the recent groundbreaking for a Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, another effort he has supported.
Like many people involved in the resurgence of Jewish culture in Poland, Mr. Taube said he believed that it was not only important for Poland, but for Jews around the world.
Chris Schwarz, founder and director of Krakow’s Galicia Jewish Museum, agreed, saying, “Rather than coming here just to mourn, we should come with a great sense of dignity, a great sense of pride for what our ancestors accomplished.”
For others, the celebration of Jewish culture in a city just an hour away from Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where a million Jews died, is a triumph of history.
“The fact that you can walk around Krakow with a lanyard around your neck that reads ‘Jewish Culture Festival’ is an extraordinary thing,” Ms. Kirschner said.
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I didn't know this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haym_Salomon
http://jewishworldreview.com/jewish/salomon.asp
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Another one of those darn Jewish Bankers! :-D
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And he was only 45 when he died.
I am surprised 800K is only worth 22 million today. I remember seeing a restaurant menu once which dated back to the late 1700s.
A recall a steak sold for 2 cents.
Anyway:
http://www.alaskacoinexchange.com/Stamps%2010/10c%20Haym%20Salomon.jpg
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Yeah, terrible of us, , , :roll: :lol:
Going back to some basics here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM0HHYNVPKY&mode=related&search=
Concentration Camps #1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvViOT_Aqqc&NR=1
#2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ObmI8xfk7Y&mode=related&search=
#3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=be-F9KyxaFs&mode=related&search=
#4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuVmS1tMXZE&mode=related&search=
#5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no8RaAEkuWc&mode=related&search=
#6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47GOtpV9I6E&mode=related&search=
#7
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y95nCydzC-s&mode=related&search=
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Jewish resistance against the Nazis:
http://www.davekopel.com/2A/Foreign/Armed-resistance-to-the-holocaust.pdf'
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http://www.thememriblog.org/blog_personal/en/2269.htm
Iranian Daily: Harry Potter, Billion-Dollar Zionist Project
In an article, the Iranian daily Kayhan, which is identified with Iranian Supreme Leader 'Ali Khamenei, criticized Iran's Culture and Islamic Guidance Ministry for approving the distribution of the new book in the "Harry Potter" series.
The paper said that "Harry Potter" was a Zionist project in which billions of dollars had been invested in order to disrupt the minds of young people.
Source: Kayhan, Iran, July 26, 2007
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I don't want to sound like a dick here and I mean this with all due respect but it really gets my gas going when ppl talk about the holocaust and the jew's. Hundreds of thousands and other millions of other Types of ppl died in the camps...Gypsies, Poles and Germans that were against hitler( and many more). My GrandMother's Brother had to flee germany for writting a undergound paper talking sh1t on nazi germany,..He was warned by a friend who was a Gestapo that he was going to get a visit..He knew what was going to happen and he then contacted a relative that lived here in the states...They sent for him and he was flown out..My grandmother on the other hand was 13 years old and was for the Nazi's..She did not know anything of death camps or any of that stuff..But back to the point..I have a friend who's grandfather was put to death in a death camp and he was from Romania..He was thrown into cars with thousands of other Romanians who were carted off not even to work..They took them right to the shooting range and they were the targets and these ppl were not Romanian jews..This is after the fact Nazi were meeting with the cathoilc church and we all know how the Catholic Church felt about gypsies though out the ages and the Jews...
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y56/TheVorpalOne/hitler19.jpg
I tend to feel that most of the media and most jewish americans never tend to mention those other "Ethnic" groups or handicapped persons that were put to death..
Also the fact the the human "Logs" that section 742 ( I think thats what they were called) what those Japanese scientist did to captured american soldiers, Chinese civilians or the Black ppl that the experimented on..I might also add that they did most of their experiments on black ppl because the Japanese considered them lower then a dog and had no mercy when testing on them
The holocaust brought death and misery to alot of different ppl..
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I also forgot to mention that I HATE Tyrants and also I Apologize for my Internet sentence structure...
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http://www.aish.com/literacy/jewishhistory/Napoleon_And_The_Jews.asp
Some interesting history about Napoleon and the Jews.
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Max:
Yes of course there were other groups that were hit hard as well. That said, the title of this thread means that the focus will tend to be on Anti-semitism.
Marc
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Fearing the Nazis again
Rachel Kane is among the aging Holocaust survivors whose postwar resilience is crumbling under the weight of long-buried memories.
By Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 23, 2007
Photo Gallery
Nazi memories return
For more than half a century, Rachel Kane kept the memories at bay.
There were her daughters to think of, twins born in a displaced persons camp in the aftermath of the second World War. Kane didn't want to burden them with tales of the Holocaust, of a husband shot to death by the Nazis, a baby who starved to death in the forest, an extended family wiped out in a mass execution.
She didn't explain the nightmares that woke her, screaming, in the long string of cramped apartments the family called home after resettling in Detroit and then Los Angeles.
Instead, the university-educated Hebrew teacher who spoke seven languages regaled her daughters with stories about her "beautiful life" before Hitler's armies stormed Poland, successfully locking the war years away until 1998.
That was when her second husband died. When she began to lose her battle with dementia. When she became convinced that the soldiers were coming for her, as they'd done so many years before.
Lying in her room at the Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aging in Reseda, the elderly woman with the soft white hair and bright blue eyes "was seeing Nazis," recounted daughter Esther Kane Meyers. "She was hearing things. I came and sat with her every day. It was the most painful thing I'd ever seen. It was all happening, right there."
Watching 50 years of strength crumble under the weight of a long-buried trauma made Kane's family sad and angry. What they did not know at the time was that her experience was not uncommon among aging victims of Nazi brutality.
In recent years, a body of research has sprung from the lives of Holocaust survivors like Kane as caregivers and mental health professionals work to understand and alleviate the pain of old age and remembered trauma. But when she first began to relive her past, the territory was largely uncharted.
"There has never been a group of genocide survivors live to this age in history," said Paula David, editor of the manual "Caring for Aging Holocaust Survivors." Their experiences offer a rare window into the confluence of trauma and aging.
One clear lesson from this shrinking group, whose median age is more than 70, is that "resilience ages, too," David said, "and diminishes along with hearing and vision."
The Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aging has the largest population of Holocaust survivors in the West, according to nursing home officials. There were 63 such patients at latest count, although that number could rise to nearly 90 when a new building opens later this summer.
Although every Holocaust survivor is different, Kane's end-of-life experiences are a good illustration of the kinds of things they can go through, said Chaya Berci, the Jewish Home's executive director of nursing.
As people age and their grasp on the present weakens, events from the distant past can seem as real as anything unfolding today. For those who lived through severe early trauma, the memories that come rushing back are often of their most harrowing experiences.
Mental health professionals debate whether the symptoms they see in some aging Holocaust survivors stem from classic trauma or other conditions, such as an incomplete mourning process, said Allen Glicksman, director of research at the Philadelphia Corp. for Aging, who has studied the experiences of Nazi victims in long-term care.
Psychologist Marla Martin met with Kane regularly over the course of nearly three years as the woman's depression and anxiety bloomed into a psychotic break fraught with paranoia and auditory hallucinations.
Even pleasant events sometimes took on dark overtones for Kane, as the voices in her head reminded her of all she had witnessed and lost.
In October 1998, Martin wrote in her case notes that Kane's "daughter Esther gave her two nice blankets, and this started a problem for her. She was feeling guilt because of the Holocaust and the voices telling her to share the blankets. How could she have two nice blankets?"
Martin has been treating Holocaust survivors at the Los Angeles Jewish Home for 15 years. By the time she started seeing Kane, she had already observed that a "sizable minority" of the strongest survivors dwelt daily on past horrors.
And a psychotic break like Kane's is "not unusual," she said. "People who have had really acute trauma can re-experience it, feel that they're there."
Kane's first husband was shot to death after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. Pregnant and alone in an occupied city, she fled to her family's home in the small town of Byten. But the soldiers soon reached there, too, and forced Jews into a cramped ghetto.
After Kane gave birth, her father, a respected rabbi, begged her to leave. It was the only way, he told her, to avert disaster. So she took her infant daughter into the nearby forest and joined the resistance fighters.
The partisans were constantly on the run, sabotaging Nazi efforts, helping Jews escape from the ghettos, scavenging for food. Kane survived, but the baby died of starvation. Her name was Freidele, "joy" in Yiddish.
More than half a century later, as Kane's dementia worsened along with her health, Martin said, the elderly woman became increasingly focused on controlling her environment.
The shades on her window had to be just so. The leg supports on her wheelchair were never quite right. The more panicky and paranoid she felt, the tighter her clothes seemed to be.
"This was beyond the normal kind of reactions that people have adjusting to aging," Martin said. "All of the loss of control she would have had in the Holocaust and what she had lost, that was reawakened."
Kane's failing vision meant much more than not being able to read, Martin said; it robbed her of an important bridge to prewar happiness, "to her loving father, a rabbi, who shared his wall of books with her." A large-print prayer book helped.
She had trouble eating because of denture problems and depended on pureed foods. She felt that she was starving -- a common trigger for Holocaust memories -- and began to lose weight. Voices in her head reminded her of her first daughter's death by starvation.
When Kane's psychotic break began, there was no manual to help guide nursing homes and family members as they cared for aging Holocaust survivors.
Early on in Kane's breakdown, her caregivers recommended that she be transferred to a psychiatric unit at UCLA. But Meyers fought hard to keep her elderly mother in her own room -- and succeeded.
It was a critical lesson for administrators at the Jewish Home about the importance of familiar surroundings for Holocaust survivors and other dementia patients; the result is a psychiatric unit that is scheduled to open in the home's new building.
Kane's experiences point out a conundrum: Though nursing homes are often the best choice for emotionally and physically frail Holocaust survivors, institutional life -- even in the most caring facilities -- can be a constant reminder of wartime horror.
Mundane experiences -- showers, doctor visits, hunger pangs, lack of privacy -- can trigger memories of concentration camps.
"Caring for Aging Holocaust Survivors: A Practice Manual" lists nearly 40 such emotional catalysts.
The manual was published three years ago; it could have gone to press much earlier, said editor David, but "every time we talked to anyone, the list kept growing."
Lack of privacy is one reminder of life in concentration camps or in hiding, when "there was no privacy for the Jews," the manual notes, "and at any given moment the world as they knew it could be turned inside out."
Standing in line for treatment or service also can cause extreme anxiety in survivors who were forced to line up for food rations, roll calls, deportations -- even death.
As much as possible at the Los Angeles Jewish Home, Holocaust survivors are given private accommodations. Starting in 2006, residents ate restaurant-style meals in bright dining rooms, where the food comes out one course at a time and is tailored for individual health needs.
Personal hygiene is another trigger for many camp survivors, who watched as loved ones were promised showers but herded into gas chambers instead.
Caregivers can offer baths as an option, but that, too, can be an imperfect solution, because some of the Nazis' victims were placed in tubs of dry ice for hypothermia experiments.
One major point in "Caring for Aging Holocaust Survivors" is that what can cause distress in one person may be perfectly innocuous to another. It's a lesson David learned firsthand at the Baycrest Geriatric Health Care System in Toronto, where she is senior social worker and coordinates the Holocaust resource program.
"We have one gentleman who watched his entire family marched into a gas chamber. He was held back so he could pick up their corpses in a wheelbarrow and take them to the oven," she recounted. "But his family arranged for him to have a daily shower. He feels thoroughly refreshed by it."
Certain realities of nursing home life simply cannot be avoided, David said. For some, "like the impaired person who we cannot convince that they are safe and we are not the enemy," institutional life means ongoing trauma, and individual attention is the only salve.
That is why the international organization that spearheads reparations to Nazi victims worldwide allocates millions of dollars annually for home care and is pushing the German government for more funding.
In a 2005 opinion piece in the Jewish newspaper the Forward, Roman Kent, an Auschwitz survivor and senior officer with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, called home care "one of our most pressing needs."
"We survivors are adamant about remaining in our own homes rather than entering a nursing home," Kent wrote. "To someone who endured incarceration by the Nazis, the prospect of institutionalization is frightening. It triggers memories and even induces panic."
So far, the German government has allocated only about $50 million for home care services, an amount nowhere near enough to assist the nearly 700,000 surviving Nazi victims around the world, more than 120,000 of whom live in the United States.
And some of the frailest survivors are simply better cared for in a nursing home, said Susie Forer-Dehrey, associate executive director of Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles. "For some people, including Holocaust survivors. . . with a psychotic break or Alzheimer's," she said, "it probably is the best place to be."
Today, Kane is 96 and one of the oldest surviving Nazi victims in the U.S. She has end-stage Alzheimer's disease. She no longer speaks and is severely hard of hearing. Still, her caregivers try hard to keep her comfortable, secure and free of reminders of her painful past.
Every morning she is carefully dressed and helped into her wheelchair. Caregivers at the Jewish Home roll her to meals in a second-floor dining room, where pureed food is gently spooned into her mouth. She can neither chew well nor feed herself. She naps a lot.
Exercise classes are held in the same dining room, after the breakfast dishes have been cleared and the tables pushed to the walls. Frank Sinatra croons from the stereo. Kane squeezes a soft yellow ball in her weathered hands. The instructor slowly counts to nine: "One more, Rachel. Very good."
And every Friday afternoon, there is Shabbat, the service that has shaped Kane's life for the better part of a century, giving her strength and solace in the darkest times.
Meyers wheels her mother down to the multipurpose room, where two electric candles are lighted to signal the Sabbath's official start. Wine is poured into plastic medicine cups. The challah is broken and passed around by hands sheathed in protective gloves. Prayers are intoned.
Meyers repeats the sacred words into a small black apparatus she holds in her hand like a deck of cards. It amplifies the prayer and sends it through a headset directly into her mother's ears.
Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha-olam. Praised are You, Lord our God, King of the universe.
maria.laganga@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/la-me-rachel23aug23,0,3005247,full.story?coll=la-home-center
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Rabbi stabbed on street in Frankfurt, police say
The Associated Press
Published: September 8, 2007
FRANKFURT, Germany: A 42-year-old rabbi was stabbed in the stomach by another man on a Frankfurt street in what appeared to be a spontaneous attack, police said Saturday.
The rabbi underwent surgery after the Friday night attack and appears to be out of danger, police said.
The rabbi, whose name was not disclosed, was walking with two other people when they encountered the assailant and two women, a police statement said.
The man, whom witnesses described as possibly Arab, spoke to the rabbi — who was wearing a Jewish head-covering — in what sounded like Arabic.
The rabbi didn't understand, and the man threatened in German to kill him, then stabbed him once, the statement said. The attacker fled and the women who were with him ran in different directions.
Police said there were no indications that the man had planned his attack.
Roland Koch, the governor of the German state of Hesse, deplored the stabbing as "a perfidious deed that we can only view with horror and indignation and most strongly condemn."
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070915/COMMENTARY/109150003/1008
Scapegoats yet again
Victor Davis Hanson
September 15, 2007
Who recently said: "These Jews started 19 Crusades. The 19th was World War I. Why? Only to build Israel." Some holdover Nazi?
Hardly. It was former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan of Turkey, a NATO ally. He went on to claim that the Jews — whom he refers to as "bacteria" — controlled China, India and Japan, and ran the United States.
Who alleged: "The Arabs who were involved in September 11 [2001] cooperated with the Zionists, actually. It was a cooperation. They gave them the perfect excuse to denounce all Arabs." A conspiracy nut? Actually, it was former Democratic U.S. Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota. He denounced Israel on a Hezbollah-owned television station, adding: "I marveled at the Hezbollah resistance to Israel.... It was a marvel of organization, of courage and bravery."
And finally, who claimed at a U.N.-sponsored conference that democratic Israel was "much worse" than the former apartheid South Africa and that it "undermines the international community's reaction to global warming"? A radical environmentalist wacko? Again, no. It was Clare Short, a member of the British Parliament and Tony Blair's international development secretary.
A new virulent strain of the old anti-Semitism is spreading worldwide. This hate — of a magnitude not seen in more than 70 years — is not just espoused by Iran's loony president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or radical jihadists. The latest anti-Semitism is also now mouthed by world leaders and sophisticated politicians and academics. Their loathing often masquerades as "anti-Zionism" or "legitimate" criticism of Israel. But the venom exclusively reserved for the Jewish state betrays existential hatred.
Israel is always lambasted for entering homes in the West Bank to look for Hamas terrorists and using too much force. But last week the world snoozed when the Lebanese army bombarded and then crushed the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, which harbored Islamic terrorists.
The world has long objected to Jewish settlers buying up land in the West Bank. Yet Hezbollah, flush with Iranian money, is now purchasing large tracts in southern Lebanon for military purposes and purging them of non-Shi'ites.
Here at home, "neoconservative" has become synonymous with a supposed Jewish cabal of Washington insiders who hijacked U.S. policy to take us to war for Israel's interest. That our State Department is at the mercy of a Jewish lobby is the theme of a recent high-profile book by professors at Harvard University and the University of Chicago.
Yet when the United States bombed European and Christian Serbia to help Balkan Muslims, few critics claimed American Muslims had unduly swayed President Clinton. And charges of improper ethnic influence are rarely used to explain the billions in American aid given to nondemocratic Egypt, Jordan or the Palestinians — or the Saudi oil money that pours into U.S. universities.
The world likewise displays such a double standard. It seems to care little about the principle of so-called occupied land — whether in Cyprus or Tibet — unless Israel is the accused. Mass murdering in Cambodia, the Congo, Rwanda and Darfur has earned far fewer United Nations' resolutions of condemnation than supposed atrocities committed by Israel. A number of British academics are sponsoring a boycott of Israeli scholars but leave alone those from autocratic Iran, China and Cuba.
There are various explanations for the new anti-Semitism. For many abroad, attacking Jews and Israel is an indirect way of damning its main ally, the United States — by implying Americans are not entirely evil, just hoodwinked by those sneaky and far more evil Jews.
At home, there are obvious pragmatic considerations. Some Americans may find it makes more sense to damn a few million Israelis without oil than it does to offend Israel's adversaries in the Middle East, who number in the hundreds of millions and control nearly half the world's petroleum reserves.
Cowardice explains a lot. Libeling Israel won't earn someone a fatwa or a death sentence in the manner comparable criticism of Islam might. There are no Jewish suicide bombers in London, Madrid or Bali. This new face of anti-Semitism is so insidious because it is so well disguised, advanced by self-proclaimed diplomats and academics — and now embraced by the supposedly sophisticated left on university campuses.
When national, collective or personal aspirations are not met, it is far easier to blame someone or something rather than to look within for the source of the failure and frustration. More recently, someone must be blamed for getting terrorists (with oil and its profits behind them) mad at us.
That someone is — no surprise — once again Jews.
Victor Davis Hanson is a nationally syndicated columnist and a classicist and historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and author of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."
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The Moran Liability
Real friction is developing in Congress between one of Speaker Nancy Pelosi's top lieutenants and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. At issue are harshly critical comments made by Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia about the alleged influence of Jewish-Americans in government. Congressional Quarterly reports that Mr. Hoyer "stopped just short of calling [Mr. Moran] an anti-Semite and urged him to recant."
Mr. Moran is an ethically-challenged bully boy who represents the Washington D.C. suburbs of Arlington and Alexandria. He's notorious for not keeping his mouth under control. Last November, he bluntly told fellow Democrats who opposed Jack Murtha for majority leader -- Ms. Pelosi's preferred candidate -- that punishment would come to those who failed to toe the line: "We are entering an era where when the Speaker instructs you what to do you do it." (House Democrats ignored the threat and backed Mr. Hoyer instead.)
Mr. Moran's latest verbal belly flop involves remarks to the Jewish magazine Tikkun in which Mr. Moran called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) "the most powerful lobby and has pushed this [Iraq] war from the beginning. I don't think they represent the mainstream of American Jewish thinking at all, but because they are so well-organized, and their members are extraordinarily powerful -- most of them are quite wealthy -- they have been able to exert power."
Mr. Hoyer wasted no time noting that such language adopted "a canard that is absolutely not true, that the Jewish community controls the press, media, government and other institutions. It has been used by those who are anti-Semitic for a very long period of time."
But this is not the first time Mr. Moran has expressed such views. Shortly after the war began, the congressman whipped up an anti-war rally by saying: "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this. The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going, and I think they should."
When will Democrats finally discipline Mr. Moran, easily one of their most embarrassing members? Frankly, when will the news media abandon its obsession with Senator Larry Craig's bathroom footwork and report on Mr. Moran's record? It's not hard to find him, even when he's home. Just leave Washington, D.C., cross the Potomac River and take an extreme left for a few miles until you reach Alexandria.
Political Journal WSJ
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It used to be that the crazy right was the core of anti-semitism in the US, today it's the allegedly mainstream left of the Daily Kos/Huffington Post/Jimmy "The Dhimmi" Carter.
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The Sword of Wood
retold by Doug Lipman
There was once a king who loved nothing better than to go out alone in the clothes of a commoner. He wanted to meet the ordinary people of his kingdom--to learn their way of life, and especially their way of thinking about the world. One night, this king found himself walking in the poorest, narrowest street of the city. This was the street of the Jews. He heard a song in the distance. The king thought, "A song sung in this place of poverty must be a lament!" But as he got closer, he could hear the true character of the song: it was a song of pride! "Bai-yum-dum, bai-yum-bai, yum-bai, bai...."
The king was drawn to the source of the song: the smallest, humblest shack on that street. He knocked on the door. "Is a stranger welcome here?"
The voice from within said, "A stranger is G-d's gift. Come in!"
In the dim light inside, the king saw a man sitting on the only piece of furniture, a wooden box. When the king came in, the man stood up and sat on the floor, offering the king the crate for a seat.
"Well, my friend," the king asked, "what do you do to earn a living?"
"Oh, I am a cobbler."
"You have a shop where you make shoes?"
"Oh, no, I could not afford a shop. I take my box of tools--you are sitting on it--to the side of the road. There I repair shoes for people as they need them."
"You cobble shoes by the side of the road? Can you make enough money that way?"
The cobbler spoke with both humility and pride. "Every day, I make just enough money to buy food for that day."
"Just enough for one day? Aren't you afraid that one day you won't make enough, and then you'll go hungry?"
"Blessed be G-d, day by day."
The next day, the king determined to put this man's philosophy to the test. He issued a proclamation that anyone wishing to cobble shoes by the side of the road must purchase a license for fifty pieces of gold.
That night, the king returned to the street of the Jews. Again he heard a song in the distance, and thought, "This time, the cobbler will be singing a different tune." But when the king neared the house he heard the cobbler sing the same song. Worse, it was even longer, with a new phrase that soared joyfully: "Ah, ha-ah-ah, ah-hah, ah-hah, ah-yai."
The king knocked on the door. "Oh, my friend, I heard about that wicked king and his proclamation. I was so worried about you. Were you able to eat today?"
"Oh, I was angry when I heard I could not make my living in the way I always have. But I knew: I am entitled to make a living and I will find a way. As I stood there saying those very words to myself, a group of people passed me by. When I asked them where they were going, they told me: into the forest to gather fire wood. Every day, they bring back wood to sell as kindling. When I asked if I could join them, they said, 'There is a whole forest out there. Come along!'
"And so I gathered fire wood. At the end of the day, I was able to sell it for just enough money to buy food for today."
The king sputtered. "Just enough for one day? What about tomorrow? What about next week?"
"Blessed be G-d, day by day."
The next day, the king again returned to his throne, and issued a new proclamation: anyone caught gathering firewood in the royal forest would be inducted into the royal guard. For good measure, he issued another: no new members of the royal guard would be paid for forty days.
That night, the king returned to the street of the Jews. Amazed, he heard the same song! But now, it had a third part that was militant and determined: "Dee, dee, dee, dee-dee, dee-dee, dah...."
The king knocked on the door. "Cobbler, what happened to you today?"
"They made me stand at attention all day in the royal guard! They issued me a sword and a scabbard. But then they told me I wouldn't be paid for forty days!"
"Oh, my friend, I bet you wish now that you had saved some money."
"Well, let me tell you what I did. At the end of the day, I looked at that metal sword blade. I thought to myself, that must be valuable! So I removed the blade from the handle, and fashioned another blade of wood. When the sword is in the scabbard, no one can tell the difference. I took the metal blade to a pawnbroker, and I pawned it for just enough money to buy food for one day."
The king was stunned. "What if there's a sword inspection tomorrow?"
"Blessed be G-d, day by day."
The next day, the cobbler was pulled out of line in the king's guard. He was presented with a prisoner in chains.
"Cobbler, this man has committed a horrible crime. You are to take him to the square. Using your sword, you are to behead him."
"Behead him? I'm an observant Jew. I couldn't take another human life."
"If you do not, we'll kill both of you."
The cobbler led this poor, trembling man into the square, where a crowd had gathered to watch the execution. The cobbler put the prisoner's head on the chopping block. He stood tall, his hand on the handle of his sword. Facing the crowd, he spoke.
"Let G-d be my witness: I am no murderer! If this man is guilty as charged, let my sword be as always. But if he is innocent, let my sword turn to wood!"
He pulled his sword. The people gasped when they saw the wooden blade. They bowed down at the great miracle that had happened there.
The king, who had been watching all of this, came over to the cobbler. He took him by both his hands, and looked him deep in the eyes. "I am the king. And I am your friend who has visited you these last nights. I want you to come live with me in the palace and be my advisor. Please teach me how to live like that--one day at a time."
Then, in front of everyone, the two of them danced and sang: "Bai-yum-dum, bai-yum-bai, yum-bai, bai...."
I first found this story in Dov Noy's Folktales of Israel, University of Chicago Press, 1963. Another, essentially similar, Jewish version from Afghanistan is in Howard Schwartz's Elijah's Violin, Harper and Row, 1983. This story is sometimes attributed to Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, who retold and interpreted it. The basic plot is also known in Turkey and Uzbekistan, as well as in Finland, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Greece.
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Second post of the morning:
The Chosen
Essential works about Judaism.
BY RUTH R. WISSE
Saturday, September 22, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
1. "Days of Awe" by S.Y. Agnon (Schocken, 1948).
During the 10 days between the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, and the fast of Yom Kippur, Jews submit themselves to the all-knowing and unerring judgment of God. It is sometimes a challenge to experience this soul-sifting in the modern world as most others go about their daily business. For those who desire help--or for those who simply want to gain a deeper understanding of the observances--look no further than "Days of Awe," a nonfiction work by novelist S.Y. Agnon (1888-1970), who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1966. His compendium of Jewish practices, legends and commentaries traces the rhythm of these September rituals, from the pre-holy day preparations to the aftermath of the concluding meal. The material includes simple customs (like eating an apple sweetened with honey), kabbalistic interpretations of the ram's horn blasts that are sounded in the synagogue, and prescriptions for a thorough moral accounting. Though my devotions do not approach the intensity of those of my ancestors--who, in the words of a Yiddish saying, trembled with the fish in the seas in the days of judgment--this little book puts me in awe of generations of Jews as they stood in awe of God.
2. "A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People" edited by Eli Barnavi (Schocken, 1992).
My teacher, the late Salo Baron, published 18 volumes of a "Social and Religious History of the Jews"--a project that he did not live to complete. Obviously, no single book can encompass all of Jewish experience. But when I want to find out about Jews in Palestine under the Romans, or learn how Jews fared in Muslim lands, or trace the migration of Jews to America, I turn to "A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People," an attractive volume of maps, documents, time lines and basic information. If I don't find exactly what I'm looking for, I become engrossed in something else, like an account of Jewish agriculture in South America. The book's organization is quirky, but its mixing of anthropology, history, religion and culture reflects how they are woven into the life of the Jews.
3. "Daniel Deronda" by George Eliot (1876).
One of the finest books about Jewish experience was written by an Englishwoman. George Eliot studied Judaism for years before writing this novel, her last, and her hero's gradual discovery of his Jewish origins seems to reproduce her own evolving appreciation of what Jews were about. Daniel Deronda's mother despised being Jewish, and when he was born she arranged for him to be raised as the ward of a wealthy English gentleman. But Deronda is pleased as his self-discovery unfolds, and he dreams of helping Jews find their own land "such as the English have"--in effect becoming a Zionist more than two decades before Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement. The novel has its painful side. Deronda's Jewish path thwarts his potential romance with the lovely Gwendolen Harleth, and well-meaning Christians who want to envelop Deronda in their embrace must learn from him the art of "separateness with communication."
4. "Tevye the Dairyman" by Sholem Aleichem (1894-1914).
No one did more than the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916) to forge the connection between Jewishness and comedy, and no character does it better than Tevye the Dairyman. In Aleichem's Tevye stories, set in Russia and collected in various forms over the years, the monologues of this first stand-up Jewish comedian treat many of the crises that Jews experienced in confronting modernity. A traditional father of many daughters (whittled down to three in the musical adaptation "Fiddler on the Roof"), Tevye must face both their challenges to his paternal authority and the dangers posed by the czarist regime. He does so with a philosophical humor that many readers attribute to Jewishness itself. "What does it say in the prayer book? We're God's chosen people; it's no wonder the whole world envies us." Whenever I teach this work, filled with specifically Jewish quotations and expressions, students of other minorities--especially those from religious families--recognize Tevye's predicaments, and they appreciate the moral balance he strives to maintain between metaphysical confidence and the disillusioning evidence presented by daily life.
5. "The Bellarosa Connection" by Saul Bellow (Penguin, 1989).
In this cautionary tale about the dangers of forgetting, the narrator, a cultured American Jewish widower, is the founder of the Mnemosyne Institute in Philadelphia. Appropriately for someone who teaches the techniques of memory, he lives in a house filled with antiques. A sudden inquiry from Jerusalem sends him in search of Harry Fonstein, a near-relative he hasn't seen in 30 years. Harry was once saved from the Nazis in Italy by the personal intervention of showman Billy Rose (mangled in Italian as "Bellarosa"), and for the remainder of this brief book the unnamed narrator recalls for us the story of the rescue and his encounters with Harry and his wife, Sorella, the woman he married after immigrating to America. Oversize yet delicate, Sorella functions as the book's oracle when she says: "The Jews could survive everything that Europe threw at them. . . . But now comes the next test--America." Wryly, and at his own expense, the memory-man describes how, by neglecting Harry and Sorella, he himself has failed that test.
Ms. Wisse, whose "Jews and Power" has just been published by Schocken, teaches Yiddish literature and comparative literature at Harvard.
WSJ
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The following was sent to me without URL. Anyone know anything about this?
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China
Rabbi Marvin Tokayer
In the mountainous area of northwest China, west of the Min River, near the border of Tibet, in Szechuan lives an ancient people called by the Chinese, Chiang or Chiang-Min, who numbers about 250 thousand people.
The language of the Chiang tribe had been forgotten and they had also lost their ancient script. Today they speak Chinese and two other languages, one that originates from Tibet and the other is a slang which is called Chiaring.
The area which they live is famous for its rare animals and plants including the Panda bear. The Chiang people live in villages similar to fortresses which are generally built on hilltops. In the past they were a great people who ruled the provincial territories from Kansu in the north to Liyunan in the south.
Historical maps during the Han dynasty (3rd century BCE - 3rd century CE) show that this tribe the Chiang spread to the northwest part of China. They themselves see themselves as immigrants from the west who reached this area after a journey of three years three months. The Chinese treated them as Barbarians and they related to the Chinese as idol worshipers.
Hate and enmity existed between the Chinese and this tribe for a long time. They lived independently until the middle of the 18th century when they became part of the general population to earn more freedom. The religious pressure from the Chinese, the spread of Christianity, and the influence of intermarriage caused the Chiang tribe to generally and greatly give up their special monotheistic way of life.
However it is still possible even today to learn about the past traditions of the Chiang tribe through their customs and their faith which they still keep. This tribe had been living a special Israeli way of life for 2300 years.
According to their tradition, the Chiang tribe is the descendant of Abraham and their forefather had 12 sons. Those among them who did not take Chinese wives after their victory in war still look Semitic.
The character traits of this people are integrity, love of neighbor, mutual aid, generosity, modesty, shyness, gratitude, and stubbornness. They also have a fear of heaven or respect for God.
They believe in one God whom they call Abachi meaning the father of heaven, or Mabichu, the spirit of heaven, or also Tian, heaven. As a result of Chinese influences they all call Him God of the mountains as the mountains are the central place for worship of God.
Their concept of God is that of an all powerful God who watches over the entire world, judges the world fairly, rewards the righteous, and punishes the wicked. This God gives them the opportunity to do repentance and to gain atonement for their actions. In times of trouble, they call God Yah-weh.
They also believe in spirits and demons and they are forbidden to worship them, but this is probably a Chinese influence. In the past they had written scrolls of parchment and also books but today they only have oral traditions. They themselves do not understand the prayers that they recite every week.
The Custom of Sacrifice Among the Chiang Tribe
The Chiang tribe lives a very special way of life based on the offering of animal sacrifices which seems to have been seen among the Ten Tribes of Israel. It is forbidden to worship statues or foreign gods and anyone who offers a sacrifice to another god faces the death penalty.
This worship is performed in two ways. It is public sacrifice on platforms erected on mountain tops on which they build altars of stone which may not be fashioned with tools and on which they offer special sacrifices.
They also have domestic of personal sacrifices on domestic altars built on flat surfaces on the roofs of their houses. There is an atmosphere of holy worship in all these sacrifices. They are performed by priests whose priesthood is passed down through inheritance from father to son. This was the same in ancient Israel.
These priests wear clean white clothes and perform the sacrifices in a state of purity as the priests in ancient Israel did (1 Samuel 15:27). I recall that Japanese Shinto priests also wear clean white clothes at holy events.
The priest of the Chiang tribe wears a special head turban. The priest is ordained in a special ceremony in which sacrifices are also offered. Unmarried men may not be a priest, which was the same in ancient Israel (Leviticus 21:7, 13).
The Chiang tribe does not have statues of images but they do have two symbols of holiness. A clean white sheet of paper and a piece of natural white stone. These symbolize absolute purity and perhaps the written parchment which they had in the past. Before one worships God, you must become holy and purify yourself.
It is perhaps because of the Assyrian influence of the past that they try to build their altars next to trees or branches. The altar itself is built of earth which is molded into stones which are then laid one on top of the other without being cut of fashioned by any tool of metal. It is important to remember that in the Torah, the ancient altar could not be made of cut stones (Exodus 20:25), since the sword or whatever tool to be used to cut the stone was also an instrument of war and harm.
The main part of the service is performed at night perhaps to conceal it from other Chinese or because of the special effect of the silence and the tranquility of night. This was also ancient Israeli tradition. It is interesting that the important rituals of Japanese Shinto religion are also performed at night.
Before the offering of sacrifices, one is required to wash one's self and one's clothing and to dress in clean garments. Sacrificial animals themselves must be washed and purified. There is a special place for purification and washing. The elders and priest place their hands on the head of the sacrifice which is to be slaughtered then offer their prayers.
Strangers are forbidden to approach the place of worship. The priest of the Chiang tribe perform the service solemnly. "Unclean ones" are also forbidden to approach the service (Leviticus 21:17-23). These were the same in ancient Israel.
The purpose of the sacrifice is a type of atonement and to bring God's blessings upon those offering the sacrifice. The sacrifice has the purpose of taking away sin and blood must be sprinkled on the corners of the altar to be granted atonement and to have one's prayers accepted.
Prayer Words of the Chiang Tribe
One of the prayers pronounced by the priest of the Chiang tribe in China includes the following prayer:
"Priest of God, You are the Priest of the generations who are witnesses to the fact that our sacrifice is pure and has not been changed by us, but has been performed in the same manner since ancient times. We hereby fulfill our vows. We have not eaten impure foods for three days and we have not been in impure places. We have gathered in the holy place, the bundles of grass for the sprinkling of the blood are in their places and we have brought the sacrifices and have lowered the rope on the bundles of grass for the sprinkling of the blood."
Following the prayer many of the organs of the animal are burnt with the meat in the fire and the priest receives the shoulder, the chest, the legs, and also the skin, and the meat is divided among the worshipers. At the time of the sacrifice 12 flags are placed around the altar in order to teach that they originate from a father who had 12 sons. This system of sacrifices is very similar to the sacrifices brought in ancient Israel at the time of the dispersion of the Lost Tribes.
Among the ceremonies that the Chiang tribe has include the sprinkling of blood on the doorpost to insure the safekeeping of the house, and the laws of levirate marriage which was an Israeli custom as I mentioned earlier. It is considered shameful for a woman to leave her hair uncovered and therefore, they wear white scarves. Mixed dancing of men and women does not take place. And they have a custom of closing all forests for 50 years after which they have a special ceremony to mark their opening. This is like a custom in ancient Israel.
The the Chiang tribe also has a purification of the earth as well as a ceremony with a white scroll or parchment. They show great love for parchment and take care to make sure that it remains unblemished. They also practice trances for witchcraft and to expel demons and this may be a Chinese influence.
The Chiang tribe has a new year feast, a feast of feast, and a feast of thanksgiving, but circumcision is not performed. But after the 7th day or at the eve of the 40th day of the child's life, a white rooster is slaughtered in the child's honor and he is given a name.
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NY Times
PARIS, Oct. 5 — His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time, terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the bottom rung of the Nazi killing machine — as diggers of mass graves, cooks who fed Nazi soldiers and seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews before execution.
"I cannot react to the horrors that pour out. If I react, the stories will stop."
The Rev. Patrick Desbois
They live today in rural poverty, many without running water or heat, nearing the end of their lives. So Patrick Desbois has been quietly seeking them out, roaming the back roads and forgotten fields of Ukraine, hearing their stories and searching for the unmarked common graves. He knows that they are an unparalleled source to document the murder of the 1.5 million Jews of Ukraine, shot dead and buried throughout the country.
He is neither a historian nor an archaeologist, but a French Roman Catholic priest. And his most powerful tools are his matter-of-fact style — and his clerical collar.
The Nazis killed nearly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine after their invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941 slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that history has gone untold.
Knocking on doors, unannounced, Father Desbois, 52, seeks to unlock the memories of Ukrainian villagers the way he might take confessions one by one in church.
“At first, sometimes, people don’t believe I’m a priest,” said Father Desbois in an interview this week. “I have to use simple words and listen to these horrors — without any judgment. I cannot react to the horrors that pour out. If I react, the stories will stop.”
Over four years, Father Desbois has videotaped more than 700 interviews with witnesses and bystanders and has identified more than 600 common graves of Jews, most of them previously unknown. He also has gathered material evidence of the execution of Jews from 1941 to 1944, the “Holocaust of bullets” as it is called.
Often his subjects ask Father Desbois to stay for a meal and to pray, as if to somehow bless their acts of remembrance. He does not judge those who were assigned to carry out tasks for the Nazis, and Holocaust scholars say that is one reason he is so effective.
“If a Jewish taker-of-testimony comes, what would people think — that this is someone coming to accuse,” said Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “When a priest comes, people open up. He brings to the subject a kind of legitimacy, a sense that it’s O.K. to talk about the past. There’s absolution through confession.”
Unlike in Poland and Germany, where the Holocaust remains visible through the searing symbols of the extermination camps, the horror in Ukraine was hidden away, first by the Nazis, then by the Soviets.
“There was nothing to see in Ukraine because people were shot to death with guns,” said Thomas Eymond-Laritaz, president of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Ukraine’s largest philanthropic organization. “That’s why Father Desbois is so important.”
The foundation helped underwrite a conference on the subject at the Sorbonne this week — the first to bring together Western and Ukrainian scholars — and has begun contributing funds to Father Desbois’s project.
Some of the results of Father Desbois’s research — including video interviews, wartime documents, photographs of newly uncovered mass graves, rusty bullets and shell casings and personal possessions of the victims — are on display for the first time at an exhibit at the Memorial of the Shoah in the Marais district of Paris.
The exhibit shows, for example, images of the 15 mass graves of several thousand Jews in a commune called Busk that Father Desbois and his team discovered and began excavating after interviewing several witnesses. Among hundreds of other items on display is a black-and-white photo from 1942 that shows a German police officer shooting naked Jewish women lying in a ravine in the Rivne region.
Traveling with a team that includes two interpreters, a photographer, a cameraman, a ballistics specialist, a mapping expert and a notetaker, Father Desbois records all the stories on video, sometimes holding the microphone himself, and asking questions in simple language and a flat tone.
In Buchach in 2005, Regina Skora told Father Desbois that as a young girl she witnessed executions.
“Did the people know they were going to be killed?” Father Desbois asked her.
“Yes.”
“How did they react?”
“They just walked, that’s all. If someone couldn’t walk, they told him to lie on the ground and shot him in the back of the neck.”
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Page 2 of 2)
Vera Filonok said she was 16 when she watched from the porch of her mud hut in Konstantinovka in 1941 as thousands of Jews were shot, thrown into a pit and set on fire. Those who were still alive writhed “like flies and worms,” she said.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
In a World War II photograph, a member of a Nazi SS paramilitary group prepared to execute a Ukrainian Jew, one of 1.5 million put to death during the war.
Witness to Genocide (memorialdelashoah.org) There are stories of how the Nazis drummed on empty buckets to avoid having to listen to the screams of their victims, how Jewish women were made sex slaves of the Nazis and then executed. One witness said that as a 6-year-old he hid and watched as his best friend was shot to death.
Other witnesses described how the Nazis were allowed only one bullet to the back per victim and that the Jews sometimes were buried alive. “One witness told of how the pit moved for three days, how it breathed,” Father Desbois recalled.
Father Desbois became haunted by the history of the Nazis in Ukraine as a child growing up on the family farm in the Bresse region of eastern France. His paternal grandfather, who was deported to a prison camp for French soldiers in Rava-Ruska, on the Ukrainian side of the Polish border, told the family nothing about the experience. But he confessed to his relentlessly curious grandson, “For us it was bad, for ‘others’ it was worse.”
There were other family links to the German occupation of France. One maternal cousin who carried letters for French resisters perished in a Nazi concentration camp. Father Desbois’s mother told him only recently that the family hid dozens of resisters on the farm.
After teaching mathematics as a French government employee in West Africa and working in Calcutta for three months with Mother Teresa, he joined the priesthood. His secular family was horrified.
He started as a parish priest, studying Judaism and learning Hebrew during a stint in Israel. He asked to work with Gypsies, ex-prisoners or Jews, and was appointed as a bridge to France’s Jewish community.
It was on a tour with a group in 2002 that, visiting Rava-Ruska, he asked the mayor where the Jews were buried. The mayor said he did not know.
“I knew that 10,000 Jews had been killed there, so it was impossible that he didn’t know,” Father Desbois recalled.
The following year, a new mayor took the priest to a forest where about 100 villagers had gathered in a semicircle, waiting to tell their stories and to help uncover the graves buried beneath their feet.
He met other mayors and parish priests who helped find more witnesses. In 2004, Father Desbois created Yahad-In Unum, an organization devoted to Christian-Jewish understanding run from a tiny office in a working-class neighborhood in northeastern Paris, backed and largely financed by a Holocaust foundation in France and the Catholic Church.
To verify witnesses’ testimony, Father Desbois relies heavily on a huge archive of Soviet-era documents housed in the Holocaust museum in Washington, as well as German trial archives. He registers an execution or a grave site only after obtaining three independent accounts from witnesses.
Only one-third of Ukrainian territory has been covered so far, and it will take several more years to finish the research. A notice at the exit of the Paris exhibit asks that any visitor with information about victims of Nazi atrocities in Ukraine leave a note or send an e-mail message.
“People talk as if these things happened yesterday, as if 60 years didn’t exist,” Father Desbois said. “Some ask, ‘Why are you coming so late? We have been waiting for you.’”
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This piece contains a lot of formatting and links I'm too lazy to replicate. Link provided at the end of Part III
The First and Last Enemy
-- Jew-Hatred in Islam*
by Dr. Andrew G. Bostom (Oct. 2007)
(* Text of a speech delivered at the “Counterjihad” conference in Brussels, Belgium, October 18, 2007
Fawaz Damra, the former Imam of the Islamic Center of Cleveland was convicted in 2004 for lying to immigration officials about his links to the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and subsequently deported. Yet Damra was touted as a promoter of interfaith dialogue even after evidence of his participation in fundraising events for the PIJ, was produced, along with a videotape of the Imam telling a crowd of Muslim supporters in 1991 that they should aim “…a rifle at the first and last enemy of the Islamic nation, and that is the sons of monkeys and pigs, the Jews.”
As I will demonstrate, Imam Damra’s blatant Jew-hatred was fully sanctioned by—indeed he was merely paraphrasing, and quoting directly from—the core religious texts of Islam. And the historical treatment of Jews in Muslim societies has been consistent with this sacralized religious bigotry. Sheer ignorance of such theology and history, combined with craven denial, allowed Damra’s words to go unchallenged for more than a decade. However the Damra affair is pathognomonic of a much larger and more dangerous phenomenon: the complete, often willful failure to examine and understand the living legacy of Islam’s foundational anti-Jewish animus.
Islamic Antisemitism = Islamic Jew-Hatred**
Although Jew-hatred is an uncompromisingly clear term, in both common and scholarly usage, the synonymous “Antisemitism,” (which should never be written with a hyphen!), predominates. Robert Wistrich has emphasized the problematic nature of the term “Antisemitism”, derived from a group of cognate “Semitic” (i.e., stemming from the Biblical Shem, one of Noah’s three sons) languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Ethiopic—and applied, inappropriately, to a pseudo-scientific racial designation by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr, in the 1870s. Regardless, for the past century, as Wistrich notes,
…the illogical term ‘antisemitism’…[w]hich never really meant hatred of ‘Semites’ (for example, Arabs [emphasis added in original]) at all, but rather hatred of Jews, has come to be accepted in general usage as denoting all forms of hostility towards Jews and Judaism throughout history.
But perhaps the strongest evidence that antisemitism was never meant to be directed at Arabs (or Muslims, or any non-Jews) comes from the perpetrators of genocidal antisemitic violence, the Nazis. During a November, 1942 press conference, a Berlin Foreign Ministry spokesman, as reported in the New York Times, took “great pains” to assure Arabs that Nazi antisemitic policies were directed at Jews, exclusively. The spokesman elaborated:
The difference between Germany’s attitude toward Jews and Arabs has been clearly shown in the exchange of letters between the former Prime Minister of Iraq, Rashid Ali, and the German Institute for Racial Problems. We have never said the Arabs were inferior as a race. On the contrary, we have always pointed out the glorious historic past of the Arab people.
Moreover, in the specific context of the Arab Muslim world during the high Middle Ages (circa 950-1250 C.E.), S.D. Goitein’ s seminal analyses of the Geniza documentary record employed the term anti-Semitism,
…in order to differentiate animosity against Jews from the discrimination practiced by Islam against non-Muslims in general. Our scrutiny of the Geniza material has proved the existence of ‘antisemitism’ in the time and the area considered here…
Goitein cites as concrete proof of his assertion that a unique strain of Islamic Jew hatred was extant at this time (i.e., up to a millennium ago)—exploding the common assumption of its absence—the fact that letters from the Cairo Geniza material,
…have a special word for it and, most significantly, one not found in the Bible or in Talmudic literature (nor registered in any Hebrew dictionary), but one much used and obviously coined in the Geniza period. It is sin’?th, “hatred”, a Jew-baiter being called s?n?, “a hater.”
Incidents of such Muslim Jew hatred documented by Goitein in the Geniza come from northern Syria (Salamiyya and al-Mar‘arra), Morocco (Fez), and Egypt (Alexandria), with references to the latter being particularly frequent.
Despite all of the following—clear historical evidence of specific Islamic antisemitism, from the Geniza record of the high Middle Ages (including the coinage of a unique Hebrew word to characterize such Muslim Jew hatred, i.e., sin’?th), published in full by Goitein as of 1971; important studies of foundational Muslim sources detailing the sacralized rationale for Islam’s anti-Jewish bigotry, including Hartwig Hirschfeld’s mid 1880s essay series on Muhammad’s subjugation of the Jews of Medina; George Vajda’s elegant, comprehensive 1937 analysis focusing primarily on the hadith (the putative words and deeds of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, as recorded by pious transmitters); and much more recently, Haggai Ben-Shammai’s concise 1988 study of key examples of Jew hatred in the Koran and Koranic exegesis—conventional academic (and journalistic) wisdom continues to assert that Muslim Jew hatred is entirely a 20th century phenomenon, a mere by-product of the advent of the Zionist movement and the protracted Arab-Israeli conflict over the lands comprising the original 1922 Mandate for historical Palestine (i.e., modern Israel, Jordan, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza). Such thinking also contends that this strain of Jew hatred is a loose amalgam of re-cycled medieval Christian Judeophobic motifs, calumnies from the Czarist Russia “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and standard Nazi propaganda. A prototypical assessment of this ilk was written by the journalist Lawrence Wright in his widely acclaimed investigative account of the events leading to the cataclysmic acts of jihad terrorism on September 11, 2001.
Until the end of World War II…Jews lived safely –although submissively—under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom; but in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda on Arabic-language shortwave radio, coupled with slanders by Christian missionaries in the region, infected the area with this ancient Western prejudice [antisemitism]. After the war, Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and the government. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier.
Wright’s statement was not accompanied by documentation—this was the accepted wisdom after all. And in its essence, Wright’s views are entirely consistent with those of the more elaborate prevailing scholarly analyses summarized quite accurately by Esther Webman in 1994:
Antisemitism did not exist in the traditional Islamic world…Antisemitism is, in fact, a relatively new phenomenon in the Arab world, gaining ground particularly since the eruption of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the mid-twentieth century. Nazi-style antisemitic books and publications have been produced openly. For example, there are at least nine different Arabic translations of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, which was translated into Arabic for the first time in the 1920s…The development of European-style antisemitism in the Arab countries is related to three major factors: first penetration during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of a variety of European ideologies and concepts into the Arab world, among them antisemitism; second, the collapse of traditional political systems and of the loyalties and practices associated with them, giving way to the emergence of nationalistic government structures less tolerant in their treatment of religious, ethnic, and ideological minorities; and third, and most crucial, the development of the conflict over the domination of Palestine, beginning with Jewish resettlement in the late nineteenth century, followed by the establishment of the State of Israel and the ensuing Arab-Israeli conflict…Themes borrowed from European Christendom were adapted by incorporating references in them.
But this very flawed construct ignores primary, uniquely Islamic components of Muslim Jew hatred, both past and present. Indeed, for the Muslim masses, basic Islamic education in the Koran, hadith, and sira (earliest Muslim biographies of Muhammad) may create an immutable superstructure of Jew hatred on to which non-Muslim sources of Jew hatred are easily grafted.
The uncomfortable examination of Islamic doctrines and history is required in order to understand the enduring phenomenon of Muslim Jew hatred, which dates back to the origins of Islam. We can no longer view Muslim Jew hatred as a “borrowed phenomenon,” seen exclusively, or even primarily, through the prism of Nazism and the Holocaust, the tragic legacy of Judeophobic Christian traditions, or “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” from Czarist Russia. For example, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi wrote these words in his 700 page treatise rationalizing Muslim Jew hatred, Banu Isra’il fi al-Koran wa al-Sunna [Jews in the Koran and the Traditions], originally published in the 1970s, and then re-issued in 1986/87:
[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah, corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness…only a minority of the Jews keep their word….[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not. (Koran 3:113)
Tantawi was apparently rewarded for this scholarly effort by being named Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in 1996, a position he still holds. These are the expressed, “carefully researched” views on Jews held by the nearest Muslim equivalent to a Pope—the head of the most prestigious center of Muslim learning in Sunni Islam, Sunnis representing some 85% of the world’s Muslims. And Sheikh Tantawi has not mollified such hatemongering beliefs since becoming the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar as his statements on the Jews as “enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs”, the legitimacy of homicide bombing of Jews, or “dialogue” with Jews (just below), make clear.
…anyone who avoids meeting with the enemies in order to counter their dubious claims and stick fingers into their eyes, is a coward. My stance stems from Allah’s book [the Koran], more than one-third of which deals with the Jews… wrote a dissertation dealing with them [the Jews], all their false claims and their punishment by Allah. I still believe in everything written in that dissertation. [i.e., from above, in Banu Isra’il fi al-Koran wa al-Sunna]
Tantawi’s case illustrates the prevalence and depth of sacralized, “normative” Jew hatred in the contemporary Muslim world. Even if all non-Muslim Judeophobic themes were expunged from the Islamic world, the living legacy of anti-Jewish hatred, and violence rooted in Islam’s sacred texts—Koran, hadith, and sira—would remain intact. The assessment and understanding of Islamic antisemitism must begin with an unapologetic analysis of the anti-Jewish motifs contained in these foundational texts of Islam.
Jew Hatred in Islam’s Sacred Texts: From Theory to Practice**
The essential nature of the Koranic “revelation,” as understood by Muslims, was elaborated in 1891 by Theodore Nöldeke (whose seminal 1860 Geschichte des Qorans remains a vital tool for Koranic research):
To the faith of the Muslims…the Koran is the word of God, and such also is the claim which the book itself advances…
And to this day, for the Muslim masses, as Ibn Warraq notes,
…the Koran remains the infallible word of God, the immediate word of God sent down, through the intermediary of a “spirit” or “holy spirit” or Gabriel, to Muhammad in perfect, pure Arabic; and every thing contained therein is eternal and uncreated. The original text is in heaven…The angel dictated the revelation to the Prophet, who repeated it after him, and then revealed it to the world. Modern Muslims also claim that these revelations have been preserved exactly as revealed to Muhammad, without any change, addition, or loss whatsoever…the Koran remains for all Muslims, and not just “fundamentalists” the uncreated word of God Himself. It is valid for all times and places; its ideals are, according to all Muslims, absolutely true and beyond any criticism. [emphasis added]
Thus, the Jews’ traits as characterized in the Koran are deemed both infallible and timeless. Unfortunately, as a central anti-Jewish motif, the Koran decrees an eternal curse upon the Jews (Koran 2:61/ 3:112) for slaying the prophets and transgressing against the will of Allah. This motif is coupled to Koranic verses 5:60 and 5:78 which describe the Jews transformation into apes and swine (5:60), having been “…cursed by the tongue of David, and Jesus, Mary’s son” (5:78). The related verse, 5:64, accuses the Jews—as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas did in a January 2007 speech, citing Koran 5:64—of being “spreaders of war and corruption”, a sort of ancient Koranic antecedent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
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The centrality of the Jews’ permanent “abasement and humiliation,” and being “laden with God’s anger” in the corpus of Muslim exegetic literature on Koran 2:61 (including the hadith and Koranic commentaries), is clear. By nature deceitful and treacherous, the Jews rejected Allah’s signs and prophets, including Isa, the Muslim Jesus. Classical Koranic commentators such as Tabari (d. 923), Zamakshari (d. 1143), Baydawi (d. 1316), and Ibn Kathir (d. 1373), when discussing Koran 5:82 (“Thou wilt surely find the most hostile of men to the believers are the Jews and the idolaters; and thou wilt surely find the nearest of them in love to the believers are those who say 'We are Christians'; that, because some of them are priests and monks, and they wax not proud.”), concur on the unique animus of the Jews towards the Muslims, which is repeatedly linked to the curse of Koran 2:61. For example, in his commentary on 5:82, Tabari writes,
In my opinion, [the Christians] are not like the Jews who always scheme in order to murder the emissaries and the prophets, and who oppose God in his positive and negative commandments, and who corrupt His scripture which He revealed in His books.
Tabari’s classical interpretations of Koran 5:82 and 2:61, as well as his discussion of the related verse 9:29 mandating the Jews payment of the jizya (Koranic poll-tax), represent both Antisemitic and more general anti-dhimmi views that became, and remain, intrinsic to Islam to this day. Here is Tabari’s discussion of 2:61 and its relationship to verse 9:29, which emphasizes the purposely debasing nature of the Koranic poll tax:
…“abasement and poverty were imposed and laid down upon them”, as when someone says “the imam imposed the poll tax (jizya)on free non-Muslim subjects”, or “The man imposed land tax on his slave”, meaning thereby that he obliged him [to pay ] it, or, “The commander imposed a sortie on his troops”, meaning he made it their duty.…God commanded His believing servants not to give them [i.e., the non-Muslim people of the scripture] security—as long as they continued to disbelieve in Him and his Messenger—unless they paid the poll tax to them; God said: “Fight those who believe not in God and the Last Day and do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden—such men as practice not the religion of truth [Islam], being of those who have been given the Book [Bible]—until they pay the poll tax, being humble” (Koran 9:29).. The dhimmis [non-Muslim tributary’s] posture during the collection of the jizya- “[lowering themselves] by walking on their hand, …reluctantly
…Ibn Zaid said about His words “and abasement and poverty were imposed upon them”, ‘These are the Jews of the Children of Israel’. I said: ‘Are they the Copts of Egypt?’ He said: “What have the Copts of Egypt to do with this? No, by God, they are not; but they are the Jews, the Children of Israel.…By “and slain the prophets unrightfully” He means that they used to kill the Messengers of God without God’s leave, denying their messages and rejecting their prophethood.
Indeed the Koran’s overall discussion of the Jews is marked by a litany of their sins and punishments, as if part of a divine indictment and conviction process. The Jews wronged themselves (16:118) by losing faith (7:168) and breaking their covenant (5:13). The Jews (echoing an ante-Nicaean, Marcionite polemic) are a nation that has passed away (2:134; repeated in 2:141). Twice Allah sent his instruments (the Assyrians/or Babylonians, and Romans) to punish this perverse people (17:4-5)—their dispersal over the earth is proof of Allah’s rejection (7:168). The Jews are further warned about both their arrogant claim that they remain Allah’s chosen people (62:6), and continued disobedience and “corruption” (5:32-33) Other sins, some repeated, are enumerated: abuse, even killing of prophets (4:155; 2:91), including Isa [Jesus] (3:55; 4:157), is a consistent theme. The Jews ridiculed Muhammad as Ra’ina (the evil one, in 2:104; 4:46), and they are also accused of lack of faith, taking words out of context, disobedience, and distortion (4:46). Precious few of them are believers (also 4:46). These “perverse” creatures also claim that Ezra is the messiah and they worship rabbis who defraud men of their possessions (9:30). Additional sins are described: the Jews are typified as an “envious” people (2:109), whose hearts are as hardened as rocks (2:74). They are further accused of confounding the truth (2:42), deliberately perverting scripture (2:75), and being liars (2:78). Ill-informed people of little faith (2:89), they pursue vague and wishful fancies (2:111). Other sins have contributed to their being stamped (see 2:61/ 3:112 above) with “wretchedness/abasement and humiliation,” including—usury (2:275), sorcery (2:102), hedonism (2:96), and idol worship (2:53). More (and repeat) sins, are described still: the Jews’ idol worship is again mentioned (4:51), then linked and followed by charges of other (often repeat) iniquities—the “tremendous calumny” against Mary (4:156), as well as usury and cheating (4:161). Most Jews are accused of being “evil-livers” /“transgressors” /“ungodly” (3:110), who, deceived by their own lies (3:24), try to turn Muslims from Islam (3:99). Jews are blind and deaf to the truth (5:71), and what they have not forgotten they have perverted—they mislead (3:69), confound the truth (3:71), twist tongues (3:79), and cheat Gentiles without remorse (3:75). Muslims are advised not to take the Jews as friends (5:51), and to beware of the inveterate hatred that Jews bear towards them (5:82). The Jews’ ultimate sin and punishment are made clear: they are the devil’s minions (4:60) cursed by Allah, their faces will be obliterated (4:47), and if they do not accept the true faith of Islam—the Jews who understand their faith become Muslims (3:113)—they will be made into apes (2:65/ 7:166), or apes and swine (5:60), and burn in the Hellfires (4:55, 5:29, 98:6, and 58:14-19).
A general guiding principle of the hadith for Muslims is khalifuhum, which means, “do not do like them.” As Georges Vajda demonstrated, however, this seemingly banal principle which covers matters ranging from daily customs and practices (such as basic grooming and dress practices to avoid), is laden with anti-Jewish animus which only intensifies when the hadith deal with more profound subjects such as eschatology.
Even sanctioned Muslim practices of onanism/masturbation, and bestiality, in particular with slaves whom the Muslims wished to avoid impregnating, became a source of friction vis a vis the Jews, who were revolted by these practices. The customs to be observed at funerals, the matters of burial plots and tombs, and more decidedly, Muhammad’s view of the fate of buried Jews, also illustrate anti-Jewish animus. For example, public lamentation over the dead became forbidden to the Jews (and Christians). The hadith further condemn certain physical gestures for being specific to Jews.
The hadith also portray the Jews’ hatred and jealousy of Muhammad: despite being convinced of the authenticity of Mohammed’s divine mission, the Jews did not become votaries of Islam due to pride in their birth and appetite for domination. (These charges became a recurrent theme in later Muslim polemics.) A related commonplace charge in the hadith is that Jews altered their sacred texts deleting Muhammad’s name and precise description. Another series of hadiths elaborate on Koran 3:93, and associated Koranic exegeses, which accuse the Jews of misrepresenting their alimentary prohibitions, most notably camel’s flesh, as in fact described in the Torah. Vajda observes, “distrust must reign” in Muslims relations with Jews—Muslims must especially beware of asking them for information of a religious kind because, “…the Jews…are rebels to the solicitations of Islam and keep their religious traditions in a way liable to lead Muslims into error.”
Striking evidence of Jewish perfidy in the hadith is illustrated by their continual, surreptitious cursing of the Muslims while ostensibly offering proper greetings. Other traditions attribute evil spells to the Jews.
Following the Muslims’ initial conquest of the Jewish farming oasis of Khaybar, one of the vanquished Jewesses reportedly served Muhammad poisoned mutton (or goat), which resulted, ultimately, in his protracted, agonizing death. Ibn Sa‘d’s biography emphasizes the conspiratorial nature of this poisoning as plotted by Jews, and insists that the offending Jewess who poisoned Muhammad was put to death. Thus the Koranic curse (verse 2:61, repeated in 3:112) upon the Jews for (primarily) rejecting, even slaying Allah’s prophets, is updated with perfect archetypal logic in this canonical hadith.
Muslim eschatology, as depicted in the hadith, highlights the Jews’ supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjâl—the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ—or according to another tradition, the Dajjâl is himself Jewish. At his appearance, other traditions maintain that the Dajjâl will be accompanied by 70,000 Jews from Isfahan wrapped in their robes, and armed with polished sabers, their heads covered with a sort of veil. When the Dajjâl is defeated, his Jewish companions will be slaughtered— everything will deliver them up except for the so-called gharkad tree. According to a canonical hadith—repeated in the 1988 Hamas Charter (in section 7)—if a Jew seeks refuge under a tree or a stone, these objects will be able to speak to tell a Muslim: “There is a Jew behind me; come and kill him!” Another hadith variant, which takes place in Jerusalem, has Isa (the Muslim Jesus) leading the Arabs in a rout of the Dajjâl and his company of 70,000 armed Jews. And the notion of jihad “ransom” extends even into Islamic eschatology—on the day of resurrection the vanquished Jews will be consigned to Hellfire, and this will expiate Muslims who have sinned, sparing them from this fate.
Stubborn malevolence, however is the Jews defining worldly characteristic: rejecting Muhammad and refusing to convert to Islam out of jealousy, envy and even selfish personal interest, lead them to acts of treachery, in keeping with their inveterate nature: “...sorcery, poisoning, assassination held no scruples for them.” These archetypes sanction Muslim hatred towards the Jews, and the admonition to at best, “subject [the Jews] to Muslim domination,” as dhimmis, treated “with contempt,” under certain “humiliating arrangements.”
Hartwig Hirschfeld’s study of the sira and their depiction of Muhammad’s interactions with the Jews of Medina concludes that “mutual disappointment” characterized their relationship, with predictably disastrous consequences for the Jews. During his attempts at proselytization, Muhammad’s misunderstanding (or sheer ignorance) of Jewish doctrine was ridiculed by rabbis and Jewish poets. Ibn Ishaq, author of the earliest Muslim biography of Muhammad, accuses them of “hostility…, envy, hatred, and malice because God ha[d] chosen his apostle from the Arabs.” Regardless, the Jews’ stubborn refusal to convert to Islam altered, decisively, the trajectory of Muhammad’s religious thinking. Following the Battle of Badr—which established the power of nascent Islam—Muhammad initiated a campaign of political assassinations of Jewish (or presumptively Jewish) poets and leaders. Ibn Ishaq recorded these telling words of one of Muhammad’s Muslim assassins, “Our attack upon God’s enemy cast terror among the Jews, and there was no Jew in Medina who did not fear for his life.” Such fear proved to be well founded, as on the very morning after one political assassination (i.e., of Ka’b b. al ‘Ashraf), Muhammad encouraged the Muslims to slay Jews indiscriminately, according to Ibn Ishaq:
The apostle said, “Kill any Jew that falls into your power.” Thereupon Muhayyisa b. Mas'ud leapt upon Ibn Sunayna, a Jewish merchant with whom they had social and business relations, and killed him.
These murders of individual Jews were followed by the siege, expropriation, and expulsion of the Medinan Jewish tribes B. Qaynuqa and B. Nadir, and the subsequent massacre of the Jewish men of the B. Qurayza whose wives, children, and possessions were then seized as booty by the Muslims. Muhammad subsequently prepared for his campaign against Khaybar—a farming oasis and the last Jewish stronghold in Northern Arabia, where survivors (most notably, the B. Nadir) of the Muslims earlier attacks on Medinan Jewry had also sought refuge—with two further political assassinations. Bloody assaults by the Muslims which ensued shortly afterwards resulted in the complete subjugation of the Jews of Khaybar, the survivors becoming dhimmis. The theological animus which motivated Muhammad’s political subjugation of the Jews, specifically, became an indelible part of Muslim attitudes toward Jews across space and time. It also defined eternal parameters in which Jews would be permitted to live as humiliated Muslim dhimmis, the Jews of Khaybar—who, according to the hadith and sira, were eventually expelled from Arabia by Caliph Umar—being the prototype.
And a profoundly anti-Jewish motif occurring after the events recorded in the hadith and sira, put forth in early Muslim historiography (for example, by Tabari), is most assuredly a part of “the birth pangs” of Islam: the story of Abd Allah b. Saba, an alleged renegade Yemenite Jew, and founder of the heterodox Shi’ite sect. He is held responsible—identified as a Jew—for promoting the Shi’ite heresy and fomenting the rebellion and internal strife associated with this primary breach in Islam’s “political innocence”, culminating in the assassination of the third Rightly Guided Caliph Uthman, and the bitter, lasting legacy of Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian strife.
As noted previously, consistent with Islam’s theological Jew-hatred, S.D. Goitein’s seminal analyses of the Cairo Geniza materials from the high Middle Ages (~ 950-1250), reveal that Jews living a millennium ago were already experiencing an indigenous Muslim Antisemitism in the Middle East and North Africa. The intensity of this Muslim Jew-hatred motivated Jews of the era to coin two unique Hebrew words: sin?th for Muslim Antisemitism, and s?n? for the Muslim haters who promulgated it. Moreover, two independent Muslim observers writing in the mid-9th century (the polymath al-Jahiz, and the Sufi theologian al-Muhasibi) suggest the most plausible sources of such anti-Jewish animus among the Muslim masses were Koran 5:82, and the sira accounts of Muhammad’s interactions with the Jews of Medina. Nearly a thousand years later in mid-19th century Egypt, E.W. Lane also attributed the Jew hatred he commonly witnessed among ordinary Muslims to their understanding of Koran 5:82.
Although Antisemitic Islamic motifs from the Koran, hadith, and sira were much more commonly employed in daily life as a form of chronic discrimination against Jews, they have also been used to incite, more extensive persecutions, including mass violence against Jewish communities.
Rigid conformity to a motif in the hadith (and sira) based on the putative death bed wish of Muhammad himself, as recorded by Umar (the second Rightly Guided Caliph), “Two religions shall not remain together in the peninsula of the Arabs,” had tragic consequences for the Jews of Yemen. (The hadith and sira further maintain that Umar did eventually expel the Jews of Khaybar.) Thus a pious 17th century Yemenite ruler, Al-Mahdi wishing to fulfill the mandate of this hadith in Yemen, as well, in 1679-1680, expelled the entire Jewish population of Yemen – men, women and children— deporting them to the inhospitable wastelands of the plain of Tihama. This expulsion was accompanied by the destruction of synagogues, desecration of Torah scrolls, and inducements for conversion to Islam. Three-quarters of the thousands of Jews expelled perished from exposure to the intense daytime heat (and evening cold), absence of potable water, and the subsequent spread of epidemic disease. The major Yemenite Jewish community in San’a experienced a 90 percent mortality rate from this catastrophic exile—of about 10,000 persons exiled, only about one tenth, i.e., 1,000, survived.
References to the Jews transformation into apes (Koran 2:65 and 7:166), or apes and swine (Koran 5:60)—perhaps the most striking Koranic motifs for the Jews debasement, which have always transcended any mere application to “Sabbath breakers”—have been exploited in polemical incitement against Jews, or odes celebrating their having been disgraced and slaughtered. Here again, the sacralized prototype is clear: right before subduing the Banu Qurayza and orchestrating the mass execution of the adult males from the besieged Medinan Jewish tribe, Muhammad addressed these Jews with hateful disparagement, as “You brothers of monkeys.” Some 3000 to 4000 Jews were massacred in the 1066 Granada pogrom, inspired in part by an anti-Jewish ode containing the line, “Many a pious Muslim is in awe of the vilest infidel ape,” referring to the Jewish communal leader, the vizier Joseph b. Samuel Naghrela. More Jews were killed in this one pogrom than in the Crusaders’ much more infamous ravages through the Rhineland 30 years later. Anti-Jewish riots and massacres by Muslims accompanied the 1291 death of Jewish physician-vizier Sa’d ad-Daula in Baghdad—the plundering and killing of Jews, which extended throughout Iraq (and likely into Persia)—were celebrated in a verse by the Muslim preacher Zaynu’d-Din ‘Ali b. Said, which begins with this debasing reference to the Jews as apes: “His name we praise who rules the firmament./These apish Jews are done away and shent [ruined].” Referring to the Jews as “brothers of apes”, who repeatedly blasphemed the prophet Muhammad, and whose overall conduct reflected their hatred of Muslims, the Moroccan cleric Al-Maghili (d. 1505) fomented, and then personally lead, a Muslim pogrom (in ~ 1490) against the Jews of the southern Moroccan oasis of Touat, plundering and killing Jews en masse, and destroying their synagogue in neighboring Tamantit. Each of these massacres was incited and/or celebrated by depictions of Jews as apes in verses by popular clerics—in the case of Touat, the “composer” of such a verse al-Maghili (d. 1505), an important Muslim theologian whose writings influenced Moroccan religious attitudes towards Jews into the 20th century—led the pogrom himself. Maghili also declared in verse, “Love of the Prophet, requires hatred of the Jews.”
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Currently the invocation of Koranic references to the Jews as apes and pigs pervades Muslim (especially Arab Muslim) religious and political discourse in print, audio, video, and internet venues. Young children are targeted with these messages, and even encouraged to repeat them by approving adults during additional media coverage. Menachem Milson recently warned that repeated invocation of these motifs cannot be “dismissed as mere vulgar invective”, or “primitive magical thinking”. Rather, these recurring expressions need to be understood as a form of dehumanization serving as a pretext for the destruction of Jews. Given the murderous historical legacy of Muslim societies that invoked these Koranic motifs (i.e., in Granada, Baghdad, and Touat, Morocco) his concern is not alarmist.
The Islamization of European Antisemitism**
On Thursday, September 7, 2006, an All-Party Parliamentary Enquiry into Antisemitism issued its finding that anti-Jewish violence had become endemic in Britain, both on the streets and university campuses. A major surge of attacks had accompanied—and followed—the summer 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, and the report held a “minority of Islamic extremists” responsible for “inciting hatred toward Jews.” As a press report noted, The Parliamentary Enquiry’s results are consistent with data recently published in The Journal of Conflict Resolution by Yale University biostatistician Dr. Edward H. Kaplan, and Dr. Charles A. Small of the Yale Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism.
Drs. Kaplan and Small examined the views of 5004 Europeans, roughly 500 individuals sampled from each of 10 European Union countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom). The authors’ main publicized results confirmed their (rather commonsensical) a priori hypothesis: anti-Israel sentiments strongly and independently predicted the likelihood that an individual was Antisemitic in a graded manner, i.e., the more anti-Israel (on a scale of zero to 4), the more a person was likely to be Antisemitic. But perhaps an even more striking finding in light of the burgeoning Jew hatred now evident in Europe’s Muslim communities, received much less attention: in a controlled comparison to European Christians (as the “referent” group), European Muslims were nearly eightfold (i.e., 800%) more likely to be overtly Antisemitic. [emphasis added]. Furthermore, in light of the Pew Global Attitudes Project data on Muslim attitudes toward Jews in Islamic countries, the Yale study likely underestimated the extent of Antisemitism amongst Europe’s Muslim communities, had more poorly educated, less acclimated European Muslims been sampled. Pew’s earlier international survey indicated,
In the Muslim world, attitudes toward Jews remain starkly negative, including virtually unanimous unfavorable ratings of 98% in Jordan and 97% in Egypt. Muslims living in Western countries have a more moderate view of Jews - still more negative than positive, but not nearly by the lopsided margins that prevail in Muslim countries.
The clear excess virulence of the Antisemitism in Europe’s Muslim versus Christian populations, combined with the evidence that globally, Muslims in Islamic countries exhibit even more fanatical Jew hatred than their European co-religionists, defies the “conventional wisdom” regarding the ultimate origins of Muslim Jew hatred in Western Europe, and beyond. This very flawed construct—that Muslim Jew hatred is merely a loose amalgam of re-cycled medieval Christian Judeophobic motifs, calumnies from the Czarist Russian “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and standard Nazi propaganda—continually ignores both empirical contemporary observations, and primary, uniquely Islamic components of Jew hatred, both past and present. When the late 23 year-old Parisian Jew Ilan Halimi was being tortured to death in February 2006, his Muslim torturers, as Nidra Poller wrote in the Wall Street Journal “…phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Koran, while Ilan's tortured screams could be heard in the background.” In the heart of Western Europe, Ilan Halimi’s torturers/murderers did not invoke any non-Islamic sources of anti-Jewish hate, only the Koran.
Islam Über Alles—The Convergence of Jihad, Islamic Jew-Hatred, and Nazism**
Thirty-fours years ago (1973/74) Bat Ye’or published a remarkably foresighted analysis of the Islamic Antisemitism resurgent in her native Egypt, and being packaged for dissemination throughout the Muslim world. The primary, core Antisemitic motifs were Islamic, derived from Islam’s foundational texts, on to which European, especially Nazi elements were grafted.
The pejorative characteristics of Jews as they are described in Muslim religious texts are applied to modern Jews. Anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism are equivalent—due to the inferior status of Jews in Islam, and because divine will dooms Jews to wandering and misery, the Jewish state appears to Muslims as an unbearable affront and a sin against Allah. Therefore it must be destroyed by Jihad. Here the Pan-Arab and anti-Western theses that consider Israel as an advanced instrument of the West in the Islamic world, come to reinforce religious anti-Judaism. The religious and political fuse in a purely Islamic context onto which are grafted foreign elements. If, on the doctrinal level, Nazi influence is secondary to the Islamic base, the technique with which the Antisemitic material has been reworked, and the political purposes being pursued, present striking similarities with Hitler’s Germany.
That anti-Jewish opinions have been widely spread in Arab nationalist circles since the 1930s is not in doubt. But their confirmation at [Al] Azhar [University] by the most important authorities of Islam enabled them to be definitively imposed, with the cachet of infallible authenticity, upon illiterate masses that were strongly attached to religious traditions.
Nazi academic and propagandist of extermination Johannes von Leers’ writings and personal career trajectory—as a favored contributor in Goebbel’s propaganda ministry, to his eventual adoption of Islam (as Omar Amin von Leers) while working as an anti-Western, and Antisemitic/anti-Zionist propagandist under Nasser’s regime from the mid-1950s, until his death in 1965—epitomizes this convergence of jihad, Islamic Antisemitism, and racist, Nazi Antisemitism, as described by Bat Ye’or. Already in essays published in 1938 and 1942, the first dating back almost two decades before his formal conversion to Islam while in Egypt, von Leers produced analyses focused primarily on Muhammad’s interactions with the Jews of Medina. These essays reveal his pious reverence for Islam and its prophet, and a thorough understanding of the sacralized Islamic sources for this narrative, i.e., the Koran, hadith, and sira. von Leers provided this reverent summary characterization of Muhammad’s activities in Mecca, and later Medina, which is entirely consistent with standard Muslim apologetics, in 1942:.
[Mecca] For years Muhammad sought in Mecca to succeed with his preaching that there was only one God, the sole, all-merciful king of Judgment Day. He opposed to the Christian Trinity the unity of God, rejected the Christian doctrine of original sin and salvation, and instead gave every believer as a guiding principle the complete fulfillment of the commands of the righteous, given by a compassionate and just God, before whom every individual person had to account for his acts.
[Medina] September 622 he left Mecca for Medina, where he took up residence. Here he encountered the Jewish problem for the first time. He believed in the victorious power of good in the world, he was firmly convinced that the religion of the one and only God, with its easy, practical, reasonable, basic laws for human life was nothing other than the original religion. He wanted to take mankind out of the current turmoil and lead it toward the original, clear vision of God. But since he had to deal with people who had been influenced by both Christianity and Judaism, he said that it was the religion in which Abraham (Ibrahim) had already believed, and which Christ and Moses had proclaimed, only each time it had been distorted by human beings. He said that this had been revealed anew to him by God. He wanted to make the path easy to follow for both Christians and Jews; thus at first he allowed his followers to pray facing toward Jerusalem. He repeatedly emphasized that he only wanted to purify the existing religions, to establish the restored, newly revealed faith. At the same time he was a skilled statesman. When the Arab tribes were unified, the Jews became a minority in Medina. Muhammad provided them with a kind of protectorate agreement: they were to retain their administration and their forms of worship, help the faithful defend the city, not ally themselves with Muhammad's opponents, and contribute to the faithful’s wars. The Jews could have been satisfied with this. But they began a general hate campaign against Islam, which proclaimed a pure conception of God…
Citing (or referring to) the relevant foundational text sources (i.e., Koran 13:36; 8:55-58; 59:1-15; the sira and canonical hadith descriptions of the fate of individual Jews such as Abu Afak and Ka’b ibn Ashraf, and the Jewish tribes Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir, Banu Qurayzah, as well as the Jews of the Khaybar oasis), von Leers chronicles Muhammad’s successful campaigns which vanquished these Jews, killing and dispersing them, “…or at most allow[ing] them to remain in certain places if they paid a poll tax.” Von Leers further describes the accounts (from the hadith, and more elaborately, the sira) of Muhammad’s poisoning by a Khaybar Jewess, and also notes the canonical hadith which records Caliph Umar’s rationale for his putative expulsion from northern Arabia of those remaining Jews who survived Muhammad’s earlier campaigns.
On his deathbed Mohammed is supposed to have said: “There must not be two religions in Arabia.” One of his successors, the caliph Omar, resolutely drove the Jews out of Arabia.
And von Leers even invokes the apocalyptic canonical hadith which 46 years later became the keystone of Hamas’ 1988 charter sanctioning a jihad genocide against the Jewish State of Israel.
Ibn Huraira even communicates to us the following assertion of the great man of God: “Judgment Day will come only when the Moslems have inflicted an annihilating defeat on the Jews, when every stone and every tree behind which a Jew has hidden says to believers: ‘Behind me stands a Jew, smite him.’”
Von Leers’ 1942 essay concludes by simultaneously extolling the “model” of oppression the Jews experienced under Islamic suzerainty, and the nobility of Muhammad, Islam, and the contemporary Muslims of the World War II era, foreshadowing his own conversion to Islam just over a decade later:
They [the Jews] were subjected to a very restrictive and oppressive special regulation that completely crippled Jewish activities. All reporters of the time when the Islamic lands still completely obeyed their own laws agree that the Jews were particularly despised…
Mohammed's opposition to the Jews undoubtedly had an effect—oriental Jewry was completely paralyzed by Islam. Its back was broken. Oriental Jewry has played almost no role in Judaism's massive rise to power over the last two centuries. Scorned, the Jews vegetated in the dirty alleys of the mellah, and were subject to a special regulation that did not allow them to profiteer, as they did in Europe, or even to receive stolen goods, but instead kept them fearful and under pressure. Had the rest of the world adopted a similar method, today we would have no Jewish question—and here we must absolutely note that there were also Islamic rulers, among them especially the Spanish caliphs of the House of Muawiyah, who did not adhere to Islam's traditional hostility to Jews—to their own disadvantage. However, as a religion Islam has performed the immortal service of preventing the Jews from carrying out their threatened conquest of Arabia and of defeating the dreadful doctrine of Jehovah through a pure faith that opened the way to higher culture for many peoples and gave them an education and humane training, so that still today a Moslem who takes his religion seriously is one of the most worthy phenomena in this world in turmoil.
And even earlier, in a 1938 essay, von Leers further sympathized with, “the leading role of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the Arabians’ battles against the Jewish invasion in Palestine.” He observes that to the pious Muslim, “…the Jew is an enemy, not simply an ‘unbeliever’ who might perhaps be converted or, despite the fact that he does not belong to Islam, might still be a person of some estimation. Rather, the Jew is the predestined opponent of the Muslim, one who desired to bring down the work of the Prophet.” Thus, von Leers continues, “how shocked and angry the Muslims of today are…when the Jews are once again introduced into Palestine by a European nation against all historical common sense, and set up as a ruling class!” He then proclaims, “For the pious Muslim, this is nothing other than a manifestation of the enthroning of Satan!” von Leers concludes by warning that,
The British political policy here is not paying sufficient attention to the true realities of spiritual history. They would do better to free themselves from the Jew-friendly teachings of liberalism and to listen closely to the cry of the anger of Islam…
Until his death in 1965 von Leers remained unrepentant about the annihilationist policies towards the Jews he helped advance serving Hitler’s Reich. Indeed he was convinced of the righteousness of the Nazi war against the Jews, and as a pious Muslim convert, von Leers viewed the Middle East as the succeeding battleground to seal the fate of world Jewry. His public evolution over the course of three decades illustrates starkly the shared centrality to these totalitarianisms—both modern and ancient—of the Jews as “first and last enemy” motif. Finally, an October 1957 US intelligence report on von Leers’ writings and activities for Egypt and the Arab League confirmed his complete adoption of the triumphalist Muslim worldview, desirous of nothing less than the destruction of Judeo-Christian civilization by jihad:
He [Dr. Omar Amin von Leers] is becoming more and more a religious zealot, even to the extent of advocating an expansion of Islam in Europe in order to bring about stronger unity through a common religion. This expansion he believes can come not only from contact with the Arabs in the Near East and Africa but with Islamic elements in the USSR. The results he envisions as the formation of a political bloc against which neither East nor West could prevail.
Fifty years later ignorance, denial, and delusion have engendered the sorry state of public understanding of this most ominous conversion of hatreds, by all its potential victims, not only Jews. This lack of understanding is little advanced by the current spate of analyses which seek “Nazi roots” of the cataclysmic September 11, 2001 acts of jihad terrorism, and see Nazism as having “introduced” antisemitism to an otherwise “tolerant”, even philosemitic Islamic world beginning in the 1930s. Awkwardly forced, and ahistorical, these analyses realign the Nazi cart in front of the Islamic steed which has driven both jihad and Islamic antisemitism, since the 7th century advent of the Muslim creed, particularly during the last decade of Muhammad’s life.
Even if all vestiges of Nazi militarism and racist antisemitism were to disappear miraculously overnight from the Islamic world, the living legacy of jihad war against non-Muslim infidels, and anti-Jewish hatred and violence, rooted in Islam’s sacred texts—Koran, hadith, and sira—would persist. The assessment and understanding of the uniquely Muslim institution of jihad, and Islamic antisemitism, begins with an unapologetic exposure of both the injunctions sanctioning jihad war, and the anti-Jewish motifs contained in these foundational texts of Islam. Yet while the West has engaged in self-critical mea culpa, acknowledging its own imperialistic past, shameful role in the slave trade, and antisemitic persecution, and has taken steps to make amends where possible, the Islamic nations remain in perpetual denial. Until Muslims acknowledge the ugly realities of jihad imperialism, and anti-Jewish persecution in their history, the past will continue to poison the present, and there will be no hope of combating resurgent jihadism, and Islam’s unreformed theological hatred of Jews in modern times, from Morocco to Indonesia, and within Muslim communities living in Western, and other non-Muslim societies across the globe.
**All adapted from Andrew G. Bostom’s forthcoming, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, 2007, on Prometheus Books.
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/11679/sec_id/11679
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Saving Civilization From Itself
Churchill understood that the Jews are the bedrock of Western tradition.
BY ARTHUR HERMAN
Thursday, November 8, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
"Why should we Anglo-Saxons apologize for being superior?" Winston Churchill once growled in exasperation. "We are superior." Certainly Churchill's views of what he and other late Victorians called the "lesser races," such as blacks and East Indians, are very different from ours today. One might easily assume that a self-described reactionary like Churchill, holding such views, shared the anti-Semitism prevalent among Europe's ruling elites before the Holocaust.
But he did not, as Martin Gilbert vividly shows in "Churchill and the Jews." By chronicling Churchill's warm dealings with English and European Jews throughout his long career, and his heartfelt support of Zionism, Mr. Gilbert conveys Churchill's deep admiration for the Jewish people and captures his crucial role in creating the state of Israel. Churchill offers the powerful example of a Western statesman who--unlike other statesmen in his own time and ours--understood the malignant nature of anti-Semitism and did what he could to oppose its toxic effects.
His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had been a close friend and ally to many wealthy British Jews, almost notoriously so, given the rancid snobbery of his circles. The son rarely failed to follow his father's inclinations, in this matter as in others. Jews like the Rothschilds and the banker Sir Ernest Cassel helped to advance Winston Churchill's early career (including watching over his finances after his father's death), and he repaid their support in part by publicly condemning the kind of anti-Semitism that was all too common in England's upper classes. But his actions were not merely an expression of personal thanks.
A student of history, Churchill came to feel that Judaism was the bedrock of traditional Western moral and political principles--and Churchill was of a generation that preferred to talk about principles instead of "values." For Europeans to turn against the Jew, he argued, was for them to strike at their own roots and reject an essential part of their civilization--"that corporate strength, that personal and special driving power" that Jews had brought for hundreds of years to Europe's arts, sciences and institutions.
To deny Jews a national homeland was therefore an act of ingratitude. Churchill became a keen backer of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which broached the idea of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As a friend to Zionist leader Chaim Weizman, and as colonial secretary after World War I, Churchill made establishing such a homeland a matter of urgency. "The hope of your race for so many centuries will be gradually realized here," Churchill told a Jewish audience in Jerusalem during his visit in March 1921, "not only for your own good, but for the good of all the world."
By "all the world" Churchill most pointedly meant to include Palestine's Arabs. As Mr. Gilbert recounts, Churchill was dismayed and disgusted by Arab resistance to Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine. "The Jews have a far more difficult task than you," he told Arab representatives, since "you only have to enjoy your own possessions," while the Jewish emigrants from Europe and elsewhere would have to carve a society out of a barren wilderness.
Yet Churchill was convinced that Arab civilization would benefit from contact with an entrepreneurial and morally centered people. "Speaking entirely as a non-Jew," he wrote, "I look on the Jews as the natural importers of western leaven so necessary for countries in the Near East." At the same time, Churchill tried to ensure that Palestinian Arabs got their own national homeland. It was Churchill who, as colonial secretary, decided to separate Transjordan (modern-day Jordan) from the rest of Palestine, assuming that Transjordan would become the site of the Arabs' future state and that other parts of Palestine (including the West Bank of the Jordan River) would be open to Jewish settlement.
Churchill was to be disappointed by the results of his Middle Eastern efforts, as Arabs hunted down and murdered Jewish settlers by the hundreds in the 1920s and 1930s--just at the time when Adolf Hitler was building his own regime around the persecution of the Jews in Germany. As early as 1930 Churchill realized that the Nazis' anti-Jewish policies carried the stench of an ancient evil. "Tell your boss from me," he said to a Hitler acquaintance in the late summer of 1932, as the Nazi Party was on the verge of power, "that anti-Semitism may be a good starter but it is a bad finisher."
In December 1942, Churchill--now prime minister--learned from a Roman Catholic member of the Polish resistance, a man named Jan Karsky, that thousands of Jews were being rounded up and sent by cattle cars to what turned out to be the death camp at Belzec, in eastern Poland. Churchill used the Karsky report to compel the Allies, including the Russians, to condemn "a bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination" in Germany--although he understood that the best way to halt the slaughter would be the speedy destruction of Hitler's empire. The chief of Britain's air staff, Sir Charles Portal, warned that any air raids "avowedly conducted on account of the Jews would be an asset to enemy propaganda," and Churchill reluctantly bowed to his advice. Nonetheless, in 1943 he wanted a film that documented the atrocities committed against the Jews to be shown to every American serviceman before the invasion of Europe.
After the war, Churchill felt that the most fitting response to the Holocaust would be to punish those guilty of the most horrific crimes against the Jews and to fulfill the promise of a Jewish homeland that he and Britain had made almost 30 years earlier. When Ernest Bevin, Britain's Labour Party foreign minister, hesitated to recognize Israel nine months after its founding, for fear of inflaming Arab opinion, Churchill swung back hard: "Whether the Right Honorable Gentleman likes it or not, the coming into being of a Jewish State in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand, or even three thousand years." Israel was just recompense, Churchill felt, not only for what the Jews of Europe had lost but for what they had given to civilization over the centuries.
This view, of course, no longer prevails. Today the existence of Israel is apparently something to be regretted, even deplored, not only in Arab capitals but in European ones and on American university campuses. Paradoxically, such feelings intensified after 9/11, an event that should have made us all aware of who the friends of Western civilization really are--and who its enemies. Martin Gilbert's book reminds us that anti-Semitism is the dark turn of the modern mind against itself, and a form of cultural patricide.
Mr. Herman's "Gandhi & Churchill" will be published by Bantam in April. You can buy "Churchill and the Jews" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
WSJ
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Jews on first?
http://www.veoh.com/videoDetails.html?v=e107067WHhNhRh4
and one more:
From: "Marc Denny" <craftydog@dogbrothers.com>
To: "Marc Denny" <craftydog@dogbrothers.com>
Subject: Fw: Great Jewish Parrot Joke
Date: Thursday, November 15, 2007 7:34 PM
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2007 7:06 PM
Subject: Fw: Great Jewish Parrot Joke
The Jewish Parrot
Meyer, a lonely widower, was walking home along Delancy Street one day
wishing something wonderful would happen in his life, when he passed a
pet store and heard a squawking voice shouting out in Yiddish,
"Quawwwwk...vus machts du?"
Meyer rubbed his eyes and ears. Couldn't believe it.
Perfect Yiddish.
The proprietor urged him, "Come in here, fella, and check out this parrot..."
Meyer did. An African Grey cocked his little head and said: "Vus?
Kenst sprechen Yiddish?"
In a matter of moments, Meyer had placed five hundred dollars on the
counter and carried the parrot in his cage away with him. All night he
talked with the parrot. In Yiddish. He told the parrot about his
father's adventures coming to America. About how beautiful his late
wife, Sarah, was when she was a young bride. About his family. About
his years of working in the garment district. About Florida.
The parrot listened and commented.
They shared some walnuts.
The parrot told him of living in the pet store, how lonely he would
get on the weekends. They both went to sleep.
Next morning, Meyer began to put on his Tfillin, all the while saying
his prayers. The parrot demanded to know what he was doing and when
Meyer explained, the parrot wanted to do the same. Meyer went out and
had a miniature set of tfillin hand made for the parrot.
The parrot wanted to learn to daven and learned every prayer. He even
wanted to learn to read Hebrew.
So Meyer spent weeks and months, sitting and teaching the parrot,
teaching him Torah. In time, Meyer came to love and count on the
parrot as a friend and fellow Jew.
One morning, on Rosh Hashanah, Meyer rose and got dressed and was
about to leave when the parrot demanded to go with him. Meyer
explained that Shul was not a place for a bird, but the parrot made a
terrific argument, so Meyer relented and carried the bird to Shul on
his shoulder.
Needless to say, they made quite a spectacle, and Meyer was questioned
by everyone, including the Rabbi and the Cantor. They refused to allow
a bird into the building on the High Holy Days, but Meyer persuaded
them to let him in this one time, swearing that the parrot could
daven. Wagers were made with Meyer.
Thousands of dollars were bet that the parrot could NOT daven, could
not speak Yiddish or Hebrew, etc.
All eyes were on the African Grey during services. The parrot perched
on Meyer's shoulder as one prayer and song passed - Meyer heard not a
peep from the bird. He began to become annoyed, slapping at his
shoulder and mumbling under his breath, "Daven!"
Nothing.
"Daven...parrot, you can daven, so daven...come on, everyone is looking at you!"
Nothing.
After Rosh Hashanah services were concluded, Meyer found that he owed
his Shul buddies and the Rabbi over four thousand dollars..
He marched home, so upset he said nothing to the parrot.
Finally several blocks from the Temple the Parrot began to sing an old
Yiddish song, as happy as a lark.
Meyer stopped and looked at him.
"Why? After I had tfillin made for you and taught you the morning
prayers, and taught you to read Hebrew and the Torah. And after you
begged me to bring you to Shul on Rosh Hashana, why? WHY?!? Why did
you do this to me?"
"Meyer, don't be a schmuck," the parrot replied. "Think of the odds
we'll get on Yom Kippur!"
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RESPECT to the Muslim who stepped forward!!!
NEW YORK -- Ten subway riders, including two with prior bias crime busts, were charged with assaulting a group of four Jews wishing each other "Happy Hannukah" aboard a Q train in Brooklyn last week.
Authorities say the victims, two men and two women, were on a southbound Q train at Canal Street in Lower Manhattan when they were approached by the gang of 10 at around 11:15 p.m. Friday.
They were allegedly beaten up by the group in an attack now being investigated as a bias crime, because one is accused of shouting, "Hanukkah is when the Jews killed Jesus."
Two of the victims, Maria Parsheva and Walter Adler spoke to Eyewitness News reporter NJ Burkett.
"At first, I got hit, but I wasn't bleeding," Adler said. "It was one of those sucker punch, shock punches. But by the second time, there were like people stomping me."
But it was what the attackers said that will stay with Adler longer than the bruises.
"'You killed him, you killed Jesus, you killed him on Hanukkah, you dirty Jew, you [expletive] Jew,' Adler said the attackers said.
Adler said the incident was sparked by him wishing his friends a Happy Hannukah to his friends.
"And almost immediately, you see the look in this guy's face, like I've called his mother something," Adler said. "And I see the way this guy looks, and I see the way that this guy wants to fight me, and I look, and I see another guy right in front of me, another guy. And I see the crowd moving in."
"Attacking someone because they yell 'Happy Hanukkah' is obviously reason to believe this is an anti-Semitic," Parsheva said.
When Hassan Askari, another passenger on the train, tried to help, he was beaten up too.
"I don't understand," Askari said. "They just said 'Happy Hannukah.' That was it. There was nothing else."
Although hate crimes charges have not yet been brought, it is being investigated as a bias incident.
Police say the victims were treated for bruising and swelling to the head and face, but none required hospital treatment.
The 10 suspects, ages 19 and 20, were arrested at the DeKalb Avenue station in Brooklyn. They were charged with assault and unlawful assembly.
"No one else helped up, except Hassan," Parsheva said. "No one else on the train."
"A Muslim-American saved us, when our own people were on the train and didn't do anything," Adler said. "Someone who in the media often gets painted as the enemy of Israel and the Jews, this is a...Sunni Muslim, this is someone that jumped in, he knew we were Jews, to help us."
During the investigation, one of four victims revealed the comment made by one of the attackers, prompting the hate crimes task force investigation.
Two of the 10 suspects charged have prior hate crimes arrests.
Authorities say 19-year-old Joseph Jirovec was one of six charged in a June 2006 attack on four black youths in Brooklyn's mostly white Gerritsen Beach neighborhood.
Jirovec, the son of a firefighter serving in Iraq as an Army staff sergeant, claimed at the time that the motivation for the attack was his membership in a violent street gang, and not bias.
He said his street name was "Bloody Fitted" and that he held the rank of two-star general in the Bloods street gang.
Another of those arrested, 19-year-old Zachary Rogalski of Brooklyn, was charged in a May 2005 attack on several black youths in Marine Park, Brooklyn.
He was part of a group of nine white youths who beat up a group of three blacks looking for a $70 cigarette lighter they lost during a previous fight, according to police.
(Copyright ©2007 WABC-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.)
Source Drudge
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Bush Says U.S. Should Have Bombed WWII Death Camp During Holocaust Memorial Tour
Friday , January 11, 2008
Associated Press
JERUSALEM —
President George W. Bush, on an emotional tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial, stopped in front of an aerial photo of Auschwitz on Friday and told his secretary of state that the U.S. should have bombed the death camp to stop the extermination of Jews there, the memorial's chairman said.
It was a rare acknowledgment from a U.S. leader on an issue that has stirred deep controversy for decades.
The Allies had detailed reports about Auschwitz during the war from Polish partisans and escaped prisoners. But they chose not to bomb the camp, the rail lines leading to it, or any of the other Nazi death camps, preferring instead to focus all resources on the broader military effort.
Between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people were murdered at the infamous camp in Poland.
Bush twice had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of the museum, said Yad Vashem's chairman, Avner Shalev, who guided Bush through the exhibits.
Upon viewing an aerial shot of Auschwitz, taken during the war by U.S. forces, Bush called the ruling not to bomb it "complex." He then called over Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to discuss President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's decision, clearly pondering the options before rendering an opinion of his own, Shalev told the Associated Press.
"We should have bombed it," Bush said, according to Shalev.
Tom Segev, a leading Israeli scholar of the Holocaust, said the Bush comment, which appeared spontaneous, marked the first time an American president had made this acknowledgment.
"It is clear now that the U.S. knew a lot about it," he said. "It's possible that bombing at least the railway to the camps may have saved the lives of the Jews of Hungary. They were the very last ones who were sent to Auschwitz at a time when everybody knew what was going on."
Bush, making the most extensive Mideast trip of his presidency, was accompanied on his tour of the museum by a small party that included Rice, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Israeli President Shimon Peres.
At the compound, overlooking a forest on Jerusalem's outskirts, Bush visited a memorial to the 1.5 million Jewish children killed in the Holocaust, featuring six candles reflected 1.5 million times in a hall of mirrors.
At the site's Hall of Remembrance, he heard a cantor chant a Jewish prayer for the dead. There, Bush, wearing a yarmulke, placed a red-white-and-blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six extermination camps. He also lit a torch memorializing the victims.
"I was most impressed that people in the face of horror and evil would not forsake their God. In the face of unspeakable crimes against humanity, brave souls — young and old — stood strong for what they believe," Bush said.
"I wish as many people as possible would come to this place. It is a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we must resist it," he said.
The memorial was closed to the public and under heavy guard Friday, with armed soldiers standing on top of some of the site's monuments and a police helicopter and surveillance blimp hovering in the air overhead.
It was Bush's second visit to the Holocaust memorial, a regular stop on the visits of foreign dignitaries. His first was in 1998, as governor of Texas. The last sitting U.S. president to visit was Bill Clinton in 1994.
In the memorial's visitors' book, the president wrote simply, "God bless Israel, George Bush."
Shalev then presented Bush with illustrations of the Bible drawn by the Jewish artist Carol Deutsch, who perished in the Holocaust.
Deutsch created the works while in hiding from the Nazis in Belgium. He was informed upon, and died in 1944 in the Buchenwald camp. After the war, his daughter Ingrid discovered that the Nazis had confiscated their furniture and valuables but had left behind a single item: a meticulously crafted wooden box adorned with a Star of David and a seven-branched menorah, containing a collection of 99 of the artist's illustrations of biblical scenes.
The originals are on display at Yad Vashem. The memorial recently decided to produce a special series of 500 replicas, the first of which was presented to Bush.
Debbie Deutsch-Berman, a Yad Vashem employee whose grandfather was Deutsch's brother, said she was proud that Bush would be given her relative's artwork.
"These are not just his paintings, they are his legacy, and the fact that they survived shows that as much as our enemies tried to destroy the ideas that these paintings embody, they failed," she said.
-
The relative lack of Jewish resistance in Europe is a common myth. However inadequate, it was far more than anyone else in Europe was doing. And a lot of other important factors keep getting conveniently overlooked.
A very important discussion of that is posted here by noted writer and political scientist Dave Kopel.
http://www.davekopel.com/2A/Foreign/...-holocaust.htm
I would suggest reading the whole thing and its references.
The key quote would be "Jews resisted Hitler more so than any other group behind Nazi lines"
However, a few more quotes seem in order.
"Contrary to myth of Jewish passivity, many Jews did fight back during the Holocaust. They shut down the extermination camp at Sobibor, rose up in the Warsaw Ghetto, and fought in the woods and swamps all over Eastern Europe. Indeed, Jews resisted at a higher rate than did any other population under Nazi rule."
"Jewish resistance was extensive, and succeeded in saving many lives. The record also explains that a key impediment to even more effective resistance was the lack of firearms, as well as Jewish unfamiliarity with arms during the pre-war years. The article dispels the myth of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust"
About who else was helping, in no small way, to murder Jews:
"In the woods and swamps of Eastern Europe, the Jewish partisans were often attacked by local civilians, or by non-Jewish partisan groups, including remnants of the Russian or Polish armies."
Locals collaborating with Nazis were a major factor too.
Also note that a very large fraction of combat capable Jews were already serving in various armies and/or units. Note the interesting statistic for one partisan formation:
"On the day the Bielski unit was disbanded, it comprised 1,140 Jews, including 149 armed combatants."
Given that there was a most remarkable 95% survival rate in this unit, that says a great deal about available human resources.
Looks like it's the Europeans, and not the Jews (Poles in this case) who were the real passive bunch
"In 1942-43, Jews constituted half of all the partisans in Poland."
Being a Jewish partisan apparently carried about 80% death rate, on average.
"There were armed revolts in over forty different ghettos, mostly in Eastern Poland."
More on who was really passive. And why we don't hear much about it.
"In other parts of Europe, Jews likewise joined the resistance at much higher rates than the rest of the population. Unlike in Eastern Europe, though, Jews were generally able to participate as individuals in the national resistance, rather than having to fight in separate units."
At risk of reinforcing stereotypes of France and French. Nothing passive here.
"For example, in France, Jews amounted to than one percent of French population, but comprised about 15-20 percent of the French Resistance."
Similar situation in Greece.
"In Greece too, Jews were disproportionately involved in the resistance. In Thessaly, a Jewish partisan unit in the mountains was led by the septuagenarian Rabbi Moshe Pesah, who carried his own rifle. The Athenian Jew Jacques Costis led the team which demolished the Gorgopotoma Bridge, thereby breaking the link between the mainland and Peloponnesian Peninsula, and interfering with the delivery of supplies to Rommel’s Afrika Korps."
"Approximately 10,000 of the 80,000 Jews in Minsk escaped to the wood to fight as partisans.Half of them survived the war."
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080427/ap_on_re_eu/the_wallenberg_mystery
Scholars run down more clues to a Holocaust mystery
By ARTHUR MAX and RANDY HERSCHAFT, Associated Press Writers Sun Apr 27, 3:51 PM ET
STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Budapest, November 1944: Another German train has loaded its cargo of Jews bound for Auschwitz. A young Swedish diplomat pushes past the SS guard and scrambles onto the roof of a cattle car.
Ignoring shots fired over his head, he reaches through the open door to outstretched hands, passing out dozens of bogus "passports" that extended Sweden's protection to the bearers. He orders everyone with a document off the train and into his caravan of vehicles. The guards look on, dumbfounded.
Raoul Wallenberg was a minor official of a neutral country, with an unimposing appearance and gentle manner. Recruited and financed by the U.S., he was sent into Hungary to save Jews. He bullied, bluffed and bribed powerful Nazis to prevent the deportation of 20,000 Hungarian Jews to concentration camps, and averted the massacre of 70,000 more people in Budapest's ghetto by threatening to have the Nazi commander hanged as a war criminal.
Then, on Jan. 17, 1945, days after the Soviets moved into Budapest, the 32-year-old Wallenberg and his Hungarian driver, Vilmos Langfelder, drove off under a Russian security escort, and vanished forever.
And because he was a rare flicker of humanity in the man-made hell of the Holocaust, the world has celebrated him ever since. Streets have been named after him and his face has been on postage stamps. And researchers have wrestled with two enduring mysteries: Why was Wallenberg arrested, and did he really die in Soviet custody in 1947?
Researchers have sifted through hundreds of purported sightings of Wallenberg into the 1980s, right down to plotting his movements from cell to cell while in custody. And fresh documents are to become public which might cast light on another puzzle: Whether Wallenberg was connected, directly or indirectly, to a super-secret wartime U.S. intelligence agency known as "the Pond," operating as World War II was drawing to a close and the Soviets were growing increasingly suspicious of Western intentions in eastern Europe.
Speculation that Wallenberg was engaged in espionage has been rife since the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged in the 1990s that he had been recruited for his rescue mission by an agent of the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, which later became the CIA.
About the Pond, little is known. But later this year the CIA is to release a stash of Pond-related papers accidentally discovered in a Virginia barn in 2001. These are the papers of John Grombach, who headed the Pond from its creation in 1942. CIA officials say they should be turned over to the National Archives in College Park, Md.
In February, the Swedish government posted an online database of 1,000 documents and testimonies related to Wallenberg's disappearance. In a few months, independent investigators plan to launch a Web site with their nearly 20-year research into Russian archives and prison records. Russia is building a Museum of Tolerance that will feature once-classified documents on Wallenberg. And the CIA last year relaxed its guidelines to reveal details of its sources and intelligence-gathering methods in the case.
Despite dozens of books and hundreds of documents on Wallenberg, much remains hidden. The Kremlin has failed to find or deliver dozens of files, Sweden has declined to open all its books, and The Associated Press has learned as many as 100,000 pages of declassified OSS documents await processing at the National Archives.
The Russians say Wallenberg died in prison in 1947, but never produced a proper death certificate or his remains.
But independent research suggests he may have lived many years — perhaps until the late 1980s. If true, he likely was held in isolation, stripped of his identity, known only by a number or a false name and moving like a phantom among Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric institutions.
In 1991, the Russian government assigned Vyacheslav Nikonov, deputy head of the KGB intelligence service, to spend months searching classified archives about Wallenberg.
"I think I found all the existing documents," Nikonov e-mailed The Associated Press last month. The Soviets believed Wallenberg had been a spy, he said, but unlike many political detainees he never had a trial.
Nikonov's conclusion: "Shot in 1947."
Later in 1991, Russia and Sweden launched a joint investigation that lasted 10 years but failed to reach a joint conclusion.
The 2001 Swedish report said: "There is no fully reliable proof of what happened to Raoul Wallenberg," and listed 17 unanswered questions.
The Russian report bluntly said, "Wallenberg died, or most likely was killed, on July 17, 1947." It named Viktor Abakumov, the head of the "Smersh" counterintelligence agency, as responsible for the execution and cover-up. It said the Russians consider the Wallenberg case "resolved."
Unsatisfied, independent consultants and academics have kept digging, analyzing, reassessing old information and pressing for the Kremlin to release missing files.
___
Wallenberg arrived in Budapest in July 1944. With the knowledge of his government, his task as first secretary to the Swedish diplomatic legation was a cover for his true mission as secret emissary of the U.S. War Refugee Board, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a belated attempt to stem the annihilation of Europe's Jews.
In the previous two months, 440,000 Hungarian Jews had been shipped to Auschwitz for extermination. They were among the last of six million Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust.
Of the 230,000 who remained in the Hungarian capital in mid-1944, 100,000 survived the war.
After the Red Army arrived in January, Wallenberg went to see the Russian military commander to discuss postwar reconstruction and restitution of Jewish property. Two days later he returned under Russian escort to collect some personal effects, then was never seen in public again.
And what did his country — or his influential cousins — do about it?
Looking back a half century later, the Swedish government acknowledged that its own passive response to the detention of one of its diplomats was astounding, and that it had missed several chances to win his freedom.
"The worst mistakes were done in the first two years," said Hans Magnusson, the Swedish co-chairman of the 10-year investigation with the Russians. Sweden felt intimidated by the mighty Soviets and unwilling to challenge them, he said.
In the mid-1950s, the Swedes pursued the case more aggressively, prompting a memorandum from Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in 1957 that Wallenberg had died of heart failure in detention 10 years earlier — at age 34.
As more testimony came in that Wallenberg was still alive, Stockholm periodically raised the issue with Moscow — but without results, said Magnusson, interviewed in the Netherlands where he is now ambassador.
Sweden could have pushed harder, he said, "but I doubt it would have achieved more."
"It is inconceivable," says Wallenberg's half-sister, Nina Lagergren. "Here is a man sent out by the Swedish government to risk his life. He saved thousands of people — and he was left to rot."
___
Some time around 1994, Susan Mesinai, who had by then been researching the Wallenberg case for five years, visited Lucette Colvin Kelsey, Wallenberg's cousin, at her home in Connecticut. After lunch, Kelsey caught up with Mesinai as she got into the car and told her: "Raoul was working for the highest levels of government."
"So I said to her, 'How high? Do you mean the president?' And she nodded her head," Mesinai said, disclosing to AP a conversation she had kept confidential for 14 years.
Kelsey's father, Col. William Colvin, had been the U.S. military attache in the Swedish capital around the time of World War I. Wallenberg spent vacations in the 1930s with the Colvin family while he earned a degree in architecture at the University of Michigan. Kelsey, who was a year younger than her cousin, died in 1996.
Rather than clarify anything, Kelsey's cryptic remark only deepened the fog.
Wallenberg's rescue mission inevitably placed him in a vortex of intrigue and espionage involving the Hungarian resistance, the Jewish underground, communists working for the Soviets, and British, U.S. and Swedish intelligence operations. He also had regular contact with Adolf Eichmann and other Nazis running the deportation of Jews.
Whether or not he himself was passing on intelligence, Russia had plenty of reason to suspect him of spying, either for the Allies or Germany — or both.
"Wallenberg had ties to all the major actors in Hungary," says Susanne Berger, a German researcher who collaborated with the Swedish-Russian research project.
The Stockholm chief of the War Refugee Board, Iver C. Olsen, was also a key member of the 35-man OSS station in the Swedish capital, and it was he who recruited Wallenberg, who in turn kept the U.S. connection secret by sending his communications through Swedish diplomatic channels.
Olsen's OSS personnel file — unpublished until the AP viewed it at the National Archives — revealed that the American was cited for using his position at the War Refugee Board "in gathering important information for the OSS and for the State Department."
In 1955 Olsen denied to the CIA that Wallenberg ever spied for the OSS, and Mesinai and Berger offer a different likelihood: that the Swede was a source for the Pond, which was a rival to the OSS known only to Roosevelt and a few insiders in the War and State Departments.
A small clandestine intelligence-gathering operation, the Pond relied on contacts in private corporations and hand-picked embassy personnel. It worked closely with the Dutch electronics company N.V. Philips, "which had access to 'enemy' territory as well as a far-flung corporation intelligence apparatus in its own right," said former CIA analyst Mark Stout who wrote a brief unofficial history of the Pond.
So far, no evidence has emerged that Wallenberg worked for the Pond, and Stout said in an interview he had not seen Wallenberg mentioned in any papers he has reviewed.
But their circles of contacts intersected at several points, including members of the Hungarian resistance and possibly the Philips connection.
"The Pond was centered around President Roosevelt's office and rumors of a special mission, intelligence or otherwise, for Raoul Wallenberg have persisted through the years," said Berger, who suspects the Soviets knew about the agency.
It may have been just one more reason for Stalin to order his arrest, she said. Regardless of whether Wallenberg was involved, "the Pond's activities clearly would have served to enhance Soviet paranoia about Allied activities and aims in Hungary."
Hungarian historian Laszlo Ritter, of the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, said the Philips company also was providing cover for Britain's MI6 intelligence service. One of its crucial agents in the Balkans was Lolle Smit, who was knighted after the war by both Britain and his native Holland.
One month before Wallenberg arrived, Smit fled Budapest for Romania, from where he continued to control his network, Ritter said, but he left his family behind.
Smit's daughter, Berber Smit, worked with Wallenberg in his rescue efforts — and "had a romance with him," according to her son, Alan Hogg.
Ritter said Hungarian war files show no direct tie between Wallenberg and Smit, or between the diplomat and British intelligence. At the same time, MI6 used the Swedish legation at least twice to smuggle out information, and helped give false papers to Jews and the anti-fascist resistance, he said.
When the OSS wanted to dispatch a radio to the Hungarian underground leader Geza Soos, it sent the transmitter with a Swedish intelligence officer and told him Wallenberg would know how to contact Soos.
Wallenberg's very name may have been enough to arouse Russian distrust. Throughout the war, his cousins Marcus and Jacob Wallenberg, the czars of a banking and industrial empire, had done business in Germany, producing the ball bearings that kept its army on the move.
The Wallenbergs also were involved in discreet, unsuccessful peace efforts between the Allies and Germany, which Stalin feared would leave him excluded — a foretaste of global realignment that would lead to the Cold War.
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In December 1993, investigator Marvin Makinen of the University of Chicago interviewed Varvara Larina, a retired orderly at Moscow's Vladimir Prison since 1946. She remembered a foreigner who was kept in solitary confinement on the third floor of Korpus 2, a building used both as a hospital and isolation ward.
Though it was decades earlier, the prisoner stood out in Larina's memory. He spoke Russian with an accent and "complained about everything," she said. He repeatedly griped that the soup was cold by the time Larina delivered it. Prison authorities ordered her to serve him first.
"This is very unusual," Makinen said in an interview. Normally, such complaints would condemn an inmate to a punishment cell. "The fact that he wasn't means he was a very special prisoner."
When shown a gallery of photographs, Larina immediately picked out Wallenberg's — one never published before, Makinen said.
She recalled he was in the opposite cell when another prisoner, Kirill Osmak, died in May 1960.
That was enough for Makinen and Chicago colleague Ari Kaplan to roughly pinpoint the cell of Larina's foreigner. Creating a database of cell occupancy from the prison's registration cards, they found two units opposite Osmak's that were reported empty for 243 and 717 days respectively.
Normally, cells were left vacant for a week at most, Makinen said. The researchers concluded that those two cells likely held special prisoners, namelessly concealed in the gulag.
Mesinai and others reviewed hundreds of accounts over the decades of people who claimed to have seen or heard of someone who could have been Wallenberg. They established a pattern of sightings, even though many individual reports were considered unreliable, uncorroborated, deliberate hoaxes or cases of mistaken identity with other Swedish prisoners.
Some stories, like Larina's, ring particularly true.
One compelling account came in 1961. Swedish physician Nanna Svartz asked an eminent Russian scientist about Wallenberg during a medical congress in Moscow. Lowering his voice, the Russian told her that Wallenberg was at a psychiatric hospital and "not in very good shape."
The Russian, Alexandr Myasnikov, later claimed he had been misunderstood, but Svartz stood firm. His remark, she later reported, "came spontaneously. He went pale as soon as he said it, and appeared to understand that he had said too much."
A few years later the Soviets sent out feelers for a possible spy swap. Envoys indicated Moscow was ready to "compensate" Sweden if it freed Stig Wennerstromm, a Swedish air force officer who had spied for the Kremlin for 15 years.
Though Wallenberg's name was never mentioned, he was considered the only prize worth exchanging for such a high-value spy. The intermediary was Wolfgang Vogel, an East German lawyer who engineered many Cold War prisoner exchanges. But years of halfhearted negotiation ended in no deal.
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Nina Lagergren keeps a small wooden box in the cellar of her comfortable Stockholm home. The Russians gave it to her in 1989 when she visited Moscow. It contains her half-brother's diplomatic passport, a stack of currency, a Swedish license for the pistol he bought but never used, and two telephone diaries. Among the entries are Eichmann and Berber Smit, the daughter of the Dutch spy.
They also gave the family a copy of Wallenberg's "death certificate," handwritten and unstamped.
"They anticipated that I would get very moved and understand there was no more hope," Lagergren said.
Instead it reinforced her belief that Wallenberg had lived beyond 1947 and perhaps was even then alive. "This proved we could go on," she said. Today he would be 95, and she concedes he must be dead.
If indeed Wallenberg's death in 1947 was a lie, the question remains: Why was he never freed?
The 2001 Swedish report speculated that the longer he was held, the harder it was for the Soviets to release him. Still, "it would have been exceptional to order the execution of a diplomat from a neutral country. It might have appeared simpler to keep him in isolation," the report said.
The search continues.
Berger, the independent researcher, has submitted a new, detailed request to Moscow to release files on prisoners who shared cells with the missing diplomat and on other foreigners in the gulag; Mesinai hopes to study psychiatric facilities where Wallenberg may have been confined; Ritter, the Hungarian researcher, is tracing the British spy network of Lolle Smit; and historians are awaiting the release of the Pond papers.
Whatever any of this reveals, a 1979 State Department memo puts these questions into perspective: "Whether or not Wallenberg was involved in espionage during World War II is a moot point at this stage in history. His obvious humanitarian acts certainly outweigh any conceivable 'spy' mission he may have been on."
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Associated Press investigative researcher Randy Herschaft reported from Washington, D.C.
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On the Net:
Wallenberg Association: http://tinyurl.com/55p7y5
Swedish government Web site:
http://www.sweden.gov.se/content/1/c6/04/11/37/37b7322e.pdf
International Wallenberg Foundation: http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/wallenberg/
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum:
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?langen&ModuleId10005211
National Archives: http:http://www.archives.gov/iwg (point of contact for CIA, OSS, Pond docs)
CIA Docs: http://www.foia.cia.gov (type in wallenberg in search field)
CIA "Pond" article: http://tinyurl.com/3ar3rx
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King and the Jews
By CLARENCE B. JONES
April 30, 2008
Earlier this month, at a Los Angeles event for the national African-American fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi, the keynote speaker launched into an anti-Semitic tirade – directed at the fraternity's guest of honor. The shocking episode shows just how far we've strayed from the original vision of the civil rights movement – and how far we have yet to travel to realize that vision.
The guest of honor, Daphna Ziman, an Israeli-American woman, had just received the Tom Bradley Award for generous philanthropy and public service. But instead of praise, the Rev. Eric Lee berated her. "The Jews," he claimed, "have made money on us in the music business and we are the entertainers, and they are economically enslaving us." (Mr. Lee would later apologize to Ms. Ziman.)
It was bad enough that the event took place on April 4, the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Even more galling, Mr. Lee is the president-CEO of the L.A. branch of the Southern Christian Leadership Foundation – the very civil-rights organization co-founded by the slain civil-rights leader.
Martin would have been repelled by Mr. Lee's remarks. I was his lawyer and one of his closest advisers, and I can say with absolute certainty that Martin abhorred anti-Semitism in all its forms, including anti-Zionism. "There isn't anyone in this country more likely to understand our struggle than Jews," Martin told me. "Whatever progress we've made so far as a people, their support has been essential."
Martin was disheartened that so many blacks could be swayed by Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam and other black separatists, rejecting his message of nonviolence, and grumbling about "Jew landlords" and "Jew interlopers" – even "Jew slave traders." The resentment and anger displayed toward people who offered so much support for civil rights was then nascent. But it has only festered and grown over four decades. Today, black-Jewish relations have arguably grown worse, not better.
For that, Martin would place fault principally on the shoulders of black leaders such as Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson – either for making anti-Semitic statements, inciting anti-Semitism (including violence), or failing to condemn overt anti-Semitism within the black community.
When American cities were burning in the summers before he died, Martin listened to any number of young blacks holding matches blame Jewish landlords or Jewish store-owners in the inner city – no matter that Jews were a minority of landlords and store owners. He asked them, Who else might have bought the buildings that we lived in and rented us apartments? Who else was willing to come in and open stores and sell us the things we needed? Where were these Negroes with money who'd abandoned their communities? And if blacks had bought those businesses and buildings, would they have charged less for rent and bread?
As Martin wrote in 1967, "Negroes nurture a persistent myth that the Jews of America attained social mobility and status solely because they had money. It is unwise to ignore the error for many reasons. In a negative sense it encourages anti-Semitism and overestimates money as a value. In a positive sense, the full truth reveals a useful lesson.
"Jews progressed because they possessed a tradition of education combined with social and political action. The Jewish family enthroned education and sacrificed to get it. The result was far more than abstract learning. Uniting social action with educational competence, Jews became enormously effective in political life."
To Martin, who believed the pursuit of excellence would trump adversity, Jewish success should, and could, be used as a blueprint and inspiration for blacks' own success rather than as an incitement to bitterness.
Any blacks who subscribe to the views represented in Mr. Lee's speech would do well to heed the words and deeds of the man whose name and legacy they claim to represent.
Mr. Jones was Martin Luther King's personal attorney and close adviser. He is the co-author, with Joel Engel, of "What Would Martin Say" (Harper, 2008), from which this was adapted.
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Architectural plans of Auschwitz death camp found in Berlin
Nov. 8, 2008
JPost.com Staff , THE JERUSALEM POST
The German paper Bild revealed never-before-seen architectural plans of the Auschwitz extermination camp on Saturday.
The floor plans, cross-sections and maps on yellowing paper, mostly on a scale of 1:100, were allegedly found during the evacuation of an abandoned Berlin apartment. They were drawn up between 1941 and 1943, when the Holocaust was at its peak.
The 28 documents include detailed blueprints of prisoner barracks, gas chambers marked clearly Gaskammer in a gothic-inspired font and even a cross-section of the gate into which entered the rails of trains carrying Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, disabled persons and other people the National Socialists sent to die in the most horrifyingly efficient genocide in history.
One of the maps carries the handwritten signature of Gestapo commander Heinrich Himmler.
The plans were not construction plans but were drawn after Auschwitz-Birkenau was built (on the foundations of an existing military base of the Austro-Hungarian empire.)
On 20 January 1942 Nazi officials met in the resort of Wannsee east of Berlin where they devised the Final Solution, and this has traditionally been taken by historians as the beginning of the Nazis' extermination campaign.
One of the drawings, predating the Wannsee Conference by eight months, sheds new light on the chronological extent of the German genocidal machine.
Dr. Hans-Dieter Kreikamp, Chief Director of the Bundesarchivs, the federal archives in Berlin, said the find was of "extraordinary importance."
"The plans are authentic certificates of a systematically planned genocide of European Jews," he was quoted by Bild as saying.
What the documents tellingly reveal, however, in their unequivocally marked sections, is that any persons involved in the operation of Auschwitz knew full well that it was intended for the systematic extermination of human beings, and were not simple "labor camps."
French right-wing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen claimed no people were gassed in Auschwitz as recently as April this year.
As the plans show a "Laundry and shower room" leading into a "Dressing room" and then to the "Gas chamber," there could be no doubt what the purpose of the large room marked Gaskammer was.
The documents rebut the last Holocaust deniers, Bild states in its report.
-- I don't think this will actually stop any holocaust deniers
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You could put a holocaust denier in a time machine and take him to the death camps firsthand and that would have no effect. Same for the 9/11 truthers.
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A cemetary I drive past on a regular basis on patrol just put up a sign indicating that it's a jewish cemetary. I've driven past it for years and had no clue. It is next to a larger cemetary, I had just assumed it was a part of the larger one.
Though it's outside my actual jurisdiction, now I feel compelled to watch it even closer, given today's climate. I'd rather that they had maintained security through obscurity.
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http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/01/lincolnwood-synagogue-temple-vandalize-graffiti.html
(http://photos-d.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak-snc1/v1972/87/18/552270435/n552270435_5545731_7779.jpg)
Several hundred people gathered in the parking lot of a Lincolnwood synagogue this afternoon to denounce the vandalism and hateful graffiti that struck several Jewish institutions across the Chicago area over the weekend, declaring in Hebrew, "The nation of Israel lives" in a defiant chant of unity against intolerance.
protest.jpg
The rally today at the Lincolnwood Jewish Congregation. (Tribune / E. Jason Wambsgans)
Elected officials and police joined the rally at the Lincolnwood Jewish Congregation, 7117 Crawford Ave., to urge vigilance, and to vow that those who scrawled "Death to Israel," and "Free Palestine" on its wall would be arrested and prosecuted.
"We're at the front a little bit, too," the congregation's rabbi, Joel Lehrfield, told the crowd, which was peppered with American and Israeli flags.
Referring to the graffiti behind him, he added, "It is an antisemitic statement against all Jews and decent human beings."
The rally was organized after vandals struck at least four synagogues and a Jewish school in Chicago and Lincolnwood early Saturday. The vandalism and rally come in the wake of Israeli airstrikes and the movement of ground forces into the Gaza Strip, which Israel says is meant to deter rocket attacks by Hamas.
The Chicago area has seen several protests the last two weeks, both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli.
"We look to the cherubic faces of our sons and daughters, of our grandchildren, and have to say that hatred is a force that has not yet been vanquished," Rabbi Zvi Engel, of Congegation Or Torah, in Skokie, told the rally, which he helped organize.
"This touches a raw nerve," he said later. "You have to remember, in our congregations, there are people who remember this happening in Europe" as the Holocaust was beginning.
Among those in the crowd was Daniel Gutstein, a member of the Lincolnwood congegation, who brought his wife, Kari, and three sons, ages 2, 4, and 6.
"I want my boys to know that, whatever happens, we have a community," Daniel Gutstein said. "We are not alone in this world, no matter how many voices are arrayed against us."
"They want us to be afaid," Kari Gutstein added of the vandals. "We aren't."
Late Sunday morning, Talmud classes were underway at Lubavitch Mesivta of Chicago, a rabbinical school and synagogue at 2756 W. Morse Ave. in Chicago. Spray painted on the brick wall facing California Avenue was the same phrase, "Death to Israel." The front door was a spiderweb of cracked glass, where rocks had been thrown.
"We continue on," said Rabbi Shalom Halberstam. "We do our thing. Studying. Learning. We didn't shut school down. The students are here, studying. We keep the faith."
Rabbi Moshe Perlstein of Lubavitch Mesivta said he told told congregants and students Saturday morning that challenges only push people to strive to be better.
"We're hoping this will make us stronger and better," Perlstein said.
Over at the Young Israel Congegation of West Rogers Park, 2706 W. Touhy Ave, head of security Stuart Singal was putting tarp over two smashed windows Sunday morning. The two bricks that were thrown through them early Saturday morning still lay on the floor of the social hall.
Rabbi Elisha Prero said synagogue officials believe the "Jewish response" to the defacement of their building was to make something positive of it.
They kept the two bricks thrown into their front window and after police told them the items would be useful in the investigation, officials decided they would use them in the cornerstone of the synagogue's library.
"We want to turn this disgusting act into a redemptive one," Prero said. "To take the attacks and use them to encourage our members and the community to be more Jewish, not less."
During services "I talked about how whether we like it or not, events in the Middle East are affecting us," Prero said.
"We were targeted for one reason and one reason only, and that's because we're Jews," he added. "That's unsettling."
Singal said a phone has been moved into the synagogue, in case a service ever gets disrupted and 911 must be called. He also routinely watches through the window for suspicious people walking by.
"I'm somebody who has lived in Israel," he said. "I'm somebody who knows security. I just check for that."
But the synagogue has no formal guards, and despite one members' suggestion that a gun be kept withing reach along with the phone, Singal said it has not yet come to that.
"We can only do what we can do," he said.
"Death to Israel" was also spray-painted on a sign showing support for Israel in front of Hanna Sacks Bais Yaakov High School, 3021 Devon Ave. No one from the school could be reached on Sunday.
At about 4 a.m. Saturday, the caretakers of the Lincolnwood Jewish Congregation were awakened by the sound of breaking glass, said Steve Kramer, the synagogue's head of security.
The caretakers reported seeing two men running from the temple, Kramer said.
"We're taking it seriously," Lincolnwood Police Lt. Mark Brines said.
Police believe the same people may also have vandalized at least three West Rogers Park synagogues. Lincolnwood and Chicago police are working with the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force on the incidents, which are being investigated as hate crimes.
At Anshe Motele Congregation, 6520 N. California Ave., "Death to Israel" also was sprayed in orange paint on the front door, said Rabbi Alan Abramson.
"We're not going anywhere," the rabbi said. If people want to protest, "they don't have to deface a house of worship. ... Do it in a peaceful manner."
"Political protest has no place on the wall of a synagogue," Engel told the rally.
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Many thanks to the perpetrators.
This just makes Jewish resolve even stronger. 8-)
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I am INFIDEL DOG OF THE NEVER AGAIN BRIGADES!!!
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http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?print=yes&id=30271
Calling for Genocide In Your Neighborhood
by Robert Spencer
Posted 01/16/2009 ET
Updated 01/16/2009 ET
The mainstream media has taken little notice, but at rallies in America and Europe this week protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza, protesters have more than once declared how happy they would be if the Jews were simply wiped out once and for all.
Los Angeles: Muslim demonstrators in front of the Israeli Consulate chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” -- a vision that can only be realized by the total destruction of Israel. They waved the flag of the jihad terrorist group Hizballah. To cheers from other demonstrators, some shouted, “Long live Hitler! Put Jews in ovens! Jews are fossil fuel!”
Fort Lauderdale: Leftist and Muslim demonstrators chanted, “Nuke, nuke Israel!” One yelled: “Go back to the ovens! You need a big oven, that’s what you need!”
Toronto: A Muslim protester complained that “Hitler didn’t do a good job.” Another shouted at pro-Israel counter-demonstrators: “Jewish child, you’re gonna f****n die. Hamas is coming for you." Pro-jihad demonstrators berated and threatened those who came out to show support for Israel, saying: “I want the war to continue because I want Hizballah to wipe the state of terrorism [i.e., Israel] off the planet....You’re being wiped off the planet. That’s a promise.” Yet another Muslim demonstrator said of Jews, “You are the brothers of pigs!” -- recalling the Qur’an’s depiction of Jews who disobeyed Allah as being transformed into apes and pigs.
London: Muslim protesters, repeatedly shouting “Allahu akbar,” threw traffic cones and sticks at the police and taunted them, calling them cowards, swine and “kuffar” (unbelievers).
Copenhagen: Muslim demonstrators chanted, “Down, down Israel, down, down USA, down, down democracy, down, down Denmark.” One Muslim in the crowd ostentatiously made the Nazi salute. Another shouted, “We want to kill all the Jews, all the Jews should be slain, they have no right to exist!” The crowd repeatedly chanted, “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahoud, jaish Muhammad sawfa yaoud” -- that is, “Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.” That chant is a reference to a celebrated incident in the life of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, when he massacred a town full of Jewish farmers. Muhammad led a Muslim force against the Khaybar oasis, which was inhabited by Jews -- many of whom he had previously exiled from Medina.
The Muslims also chanted “Hitler! Heil Hitler! Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!” Demonstrators shouted “We must just kill all those Jews, man! Then we'd be rid of them, man!,” “Death to Israel,” and “Kill the Jews.”
Amsterdam: While Dutch parliamentarian Harry van Bommel of the Socialist Party and other Leftist useful idiots marched in a demonstration calling for an intifada against Israel, the crowd behind them chanted “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.”
While not everyone at these rallies expressed genocidal sentiments, it is noteworthy that there is no record of anyone who said these things being rebuked by his fellow demonstrators -- or by the authorities in the various countries where these demonstrations took place. Have American and European authorities rushed to condemn such declarations, and called upon Muslim advocacy groups and leaders to act energetically against the rampant Jew-hatred in Muslim communities in Western countries?
Not exactly. An emblematic incident took place in Duisburg, Germany, when a pro-Israel couple put an Israeli flag in their apartment window, overlooking a 10,000-strong pro-jihad demonstration on the street below. During the demonstration, German police actually broke into the couple’s apartment to remove the flag, explaining that they did so in order to forestall the apartment being broken into by the demonstrators themselves. When a police officer removed the flag from the window, the mob below applauded, cheered, and shouted “Allahu akbar.”
That same shout has echoed through these rallies all over America and Europe in recent days -- the one that Muhammad Atta advised his fellow hijackers to use frequently, since hearing it, he said, struck terror into the hearts of the unbelievers.
Ugly demonstrations have been an unfortunate but recurring feature of public life in America for decades, but open calls for genocide are something new. If American and European officials don’t react quickly now, the next round of demonstrations by the friends and allies of the global Islamic jihad will only be worse.
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By ZE'EV MAGHEN
The accession of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been accompanied by a sharp transformation in the Iranian attitude to, and depiction of, the state of Israel. This change includes not only an amplification of the traditional hostility toward the Jewish polity, but also—most ominously—a new conception of that polity as weak and unstable, an easy target for a united Muslim (or united Shiite) offensive.
The prevailing opinion among Middle East experts and Iran watchers, however, is that the revised rhetoric is just that—rhetoric—and that it harbors no significant ramifications for policy making on the part of Israel or any other states in the region or the world. Vociferous Iranian declarations about the need to erase Israel from the map are seen as nothing more than a means toward achieving certain pragmatic goals, such as eventual détente with the West.
This view is wrong. Iranian-Islamist threats to Israel's existence are sincere, and they signal the determined pursuit of tenaciously held ends.
In January 2006, the Iranian daily Jomhuriya Eslami carried the text of a speech delivered by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran's main mosque. Attempting to defuse the diplomatic tension occasioned by the call for Israel's destruction issued by the then-newly elected President Ahmadinejad at the previous month's "World Without Zionism" conference, Khamenei concluded his uncharacteristically moderate sermon with the following ringing remarks:
We Iranians intend no harm to any nation, nor will we be the first to attack any nation. We do not deny the right of any polity in any place on God's earth to exist and prosper. We are a peace-loving country whose only wish is to live, and to let live, in peace.
Without missing a beat, or evincing a discernible hint of irony, the reporter who covered the event continued:
The congregation of worshippers, some 7,000 in number, expressed their unanimous support for the Supreme Leader's words by repeatedly chanting, marg bar Omrika, marg bar Esra'il "Death to America! Death to Israel!"
This is not as strange as it sounds. Chanting "Death to America! Death to Israel!" has been the way Iranians applaud for over a quarter-century. When the soccer team from Isfahan scores a goal against the soccer team from Shiraz, its fans cheer wildly: "Death to America! Death to Israel!" At the end of an exquisitely performed sitar solo, the genteel audience in a concert hall in Tabriz shows its appreciation by loudly heaping imprecations upon "International Arrogance" (the USA) and "its Bastard Offspring" (the Jewish state). Even during the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, Iranian participants have replaced their traditionally pious ejaculations of "I am at your service, O Lord, there is none like unto you!" with responsive Persian cursing sessions aimed at the Hebrew- and English-speaking enemies of everything that is holy. Like the daily "Two Minutes Hate" in George Orwell's "1984," this venom-spewing is the mantra upon which an entire generation of Iranians has been raised.
What does this persistent indoctrination, imbibed with mother's milk and drummed by rote into the consciousnesses of the Iranian citizenry, mean for the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic? In the eyes of many Western and non-Western experts, the answer is: Nothing. First of all, these experts urge, we must distinguish between image and reality, between ideology and strategy, between the fiery rhetoric of preachers or street mobs and the sober goals of an essentially pragmatic regime. Indeed, they insist, even the chest-beaters of mosque and madrassa are only repeating slogans that have long since lost all significance in their minds: They are just going through the motions.
"Sadly," writes the Asia Times columnist Kaveh Afrasiabi, too many Israelis ignore "the gap between mass-generated, largely symbolic rhetoric and [Iran's] actual policy." Nor, we are urged to believe, is such "mass-generated rhetoric" truly massive in scope. "The Iranians we should be listening to," explains Middle East specialist Mark LeVine, "are not the 100,000 or so marchers in support of Ahmadinejad's [anti-Israel] remarks, but the tens of millions who had something better to do that day." According to Paul Reynolds, a BBC world-affairs correspondent, President Ahmadinejad's vitriol is in any case intended primarily for domestic consumption, as a means of distracting the Iranian populace from the economic failures of the Islamic revolution, and no one should mistake it for a guide to foreign policy.
Ultimately, most analysts agree, Ahmadinejad's menacing proclamations are meant to serve as a bargaining chip: something to be given away in exchange for normalized relations with the West. After all, they stress, there is no rational reason for any eruption of hostilities between Iran and Israel. The two countries do not even share a common border, and their national and economic interests are not in conflict. To the contrary, both have traditionally conceived their "frontline" adversaries to be Arab states, and history has time and again thrown them into each other's arms, both before and even after the Islamic revolution of 1979. "Iran and Israel have no differences or occasions for getting into active hostilities, let alone a nuclear exchange," reassures Shahram Chubin, the director of the Geneva Center for Security Policy. To quote Afrasiabi again, "It is difficult to find any expert on Iran's foreign affairs today who actually shares the view [that there exists a basis for] strategic conflict between Iran and Israel."
Is the daily drill of Israel-damning in Iran only a tired exercise, a formalistic ceremony no longer accompanied by genuine passion or serious intent? Are the experts correct on this score? In a word: Yes. Oblivious to the content of their own words, thousands of mosque- and madrassa-goers calling for the demise of Israel are not, for the most part, expressing a bona fide, heartfelt hatred for the Jewish citizens or even the Jewish government of the state of Israel. About this the experts are quite right: it is ritual, and the Iranians do not really "mean it."
But therein lies the rub. In the end, it can often be far more dangerous not to mean what one is saying than to mean it—a point that may be illuminated by a brief detour into mass psychology. Fierce anger and hatred are highly intense, all-consuming emotions that subside quickly if the psyche is not to combust and collapse. Such emotions, moreover, are not only extremely intense but exceedingly unstable. People who truly hate are often just as capable of experiencing other intense emotions, including pity or empathy or remorse.
For this reason, among others, genuine anger and hatred, of the kind that is really "meant" and strongly felt, are inefficient tools for creating or sustaining an atmosphere conducive to long-term persecution or mass murder. That is why the truly horrific atrocities in human history—the enslavements, the inquisitions, the terrorisms, the genocides—have been perpetrated not in hot blood but in cold: not as a result of urgent and immanent feeling but in the name of a transcendent ideology and as a result of painstaking indoctrination.
The vast majority of Germans in World War II did not personally and passionately hate the Jews: They had never even met the men, women, children and infants whom they would eventually butcher en masse. It was, for the most part, a methodically drilled-in ideology that powered the genocide machine, a machine that killed six million Jews despite the fact that the Germans did not hate them.
Similarly with the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Did Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the terrorists who brought down the Twin Towers, genuinely and fervently hate every single individual working there on that fateful day, let alone all of the passengers on the plane he commandeered? How could he? He had never met them, and they had never personally done anything to him. What is more, Atta had spent many years in the United States preparing for his mission, during which time he rubbed elbows with all types of Americans. Is it plausible that he managed to maintain a constant boiling rage all day every day toward every one of these acquaintances and their fellow countrymen? How could such a creature survive, or master the self-control to carry out his assigned role?
What is true for Nazi storm troopers and al-Qaeda operatives is true for today's fundamentalist Shiites. It is not their genuine, vehement hatred that we have to fear; it is their endless, drone-like training. Their militant hostility to Israel is no more a function of immediate, genuine, blood-boiling rage than it is the result of some heinous act or other performed by the Jewish state, however frequently such purported crimes are exploited as triggers of "popular" protest. The hostility is, unfortunately, something far more durable and deeply implanted.
That Israel is the devil, the root of all evil, a criminal cancer that must be excised from the Muslim body politic—these propositions are not ephemeral feelings for most Iranian Muslims, but rather eternal truths that gradually, through endless, tantra-like repetition, have cloyed in the conscious mind while simultaneously installing themselves beneath the level of immediate emotion and awareness, in the place where basic instincts, automatic assumptions, and ontological verities reside. There they have taken root, to remain dormant until circumstances require their activation. When the time is right—and the rulers of Iran have made no secret of their conviction that the time is drawing ever nearer—decades of propaganda will serve the same function for them that centuries of Christian anti-Semitism in Europe performed for the Nazis.
The analysts and pundits are thus indeed correct in asserting that the Iranians do not really "mean it." They fail to realize, however, that this is the very reason why they may well "do it." By casting an entire people as a parasitic infestation, by demonizing, delegitimizing, and dehumanizing them at home, in school, in the mosque and in the media, the quarter-century-old routine of Israel-hatred, added to 1,400 years of traditional Islamic anti-Semitism, has prepared in the minds of Iranians and their neighboring coreligionists the moral ground for the eradication of the state of Israel.
What, then, of the second argument advanced by Iran specialists, to the effect that Iranian verbal belligerence toward Israel is really a means toward an entirely different end, something to be bartered in exchange for full relations with Washington and sundry other international benefits? Here, too, the analysts have it half-right. At least some elements within today's Iranian leadership are indeed interested in a rapprochement with the West and especially with America. But Tehran in no way intends to lessen its enmity toward Israel in exchange. To the contrary, the Islamic Republic is offering to diminish its enmity toward the West in exchange for the latter's abandonment of Israel.
In this connection, we must grasp a crucial distinction between Iranian attitudes to the "Great Satan" of the United States and to the "Little Satan" of Israel. Iranians may chant "Death to America" and "Death to Israel" with equal fervor, but from a tactical standpoint they well understand that the Great Satan is . . . great. The leaders of the Islamic Republic, even the fiercest ideologues among them, are under no illusion that the United States is about to be conquered by and for Islam in the near future.
Israel, however, is another matter. More and more Iranian Islamists today—together with their zealous coreligionists in other Muslim countries—believe that the erasure of the Jewish state from the map is a dream that can be realized in the here and now, whether in one fell swoop or through a relentless process of attrition and erosion. And one strong indication of this, beginning in 2005 and continuing and intensifying up to the present, is a major turnaround in government statements and published material about Israel and the Jews in the official Persian press.
Up until recently, the prevalent tendency of such coverage had involved the traditional exaggeration of the power and influence of the "Jewish lobby" and the long arm and entrenched tentacles of the government of Israel and the World Zionist Organization. This entailed everything from in-depth "analyses" of how the Jewish cabal that owns Hollywood has utilized the enormous potential of "the world's seventh art" to bolster Zionism and blacken the face of Islam, to "documentary evidence" that Zionist money and pressure are responsible for the anti-Iranian and anti-Shiite bent of the al-Jazeera television network, to in-depth "scholarly" exposés of the manner in which historically the Jews carved Protestantism out of Catholicism in order to reimpose on Christianity the ethos of the Hebrew Bible with its doctrine of the chosen people.
But these and hundreds of other portraits of Israel and world Jewry as the "hidden hand" undermining Islam at every turn have dwindled considerably of late, giving way instead to their opposite. The emphasis now is on every detectable crack, fault, and weakness in the Jewish national edifice, and on Israel as a polity teetering on the brink of collapse.
The new approach is epitomized by Ahmadinejad himself, with his repeated descriptions of Israel as a "rotten tree" and a "house of straw," as well as his pledge to his constituents and to the rest of the Muslim world that "this shameful stain on the face of the land of Islam will soon be cleansed." But the trend is far more widespread than the expostulations of one man. In the Iranian media, for instance, Israel's evacuation of its Gaza settlements in the summer of 2005 has become a major symbol of the decrepitude of the Jewish state. "The Zionist regime retreats in the face of the slightest resistance," the newspaper Hamshahri gloated in the wake of the disengagement process. "The willingness of the Zionists to leave behind their synagogues in Gaza demonstrates conclusively that they have no God, and therefore, of course, no religious connection to the Holy Land; they will now be easily ejected from all of occupied Palestine."
Soon after the Gaza pullout, the headline on a lengthy interview with Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Iranian-backed Hizballah, proclaimed: "We, Too, Drove Out the Israeli Cowards." The reference was to Israel's prior withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000—a retreat that in the eyes of Ayatollah Khamenei had similarly "proved the justness of the Islamic struggle" and demonstrated that if Muslims put their trust in God, "victory will be certain." As for Israel's July 2006 incursion into Lebanon in response to the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, Iranians were initially shocked by the force of it. But by the end of hostilities in mid-August the Iranian press—like that of many other Middle Eastern countries—was pouncing on the lack of a clear Israeli victory as a sign that the Jewish state was even feebler than many had presumed.
The perceived military defeats of "the Jerusalem-occupying regime" are regularly coupled with still another alleged indication of Israeli weakness—namely, the security fence protecting Israel's civilian population from Arab terrorism. Ayatollah Khamenei recently described this barrier as "a symbol of the impotence of the Zionists and of their inability to rein in the intifada." So successful have suicide operations been in sowing "terror and panic" among Israelis, Khamenei declared, that, like their trembling forebears in Europe, they were now retreating behind a ghetto wall. "The Islamic nation," he added, "is fully capable of deciding the fate of Palestine here and now."
But it is not the actual wall but the metaphorical walls dividing the different sectors and camps within Israeli society that have received the fullest and most scornful coverage. The Iranian press delights in every instance—real, imagined or exaggerated—of internecine Jewish conflict: between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, religious Israelis and secular Israelis, new immigrants and old immigrants, right-wingers and left-wingers, Zionists, non-Zionists, anti-Zionists and post-Zionists.
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Thus, a recent article in the daily Javan entitled "Post-Zionism and the Identity Crisis in Israel" pitted "extremist Jews," i.e., nationalists and settlers, against "religious Jews," i.e., ultra-Orthodox non-nationalists. Another piece described the supposedly large numbers of Russian immigrants who have not managed to integrate into the life of the country and have either left for good or else ended up joining the Jews for Jesus movement or various satanic and neo-Nazi cults. Still another report, devoted to the intricacies of recent Israeli political maneuvering, included a photograph of President Shimon Peres and former Defense Minister Amir Peretz conversing in an office. "Note that Peres is wearing a suit and tie," wrote the author, "whereas Peretz is not even wearing a jacket and has his shirt open. This is the traditional method of showing disrespect in Israel, whose politicians all hate one another with a vicious hatred."
And so forth. This, too, represents a volte-face of sorts: In the past, the prevailing tendency of the official Iranian press was to dismiss any distinctions among Jews as mere smokescreens, a mask behind which they plotted their diabolical conspiracies. But today's view is also not entirely new. None other than Ayatollah Khomeini portrayed the Jewish state as weak and divided. "If the Muslims were only unified," he declared, "and each one of them took a bucket of water and poured it out onto Israel, this straw state that is already eating itself alive would be washed away in no time."
In that light, it is not altogether surprising that the rise to power of Ahmadinejad, who paints himself as the renewer of Khomeini's revolutionary zeal, should have been accompanied by a resurgence of the belief that Israel is but a flimsy façade whose end is near. "The Zionist entity," proclaimed the president recently, "has reached a dead end and is in a process of precipitous decline. . . . All of the conditions are ripe for its removal" by means of an "explosion of Muslim rage." Elaborating on the same motif in the summer of 2006, Ayatollah Ahmad-e-Jannati, general secretary of the Guardian Council, whipped up the audience of his Friday sermon with the assertion—first uttered by Egypt's chief propagandist, Ahmad Said, on the brink of the Six Day War—that all the Muslims need do is spit, and Israel will drown.
The shifting Iranian line on the condition of the Jewish state—from Potemkin village, to potent nemesis, and now back again—is a salient illustration of a phenomenon noted by the historian Efraim Karsh. In Islamic tradition, Mr. Karsh writes, "the traits associated with Jews make a paradoxical mixture: they are seen as both domineering and wretched, both haughty and low." Such, he adds, is "the age-old Muslim stereotype—as it is, mutatis mutandis, the Christian." The differences encompassed in that "mutatis mutandis" are, however, pertinent to our discussion.
It has long (and correctly) been argued that major elements of modern Muslim anti-Semitism were imports into Islamic lands from Christian Europe. This holds especially true for the perception of the Jews as a powerful international cabal and a force to be not only hated but downright feared—an idea that held sway for centuries in the Christian West, and that in some locales continues to hold sway today. By contrast, this particular feature of the anti-Semitic creed, though introduced into Muslim collective consciousness relatively recently, is already waning in the Islamic world. Many factors may account for this, but to my mind one is paramount.
There is an uncanny correlation between Christian and Islamic holy scripture concerning the role played by Jews during the formative period of each religion. In the New Testament, the premier political-military enemies of Jesus were the pagan Romans. On the other hand, his increasingly meddlesome ideological-religious enemies were Jews: the scribes and Pharisees who would not cease peppering him with questions deliberately intended to trip him up and undermine his message. Similarly in Islamic historiography: Muhammad's political-military adversaries were the members of his disowned pagan Quraysh tribe back in Mecca, who launched three successive campaigns against the nascent faith-community in Medina. But the real trouble came from his pestering ideological-religious antagonists, the (genuine or imaginary) Jewish tribes of Medina itself who with their incessant legal and theological badgering made the prophet's spiritual life extremely difficult.
When it comes to the nature of Jewish subversive activity, the traditions of the two religions are thus almost eerily alike. But no less significant is a difference between them. In the Gospels, the Jews "win": They succeed in having Jesus crucified and most of his immediate followers executed or banished. In the Quran and hadith, by contrast, Muhammad wins, vanquishing his Jewish foes, executing some, and banishing the remainder from Medina and eventually, under his immediate successors, from Arabia altogether.
This formative Islamic experience was largely responsible for the disdain and scorn expressed toward Jews over most of Muslim history, as opposed to the fear and hatred characteristic of Christian attitudes. The same derisive contempt may be reflected in the surge of confidence felt by today's fundamentalists in their zealous resolve to eliminate the state of Israel from the map.
And that brings us to the larger, nontactical dimension of the fundamentalists' divergent attitudes toward the "Great Satan" and the "Little Satan"—a dimension deeply rooted in both Islamic ideology and centuries of Muslim historical experience.
Early on, after their first round of lightning victories along the Mediterranean littoral, Muslims came to realize that they would have to be satisfied with conquering only part of the Western world; the other part they would have to share with Christians. Islamic leaders and even Islamic clerics accepted and even enshrined the medieval status quo, according to which hegemony would be divided between Islam in the East and Christendom in the West. To be sure, cross-boundary encroachments were a constant menace and had to be repulsed—Saladin forced out the Crusaders, and the Ottomans were rolled back from Vienna—but on the whole an equilibrium was reached in which each side might even be said to have harbored a grudging respect for the other.
This political-military compromise benefited from an important theological underpinning, epitomized in a celebrated verse from the Quran whose contents simultaneously suggest why, in the idealized Islamic conception of balance and mutual tolerance, there is no room today for the state of Israel:
You [i.e., Muhammad and the Muslims] will certainly find the most violent of people in enmity against the believers to be the Jews and the idolaters; and you will find those who are nearest in friendship to the believers to be those who say: "We are Christians."
Thus, in addition to the fact that the Christian world was a massive fact of life that could not be ignored and would not go away, Christians occupied a special religious category and were mostly set apart from the age-old antipathetic strictures aimed at Jews. The name of Jesus appears a mere 25 times in the Quran; the name of Moses appears 131 times. Nevertheless, from the "first hijra" of Muhammad's followers to Abyssinia in 615 down to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's open letter to President Bush in March 2006, Muslims have forever invoked the common Christian and Islamic veneration of Jesus in order to promote good relations between members of the two faiths. Throughout all this time, Moses' ubiquity in the Quran has rarely if ever been exploited by Muslim exponents in order to foster coexistence with Jews.
Already in 1734, the English Orientalist George Sale wrote that Muhammad "used" the Jews "much worse than he did the Christians, and frequently exclaims against them in his Koran; his followers to this day observe the same difference between them and the Christians, treating the former as the most abject and contemptible people on earth." This traditional attitude was amplified a hundredfold after the rise of Zionism, finding expression in the adamant rejectionism that characterized the Arab position on Israel.
The distinction between the classical Islamic attitude toward Christians on the one hand, and toward Jews on the other hand, plays a greater role today than ever before in the formulation of "Islamic" foreign policy toward non-Muslims. The reasons for this include the fact that never before has there existed an actual Muslim theocracy capable of formulating such an "Islamic" foreign policy, together with the fact that never before has there existed a genuine Jewish polity toward which that Islamic policy could be formulated or implemented. The result is of major significance for the Iran-Israel standoff, as well as for any statesman or analyst who purports to understand it or hopes to influence its direction.
Among theorists of international conflict resolution, the belief is widely held that the removal of one party's "enclaves" or "outposts" from territory claimed by a rival party can not only help create mutually satisfactory borders but can inaugurate the kind of equilibrium that will eventually allow foes to become friends. In Europe, the great example is the post-World War II territorial adjustments that, however painful, put an end at last to the centuries-old enmity of France and Germany. In the Middle East, on a purely local scale, the same logic underlay Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's policy of evacuating Israel's Gaza settlements and handing over the territory to the Palestinians, as it did Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's projected "consolidation" of the Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria.
The specter that now haunts the state of Israel is that the West may some day adopt this logic, deeply problematic as it has proved to be locally, and apply it internationally vis-à-vis Iran and the "Little Satan" as a means of resolving the larger conflict between fundamentalist Islam and the "Great Satan." For no agenda is being pushed more energetically by today's Islamists worldwide than that, for the sake of Muslim-Christian rapprochement, and on pain of terrible consequences otherwise, America and Europe agree to offer up the Western imperialist enclave or outpost known as Israel on the altar of "accommodation."
This, indeed, was the implicit central theme of Ahmadinejad's 2006 letter to President Bush, as it is the menacing import of the Iranian president's most recent remarks on the subject:
Today, it has been proven that the Zionists are not opposed only to Islam and the Muslims. They are opposed to humanity as a whole. They want to dominate the entire world. They would even sacrifice the Western regimes for their own sake. I have said in Tehran, and I say it again here—I say to the leaders of some Western countries: stop supporting these corrupt people. Behold, the rage of the Muslim peoples is accumulating. The rage of the Muslim peoples may soon reach the point of explosion. If that day comes, they must know that the waves of this explosion will not be restricted to the boundaries of our region. They will definitely reach the corrupt forces that support this fake regime.
The Iranians and their allies throughout the Muslim world are bent on making the abandonment of Israel the price of "peace in our time." In a scenario that should ring frighteningly familiar, a charismatic leader of an ideological, totalitarian state is building upon an endemic anti-Semitism inculcated by centuries of religious indoctrination to create an atmosphere in which the massacre of large numbers of Jews and the destruction of their independent polity will be considered a tolerable if not indeed a legitimate eventuality.
That is ominous enough. Even more ominous is the apparent willingness of any number of leaders of the Western world, under the banner of a hoped-for "reconciliation" with a major Middle Eastern power and a world religion, to tilt dangerously toward appeasement, ignoring the requirements of rational decision-making and putting at risk the West's own abiding interests and deepest values.
As for Israel, if it takes today's challenges seriously and prepares to meet them with the requisite strength and creativity, this may yet turn out to be its finest hour. If not, we may be witnessing the prelude to its last.
Mr. Maghen is senior lecturer in Islamic history and Persian language and chair of the department of Middle East Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He is also a research fellow at Bar-Ilan's Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies, in whose series of policy papers a longer version of this essay appeared under the title, "From Omnipotence to Impotence: A Shift in the Iranian Portrayal of the 'Zionist Regime..' " This article appears in the January issue of Commentary.
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Anyone who doubts the fanaticism of Iran needs to read up on how they cleared minefields in the Iran-Iraq war.
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First Id like to say Shalom from Israel , new here and hope be here a while
I am truly amazed of the depth of thought & the seriousness in this forum and hope to somehow contribute
So, speaking of Holocaust denial - this guy leaves me speechless
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWrDjysLlHM[/youtube]
Ive always known there were fanatics talking anti semitism & hate , but I never would have guessed that somebody of this position would be so outspoken about it
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First Id like to say Shalom from Israel , new here and hope be here a while
I am truly amazed of the depth of thought & the seriousness in this forum and hope to somehow contribute
So, speaking of Holocaust denial - this guy leaves me speechless
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWrDjysLlHM[/youtube]
Ive always known there were fanatics talking anti semitism & hate , but I never would have guessed that somebody of this position would be so outspoken about it
Guys like this need to begin having "accidents". The world is becoming more evil by the day.
Dont be surprised by this, during WW2 the Catholic church was buddy buddy with hitler and refused to speak badly about his behavior. They didn't say a word until the protestant allies had already boot humped hitler and his fascist friends.
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Woof NonKosherDog:
Welcome aboard!
I too noted the Pope's action in re-instating this turd (see my post on the "Organized Religion" thread on the SCH forum). Very discouraging-- particularly after he began his papacy a few years back with his forceful statement that God is a god of Reason.
The Adventure continues!
Marc
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/01/27/pure-nazism-muslim-cleric-celebrates-the-holocaust-on-egyptian-tv/
No denial here.
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:-o :-o :-o :cry: :cry: :cry: :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x
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I can fully understand an Arab spewing forth such hate & twisting facts for their own reasons, it almost seems reasonable - but when I hear anti-jew remarks from "westerners" thats when it frustrates the most.
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Our new president is one step removed from Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, so anti-semitism is hip and trendy for today's left. Some on the left try to use anti-zionism as a fig leaf for that position. So, don't be too shocked to see it vomit forth from the mouths of westerners.
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Why Does Obama's Pastor Matter?
By John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, February 04, 2008
Barack Obama, in a way that recalls John F. Kennedy, a politician to whom he's frequently compared, has carefully controlled and burnished his image to create the impression of an independent figure, free from dogma and ideological entanglements. But there is one man who threatens to undermine Obama's appealing narrative as a man above the ugly quarrels and divisive partisanship of the past: his longtime pastor and spiritual adviser, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
On March 1, 1972, Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. became the pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), a position he still holds to this day. Because he has been a revered figure in the life of presidential aspirant Barack Obama for two decades, Wright's political views, which he commonly draws from the tenets of liberation theology, are worthy of some scrutiny—if only to shed light on the teachings that have had enough resonance to retain Obama as a TUCC congregant since 1988. So great is Obama's respect for Wright, that the former sought the Reverend's counsel before formally declaring his candidacy for U.S. President. Moreover, Obama and his wife selected Wright to perform their wedding ceremony and to baptize their two daughters. These are honors of considerable magnitude, and it is reasonable to speculate that if we learn more about Rev. Wright, we may gain some insight into the personal qualities and belief systems Barack Obama holds in high regard.
When we read the writings, public statements, and sermons of Rev. Wright, we quickly notice his unmistakable conviction that America is a nation infested with racism, prejudice, and injustices that make life very difficult for black people. As he declared in one of his sermons: "Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!... We [Americans] believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."
In a similar spirit, Wright laments "the social order under which we [blacks] live, under which we suffer, under which we are killed."[1] Depicting blacks as a politically powerless demographic, he complains that "African Americans don't run anything in the Capital except elevators."[2] On its website, Wright's church portrays black people as victims who are still burdened by the legacy of their "pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism," and who must pray for "the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people."
Wright detects what he views as racism in virtually every facet of American life. In the business world, for instance, he attributes the high unemployment rate of African Americans to "the fact that they are black."[3] Vis-à-vis the criminal justice system, he similarly explains that "the brothers are in prison" largely because of their skin color. "Consider the 'three strikes law,'" he elaborates. "There is a higher jail sentencing for crack than for cocaine because more African Americans get crack than do cocaine."[4] Notwithstanding Wright's implication that the harsh anti-crack penalties were instituted by racist legislators for the purpose of incarcerating as many blacks as possible, the Congressional Record shows that such was not at all the case. In 1986, when the strict, federal anti-crack legislation was being debated, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)—deeply concerned about the degree to which crack was decimating the black community—strongly supported the legislation and actually pressed for even harsher penalties. In fact, a few years earlier CBC members had pushed President Reagan to create the Office of National Drug Control Policy.[5]
In Wright's calculus, white America's bigotry is to blame not only for whatever ills continue to plague the black community, but also for our country's conflicts with other nations. "In the 21st century," says Wright, "white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01. White America and the western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just 'disappeared' as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns."
Remarkably, no mention of jihad—the ageless Muslim tradition of aggressive, permanent warfare whose ultimate aim is to achieve Islam's dominion over the human race at large—managed to find its way into Wright's analysis. Rather, he assured us that the 9/11 atrocities were ultimately traceable to the doorstep of U.S. provocations. In fact, Wright apparently sees no reason to suspect that Islam may be incompatible in any way with Western traditions. "Islam and Christianity are a whole lot closer than you may realize," he has written. "Islam comes out of Christianity."[6]
Apart from America's purported racism, Wright also despises the nation's capitalist economic structure, viewing it as a breeding ground for all manner of injustice. "Capitalism as made manifest in the 'New World,'" says Wright, "depended upon slave labor (by African slaves), and it is only maintained by keeping the 'Two-Thirds World' under oppression."[7] This anti-capitalist perspective is further reflected in TUCC's "10-point vision," whose ideals include the cultivation of "a congregation working towards ECONOMIC PARITY." Dispelling any doubt that this is a reference to socialism and the wholesale redistribution of wealth, the TUCC mission statement plainly declares its goal of helping "the less fortunate to become agents of change for God who is not pleased with America's economic mal-distribution!"
This view is entirely consistent with Rev. Wright's devotion to the tenets of liberation theology, which is essentially Marxism dressed up as Christianity. Devised by Cold War-era theologians, it teaches that the gospels of Jesus can be understood only as calls for social activism, class struggle, and revolution aimed at overturning the existing capitalist order and installing, in its stead, a socialist utopia where today's poor will unseat their "oppressors" and become liberated from their material (and, consequently, their spiritual) deprivations. An extension of this paradigm is black liberation theology, which seeks to foment a similar Marxist revolutionary fervor founded on racial rather than class solidarity. Wright's mentor in this discipline is James Cone, author of the landmark text Black Power and Black Theology. Arguing that Christianity has been used by white society as an opiate of the (black) masses, Cone asserts that the destitute "are made and kept poor by the rich and powerful few," and that "[n]o one can be a follower of Jesus Christ without a political commitment that expresses one's solidarity with victims."
Many of Wright's condemnations of America are echoed in his denunciations of Israel and Zionism, which he has blamed for imposing "injustice and … racism" on the Palestinians. According to Wright, Zionism contains an element of "white racism." Likening Israel's treatment of Palestinians to South Africa's treatment of blacks during the apartheid era, Wright advocates divestment campaigns targeting companies that conduct business in, or with, Israel.
Given Wright's obvious low regard for the U.S. and Israel, it is by no means surprising that he reserves some of his deepest respect for the virulently anti-American, anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. "When Minister Farrakhan speaks, Black America listens," says Wright. "Everybody may not agree with him, but they listen … His depth on analysis when it comes to the racial ills of this nation is astounding and eye opening. He brings a perspective that is helpful and honest. Minister Farrakhan will be remembered as one of the 20th and 21st century giants of the African American religious experience. His integrity and honesty have secured him a place in history as one of the nation's most powerful critics. His love for Africa and African American people has made him an unforgettable force, a catalyst for change and a religious leader who is sincere about his faith and his purpose."
Wright's paean to Farrakhan was parroted in the November/December issue of TUCC's bimonthly magazine, the Trumpet, which featured an interview with the NOI "icon" who, according to the publication, "truly epitomized greatness." "Because of the Minister's influence in the African American community," the Trumpet announced that it was honoring him with an "Empowerment Award" as a "fitting tribute for a storied life well lived."
This seems an odd distinction to confer upon someone whose anti-American, anti-white, anti-Semitic statements are numerous. For example, in 1996 Farrakhan told a Tehran newspaper that God would "bestow upon Muslims" the honor of "destroy[ing] America." In February 1998, he sent a cordial and supportive letter to Saddam Hussein, calling him a "visionary" who had earned the Iraqi people's "love," and whose demise would "mean a setback for the goal of unity [among Muslims]." In July 2002, he declared that America, "with blood dripping from [its] hands," had no moral authority by which to overthrow Saddam. In February 2005, he condemned the United States for waging a war "against Islam," adding: "[T]here's no way that I, as a Muslim, could countenance my children or grandchildren fighting a war against fellow believers in any part of the world."
Farrakhan also has a long, well-documented history of venom-laced references to the white "blue-eyed devils" and Jewish "bloodsuckers" who purportedly decimate America's black communities from coast to coast. Moreover, he has referred to white people as "the skunks of the planet."
On a 1984 trip to meet with the Libyan dictator (and America's arch enemy) Muammar Qadhafi, Farrakhan was accompanied by none other than Jeremiah A. Wright.
Farrakhan has long considered Qadhafi to be his trusted "friend," "brother," and "fellow struggler in the cause of liberation for our people." In 1996, the NOI leader formed a partnership with Qadhafi, who pledged $1 billion to help Farrakhan develop a Muslim political lobby in the U.S. Said Qadhafi: "We agreed with Louis Farrakhan and his delegation to mobilize in a legal and legitimate form the oppressed minorities—and at their forefront the blacks, Arab Muslims and Red Indians—for they play an important role in American political life and have a weight in U.S. elections." "Our confrontation with America," added Qadhafi, "was [previously] like a fight against a fortress from outside, and today [with the NOI alliance] we found a breach to enter into this fortress and confront it."
Farrakhan's October 16, 1995 Million Man March ranks among the events about which Rev. Wright has written most extensively and passionately. Wright attended the rally with his son, and has described it as "a once in a lifetime, amazing experience."[8] When a number of prominent African Americans counseled fellow blacks to boycott the demonstration because of Farrakhan's well-documented history of hateful rhetoric, Wright derided those critics as "'Negro' leaders,"[9] "'colored' leaders," "Oreos," and "house niggras"[10] whose most noteworthy trait was their contemptible "Uncle Tomism."[11] "There are a whole boat load of 'darkies' who think in white supremacist terms," added Wright. "… Some 'darkies' think white women are superior to black women…. Some 'darkies' think white lawyers are superior to black lawyers. Some 'darkies' think white pastors are better than black pastors. There are a whole boatload of 'darkies' who think anything white and everyone white is better than whatever it is black people have."[12]
In the book titled When Black Men Stand up for God, a collection of sermons and reflections on the Million Man March, Wright identifies Kwanzaa founder Maulana Karenga as an attendee of the rally.[13] In the end notes that follow a transcript of one of Wright's sermons, Karenga is described as "an internationally acclaimed social activist and scholar in Pan African Studies"; "the founder and creator of Kwanzaa, the well-known African American holiday"; and "the director of Pan African Studies and Visiting Lecturer in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside."[14] Unmentioned is the fact that Karenga is a self-identified "African socialist" whose "Seven Principles of Blackness," which are observed during Kwanzaa, are not only the Marxist precepts of parity and proletariat unity, but are also identical to those of the 1970s domestic terrorist group, the Symbionese Liberation Army. Nor is it noted that in 1971 Karenga was convicted of torturing two women who were members of United Slaves, a black nationalist cult he had established.
On its website, Wright's church describes itself in distinctly racial terms, as being an "Unashamedly Black" congregation of "African people" who are "true to our native land, the mother continent, the cradle of civilization," and who participate in TUCC's "Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community."
Some have suggested that such seemingly exclusionary assertions, coupled with Wright's own racially loaded statements and his close affiliation with Farrakhan, indicate that Wright is guilty of racism. But Wright casually dismisses this charge, stating: "I get tickled every time I hear a 'Negro' call me a racist. They don't even understand how to define the word. Racism means controlling the means."[15] In other words, Wright employs a rhetorical escape hatch that permits him to evade all charges of racism simply by claiming that only the "dominant" (i.e., white) demographic is capable of such ugliness. The implication is that no deed or utterance, however hateful or vile, is egregious enough to qualify any black person as a racist; that blacks are always the victims of racism, never its perpetrators.
American voters ought to have more than a passing interest in the fact that when Barack Obama formally joined TUCC in 1991, he tacitly accepted this same Jeremiah Wright as a spiritual mentor. Moreover, he pledged allegiance to the church's race-conscious "Black Value System" that encourages blacks to patronize black-only businesses, support black leaders, and avoid becoming "entrapped" by the pursuit of a "black middle-classness" whose ideals presumably would erode their sense of African identity and render them "captive" to white culture.
In addition, voters should examine carefully the question of whether Obama shares Wright's socialist economic preferences. They ought to be aware, for instance, that the Democratic candidate is on record as having said that his religious faith has led him to question "the idolatry of the free market." Moreover, Obama's voting record and his issue positions show him generally to favor high spending and increased government intervention in all realms of life.
When Rev. Wright's controversial statements and positions recently became more widely publicized, Obama said, "There are some things I agree with my pastor about, some things I disagree with him about." It is the duty of every American voter to determine exactly where those agreements and disagreements lie.
Notes:
[1] When Black Men Stand up for God (Chicago: African American Images), 1996, p. 17.
[2] Ibid., p. 102.
[3] Ibid., p. 17.
[4] Ibid., p. 17.
[5] John DiIulio, Jr., "My Black Crime Problem, and Ours," City Journal (Spring 1996), pp. 19-20.
[6] When Black Men Stand up for God, p. 16.
[7] Blow the Trumpet in Zion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 2005, pp. 8-9.
[8] When Black Men Stand up for God, p. 10.
[9] Ibid., pp. 11, 37.
[10] Ibid., p. 80.
[11] Ibid., p. 11.
[12] Ibid., p. 81.
[13] It should be noted that Wright's church has conducted Kwanzaa programs for its congregants. See When Black Men Stand up for God, p. iv.)
[14] When Black Men Stand up for God, p. 25.
[15] Ibid., p. 102.
John Perazzo is the Managing Editor of DiscoverTheNetworks and is the author of The Myths That Divide Us: How Lies Have Poisoned American Race Relations. For more information on his book, click here. E-mail him at wsbooks25@hotmail.com
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Our new president is one step removed from Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, so anti-semitism is hip and trendy for today's left. Some on the left try to use anti-zionism as a fig leaf for that position. So, don't be too shocked to see it vomit forth from the mouths of westerners.
Rahm Emanuel - Chief of Staff - Jewish
David Axelrod - Senior Advisor to the President - Jewish
Ronald Klain - Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United
States - Jewish
Larry Summers - Economic Advisor to the President - Jewish
Paul Volcker - Economic Advisor to the President, Former Head of Fed
Reserve - Jewish
Tim Geithner - Treasury Secetary - Jewish
Peter Orszag - Head of Budget - Jewish
Am I the only one noticing that Obama and Biden are not so much assembling staff, as gathering a minyan?
Antisemitism has always been hip in some parts of the world. Religious Jews believe antisemitism comes from G-d. If you forget you are Jewish than someone calls you a dirty jew and then you remember. I think that is actually more reasonable than saying Obama caused antisemitism. I don't think this has anything at all to do with most modern American Christian but so called Christians killed more Jews over a long period of time than the Nazis. The Catholic Church and Martin Luther don't have such a great record for religious tolerance of Jews. Life under Islam sucked for the Jews but it was the golden age compared to live under the Christianity.
In terms of what I personally believe about the causes of antisemitism ---Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin wrote a great book called Why the Jews-- The Reason for Antisemitism which I really recommend.
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So 20 years snuggled up to Wright was what for Barry-O? Who is he loyal to?
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Rachel:
"Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin wrote a great book called Why the Jews-- The Reason for Antisemitism which I really recommend."
Would you please give a summary of why you liked the book/what the book says?
TIA,
Marc
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- Chesler Chronicles - http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler -
Jews: To The Muslim Gas Chamber.
Posted By Phyllis Chesler On January 30, 2009 @ 4:55 pm In Uncategorized | 5 Comments
Today, we have grown used to seeing [1] Palestinian and Hamas supporters goose-step, Nazi-style, shoot out their arms as they deliver the Hitlerian “Sieg Heil” salute. They also chant and scream: “Jews to the ovens,” “Hitler did not kill enough of you,” “Jews to the gas chambers.”
This is raw, rank, Jew-hatred or anti-Semitism; that much is clear. But we are also faced with a major paradox. These same Palestinian and Hamas supporters routinely hold signs that accuse Israel of being a “Nazi” state. To them, Gaza is “Auschwitz,” and the Israelis have “occupied” it with “genocidal” intentions.
Of course this is not factually true. According to my colleague, Dr. Barry Rubin: “In 1939, there were seven million Jews in continental Europe. At the end of the Holocaust, only one million Jews survived. There are currently 1.2 million Palestinians in Gaza. At the end of the 2009 war, 1,199,000 Palestinians are still there. The percentage of Jewish civilians killed by Germans and their allies was 86 percent. The percentage of Gazan Palestinians killed by Israelis is .01 percent. The number of Jewish civilians deliberately killed by Nazis and their allies is 6,000,000. The number of Palestinian civilians deliberately killed by Israelis=0.” (Please see below for his additional comparisons).
But the truth no longer matters. People, both Westerners, Arabs, and Muslims, (this includes the media), have all piled onto such metaphoric overkill. It is as if thoughtful and moderate voices can no longer be “heard,” only shouting, shocking, attacks seem to “register.” And, once someone says something, no matter how outlandish, it is deemed to be true–even if it obliterates both reason and reality.
The true truth is that Hamas and Hezbollah, backed by Iran, are engaged in a serious attempt to exterminate the Jews and to wage jihad against both Jews and other infidels. The Muslims/Islamists have projected their own obvious and evil design onto their intended victims whom they portray as Christian Crusaders or Elders of Zion. This would be laughable, or only of psychiatric interest, if it were not so omnipresent and dangerous due to its widespread acceptance.
In a sense, those Europeans and North Americans who support such a false Nazification of Jews, are merely continuing the Holocaust-era determination to genocidally exterminate Jews. This time, they hope that by doing so, the Islamist hordes will spare them, allow them to live as dhimmis, as inferior and subordinate citizens, in an Islamified Europe.
I asked my friend, Dr. Nancy H. Kobrin, the psycho-analyst and Arabist, what she thinks is going on. She said: “If we (the Jews) exist, the Muslims might have to acknowledge their own Jewish roots. They can’t do that. Therefore, they must destroy us.”
“So, they’re trying to destroy the evidence, the living witnesses?” I replied.
“Well, they are pandering to people who like Nazi insignia and the Nazi ideology. But they are also trying to drive the Jews crazy. They must know how seeing Nazi insignia makes us feel. This is very primitive, non-verbal behavior.”
Talk about primitive behavior! Just as certain primitive tribes have been described as literally eating their enemies hearts or other organs in order to incorporate their magical power–similarly, psychologically, the Nazi insignia-loving Jew-haters want to inherit or subsume the Jewish status as “victim” by destroying the Jews and presenting themselves, (the persecuted Muslims), as the noble “victims” of vicious Nazi Jews.
Dr. Kobrin calls this “psychological splitting. They want to have it both ways.” What she means is that the Palestinian propagandists and Muslim jihadists want to both identify with the Nazis as triumphant, death-cult destroyers–and also with the (past) and preferred sacred status accorded to dead Jewish victims. The Palestinians and other Islamists offer up their own babies, women, elderly, and civilian populations as human shields, human sacrifices, in order to obtain this grisly goal. They also engage in faked staged photos to approximate such Jewish-style deaths as well.
Elsewhere, in a [2] Frontpage Symposium about the resurfacing of Nazi cartoons, Dr. Kobrin reminds us that “paranoids” are obsessed with “purity” and therefore with “cleansing.” This is accomplished by having a “scapegoat” upon whom one projects all the “dirty” components of oneself or of one’s group-self.
The use of Nazi images are meant to terrify and intimidate all who view them–especially those who have, in the past, been jailed, tortured, exiled, and wounded by those who display just such symbols. These images are forms of visual hate speech. They are meant to re-traumatize real victims and their second- and third-generation descendants and to intimidate bystanders.
But those Muslims/Islamists who display Nazi imagery also feel that they are the wounded ones. They seek public redress for their real and imagined wounds. What wounds could that be? For starters: Painful, shameful, anal penetration by trusted relatives in childhood; beatings in childhood; painful, public male circumcision between the ages of 5-12; cruel parents, cruel teachers, cruel religious leaders, equally cruel peers–and a culture which takes cruelty as a given; poor nutrition, illiteracy, and/or no productive future–mainly due to Muslim and Palestinian leaders who demand reverence and obedience even as they hoard the wealth meant to alleviate their people’s suffering; street theatre/political protest/mob merging as the only approved form of social life or group “orgasmic” activity.
According to Lloyd DeMause, there is a “paranoid” underside to anti-Semitism. It is caused by “child abuse, paedophilia and incest.” He writes:
“For instance, I would like to refer to a careful survey in the journal,” Child Abuse & Neglect “that showed that when questioned 652 Palestinian undergraduates concluded that 19% were sexually assaulted by a family member, 36% by a relative and 46% by a stranger. Since this adds up to more than 100%, obviously many were abused by more than one person, but the overall conclusion I detailed in my Journal of Psychohistory article entitled “If I Blow Myself Up and Become a Martyr, I’ll Finally Be Loved” (Spring 2006) was that most Palestinians are sexually abused, that men routinely have young boys they rape and that this is not mainly because of poverty because the college students reporting such horrible memories have upper-class families.”
This explains the Arab street. The Westerners who support them–ah, that is a more painful and a more curious matter. Are Westerners trying to both hide and atone for their racism by cleverly masquerading as staunch anti-colonialists and by “slumming,” dressing as impoverished Arabs, marching right alongside the presumably “wretched of the earth,” all fitted out in high jihadic gear? Or, is this a symbol of a Western wish to (psychologically) die, to be done with the demands of freedom, to be cleansed of all our filth–our greed and lust, our many choices?
There is something else. The jihadic use of European Nazi images is essentially a total “fakeout.” The jihadists are projecting all the sins of Islam towards Jews onto Christian Europe. In their use of Holocaust era imagery, the jihadists are trying to pretend that there is no long and genocidal history of Muslims towards Jews, Christians, and other infidels; they presume to deny that there is a 1400 year history of Islamic Jew hatred and genocide towards infidels–one that is still very much alive today; one that is supported by Muslim religious sources.
Despite individual exceptions and moments of respite, historically, Jews were routinely and relentlessly subjected to pogroms in the Muslim world and were ultimately driven out of the Muslim Middle East. The Jewish refugee story is the larger and more hidden story of 1948-1956. The Christian Crusades took place because crusading, imperialist, and genocidal Arab Muslims were slaughtering Christians throughout the Middle East and central Asia in what was once known as Byzantium; Zoroastrians in Persia too. Christians are still persecuted by Muslims today; many have been forced to flee Muslim lands. Read the important [3] works of [4] Bat [5] Ye’or and of [6] Dr. Andrew Bostom on this subject.
The use of Nazi images in pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli demonstrations cannot be countered with sweet reason, fact, or truth. The hoarse demonstrators who scream hate speech slogans, who seem hypnotically in thrall to hate, are not capable of rational conversations in which any truth other than their own prevails. If one presents a jihadi True Believer with objective facts which challenge their version of reality, they will either physically and verbally threaten to attack you, actually attack you, or they will walk away.
Bullies, including terrorists, must be defeated militarily. They will comprehend absolutely no other language.
Israel, Hamas and the Nazis: A More Accurate Historical Comparison
Notes by Dr. Barry Rubin
Number of Jews in Continental Europe, 1939: 7 million
Number of Palestinians in Gaza 2009: 1.2 million
Number of Jews still alive in Continental Europe at end of the
Holocaust: 1 million
Number of Palestinians left alive in Gaza after the 2009 war: 1,199,000
Percentage of Jews Killed by Germans and their allies: 86 percent
Percentage of Gazan Palestinians Killed by Israelis: .01 percent
Number of Jewish Civilians deliberately killed by Nazis and their
Allies: 6,000,000
Number of Palestinian Civilians deliberately killed by Israel: 0
Number of Jews armed during most of the Holocaust: 0
Number of Hamas soldiers in Gaza: About 20,000
Number of rockets fired at Israel by Hamas: 4000
Number of rockets fired by Jews at Germany: 0
Number of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians by Hamas:
Thousands
Number of terrorist attacks on Jewish civilians by the Nazis: thousands
Number of armed attacks of any kind by Jews on German civilians: 0
Nazi “humanitarian supplies” for Jews: starvation diet coupled with
slave labor
Israeli humanitarian supplies for Gaza: regular shipments even while
Hamas is attacking Israel, no one actually in Gaza even claims to be
hungry; treatment of Palestinians in Israeli hospitals
Nazi treatment of Jews: According to a Gestapo official in Warsaw: “It
is permissible to take from a Jew everything….Whoever wishes may kill a
Jew, and our law will not punish him for it.” (Jan Karski report, 1942)
Hamas treatment of Jews: It is permissible to take from a Jew
everything. Whoever wishes may kill a Jew, and our law will not punish
him for it.
Israeli treatment of Palestinians: Soldiers subject to strict
discipline and code of behavior for whose violation soldiers are
court-martialed and sent to prison.
Nazi soldiers hide among German civilians to incur civilian
casualties?: No
Hamas soldiers hide among Palestinian civilians to incur civilian
casualties?: Yes
Ideology of Nazis Toward Jews: All Jews in the World Should be
Exterminated
Ideology of Israel toward Palestinians: Have your own state and just
leave us alone
Ideology of Hamas toward Israelis and Jews: Starting with all Jews in
Israel should be exterminated, Hamas is increasingly extending that to
all Jews in the world.
Nazi goal: World Conquest
Israel’s goal: A small democratic state
Hamas and Islamist goal: World conquest
A common Western attitude toward Nazi Germany prior to 1939: The
Germans have suffered a lot and have legitimate grievances. If we
appease them they will leave us alone. They are only after the Jews and
what do we care about them?
A common Western attitude toward Hamas in 2009: The Palestinians have suffered a lot and have legitimate grievances. If we appease them they will leave us alone. Hamas, Iran, and other radical Islamists are only
after the Jews and what do we care about them?
Syrian, Iranian, and Hamas view of the Holocaust: It didn’t happen.
Syrian, Iranian, and Hamas view of the Gaza war: It was another
Holocaust.
Article printed from Chesler Chronicles: http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler/2009/01/30/jews-to-the-muslim-gas-chamber/
URLs in this post:
[1] Palestinian: http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler/2008/12/31/gaza-comes-to-america-hate-demonstrations-against-
israel-on-the-east-and-west-coasts/
[2] Frontpage Symposium: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=A593C5BB-315C-415F-A26B-335CC94D9913
[3] works: http://www.amazon.com/Eurabia-Euro-Arab-Axis-Bat-YeOr/dp/083864077X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=bo
oks&qid=1233355443&sr=8-1
[4] Bat: http://www.amazon.com/Islam-Dhimmitude-Where-Civilizations-Collide/dp/0838639437/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=
UTF8&s=books&qid=1233355443&sr=8-2
[5] Ye’or: http://www.amazon.com/Dhimmi-Jews-Christians-Under-Islam/dp/0838632629/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s
=books&qid=1233355443&sr=8-3
[6] Dr. Andrew Bostom : http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Islamic-Antisemitism-Sacred-History/dp/1591025540/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&am
p;s=books&qid=1233355338&sr=1-1
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Rachel:
"Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin wrote a great book called Why the Jews-- The Reason for Antisemitism which I really recommend."
Would you please give a summary of why you liked the book/what the book says?
TIA,
Marc
I read Why the Jews six or seven years ago so my ability to provide a review is limited this is provided with some help from Amazon. I should definitely dig it out and reread it. It was a quick read, well written, and they didn't knock you over the head with their arguments. It also provided a good history of antisemitism .
Why the Jews main argument is Judaism and the Jews represent modernism and ethical monotheism. Anyone who has a problem with modernism, ethical monotheism, moral law and peoplehood etc, has a problem with the Jews.
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Interesting site:
http://www.einsatzgruppenarchives.com/documents/wehrmacht.html
An excerpt:
"From a Wehrmacht Report on the Extermination of Jews in Ukraine"
December 2, 1941
Armanment in the Ukraine
Inspector
Secret
To: The Office of Wi Rü [Industrial Armament Department]
OKW [High Command of theWehrmacht]
General of the Infantry Thomas
Berlin
...c. The Jewish Question
Settling of the Jewish Question in Ukraine has been made more difficult because in the cities the Jews constituted a major part of the population. What we have here is therefore - just as in the Government-General -a massive population policy problem. Many cities had more than 50 percent Jews. Only the rich Jews fled before the German troops. The great majority of the Jewish masses remained under the German Administration. The entire situation was complicated by the fact that these Jews carried out almost all the work in the skilled trades and even provided part of the labor for small - and medium-sized industries; apart from trade, some of which had become superfluous as the result of the direct or indirect effects of the war. [Their] elimination was therefore bound to have profound economic consequences, including even direct effects on the military economy (supplies for troops).
From the outset the attitude of the Jewish population was anxious-willing. They tried to avoid anything that might displease the German Administration. That they hated the German Administration and the Army in their hearts is obvious and not surprising. However, there is no evidence that the Jews, either as a body, or even in any considerable numbers, have taken part in sabotage, etc. Without doubt there have been some terrorists or saboteurs among them, just as there have been among the Ukrainians. But it cannot be claimed that the Jews as such present any kind of danger for the German Wehrmacht. The troops and the German Administration have been satisfied with the work output of the Jews, who are of course motivated by no emotion except fear.
Immediately following the military operations, the Jewish population remained undisturbed at first. It was only weeks, in some cases months, later that systematic shooting of the Jews was carried out by units of the Order Police specially set up for this purpose. This Aktion moved in the main from east to west. It was carried out entirely in public, with the assistance of Ukrainian militia; in many cases, regrettably, also with the voluntary participation of members of the Wehrmacht. These Aktionen included aged men, women, and children of all ages, and the manner in which they were carried out was appalling. The gigantic number of executions involved in this Aktion is far greater than any similar measure undertaken in the Soviet Union up to now. Altogether about 150,000 to 200,000 Jews may have been executed in the section of Ukraine belonging to the RK [Retchskommissariat]; up to now no consideration was given to the interests of the economy.
To sum up it could be said that the solution of the Jewish Question as carried out in Ukraine, evidently motivated by ideological principles, has had the following consequences:
a) Elimination of some, in part superfluous, eaters in the cities.
b) Elimination of a part of the population which undoubtedly hated us.
c) Elimination of urgently needed craftsmen, who were in many cases indispensable for the requirements of Wehrmacht.
d) Consequences in connection with foreign propaganda that are obvious.
e) Adverse effects on troops which in any case have indirect contact with executions.
f) Brutalizing effects on the units (Order Police) which carry out the executions...
Source: Nuremberg Documents PS-3257, as cited in Yitzak Arad, Yisrael Gutman and Abraham Margaliot, eds. Documents on the Holocaust (Jerusalem and Oxford: Yad Vashem and Pergamon Press, 1987) p. 417 (Document 190).
Gitelman, Zvi, Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1997. pp. 273 - 274
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- Pajamas Media - http://pajamasmedia.com -
Of ‘Bad’ and ‘Good’ Anti-Semites
Posted By Malte Lehming On February 12, 2009 @ 9:55 am In . Column2 01, Europe, Middle East, Politics, Religion, World News | 20 Comments
Muslims are somewhat backwards; they suffered so much under western colonialism; their anger at Israel is comprehensible; one should not weigh their every word.
Such racist assumptions must be implicit in the justifiably raging debate on the rehabilitation of Holocaust denier Bishop Richard Williamson. For there is an obvious question: Why is the moral-historical bar being set very high for the Pope and the Catholic Church, whereas in the case of thousands of imams and Islamic scholars it is consciously set extremely low? Why should a Catholic clergyman not be permitted to show contempt for the dead of Auschwitz when the “Holocaust lie” and the “fable of the gas chambers” are commonplace tropes in so many Friday prayers throughout the Muslim and Arab world?
It is not hard to find the answer. Muslims are in fact not taken entirely seriously in the West. The anti-Semitism of Muslims is regarded as a kind of folklore, for which on account of cultural backwardness mitigating circumstances should apply. It is an ideological import from Europe grafted onto the teachings of Mohammed, something artificial and not organic. As a consequence, even in Germany anti-Semitic slogans of the most grotesque sort could be shouted at anti-Israeli demonstrations during the Gaza war — slogans like “Jews out!” and “All Jews must die!” If native Germans had shouted the same slogans, the DA’s office would have started an investigation long ago.
But anyone who employs such double standards is either ignorant or a racist. There is extensive research on anti-Semitism in the Arab and Muslim world. One knows, for instance, the shameful story of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who was received by Hitler in 1941 and supervised the Muslim-SS divisions from Berlin. And various speeches by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad come to mind. (For instance, [1] his speech of February 11, 2006: “[A]s far as several aggressive European governments are concerned…, it is permissible to harm the honor of the divine prophets, but it is a crime to ask questions about the myth of the Holocaust. … On the basis of this myth, the pillaging Zionist regime has managed, for 60 years, to extort all Western governments. … They are lying when they claim they have freedom. They are hostages in the hands of the Zionists.”)
But many others talk like Ahmadinejad, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Another friend of the Nazis, the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, had the Protocols of the Elders of Zion reprinted and distributed. At about the same time, the Jordanian Jerusalem Times published an open letter to Adolf Eichmann, who was on trial in Israel. The letter declared that Eichmann had “conferred a real blessing on humanity” and urged him to “find solace in the fact that this trial will one day culminate in the liquidation of the remaining six million. …”
All of this is well-known and documented. But what member of the Middle East quartet is bothered nowadays by [2] the dissertation that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president and co-founder of Fatah, completed in Moscow in 1982 ? Its title: “The Secret Ties between the Nazis and the Zionist Movement Leadership.” The claim that the Holocaust is simply used by Israel as a pretext remains one of the most important themes of contemporary Islamic anti-Semitism. This is why even dealing with the Holocaust is regarded as betrayal of the Palestinian cause. What German tourist has not received a grateful pat on the back in Cairo, Amman, or Damascus on account of the Nazis’ genocidal “Jewish policy”?
Bishop Richard Williamson should not be honored with a high office in the Catholic Church. He should be placed in quarantine — as should Hamas, whose charter makes the Jews responsible for World War II. If dialogue is not possible with Williamson, then it is certainly not possible with Hamas. Whoever complains about Williamson, but wants “somehow to include” Hamas, is lying to themselves and to the public.
The above commentary first appeared in German [3] here on the website of the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel. The English translation is by John Rosenthal.
Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/of-bad-and-good-anti-semites/
URLs in this post:
[1] his speech of February 11, 2006: http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&Area=antisemitism&ID=SP109106
[2] the dissertation that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president and co-founder of Fatah, completed in Moscow in 1982: http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=ia&ID=IA9502
[3] here: http://www.tagesspiegel.de/meinung/kommentare/auf-den-punkt/Papst-Benedikt-Antisemitismus;art15890,2
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Defiance -- Go see the movie!!!
[Please read to the end.]
Good morning, all! One of our members, Dr. David Herschtal is a nephew of the Bielski partisan fighters featured in the film 'Defiance.' He recently shared his personal thoughts about his Uncles portrayed in the movie. Reading this before or after seeing the film will, I believe, add to a greater appreciation of this amazing historical story. Rabbi Paul Plotkin
DEFIANCE SPEECH
"You're about to see one of the greatest stories NEVER told: the largest documented armed resistance and rescue, of Jews by Jews, during the Holocaust. The 1200 people saved then, number an estimated 20,000 today. And I would now like to make it personal. By 1957, my mother, Estelle Bielski Herschthal and all of the other Bielski brothers and sisters who survived the Holocaust had moved directly from Europe to America and had been living in Brooklyn with their families for 10 years. However, the Bielski Brothers that led the Partisans went directly to Palestine after surviving the Holocaust, and went to war again, to help establish the State of Israel.
So I was 6 yrs old, 1957, when my Mother told me that her brother Tuvia, a great war hero, would be moving from Israel to America. He'd be our guest for a few weeks and would be arriving later that night. I'd have to give my bed to him, and now share a bed with my younger brother, all three of us crowded into one small bedroom. I was not pleased about this inconvenience and thought, after all, how big of a hero can he be if he has to share a room with us kids? My brother and I were fast asleep when he finally arrived late that night, as he was when we left for school early the next morning. To register my dissatisfaction, I poured baby powder all over the head of my sleeping uncle. As I started to exit the room I was firmly and yet gently stopped and lifted by two steel-like arms. I was temporarily paralyzed with fear and was turned around to face a giant white powdered smiling laughing face, who gave me a big warm welcoming hug. We were fast friends ever since.
Tuvia's family and the other remaining brothers and their families arrived from Israel soon afterward. Now all the Bielskis and many of the other Partisan families lived within minutes of each other in Brooklyn as one large, mostly happy family. We were close, at times it could seem too close, and did everything together, including observing and celebrating holidays, birthdays, bar mitzvahs, graduations, weddings and of course, funerals.
At all these events there was a certain protocol. At a significant moment, typically after the blessing of bread and wine, came the equivalent of a blessing, an acknowledgement of Tuvia and the Bielski Brothers for making it possible for all of us to be there. No matter the significance or insignificance of the event, there was always a respectful proclamation of gratitude to the Bielsky partisan unit. This practice continued well into the 2nd and now present 3rd generation. Tuvia could have cared less about these accolades. He derived his satisfaction from merely observing the thriving and increasingly multiplying descendants of those he saved.
As youngsters we were fascinated by the physical aspect of what they did but were mostly lost to the bigger picture. The Uncles were quite humble and hardly ever spoke of the military aspects of their struggle, and only spoke of them as saving Jewish lives.
It was their kids or the people that they saved that freely supplied us with all the graphic details of various battles, missions, raids, retributions and even executions. Tuvia would never have any part of these types of conversations. On the other hand, my Uncle Zus, when egged on, was all too glad to demonstrate to us kids some of his lethal hand to hand combat techniques.
We had absolutely nothing in common with other 2nd generation Holocaust kids as their commonality was their parents' reluctance to discuss the Holocaust, whereas for us it was part of our normal discourse and, frankly, entertainment. While they played cowboys and Indians, we played Nazis and Partisans. And guess who played the Nazi?
I was amazed, while growing up, at how many people personally told me over and over again how they owed their existence to my uncles' saving them and their families. Nevertheless, it still seemed like a LOCAL vs global story. Even though there were many articles and books written about the Bielskis, they were mostly testimonials written by fellow Partisans: Chaim this or Chaim that. They were not widely read or known.
As time progressed from the 80's through the 90's and the Holocaust was popularized as an academic and cultural subject, much more light was shed on the horror that occurred to the 6 million. But The Bielski story was still little known. In fact, I must confess, that some of us, while never doubting the essence of the story, assumed that some of the more implausible aspects of the Bielski story just might be slightly embellished or exaggerated. Well, shame on us!!
The tipping point occurred several years after the last of the Bielski Commanders died, when an Irish Catholic New York Times reporter named Peter Duffy, wrote a popular and well researched book, published by Harper-Collins in 2003, documenting their story and placing it in its proper historical context. The author had gone back to the then newly opened Archives of the Soviet Union and uncovered detailed records of the Bielski Partisans' achievements. The Bielski Partisans had some arms and intelligence supplied to them by the Russian Military, including a Russian liason officer who kept records and even some photographs of what they did.
The story turned out to be much, much bigger than previously reported. Academicians and historians started paying attention. Articles were written. The press picked up on it and so did Hollywood. The movie rights were ultimately purchased from another book, hence the name 'Defiance.' Uncle Tuvia and the Brothers who saved over 1200 Jews, now, ironically had their story saved and immortalized by an Irish Catholic reporter and Hollywood.
To really understand how this act of Defiance came to pass, you have to appreciate the Bielski family background before the Holocaust. The Bielskis were multi-generational, redneck, hillbilly Jewish farmers who lived on a poor Ponderosa at the edge of a forest in the middle of nowhere Poland, surrounded by a Jew-hating populace (anti-semitic is too mild a word). Mix into the Bielskis, a little bit of Robin Hood and lot of Sopranos, and you can first begin to appreciate their temperament. A recent NYT article described the Brothers as "casually violent, sexually predaceous and occasionally murderous." I sincerely hope these traits are not hereditary. They were hard drinking and hard living men who were not likely candidates for future heroes. Yet, at the same time, they valued honor, family and a full love of life.
They were historically forced to defend themselves and their property, as the local laws did not protect them. Their acts of retribution were legendary, thus making them locally feared. Once the Nazis controlled their territory it would have been relatively easy to only save themselves, by simply hiding deep in the forest where they grew up. After all, they were expert horsemen, outdoorsmen and survivalists. They were not accountants. But Tuvia and the Brothers risked their own lives by saving those Jews, mostly strangers, unable to save themselves. And at the same time created a community, often-times referred to as a "Jerusalem in the Woods" that saved their cultural identity. And that's what makes this story one of a kind. The brothers loved life and were determined to fully sustain it. They showed us that real Heroes are flawed human beings. They provided a glimmer of light and hope, in a time when there was none.
History will hopefully look at the Bielski story, not a corrective to the Holocaust's 6 million, but rather an inspiring addendum. Future genocides can only be stopped by international cooperation and early government detection and prevention. And while we pressure governments to act, one must ultimately summon, Defiance! Thank you."
David Herschthal MD
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Rahm Emanuel - Chief of Staff - Jewish
David Axelrod - Senior Advisor to the President - Jewish
Ronald Klain - Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United
States - Jewish
Larry Summers - Economic Advisor to the President - Jewish
Paul Volcker - Economic Advisor to the President, Former Head of Fed
Reserve - Jewish
Tim Geithner - Treasury Secetary - Jewish
Peter Orszag - Head of Budget - Jewish
Am I the only one noticing that Obama and Biden are not so much assembling staff, as gathering a minyan?
On topic but kind of a tiny bit off topic:
Im sorry but reading this threw me back 20 odd years to something Jackie Mason said when he used to be funny
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju9AIZHKNJQ[/youtube]
fast forward almost to the end at minute 7:29
Maybe your new president is on to something :)
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I just got back from the premiere screening at Fox Studio of the Hallmark Hall of Fame move "The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler"
It airs on Sunday April 19, 2009 on CBS. The Director and Co-Writer John Harrison is my neighbor and family friend;
he kindly invited me to the showing and dinner/party after.
A true story, it is a very dark but inspiration movie of how one person can truly make a difference. I have heard the cry "never again" on
this forum; if you need a reminder of how true this statement is; try to watch it on Sunday. You cannot help but be moved. Irena
Sendler did make a difference.
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~~~~~~
Gilder Telecosm Forum Member (4/13/09): George, Can you provide any update
on the timing of the release of your book on Israel?
George Gilder, Gilder Telecosm Forum (4/13/09): I am finishing the
footnotes at the moment and books will be available within six weeks,
official publication date late July. The Jerusalem Post (David
Klinghoffer) got a copy of an early draft and already did a review
(illegitimate but enthusiastic) a week ago Friday.
David Klinghoffer, The Jerusalem Post (4/3/09): Israel stands out from
other nations in many ways, not least that its survival appears to depend
on powerful but geographically very distant countries. That observation
should lead Jews to wonder what makes friends of Israel feel as they do.
America has been the country's closet ally, while other Western countries
showed less affection even before absorbing huge new Muslim populations.
Why? In the American context, why do Republicans on average judge Israel
more favorably than Democrats - by a significant spread of 20 percent, 84%
compared to 64%, according to a Gallup poll?
Pointing to the number of Evangelical Christians among the Republican base
only begs the question. Conservative Christians quote biblical verses to
justify their passion for the Jewish state, but you can imagine an
alternative universe where those voters today would show the same
hostility to Jewish interests that other Christians demonstrated
historically.
Chalking up the difference to religious influence also ignores the
staunchly pro-Israel stance of secular conservative activists and
journalists. Add to this the mystery of Jews who either don't care about
Israel or are more or less disdainful. What explains it all?
Israel's well-wishers should carefully consider the question because the
trite, frequently cited rationales for being pro-Israel - that it is a
"bastion of democracy in the Middle East" and so on - sound like
rationalizations. In a secular democracy, religious friends also need to
be able to say, without pounding a Bible, why allying with Israel is good
not just for Israel but for other countries, notably America.
I'VE STRUGGLED for years to figure out what difference in fundamental
viewpoints it is, what polarity in thinking about how the world works,
that Israel casts so sharply into contrast.
An answer I came across recently snaps the mystery into focus. I found it
in the manuscript of a forthcoming book by, of all people, the capitalism
and technology guru George Gilder, one of the chief intellectual stars of
the Reaganomics revolution.
Gilder and I share an affiliation with the Discovery Institute, a think
tank with offices in Seattle, but I've never met him and hadn't followed
his earlier career all that carefully. I'm old school - technology bores
me. But his book The Israel Test, which should be out in June, spoke to me
with an unexpected power.
Apart from being beautifully, fiercely written, its merit lies in
clarifying, in a totally new, secular and intuitive way, why Israel
matters. Gilder begins with a frankly, even racially philo-Semitic
observation that will make some Jews uncomfortable. I can say it without
squirming because, as a convert to Judaism, I can't claim any credit that
attaches to having Jewish genes.
Jews are known for their greatly disproportionate giftedness in film,
physics, finance - almost every field where creativity and intellect
determine success. Gilder writes with candor about Jewish "superiority and
excellence." As a result of such Jewish gifts, Israel has done far more
with far less, in physical resources, than any other country. The Israeli
technology boom has made this clearer than ever.
As Gilder puts it, "The [Israel] test can be summarized by a few
questions: What is your attitude toward people who excel you in the
creation of wealth or in other accomplishments? Do you aspire to their
excellence or do you seethe at it? Do you admire and celebrate exceptional
achievement or do you impugn it and seek to tear it down?"
SOME PEOPLE see wealth-creation as a zero-sum game, where your enriching
yourself means that you are taking something away from me. Others see
wealth as almost miraculous. Material value is created from nothing - ex
nihilo. That is, from nothing material - but from an idea, from
creativity, from genius. In this view, your enrichment takes nothing from
me. In fact, it creates opportunities for your neighbors to enrich
themselves by doing business with you. Israel's Palestinian neighbors,
with their pitiful economy, have failed spectacularly to perceive this.
Elementally, there are two different personality types here. Where you
come down reveals a lot not just about your politics - though political
views flow from it - but about the orientation of your soul..
Read on:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1238562901655&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
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Irena's Children
by Gavriel Horan
Irena Sendler is a 97-year-old Polish woman who saved 2,500 Jewish children during the Holocaust.
She takes the crying baby into her arms, turns her back on the hysterical mother, and walks off into the night. If she's caught, she and the baby will die.
"Promise me my child will live!" the mother cries desperately after her.
She turns for a moment. "I can't promise that. But I can promise that if he stays with you, he will die."
Irena Sendler is 97 years old. She has seen this image in her dreams countless times over the years, heard the children's cries as they were pulled from their mothers' grasp; each time it is another mother screaming behind her. To the children, she seemed a merciless captor; in truth, she was the agent to save their lives.
Mrs. Sendler, code name "Jolanta," smuggled 2,500 children out of the Warsaw Ghetto during the last three months before its liquidation. She found a home for each child. Each was given a new name and a new identity as a Christian. Others were saving Jewish children, too, but many of those children were saved only in body; tragically, they disappeared from the Jewish people. Irena did all she could to ensure that "her children" would have a future as part of their own people.
Mrs. Sendler listed the name and new identity of every rescued child on thin cigarette papers or tissue paper. She hid the list in glass jars and buried them under an apple tree in her friend's backyard. Her hope was to reunite the children with their families after the war. Indeed, though most of their parents perished in the Warsaw Ghetto or in Treblinka, those children who had surviving relatives were returned to them after the war.
Yet Irena Sendler sees herself as anything but a heroine. "I only did what was normal. I could have done more," she says. "This regret will follow me to my death."
Breaking the Silence
Though she received the Yad Vashem medal for the Righteous Among the Nations in 1965, Irena Sendler's story was virtually unknown. But in 1999 the silence was broken by some unlikely candidates: four Protestant high-school girls in rural Kansas. The girls were looking for a subject for the Kansas State National History Day competition. Their teacher, Norm Conard, gave them a short paragraph about Mrs. Sendler, from a 1994 U.S. News & World Report story, "The Other Schindlers." Mr. Conard thought the figures were mistaken. After all, no one had ever heard of this woman; Schindler, who was so famous, had rescued 1,000 Jews. 250 children seemed more likely than 2,500.
Conard encouraged the girls to investigate and unearth the true story. With his help, the girls began to reconstruct the life of this courageous woman. Searching for her burial records, they discovered, to their surprise, that she was still alive, ninety years old and living in Warsaw. The girls compiled many details of Mrs. Sendler's life, which they eventually made into a short play, "Life in a Jar." The play has since been performed hundreds of times in the United States, Canada, and Poland, and has been broadcast over radio and television, publicizing the silent heroine to the world.
Learning to Swim
Irena Sendler was born in 1910 in Otwock, some 15 miles southeast of Warsaw. Her father, a physician and one of the first Polish Socialists, raised her to respect and love people regardless of their ethnicity or social status. Many of his patients were poor Jews. When a typhus epidemic broke out in 1917, he was the only doctor who stayed in the area. He contracted the disease. His dying words to seven-year-old Irena were, "If you see someone drowning, you must jump in and try to save them, even if you don't know how to swim."
Even before the war, Irena had strong loyalties towards Jews. In the 1930s, at Warsaw University, she stood up for her Jewish friends. Jews were forced to sit separately from "Aryan" students. One day, Irena went to sit on the Jewish side of the room. When the teacher told her to move, she answered, "I'm Jewish today." She was expelled immediately. (Decades later, under Communist rule, she was considered a subversive; her son and daughter were refused entry into Warsaw University.)
In fall of 1939, Germany invaded Poland and began its campaign of mass destruction. Many Poles were quick to side with the Nazis. Although Jews had never been accepted by the Polish masses, many of them had fought alongside their Polish countrymen during the few days before the country was overrun. Now these loyalties meant nothing.
Mrs. Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which was in charge of soup kitchens, located in every district of the city. They distributed meals and gave financial assistance and other services to the poor, elderly, and orphans. From 1939-1942, she was involved in acquiring forged documents, registering many Jews under Christian names so they could receive these services; she listed them all as typhus and tuberculosis victims, to avoid any investigations.
It wasn't enough. Irena joined the Zegota, the Council for Aid to Jews, organized by the Polish underground resistance, operating out of London with the help of many British Jews. Obtaining a pass from the Warsaw Epidemic Control Department to enter the Warsaw Ghetto, she smuggled in food, medicine, and clothing.
Over 450,000 Jews had been forced into the small 16-block area that was the Warsaw Ghetto; 5,000 were dying each month. Irena felt that her efforts were helping only to prolong the suffering, but doing nothing to save lives. She decided that the most that could be done was to try to save the children. "When the war started, all of Poland was drowning in a sea of blood. But most of all, it affected the Jewish nation. And within that nation, it was the children who suffered most. That's why we needed to give our hearts to them," Sendler said on ABC News.
Breaking Through the Walls
In 1942, Mrs. Sendler, "Jolanta," was put in charge of the Children's Division of Zegota. She and her team of twenty-five organized to smuggle out as many children as possible from the Ghetto. Ten members were to smuggle children out, ten were in charge of finding families to take the children, and five were in charge of obtaining false documents.
The hardest part was convincing parents to part with their children. Even the many secular Jewish parents shrank from the thought of surrendering their children into Catholic homes or convents, where they might be baptized or taught Christian prayers. Many chose to die with their children instead. Irena, herself a young mother, found it almost impossibly painful to have to persuade parents to part with their children, entrusting them to a non-Jewish stranger. The only thing that gave her strength to withstand this pain was the knowledge that there was no other hope for survival. Sometimes, she would finally convince the parents, only to be met with the grandparents' adamant refusal. She would be forced to leave empty-handed, returning the next day to find that the entire family had been sent to Treblinka.
Many in the Ghetto thought that Treblinka was a relocation settlement. Actually, it was even worse than Auschwitz, which was a labor camp/death camp. Treblinka, on the other hand, contained little more than gas chambers and ovens. Fighting against time, "Jolanta," entered the Ghetto several times a day, wearing on her arm a yellow Star of David to show her solidarity, desperately trying to convince parents to let her take their children. Many parents would ask her why they should trust her. "You shouldn't trust me," she would agree. "But there's nothing else you can do."
The second biggest challenge was finding Polish families. The penalty of death to every family found harboring a Jew was not always enforced, but some 700 people were killed because of it. Many of the children had to be hidden in orphanages and convents. Jolanta would write to them that she had bags of old clothes to donate; among the old clothes she would hide a child.
Then there was the smuggling of the children out of the Ghetto. Small children were sedated to keep them from crying, then hidden inside sacks, boxes, body bags, or coffins. Older children who could pretend to be ill were taken out in ambulances. Many were smuggled through sewers or underground tunnels, or taken through an old courthouse or church next to the Ghetto.
Outside the Ghetto walls, the children were given false names and documents. Mrs. Sendler claims that no one ever refused to take a child from her. But children often had to be relocated several times. She recalls carrying a little boy from one guardian family to the next, as he sobbed, "How many mothers can a person have? This is my third!"
The smuggling did not always go as planned. Fourteen-year-old Renada Zajdman was smuggled out, but then became separated from her rescuer. She survived on her own in warehouses for several months, until she was reconnected with members of Zegota.
The Church was actively involved in much of Mrs. Sendler's work. However, she stresses that the goal was not to convert people to Catholicism, but rather to save lives. Each family had to promise to return the children to any surviving family members after the war. Unfortunately, this promise was not always kept. Mrs. Sendler spent years after the war, with the help of her lists, trying to track down missing children and reconnect family members.
Of the remaining orphans, some 400 were taken to Israel with Adolph Berman, a leader in Zegota. Many others chose to stay with their adopted parents. Despite Mrs. Sendler's efforts to trace them, some 400 to 500 children are still missing; presumably they either did not survive or they are living somewhere in Poland or elsewhere, perhaps unaware of their Jewish identity.
Discovered!
For two years, Jolanta's covert operations were successful. Then, in October 20, 1943, the Gestapo caught up with her. She was arrested, imprisoned in Warsaw's notorious Pawiak prison, and tortured. Her feet and legs were broken. She still needs crutches and a wheelchair as a result of those injuries, and still carries the scars of those beatings. She refused to betray any of her co-conspirators or to reveal the whereabouts of any of the children.
Jolanta was sentenced to death by firing squad, a sentence that she accepted with pride. But unbeknown to her, Zegota had bribed one of the German guards, who helped her to escape at the last moment. He recorded her name on the list of those who had been executed. On the following day, the Germans loudly proclaimed the news of her death. She saw posters all over the city reporting it. The Gestapo eventually found out what had happened; they sent the guard to fight on the Russian front, a sentence they felt was worse than death. Irena spent the rest of the war in hiding much like the children she had saved. Relentlessly pursued by the Gestapo, she continued her rescue efforts in any way she could, but by then the Warsaw Ghetto had been liquidated.
Due to the Communist regime's suppression of history and its anti-Semitism, few Poles were aware of Zegota's work, despite the unveiling of a plaque honoring the organization, in 1995, near the former Warsaw Ghetto. Mrs. Sendler continued her life, simply and quietly, continuing to work as a social worker ... until the discovery by the Kansas teenagers catapulted her into the public arena.
Irena Sendler was awarded the Order of White Eagle, Poland's highest distinction, in Warsaw, in 2003. This year, she was nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. At a special session in Poland's upper house of Parliament, President Lech Kaczynski announced the unanimous resolution to honor Mrs. Sendler for rescuing "the most defenseless victims of the Nazi ideology: the Jewish children." He referred to her as a "great heroine who can be justly named for the Nobel Peace Prize. She deserves great respect from our whole nation."
Today's Warsaw still bears testimony to Mrs. Sendler's lifesaving work. The corner store where children were hidden in the basement and the apple tree where the names of the children where buried still stand, all within sight of the German army barracks. Although the children had known her only as Jolanta, as her story became publicized, she began to receive calls from people who recognized her face from the photos: "I remember your face! You took me out of the Ghetto!"
In an interview earlier this year with ABC News, Mrs. Sendler voiced some of her frustrations about how little anything has changed in the world: "After the Second World War it seemed that humanity understood something, and that nothing like that would happen again," Sendler said. "Humanity has understood nothing. Religious, tribal, national wars continue. The world continues to be in a sea of blood." But she added, "The world can be better, if there's love, tolerance, and humility."
This article originally appeared in Mishpacha Magazine
This article can also be read at: http://www.aish.com/holocaust/people/Irenas_Children.asp
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Rachel:
That was very moving and I hope lots of people will see it.
All:
Here's an interesting clip that left me thinking.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWbyZapkWRo
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Marc,
I'm glad you like the article.
I really like the Tribe movie. I have seen it few times and it always food for thought. I especially like the "You don't look Jewish" section at the end. I am not exactly blond hair blued eyes but my features aren't that stereotypical. There is never quite the right response to the comment "you don't look Jewish:. Or my personal favorite which has happened several time--- " You are lot nicer than the other Jewish girl I met".
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/middleeast/20holocaust.html
April 20, 2009
New Looks at the Fields of Death for Jews
By ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM — In the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, Jewish women were forced to swim across a wide river until they drowned. In Telsiai, Lithuania, children were thrown alive into pits filled with their murdered parents. In Liozno, Belarus, Jews were herded into a locked barn where many froze to death.
Holocaust deniers aside, the world is not ignorant of the systematic Nazi slaughter of some six million Jews in World War II. People know of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; many have heard of the tens of thousands shot dead in the Ukrainian ravine of Babi Yar. But little has been known about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of smaller killing fields across the former Soviet Union where some 1.5 million Jews met their deaths.
That is now changing. Over the past few years, the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and research center in Israel has been investigating those sites, comparing Soviet, German, local and Jewish accounts, crosschecking numbers and methods. The work, gathered under the title “The Untold Stories,” is far from over. But to honor Holocaust Remembrance Day, which starts Monday evening, the research is being made public on the institution’s Web site.
“These are places that have been mostly neglected because they involved smaller towns and villages,” said David Bankier, head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. “In many cases, locals played a key role in the murders, probably by a ratio of 10 locals to every one German. We are trying to understand the man who played soccer with his Jewish neighbor one day and turned to kill him the next. This provides material for research on genocide elsewhere, like in Africa.”
For the purposes of this project, a killing field entails at least 50 people, said the project director, Lea Prais. The killing began in June 1941 with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. From the Baltic republics in the north to the Caucasus in the south, Nazi death squads combed the areas.
The first evidence for what took place was gathered right after the war by Soviet investigating committees largely focused on finding anti-Soviet collaborators.
The new research checks that evidence against German records, diaries and letters of soldiers, as well as accounts by witnesses and the few surviving Jews, some of whom climbed out of pits of corpses. Sometimes, the researchers said, the Soviets seemed to have exaggerated, and that is noted on the Web site. One goal of the project is to learn more exactly the numbers killed.
One little-known case comes from a German sailor who filmed killings in Liepaja, Latvia. The film has been on view for some years at the Yad Vashem museum. But the new Web site has a forgotten video of a 1981 interview with the sailor, Reinhard Wiener, who said he had been a bystander with a movie camera.
According to part of his account, “After the civilian guards with the yellow armbands shouted once again, I was able to identify them as Latvian home guardsmen. The Jews, whom I was able to recognize by now, were forced to jump over the sides of the truck onto the ground. Among them were crippled and weak people, who were caught by the others.
“At first, they had to line up in a row, before they were chased toward the trench. This was done by SS and Latvian home guardsmen. Then the Jews were forced to jump into the trench and to run along inside it until the end. They had to stand with their back to the firing squad. At that time, the moment they saw the trench, they probably knew what would happen to them. They must have felt it, because underneath there was already a layer of corpses, over which was spread a thin layer of sand.”
Ms. Prais said one of the discoveries that had most surprised her was the way in which Soviet Jews who survived the war made an effort to commemorate those who had perished. In distant fields and village squares they often placed a Star of David or some other memorial, despite fears of overt Jewish expression in the Soviet era.
“The silent Jews of the Soviet Union were not so silent,” she said.
The slaughter that some of them had escaped defies the imagination. One case Ms. Prais and her colleagues have cross-referenced involves what happened in the town of Krupki, Belarus, where the entire Jewish community of at least 1,000 was eliminated on Sept. 18, 1941.
A German soldier who took part in the mass killing kept a diary that was found on his body by the Allies, she said. In it, he wrote of having volunteered as one of “15 men with strong nerves” asked to eliminate the Jews of Krupki. “All these had to be shot today,” he wrote. The weather was gray and rainy, he observed.
The Jews had been told they were to be deported to work in Germany, but as they were forced into a ditch, the reality of their fate became evident. Panic ensued. The soldier wrote that the guards had a hard time controlling the crowd.
“Ten shots rang out, 10 Jews popped off,” he wrote. “This continued until all were dispatched. Only a few of them kept their countenances. The children clung to their mothers, wives to their husbands. I won’t forget this spectacle in a hurry....”
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Few places on earth have been as systematically brutalized over the past decade as Chechnya. So you might have thought that the Russian government's decision last week to declare an end to its "counterterrorism" operations in the territory would have been an occasion for somber reflection in the Western media. Forget it. It's a 600-word news item at best.
Here's a contrast to ponder. Since the beginning of the second intifada in the autumn of 2000, roughly 6,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire. That figure includes combatants, as well as those killed in January's fighting in Gaza.
As for Chechnya, there are no solid figures for the number of civilians killed since the second war began in late 1999; estimates range anywhere between 25,000 and 200,000. Chechnya's population, at a little over one million, is about one-third or one-fourth that of the Palestinians. That works out to between 25 to 200 Chechen deaths per 1,000, as against 1.5 to 2 Palestinian deaths per 1,000.
Now type the words "Palestine" and "genocide" into Google. When I did so Monday, I got 1,630,000 results. Next, substitute "Chechnya" for "Palestine." The number is 245,000. Taking the Google results as a crude measure of global outrage, that means the outrage over the Palestinian situation was 6.6 times greater than over the Chechen one. Yet Chechen fatalities were anywhere between 13 to 133 times greater.
Final calculation: With an "outrage" ratio of 6.6 to one, but a proportional kill ratio of one to 13 (at the very low end), it turns out that every Palestinian death receives somewhere in the order of 28 times the attention of every Chechen death. Remember that in both cases we're mainly talking about Muslims being killed by non-Muslims.
I'll admit this math exercise is a bit of a gimmick. But it raises a worthwhile question: Why is Palestinian life so dear in the eyes of the world -- and Chechen life so cheap?
Maybe the answer is that the Palestinian cause is morally worthier than Chechnya's. But that can't be right. Yes, Chechen terrorists have committed spectacular atrocities, notably the 2004 Beslan school massacre. Yet modern terrorism is a genre Palestinians practically invented. As it is, Chechnya has been suffering grievously under Russia's thumb since the 1800s. (Just read Tolstoy's "Hadji Murat.") If colonialism is your beef, the case for Chechen independence is inarguable.
Maybe, then, the answer is that there is no shortage of imagery of Palestinian death, and thus it engages more of the world's attention. By contrast, the Russians imposed a virtual media blockade on Chechnya, and journalists who covered the story, like Anna Politkovskaya, had a way of ending up dead.
But imagery need not simply be televised to be vivid, nor does the world lack for testimonials of Russian brutality. "I remember a Chechen female sniper," a Russian soldier told L.A. Times reporter Maura Reynolds. "We just tore her apart with two armored personnel carriers, having tied her ankles with steel cables. There was a lot of blood, but the boys needed it."
Maybe it's that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is simply more important strategically than Russia's war against Chechnya, in the same way that the attacks of 9/11 mattered more in the scheme of things than, say, Tamil Tiger atrocities in Sri Lanka.
Yet even before 9/11, there was evidence that al Qaeda was feeding money and arms to Chechen fighters, putting Chechnya squarely into the context of what became the global war on terror. Evidence of al Qaeda involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is sparser, and only came to light in 2007.
Of course, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict inflames the Muslim world in a way the Chechen one does not. But why is that, when so many more Muslims are being victimized by Russia?
Then too, why does the wider world participate in the Muslim world's moral priorities? Why, for instance, do high-profile Western writers like Portuguese Nobelist José Saramago make "solidarity" pilgrimages to Ramallah, but not to the Chechen capital of Grozny? Why do British academics organize boycotts of their Israeli counterparts, but not their Russian ones? Why is Palestinian statehood considered a global moral imperative, but statehood for Chechnya is not?
Why does every Israeli prime minister invariably become a global pariah, when not one person in a thousand knows the name of Chechen "President" Ramzan Kadyrov, a man who, by many accounts, keeps a dungeon near his house in order to personally torture his political opponents? And why does the fact that Mr. Kadyrov is Vladimir Putin's handpicked enforcer in Chechnya not cause a shudder of revulsion as the Obama administration reaches for the "reset" button with Russia?
I have a hypothesis. Maybe the world attends to Palestinian grievances but not Chechen ones for the sole reason that Palestinians are, uniquely, the perceived victims of the Jewish state. That is, when they are not being victimized by other Palestinians. Or being expelled en masse from Kuwait. Or being excluded from the labor force in Lebanon. Things you probably didn't know about, either. As for the Chechens, too bad for their cause that no Jew will ever likely become president of Russia.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
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(http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?blobcol=urlimage&blobheader=image%2Fjpeg&blobheadername1=Cache-Control&blobheadervalue1=max-age%3D420&blobkey=id&blobtable=JPImage&blobwhere=1239710740367&cachecontrol=5%3A0%3A0+*%2F*%2F*&ssbinary=true)
The teenager who exposed Auschwitz
Apr. 20, 2009
RAFAEL MEDOFF , THE JERUSALEM POST
This month marks the 65th anniversary of a daring escape from Auschwitz, by a teenager who then revealed the truth about the death camp - only to be ignored by the Allied leadership.
In March 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary and began preparing to deport that country's Jews - numbering approximately 750,0000 - to Auschwitz. A 19-year-old prisoner named Rudolf Vrba, together with fellow-inmate Alfred Wetzler, decided to do something that almost nobody had ever done before: escape from Auschwitz. They were determined to alert the world about the doom that Hungarian Jews would soon face.
On April 7, Vrba and Wetzler slipped away from their slave labor battalion and hid in a hollowed-out woodpile near the edge of the camp. On the advice of Soviet prisoners of war, the fugitives sprinkled the area with tobacco and gasoline, which confused the German dogs that were used to search for them.
On their second day in the woodpile, Vrba and Wetzler heard Allied warplanes overhead. "They came closer and closer - then bombs began to crunch not far away," Vrba later recalled in his searing memoir I Cannot Forgive. "Our pulses quickened. Were they going to bomb the camp? Was the secret out?... Was this the end of Auschwitz?"
THE ALLIED PLANES were actually bombing German oil factories in and around the Auschwitz complex. The idea of bombing the death camp had not yet been proposed to the Allied leadership, and details such as the location of the gas chambers and crematoria were not yet known to the Allied war command. But that was about to change.
On April 10, in the dead of night, Vrba and Wetzler emerged from the woodpile and began an 11-day, 80-mile trek to Slovakia. There they met with Jewish leaders and dictated a 30-page report that came to be known as the "Auschwitz Protocols." It included details of the mass-murder process, maps pinpointing the gas chambers and crematoria and warnings of the impending slaughter of Hungary's Jews.
"One million Hungarian [Jews] are going to die," Vrba told them. "Auschwitz is ready for them. But if you tell them now, they will rebel. They will never go to the ovens."
A COPY of the report was given to Rudolf Kastner, a Budapest Jewish leader. Instead of publicizing the information, Kastner negotiated a deal that involved bribing the Germans to permit a train with 1,684 of his relatives, friends and Hungarian Jewish leaders to leave the country. Kastner's action became the centerpiece of a controversial trial in Israel after the war.
Another copy of Vrba's Auschwitz Protocols was given to Rabbi Michoel Dov Weissmandl, a rescue activist in Bratislava, who then wrote the first known appeal for the use of Allied air power to disrupt the mass murder. Weissmandl's plea to the Allies to bomb the railroad lines between Hungary and Auschwitz reached the Roosevelt administration in June.
Assistant secretary of war John McCloy responded that the request was "impracticable" because it would require "diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations." He also claimed the War Department's position was based on "a study" of the issue. But no evidence of such a study has ever been found by researchers. In reality, McCloy's position was based on the War Department's standing policy that no military resources should be allocated for "rescuing victims of enemy oppression."
VRBA'S REPORT convinced the Jewish Agency leadership in Palestine to change its position on bombing. Agency leaders initially opposed bombing Auschwitz because they believed it was a labor camp, not a death camp. But after receiving the Auschwitz Protocols in June, agency officials lobbied British, American and Soviet officials to bomb the camp or the railways leading to it. Their requests were rebuffed.
Most important, a condensed version of the Auschwitz Protocols reached the US government's War Refugee Board in June. It helped galvanize the board to mobilize international pressure on Hungary to halt the deportations to Auschwitz. Although that effort came too late for the more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews who had been shipped to their doom, it did spare the 200,000-plus who were still alive in Budapest.
The full version of the Vrba report was actually held up in Switzerland for three months by US diplomats who regarded it as low priority. And when the report finally reached Washington in October, the Office of War Information opposed distributing it; OWI director Elmer Davis claimed the report was actually part of a Nazi conspiracy to "create contempt for the [Jewish] inmates" by showing that the Jews were not resisting their killers.
Fortunately, Davis and his cockamamie theories were too late to blunt the impact of the Auschwitz Protocols. The Hungarian deportations had been stopped, and Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler had played a significant role in bringing that about.
The writer is director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. www.WymanInstitute.org
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1239710740325&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
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7-21-06
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism: The Link
By Diana Muir
Ms. Muir is the author of Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England. The working title of her current project is: What Good is a Nation; A Clear-Eyed Look at Nations and Nationalism.
This week, the Spanish Foreign Minister felt compelled to defend Prime Minister Zapatero from charges of anti-Semitism.
Zapatero had donned the black-checked keffiyeh that is the symbol of Palestinian determination to destroy the Jewish State and criticized Israel for using “abusive force that does not protect innocent human beings.”1
It was all too familiar.
On any given day one can find some eminent European – a university professor, high-ranking churchman, a parliamentarian – gravely explaining to reporters that harsh and disproportionate criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic.
And their protestations sound plausible. After all, this is not your grandfather’s anti-Semitism. Israel’s highly-educated critics do not refuse to dine in restaurants that serve Jews, use epithets like “kike,” or believe that Jews control the international financial markets and are more likely than others to engage in shady business practices.
At least that is what I assumed until someone did the study.
Two Connecticut professors got curious about the constant denials that extremely harsh critics of Israel were anti-Semitic. Edward H. Kaplan, the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Management Sciences at Yale, and Charles A. Small, Director of Urban Studies, Southern Connecticut State University, decided to examine the issue in formal way. Their paper, “Anti-Israel Sentiment Predicts Anti-Semitism in Europe,” appears in the August issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution. 2
Kaplan and Small ask whether individuals expressing strong anti-Israel sentiments, such as the statement by Ted Honderich, Emeritus Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London, that “those Palestinians who have resorted to necessary killing have been right to try to free their people, and those who have killed themselves in the cause of their people have indeed sanctified themselves,” are more likely than the general population to also support in such old-style anti-Semitic slurs as “Jews have too much power in our country today.”
The correlation was almost perfect. In a survey of 5,000 Europeans in ten countries, people who believed that the Israeli soldiers “intentionally target Palestinian civilians,” and that “Palestinian suicide bombers who target Israeli civilians” are justified, also believed that “Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind,” “Jews have a lot of irritating faults,” and “Jews are more willing than others to use shady practices to get what they want.”
The study’s other interesting finding was that only a small fraction of Europeans believe any of these things. Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism flourish among the few, but those few are over-represented in Europe’s newspapers, its universities, and its left-wing political parties.
For Americans who do not read the European press, the level of raw anti-Semitism in European intellectual circles can be shocking.
A couple of years ago the French Ambassador at the Court of St. James, Daniel Bernard, told his companions at a London dinner party that Israel is a “shitty little country,” “Why,” he asked, “should the world be in danger of World War Three because of those people?”3
Those people? Moderates heard echoes of old-fashioned anti-Semitism. But the French Foreign Ministry stood behind their ambassador, calling assertions that Bernard’s remarks were anti-Semitic "malevolent insinuations."4
The British press agreed. Columnist Deborah Orr defended Ambassador Bernard in the Independent. “Anti-Semitism is disliking all Jews, anywhere, and anti-Zionism is just disliking the existence of Israel and opposing those who support it,” explained Orr, who holds “the honest view that in my experience Israel is shitty and little.”5
Columnist Richard Woods summed up the attitude of the European intelligentsia when he wrote that Ambassador Bernard’s remark was only “apparently anti-Semitic”.6
Kaplan and Small have shown otherwise. When you read, for example, the opinion of Marc Gentilli, president of the French Red Cross, that the idea of allowing Israel to join the International Red Cross and use the Star of David on its ambulances is “disgusting,”7 you can be pretty sure that he, along with Ambassador Bernard, Prime Minister Zapatero, President Chirac, and the rest of Europe’s harsh critics of Israel, are very probably the kind of old-fashioned anti-Semites who just don’t like Jews very much.
Post Script 7-23-06
After writing this essay, I learned that Zapatero may have had his own Daniel-Bernard-at-the-dinner-party moment. According to some reports, at a dinner party in late 2005, Zapatero loosed a tirade of extreme anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic rhetoric that ended with the phrase: "Es que a veces hasta se entiende que haya gente que puede justificar el holocausto" which means: "At times one can even understand that there might be people who could justify the Holocaust."
The conversation was reported on a Spanish talk-radio program. This is the Spanish article that has been echoed on a number of Spanish language blogs:
Vidal Quadras habla del alegato antisemita del Presidente Zapatero.
En el programa radiofónico español ¨Mas se perdio en Cuba¨ de Intereconomia, Alejo Vidal Quadras dirigente del PP narro un suceso ocurrido hace unos meses entre el matrimonio Benarroch y la familia Zapatero. Por lo visto durante la cena, Zapatero profirió alegatos antisionistas y antisemitas de modo tan exagerado que los Benarroch (familia judía de peleteros) tuvieron que llamarle la atencion por el tono extremista de su discurso antisemita. Sin embargo, Zapatero estaba extasiado y continuo y continuo hasta que solto esta perla : ¨es que se entiende que haya quien justifique el Holocausto¨.
Despues de esta frase el matrimonio Benarroch se levanto y se largo de la Moncloa, donde se celebraba la cena, y desde entonces no han querido saber nada del presidente del Gobierno.
English translation:
Vidal Quadras Talks About President Zapatero's Anti-Semitic Tirade
"It is understandable that someone might justify the Holocaust."
On the program "Más se perdió en Cuba" on Spanish Radio Intereconomía, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, leader of the PP [Partida Popular or People's Party] told of an event that occurred a few months ago with Mr. and Mrs. Benarroch and the Zapatero family. Apparently during dinner Zapatero hurled anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic tirades so excessive that the Benarrochs (a Jewish family of furriers) had to call his attention to the extremist tone of his anti-Semitic discourse. Nevertheless Zapatero was ecstatic and kept on going until he threw out this pearl: "It is understandable that someone might justify the Holocaust."
After those words the Benarrochs got up and left the [Palace of] Moncloa, where the dinner was being held, and since then have wanted nothing to do with the President of the Government.
You can follow a link to a podcast of a Spanish radio broadcast in which Vidal-Quadras supposedly narrates the incident. The speakers are not identified, but listening to the podcast, it sounds as though the person who tells the story is one of the talk show hosts, not Vidal-Quadras.
And what he says on the radio is: "Es que a veces hasta se entiende que haya gente que puede justificar el holocausto." Not: "es que se entiende que haya quien justifique el Holocausto."
The quote on the podcast would translate as: "At times one can even understand that there might be people who could justify the Holocaust."
Notes
1 “Spanish Minister Objects – Says Criticism of Israel Not anti-Semitic” International Herald Tribune, July 20, 2006 http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/07/20/news/spain.php
2 Kaplan, Edward H. and Small, Charles A., “Anti-Israel Sentiment Predicts Anti-Semitism in Europe,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 50 No. 4, August 2006, pp. 548-561 PDF
3 Tom Gross, “ ‘A Shitty Little Country,’ Prejudice and Abuse in Paris and London,” National Review, Jan 10, 2002. http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-gross011002.shtml
4 “’Anti-Semitic’ French Envoy Under Fire,” BBC Dec. 20, 2001 news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1721172.stm
5 Deborah Orr, “I’m fed up being called an anti-Semite,” Independent, December 21, 2001, cited in Tom Gross, “ ‘A Shitty Little Country,’ Prejudice and Abuse in Paris and London,” National Review, Jan 10, 2002. http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-gross011002.shtml
6 Richard Woods in the, “When silence speaks volumes” London Sunday Times, December 23, 2001, cited in Tom Gross, “ ‘A Shitty Little Country,’ Prejudice and Abuse in Paris and London,” National Review, Jan 10, 2002. http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-gross011002.shtml
7 Davis, Avi, “A Star-Crossed Resignation,” Washington Times, Jan 2, 2002, http://www.mideasttruth.com/mda2.html
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:cry: :cry: :cry:
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I some times wonder if the liberals that attack israel do so out of the fear of the unknown and not an actual racist hate of the Jews. Israel is a civilized nation whose people are rational and respond in a logical predictable way. where as muslims are know for blowing themselves up, flying planes into buildings and using aid money to buy ammo instead of feeding a starving population. I think even the liberals realize that both parties can not co exist and therefore one side must make major concessions leading to their demise. As most liberals follow the flow and are renown for their appeasement of tyrants they rationalize that it can not be the muslims who make the concessions because concessions leading to real peace with muslims can only be made after a massive humiliating defeat ie moro uprising, barbarry pirates.......... etc..... . such a defeat will require hardship, blood sweat and tears which their soft bodies and smooth manicured hands are not made for. They cant send the rest of us as they often feel guilt about being lessor human beings and end up protesting ie. code pink and the rest of the anti war wankers..........
anyways, just thought i would throw this out there.
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Isn't it about time that everybody started ignoring this fool?
Why is Pat Buchanan's website playing host to Holocaust deniers?
BY MENACHEM Z. ROSENSAFT
SPECIAL TO NYDAILYNEWS.COM
Tuesday, May 12th 2009, 4:00 AM
Yesterday at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel, Pope Benedict said victims of the Final Solution "lost their lives, but they will never lose their names." Earlier this year, the Pope told a group of American Jewish leaders that "any denial or minimization any denial or minimization" of the Holocaust "is intolerable and altogether unacceptable."
Patrick Buchanan, a devout Catholic, might want to reacquaint himself with these declarations by the leader of his church, because the MSNBC political commentator and one-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination is currently enabling Holocaust deniers.
Buchanan.org, his official Web site, hosts, on a "Buchanan Brigade Forum" for registered members of the site, a long discussion thread in which Holocaust revisionists compare notes with each other and heap venom and vitriol on Jews. It's titled "Discussion about 'The Holocaust' " (with The Holocaust in quotes, of course).
In 2009, when the international community is busy excoriating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for doubting whether 6 million Jews did in fact perish at the hands of the Third Reich, Buchanan's Web site is encouraging this very conversation.
As Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies and director of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University, explains, Holocaust denial is a pernicious strain of anti-Semitism.
"According to deniers, Jews use the Holocaust to win the world's sympathy and, in the course of so doing, win reparations from Germany and political support for Israel," she says. "Such a charge, based as it is the imagery of money and political manipulation, harkens back to traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes."
This is a perfect description of the Buchanan Brigades' forum, which is replete with references to the "Holohoax" and "Holocaustianity." Among the gems featured there are the following:
"As anyone reads the various articles that have been posted here, they will have to realize that there simply were not gas chambers or mass crematoriums at any of the German internment camps."
"Kosher and Halal ritual slaughter, belong in the middle east sands, where both barbaric practices were begun, after an instruction to the Hebrews and Islamics by their god voices, probably the same one. It's a pity they cannot cut each others throats."
"We have known for some time that the Auschwitz myth is of an exclusively Jewish origin."
"The Jewish Race has moved into Christian societies over most of Europe over the last millennium. They tend to eventually irritate their hosts and are then told to leave. Hitler used the hatred of the Jew as a rallying call for his movement. Rightly or wrongly - the Jew was blamed for a lot of the problems that Germany suffered. The Jews were given years of warnings that they were unwelcome in Germany. A lot of Jews fled Germany in the late 1930s. The United States was not very anxious to accept very many. This was when White Christians still had a little control of our Nation."
These opinions are not inconsistent with Buchanan's own. In a March 17, 1990, syndicated column, Buchanan wrote that it would have been impossible for Jews to die in the gas chambers of the Treblinka death camp, and referred to a "so-called Holocaust survivor syndrome," which he described as involving "group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics."
Two years ago, Don Imus was unceremoniously dumped by MSNBC after making racially insensitive remarks about the Rutgers University women's basketball team.
Buchanan's sponsorship of a Holocaust denial forum is at least as offensive. Isn't it?
Rosensaft, the son of two survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, is general counsel of the World Jewish Congress and adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/05/12/2009-05-12_pat_buchanan_online_host_to_holocaust_deniers.html
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What is anti-Semitism?
A UCSB professor's controversial e-mail underscores the need to define a sensitive subject.
By Nicholas Goldberg
May 12, 2009
William I. Robinson, a professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara, probably shouldn't have been surprised when he found himself in the news earlier this month. He had, after all, forwarded an e-mail to his students that juxtaposed images of Palestinians caught up in Israel's recent Gaza Strip offensive with Jewish victims of the Nazis. The e-mail included graphic photographs of dead Jewish children from the 1940s alongside similar photos from Gaza. In a cover note, Robinson called the images "parallel" and compared Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto.
The outcry built slowly. First, a few students complained; then, organized groups became involved. Two national Jewish leaders accused Robinson (who is himself Jewish) of anti-Semitism, and the university's Academic Senate opened an investigation and is considering disciplinary proceedings. Articles about the controversy have been published all over the world and have given rise to fundamental questions:
Is it ever acceptable to compare Israelis to Nazis? When does criticism of Israel become anti-Semitism? And who should make these calls? Below, The Times asks and answers a few questions to help frame the debate.
Let's start with an easy question. What is anti-Semitism?
Actually, that's not easy at all; scholars, philosophers and policymakers have debated the question since the 19th century. The U.S. State Department has defined the term simply but vaguely: "Anti-Semitism is discrimination against or hatred toward Jews."
So how do we recognize it?
That was easier in the bad old days. Who could mistake the violent attacks on Jews across Europe during the First Crusade in 1096? Or the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 and from Spain in 1492? Demonization of Jews, forced conversions, ghettoization, pogroms and the Holocaust -- all were manifestations of classic European anti-Semitism. So were Shakespeare's Shylock and Dickens' Fagin (described as "shriveled" and "repulsive," and referred to simply as "the Jew" more than 200 times in "Oliver Twist").
But today, determining what is or is not anti-Semitism is generally a more nuanced business, at least in the West. Is it anti-Semitic or merely factual to say that Hollywood is controlled largely by Jews? (Remember: Most of the big studio chiefs are Jewish.) Or to note (as some critics of the Iraq war did) that many of the neoconservatives who helped devise the war's intellectual rationale were Jewish -- and possibly harbored a dual loyalty to Israel? Or to point to the existence of a powerful "Israel lobby" that wields substantial influence on Capitol Hill?
So it's a minefield, right?
In 2004, the European Union Monitoring Centre Centre on Racism and Xenophobia tried to bring some rationality to the debate by drawing up a "working definition" of anti-Semitism. Here are some of the examples of anti-Semitic behavior it singled out: Calling for the killing or harming of Jews in the name of an extremist ideology; making dehumanizing or demonizing stereotypical allegations about Jews; accusing the Jews as a people of being responsible for wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group; trafficking in Jewish conspiracy theories; denying the Holocaust; and accusing Jews of being more loyal to Israel than to their own nations.
The organization also noted that anti-Semitism "could also target the state of Israel."
Does that mean it is anti-Semitic to criticize Israel?
To criticize Israeli policies? Of course not. Even Abraham Foxman, the outspoken national director of the Anti-Defamation League, acknowledges that there's nothing wrong with criticizing, say, Israel's recent offensive in Gaza. Alan Dershowitz, the vehemently pro-Israel Harvard Law School professor, agrees that it would be "absurd" to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.
So if it's OK to criticize Israel's policies, what's the big deal? Professor Robinson objected to the Gaza offensive, and he made that clear.
Yes, he made it clear, but it's how he did so that got him in trouble, according to his critics. There are acceptable ways to criticize Israel, while others cross the line into anti-Semitism, says Daniel Goldhagen, author of "Hitler's Willing Executioners." For instance, if a person repeatedly singles out Israel for attack without subjecting other countries to similar scrutiny, that's questionable, Goldhagen says. Or if he opposes Zionism -- and therefore, Israel's right to exist as an explicitly Jewish state -- altogether.
Another way to cross the line, according to the EUMC, Foxman, Dershowitz, the State Department and others, is to compare Israelis to Nazis. "Any comparison between Israeli efforts to defend its citizens from terrorism on the one hand, and the Nazi Holocaust on the other hand, is obscene and ignorant," Dershowitz wrote in December.
The Anti-Defamation League's website notes that comparing the victims of Nazi crimes to those who carried them out "serves to diminish the significance and uniqueness of the Holocaust" and is "an act of blatant hostility toward Jews and Jewish history." As Foxman puts it: "The moment you compare the Jews to those who consciously and systematically determined to wipe them off the face of the Earth -- that's anti-Semitism."
Is that a reasonable line to draw?
Robinson certainly doesn't think so. He says that the charge of anti-Semitism is a smoke screen designed to intimidate Israel's critics. "Israel and its supporters intentionally use it to quash debate about the country's policies," he says. "It's a political ploy."
How does Robinson defend forwarding the offending e-mail?
He doesn't think it needs defending. He says he's teaching a controversial, provocative subject, and that it's his job to challenge students to examine their assumptions as he puts contemporary events into historical context.
And does he meet the Goldhagen test? Does he criticize other nations for their transgressions?
He says he tells his students that there can be no double standard when it comes to human rights, and that the targeting of one Iranian or Palestinian or Jew or Rwandan is equally condemnable. "But at the same time," he adds, "it's unreasonable to suggest that each time I critique one state for a human rights violation that I must also, in the name of balance, run off a litany of all the other human rights violations in the world."
Where does Robinson draw the line between what's acceptable and what's not?
It's fine, he says, to criticize Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe for driving his country to the brink of collapse, but it would be unacceptable to say that he has done so because he is a biologically inferior black African. Similarly, it is acceptable to argue that Israel's offensive in Gaza was wrong -- but it would be anti-Semitic to criticize Israel on the grounds that Jews are dirty, greedy or sinister.
What does Robinson say to the idea that comparing Israelis to Nazis is simply out of bounds?
First, he defends the comparison of Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto. He says that, like the ghetto, Gaza is sealed off. As in the ghetto, the delivery of food and medical supplies is controlled by the hostile power outside, so that poverty and malnutrition are building. As in the ghetto, he says, rebellions are put down with disproportionate force. According to Robinson, it may not be an exact comparison, but it's hardly ridiculous.
Moreover, Robinson insists that such analogies are essential to understanding history. Would it be wrong, he asked, to compare the apartheid regime in South Africa to the Jim Crow laws in the American South, even if the situations were not identical? As for whether it's OK to compare contemporary figures to the Nazis, he notes that President George H.W. Bush once likened Saddam Hussein to Hitler and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has compared Iran to Nazi Germany.
But those are not cases where victims are compared to their persecutors.
Robinson says that comparing victims to their persecutors shouldn't be off-limits. In fact, that's the very irony that makes the analogy so important. "I'm saying that the people who suffered the most nightmarish crime of the 20th century are now using tactics and practices that are eerily similar to what was done to them," he says. But he acknowledges that the analogy has its limits: "Extermination," he says. "Obviously that's the key difference."
So what's the bottom line?
The Foxmans and Dershowitzes say that comparing Israelis to Nazis is, in the final analysis, anti-Semitic because it is so demonstrably untrue and so patently disingenuous. Even Israel's fiercest critics, they argue, ought to concede that the country's actions have been taken in its own defense -- even if one believes that defense was misguided or disproportionately violent or even criminal. Further, they say that the number of Palestinian deaths during the 60-year conflict can't begin to compare to the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. To suggest a moral equivalency is anti-Semitic because it's so absurd.
Robinson's bottom line is this: Whether you accept the analogy or find it "absurd," the real principle at stake is that of open debate and academic freedom. A professor engaging in a controversial conversation with his students may not be shut down by the defenders of a particular ideology. Deeply held beliefs are there to be challenged; that's how critical thinking is developed.
You be the judge.
Nicholas Goldberg is deputy editor of The Times' editorial pages.
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With regards to Buchanan he has also been supporter of Israel's existence.
I can't seem to find any online evidence of him respoding to these criticisms though there is a lot about his comments over the years but more in the past (pre2000). I would like to hear him respond now about it.
JDN's post about the difference with pointing out a truth that most studio heads in Hollywood may be Jewish is not the same as being anti semitic IMO.
As a Jew I am also comfortable saying that many Jews are the architects behind the big liberal Democrat machines such as the Clinton and Bama expresses.
I am dismayed that my fellow Jews think this is smart and so good for this country.
I've wanted but never took the time to ask radio host Mark Levin why he thinks this is so.
Being a strict Jewish conservative (not common) I would be interested in his take.
We have discussed this on this forum before and I have my theories.
I don't hate liberal Jews for being Jewish but I do hate that liberal Jews think that way.
There is no changing their minds.
One can be critical of Israel and or that Jews put Israel before America without being anti semitic. But it is hard to be clear of motives of such ciritics. And OTOHI can understand their sensitivities. I mean Jews have for centuries been the object of oppression. It often started as simple criticism. Later to pogrums, inquisitions, and genocide.
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Sorry for the late reply.
Marc,
I'm would find it hard to believe that I am more um.. realistic than you but I didn't find the article I posted particularly depressing. It was sort of scientific proof of what I have always believed. -- a lot of criticism of Israel is antisemitic and not rational. I found it sort of reassuring. Why did you find it so depressing?
I am not saying if you criticize Israel you are necessary antisemitic. Israel or America or any country or any person is not perfect and can make mistakes. There are matters on Israel where intelligent caring people can disagree. People can also be misguided or misinformed. In general unless I think I can help that person or protect someone it is not my place to judge.
However most anti-Semites cloth their anti-semetic beliefs in criticism of Israel.
I am willing to say if you have a free Palestine shirt on it is very like that you also believe
“Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind,” “Jews have a lot of irritating faults,” and “Jews are more willing than others to use shady practices to get what they want.”
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The Wikipedia article on Pat Buchanan has some interesting information on Buchanan and Israel and the Jews. He is not consistently bad but I would definitely not count him among Israel's friends
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Buchanan
Accusations of Anti-Semitism
[edit] Hitler, World War II and the Holocaust
Pat Buchanan says Adolf Hitler only sought to dominate Europe, making him, "no physical threat to the US" after 1940. He observes that to push Japan into starting a war, Franklin Delano Roosevelt "froze all Japanese assets, cutting off trade, including oil."[104] He refers to Roosevelt as "a base appeaser of Stalin" and that his administration was "shot through with Communist spies and traitors."[105] "In World War II," he writes, "patriots argued the wisdom of FDR's 'Europe First' policy that left our men on Corregidor to the mercy of the butchers of Bataan".[106] He says:
“ Responsibility for the lack of American preparedness at the time of Pearl Harbor rests wholly with FDR. He had been in power nine years and had controlled both Houses of Congress for all nine of those years. Blaming our lack of preparedness on the isolationists (or even on the Communists) is the shilling of court historians.[107] ”
Buchanan called for ending prosecution of Nazi camp guards, saying it was "running down 70-year-old camp guards."[108]
During the 2000 campaign, he elaborated on his interpretations of the roots of WWII:
“ It was Wilsonism, liberal interventionism, not 'isolationism,' that created the moral-political swamp in which fascism, Hitlerism, and Stalinism were spawned. Unable to deal with the truth - that their own heroes produced the disasters that may yet ring down the curtain on Western Civilization - the blind children of Wilson now scapegoat Pius XII and America First. Do those attacking me realize they are defending the policies that produced World War II and virtual annihilation of the Jewish population of Europe? While the West is busy erecting Holocaust museums, it has failed to study the history that produced it.[109] ”
In A Republic, Not an Empire, he refers to Auschwitz and Katyn as places "where SS and NKVD killers roamed free and labored long into the night."[110] In another column, Buchanan mentions the Holocaust as one of the horrors of World War II along with "the collapse of the British Empire, the Stalinization of 11 nations of Eastern Europe, 50 million dead and half a century of Cold War."[111]
In his book State of Emergency, Buchanan blames Hitler and the Holocaust for contemporary "white guilt" and political correctness. He quotes several Jewish voices in support of the melting pot concept contrary to multiculturalism, and gives examples of anti-Jewish sentiment on the part of some Mexican immigrants.
In defending himself against charges of Nazi sympathies, Buchanan calls Hitler a "monster" guilty of "ugly actions and discriminatory laws".[110] He says the Holocaust did not become a Final Solution until the Wannsee conference in 1942, after the Pearl Harbor attack ended the debate over U.S. involvement in World War II. Until then, the Holocaust was no more of a concern for U.S interventionist leaders than it was for the isolationists.[112] Buchanan says America fought on the right side of the conflict -- and after Hitler declared war on the United States, had no choice but to fight.[113]
[edit] "Great courage" controversy
In a 1977 Globe-Democrat column discussing John Toland's biography of Adolf Hitler, Buchanan wrote:
“ Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him...Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.[114] ”
Slate's Jacob Weisberg takes credit for finding this quote as one evidence of Buchanan's alleged bigotry.[115] Buchanan supporters say the paragraph is easily taken out of context.[116] They point out that in the same review Buchanan praised Winston Churchill for seeing that "Hitler was marching along the road toward a New Order where Western civilization would not survive" and concluded that modern-day statesmen were not following that example.[114]
[edit] Charles Lindbergh
Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, in an October 11, 1999, letter to the Washington Post claimed that A Republic, Not an Empire "defends Charles Lindbergh against charges of anti-Semitism, not mentioning the infamous 1940 [sic] speech in which he accused the Jews of warmongering." Buchanan denies this and points out Foxman's error, saying that he mentioned the 1941 speech to say it "ignited a national firestorm," which lingered after the aviator's death, and shows "the explosiveness of mixing ethnic politics and foreign policy".[117] Buchanan also said in 2002:
“ There was nothing immoral, or unwise, about the isolationists’ position of 1940-41. Because of the courageous efforts of Lindbergh and America First, the United States stayed out of the war until Hitler threw the full force of his war machine against Stalin. Thus, the Soviet Union, not America’s young, bore the brunt of defeating Nazi Germany.[107] ”
[edit] John Demjanjuk
Buchanan asserted that six men accused of Nazi-era war crimes were innocent, or had not received just legal treatment: John Demjanjuk, Karl Linnas, Arthur Rudolph, Frank Walus, Ivan Stebelsky, Tscherim Soobzokov.[110] Ukrainian born Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland autoworker accused of operating the gas chambers at the Treblinka concentration camp, received the most attention. Buchanan called his trial a witch hunt and said "Demjanjuk had never even been at Treblinka."[110] After a highly publicised trial, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death by an Israeli court, but his conviction was later overturned by the Supreme Court of Israel on the grounds of mistaken identity. Buchanan wrote at the time that this spared Israel the disgrace of hanging an innocent man.[110]
In a 1990 column defending Demjanjuk, Buchanan also claimed:
“ Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody. In 1988, 97 kids, trapped 400 feet underground in a Washington, D.C., tunnel while two locomotives spewed diesel exhaust into the car, emerged unharmed after 45 minutes. Demjanjuk's weapon of mass murder cannot kill.[118] ”
When asked for his source, Buchanan said, "somebody sent it to me." Critic Jamie McCarthy says this claim may have come from the German American Information and Education Association's newsletter, a publication he accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. He also argues that:
“ Unlike the locomotive engineer in Buchanan's example, who was concerned with saving the lives of trapped people, the Nazis had no qualms about opening the engine's throttle and restricting the air intake.[119] ”
The Washington Post reported in 1989, before the controversy, that:
“ An Amtrak train had been stalled in a tunnel for half an hour, and smoke from the diesel engine had filled the first car, where there were 97 fifth-grade pupils and 27 adult chaperones. [EMT Cynthia] Brown boarded the train, guided the passengers -- most of whom suffered from smoke inhalation -- from the car and assisted those who needed immediate attention.[120] ”
In an April 14, 2009, column, Buchanan likened the persecution of Demjanjuk to that of Jesus Christ on Calvary Hill stating:
“ It is the same satanic brew of hate and revenge that drove another innocent Man up Calvary that first Good Friday 2,000 years ago. [121] ”
[edit] U.S. – Israel Policy
Although he regularly criticizes U.S. policy in the Middle East, Buchanan says he favors "a strong, independent state of Israel."[116] He wrote in 1999:
“ As for my views on Israel, they have changed. With the Intifada, I came to believe that Israel's survival now mandated a homeland, a flag, and a nation of their own for the Palestinian people. A friend I made in Israel at the end of the Six Day War, Yitzhak Rabin, reached the same conclusion at the same time. For attempting to negotiate peace with Arafat, Rabin, too, was called an anti-Semite and Nazi, and was murdered in that climate of hatred.[110] ”
In Buchanan's opinion:
“ The Israeli people are America’s friends and have a right to peace and secure borders. We should help them secure these rights. ”
He believes that the United States has a "moral commitment" to recognize Israel's right to defend itself:
“ But U.S. and Israeli interests are not identical. They often collide, and when they do, U.S. interests must prevail.[122] ”
Buchanan argues that much American "meddling" in the Middle East is not to protect the U.S. national interest but largely done to support Israel. Buchanan has referred to Capitol Hill as "Israeli-occupied territory."[123] In 1991 he wrote Congress has become "a Parliament of Whores incapable of standing up for U.S. national interests if AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is on the other end of the line."[124] He accuses Israel of spying on the U.S. in many instances other than the well-publicized case of Jonathan Pollard, about whom he wrote:
“ Israel suborned Jonathan Pollard to loot our secrets and refuses to return the documents, which would establish whether or not they were sold to Moscow. When Clinton tried to broker an agreement at Wye Plantation between Israel and Arafat, Bibi Netanyahu attempted to extort, as his price for signing, release of Pollard, so he could take this treasonous snake back to Israel as a national hero.[122] ”
In the 1990s, he endorsed the "land for peace" policy in the Middle East.[116] He also strongly praised Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin,[125] calling him "the statesman who brought peace after a half century of fighting for Israel's place in the sun".[116]
The first widespread accusations of anti-Semitism against Buchanan concerned the September 15, 1990, McLaughlin Group program.[126] On it, Buchanan said that:
“ There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East — the Israeli defense ministry and its 'amen corner' in the United States.[126] The Israelis want this war desperately because they want the United States to destroy the Iraqi war machine. They want us to finish them off. They don't care about our relations with the Arab world.[126] ”
This sparked New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal to complain of "venom" and a "blood libel" against Jews, saying "that to be silent about anti-Semitism would be a sin with which I could not live."[126] ("Amen corner" is a slang term used by some American Protestants to describe a group of people who sit in near one another in church and shout "Amen!" whenever the preacher makes a point.)
Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League said before the 1990 invasion of Iraq, Buchanan made "an appeal to anti-Semitic bigotry"[117] and "accused Israel's American supporters of goading the United States into the Persian Gulf War"[127] by writing in one column:
“ 'The civilized world must win this fight,' the editors thunder. But, if it comes to war, it will not be the 'civilized world' humping up that bloody road to Baghdad; it will be American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales and Leroy Brown. ”
Buchanan doesn't see anything anti-Semitic about this statement, and he responded:
“ If it is the lack of Jewish names among those soldiers, why is my list not also anti-Italian, anti-Greek, and anti-Polish?[117] ”
[edit] A Palestinian State
Buchanan supports an independent Palestinian state, but criticized the leadership of the former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat (who died in 2004.)[128] He compared the 2002 Battle of Jenin to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and describes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the battle of intractable foes. He says a Palestinian state is the only hope for peace -- and would give the Palestinians "a huge stake" in "preventing acts of terror against Israel – i.e., national survival".[129] He also said that "Israeli repression" made the Palestinians radical -- and describes U.S. policy as "waging war on innocents to break their political leaders" and fueling anti-American hatreds.[130]
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Islam's Homemade Concentration Camp
By: Pamela Geller / IsraelNationalNews.com
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Why Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old Parisian Jew, had to be kidnapped and tortured for 24 days by an entire Muslim neighborhood.
The abduction and murder in Paris of a young Jewish man by a gang of Muslim immigrants calling themselves the Barbarians shocked the whole of France in 2006. But now that the accused are on trial - silence.
A French judge has ordered the latest issue of the magazine Choc ("shock") removed from the shelves. The cover showed a man with duct tape completely covering his head, except for a small opening around his nostrils. His nose is bloody. His hands are also bound with duct tape.
It was a photo of Ilan Halimi, the 23-year-old Parisian Jew who was kidnapped and tortured for 24 days by the Barbarians. His captors took the picture and sent it to his family. A lawyer for Halimi's family had complained about the magazine, but Choc's editor-in-chief Paul Payan responded: "Of course, we understand the anguish of the parents and, of course, we share their anguish.... But what's so harrowing is not the publication of this photo. What's harrowing is what it represents, what happened, the reality behind it."
And it gets worse. The New York Times reported last week that "in the two and a half weeks since 27 people went on trial [in Paris] for the brutal 2006 kidnapping, torture and killing of a young Jewish man, little has filtered out about the proceedings." Worse still, the little that has emerged indicates that French government and law enforcement have done everything in their power to obscure the Islamic Jew-hatred that led these Muslims to commit this crime.
The corrupt media, aligned with the jihad forces, has long blacked out the truth about Halimi's homemade concentration camp and the inconceivable horrors that were suffered by this French Jew, chosen by Islam's soldiers for unimaginable torture. They covered up the religious aspects of this depraved barbarity. Law enforcement did as well.
No one said anything about the Koran's statement that the Jews are the Muslims' worst enemies. No one referenced Muhammad's words: "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say, 'O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.'" Never was there heard anything about the Islamic tradition that says: "When judgment day arrives, Allah will give every Muslim a Jew or Christian to kill, so that the Muslim will not enter into hell fire."
Ilan's uncle, Rafi Halimi, reported that "the gang phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Koran, while Ilan's tortured screams could be heard in the background."
Three weeks of unimaginable torture. Three weeks. So many clues. So many guilty animals partaking in the continuing torture in their "homemade concentration camp." Twenty-three people participated in torturing Ilan. Another twenty were involved indirectly. The custodian of the building gave them the key to an apartment where they said they wanted to "keep someone." French journalist Guy Millière reported that "the screams must have been loud because the torture was especially atrocious: the thugs cut bits off the flesh of the young man, they cut his fingers and ears, they burned him with acid, and in the end poured flammable liquid on him and set him on fire."
Horrible tortures. Horrible torturers. One of the torturers would go to work at a TV station every day and come back to partake in the torture. The girls who lured Halimi into the trap knew he had been kidnapped. They knew Youssef Fofana, the leader of the Barbarians, was extremely violent. They knew Ilan was still in his hands three weeks later. All they had to do was make an anonymous phone call to the police. No one would have known. They did not do it. No neighbor thought to say to the police that something strange was going on in their building.
The police told the family not to say a word. The Jewish community was not warned when prior attempts to kidnap Jewish men had failed. The Jewish community was not warned before the successful attempt.
Even the one member of the gang who dropped out because he was shocked by their violence did not call the police.
When Ilan was found, the head of the fire department who was called to the scene, a man with decades of experience, almost fainted when he saw the victim. The last thing Youssef Fofana did was slit Ilan's throat, twice, and pour a flammable liquid on him to try to set him on fire. But this did not burn him to death, because Ilan walked for perhaps one hour, trying still to find a way to live.
It was another brutal Islamic slaughter of a defenseless Jew. To cover it up now is only to help ensure that it happens again.
Pamela Geller is the former associate publisher of the New York Observer and the founder of the "Atlas Shrugs" website.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35018
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Truly terrible.
At least however France seems to be stepping up to the table and doing something about it.
And anti-semitic attacks have significantly dropped in recent years.
TIME Magazine
5.3.09
The 936 anti-Semitic acts reported in 2002, and 974 two years later coincided with flare-ups between Israel and the Palestinians. Those peaks — and perception among many Jews in France and abroad that French authorities had displayed insufficient concern or reaction — led Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2004 to denounce the "spread of the wildest anti-Semitism" in France. The only answer for French Jews, Sharon said, was immediate immigration to Israel for their own safety.
Even at that time, however, French Jewish leaders denounced Sharon's comments as unfounded, deeming them a misguided swipe at the pro-Arab policies of France's then-president, Jacques Chirac. Current President Nicolas Sarkozy has made priorities out of cultivating strong relations with Israel, and fighting anti-Semitism at home — factors that have partially contributed to a slowing of French immigration to Israel. Last year, the number of French Jews moving to Israel was 1,562 — a 33% decline over the 2007 figure, which itself had been down from 2006.
The incidence of anti-Semitic attacks in France in 2008 dropped, for the third straight year, to 397 — even as racist acts directed at other minorities exploded by 45%. Though the recent violence in Gaza did fuel a spate of anti-Jewish aggression in France over December and January, Prasquier is careful to note that "France wasn't unique in this way, because we saw the same kind of action against Jews elsewhere in Europe — notably in England and Belgium".
And as it has done recently in facing up to its darker history under Nazi occupation, France is also showing clear intent to confront rather than deny anti-Semitism — as much of the commentary regarding Halimi's murder indicates. French Jews are not ready to claim anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, but Prasquier says most now do feel things are moving in the right direction.
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By ANDRÉ ACIMAN
Published: June 8, 2009
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S speech to the Islamic world was a groundbreaking event. Never before has a young, dynamic American president, beloved both by his countrymen and the nations of the world, extended so timely and eager a hand to a part of the globe that, recently, had seen fewer and fewer reasons to trust us or to wish us well.
As important, Mr. Obama did not mince words. Never before has a president gone over to the Arab world and broadcast its flaws so loudly and clearly: extremism, nuclear weapons programs and a faltering record in human rights, education and economic development — the Arab world gets no passing grades in any of these domains. Mr. Obama even found a moment to mention the plight of Egypt’s harassed Coptic community and to criticize the new wave of Holocaust deniers. And to show he was not playing favorites, he put the Israelis on notice: no more settlements in the occupied territories. He spoke about the suffering of Palestinians. This was no wilting olive branch.
And yet, for all the president’s talk of “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world” and shared “principles of justice and progress,” neither he nor anyone around him, and certainly no one in the audience, bothered to notice one small detail missing from the speech: he forgot me.
The president never said a word about me. Or, for that matter, about any of the other 800,000 or so Jews born in the Middle East who fled the Arab and Muslim world or who were summarily expelled for being Jewish in the 20th century. With all his references to the history of Islam and to its (questionable) “proud tradition of tolerance” of other faiths, Mr. Obama never said anything about those Jews whose ancestors had been living in Arab lands long before the advent of Islam but were its first victims once rampant nationalism swept over the Arab world.
Nor did he bother to mention that with this flight and expulsion, Jewish assets were — let’s call it by its proper name — looted. Mr. Obama never mentioned the belongings I still own in Egypt and will never recover. My mother’s house, my father’s factory, our life in Egypt, our friends, our books, our cars, my bicycle. We are, each one of us, not just defined by the arrangement of protein molecules in our cells, but also by the things we call our own. Take away our things and something in us dies. Losing his wealth, his home, the life he had built, killed my father. He didn’t die right away; it took four decades of exile to finish him off.
Mr. Obama had harsh things to say to the Arab world about its treatment of women. And he said much about America’s debt to Islam. But he failed to remind the Egyptians in his audience that until 50 years ago a strong and vibrant Jewish community thrived in their midst. Or that many of Egypt’s finest hospitals and other institutions were founded and financed by Jews. It is a shame that he did not remind the Egyptians in the audience of this, because, in most cases — and especially among those younger than 50 — their memory banks have been conveniently expunged of deadweight and guilt. They have no recollections of Jews.
In Alexandria, my birthplace and my home, all streets bearing Jewish names have been renamed. A few years ago, the Library of Alexandria put on display an Arabic translation of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” perhaps the most anti-Semitic piece of prose ever written. Today, for the record, there are perhaps four Jews left in Alexandria.
When the last Jew dies, the temples and religious artifacts and books that were the property of what was once probably the wealthiest Jewish community on the Mediterranean will go to the Egyptian government — not to me, or to my children, or to any of the numberless descendants of Egyptian Jews.
It is strange that our president, a man so versed in history and so committed to the truth, should have omitted mentioning the Jews of Egypt. He either forgot, or just didn’t know, or just thought it wasn’t expedient or appropriate for this venue. But for him to speak in Cairo of a shared effort “to find common ground ... and to respect the dignity of all human beings” without mentioning people in my position would be like his speaking to the residents of Berlin about the future of Germany and forgetting to mention a small detail called World War II.
André Aciman, a professor of comparative literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center, is the author of the memoir “Out of Egypt.”
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GM's post moved here
dailypress.com/news/dp-local_wright_0610jun10,0,7603283.story
dailypress.com
Rev. Wright says he doesn't regret severed relationship with president
By DAVID SQUIRES
247-4639
June 10, 2009
HAMPTON –
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright says he does not feel any regrets over his severed relationship with President Barack Obama, a former member of the Chicago church in which Wright was the longtime pastor.
Wright also said that he had not spoken to his former church member since Obama became president, implying that the White House won't allow Obama to talk to him. He did not indicate whether he had tried to reach Obama.
"Regret for what... that the media went back five, seven, 10 years and spent $4,000 buying 20 years worth of sermons to hear what I've been preaching for 20 years?
"Regret for preaching like I've been preaching for 50 years? Absolutely none," Wright said.
Wright said that when he went to the polls, he did not hold any grudge against Obama.
"Of course I voted for him; he's my son. I'm proud of him," Wright said. "I've got five biological kids. They all make mistakes and bad choices. I haven't stopped loving any of them.
"He made mistakes. He made bad choices. I've got kids who listen to their friends. He listened to those around him. I did not disown him."
Asked if he had spoken to the President, Wright said: "Them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter, that he'll talk to me in five years when he's a lame duck, or in eight years when he's out of office. ...
"They will not let him to talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is. ... I said from the beginning: He's a politician; I'm a pastor. He's got to do what politicians do."
Wright also said Obama should have sent a U.S. delegation to the World Conference on Racism held recently in Geneva, Switzerland, but that the president did not do so for fear of offending Jews and Israel.
"Ethic cleansing is going on in Gaza. Ethnic cleansing of the Zionist is a sin and a crime against humanity, and they don't want Barack talking like that because that's anti-Israel," Wright said.
Wright is in Hampton this week attending Hampton University's 95th Annual Ministers Conference. The son of a pastor, Wright said he has attended the conference since he was a child – though he was not spotted at the conference in 2008 during the heat of the debate over comments he made that many in the media branded racially divisive.
Perhaps without the Wright controversy, the issue of race might not have become a part of the 2008 Presidential campaign.
After the initial rounds of the controversy, Obama made his famous speech in Philadelphia on race relations, in which he said he could no more disown Wright than his own grandmother.
But the issue heated up after more comments by Wright at the National Press Club and from other controversial speakers at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Obama eventually distanced himself from the church.
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Who would have guessed that someone that was a 20 year adherent of Rev. Wright would be an anti-Israeli president ?
Shocked! I am just stunned to see this development. How many Jews in Obama's administration again?
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http://www.bizzyblog.com/wp-images/TUCChamasColumn072207.jpg
Great reading for a future president.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/06/10/guy-who-attended-jeremiah-them-jews-wrights-church-for-20-years-we-must-be-vigilant-about-anti-semitism/
I'm sure he's just "shocked and saddened". :roll:
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G M,
You are over the line and I find you comments offensive. I think some of Obama's policies towards Israel are wrong and detrimental to Israel and the United States a but I don't think Obama is antisemtic. Why would any decent person not be shocked and saddened at the death of the security guard.
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Rachel,
Obama is a 20 year disciple of Rev. "Them Jews" Wright. Much like Obama's lack of concern for the US soldier murdered by the black muslim convert in Arkansas, I doubt his concern here. His radicalism become clearer every day.
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Rachel,
Obama is a 20 year disciple of Rev. "Them Jews" Wright. Much like Obama's lack of concern for the US soldier murdered by the black muslim convert in Arkansas, I doubt his concern here. His radicalism become clearer every day.
+1. Obama would have to be the dumbest community planner ever to have not noticed that his pastor was a racist and overly chummy with the head of the nation of islam, also a racist organization.
Wright’s Security Provided By Nation Of Islam
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/04/28/wrights-security-provided-by-nation-of-islam/ ^
Posted on 04/28/2008 3:54:13 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
By Michelle Malkin
April 28, 2008
Heard E.D. Hill mention this earlier today. It’s been confirmed: Jeremiah Wright’s bodyguards are Nation of Islam goons. Several Farrakhan acolytes were also in the audience for Wright’s vaudeville performance at the National Press Club, including one of our favorite race clowns, Malik Zulu Shabazz, and America’s favorite race clown politician, Marion Barry. Also in attendance: Wacknut Obama supporter Rev. Michael Pfleger:
Speaking before an audience that included Marion Barry, Cornel West, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam official Jamil Muhammad, Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks (”God damn America”) and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.
(Excerpt) Read more at michellemalkin.com ...
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And as Krauthammer first suggested BO's greatest gift is his temperment.
It is hard if not impossible for me to believe BO sat in Wright's church for decades listening to this kind of stuff and didn't on at least some level, if not completely, agree.
He certainly did not protest much did he?
IMO this is an example of what Krauthammer, a Harvard trained psychiatrist, was one of the first to notice - that BO can hide his feelings and play everyone for his own benefit.
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"[F]or years, mainstream liberalism and other outposts of paranoid Bush hatred have portrayed neoconservatives -- usually code for conservative Jews and other supporters of Israel -- as an alien, pernicious cabal. 'They have penetrated the culture at nearly every level from the halls of academia to the halls of the Pentagon,' observed the New York Times. '...They've accumulated the wherewithal financially (and) professionally to broadcast what they think over the airwaves to the masses or over cocktails to those at the highest levels of government.' NBC's Chris Matthews routinely used the word 'neocon' as if it was code for 'traitor.' He asked one guest whether White House neocons are 'loyal to the Kristol neoconservative movement, or to the president?' [Holocaust Museum shooter James] Von Brunn may have wondered the same thing, which is why he reportedly had the offices of Bill Kristol's 'Weekly Standard' on his hit list. Unhinged Bush-hater Andrew Sullivan insists that, 'The closer you examine it, the clearer it is that neoconservatism, in large part, is simply about enabling the most irredentist elements in Israel and sustaining a permanent war against anyone or any country who disagrees with the Israeli right.' Leading liberal intellectual Michael Lind warned about the alarming fact that 'the foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made by a small clique' of neoconservative plotters. Even with Bush out of the picture, some see the problem emerging again. Just this week, Jeremiah Wright, the president's longtime mentor and pastor, whined that, 'Them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me.' Maniacs like von Brunn connect dots that aren't there because that's what paranoid anti-Semites do. What's the left's excuse?" --National Review editor Jonah Goldberg
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Israel disturbed by Swedish silence
Aug. 19, 2009
HERB KEINON and JONAH NEWMAN , THE JERUSALEM POST
Israel is "bothered" that the Swedish government has not publicly condemned in Stockholm an article that appeared in the mass-circulation Aftonbladet tabloid on Monday claiming IDF soldiers snatched body organs from dead Palestinians, the Foreign Ministry's senior deputy director-general said Wednesday.
Rafi Barak relayed this message in two phone conversations he had on the subject during the day with Sweden's Ambassador to Israel Elisabet Borsiin Bonnier, who issued a sharply worded statement saying the article was "as shocking and appalling to us Swedes as it is to Israeli citizens. We share the dismay expressed by Israeli government representatives, media and the Israeli public. This embassy cannot but clearly distance itself from it."
According to the statement, "Freedom of the press and freedom of expression are freedoms which carry a certain responsibility. It falls on the editor-in-chief of any given newspaper."
Foreign Ministry officials, while praising the Swedish envoy for her statement, said a similar one needed to be heard from the government in Stockholm and aimed not at the Israeli public, but at the Swedish one.
"We are expecting that they will condemn this, as they did here," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor. "It is clear the government is not responsible, but it is important the government voice be heard on this inside Sweden."
Palmor said that since Sweden currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, it was even more important - to preserve its image and reputation - for a strong condemnation to be made.
This is something that is extremely dangerous because it could lead to hate crimes," Palmor said. "An orderly country that doesn't want civil unrest needs to make clear this is unacceptable."
The article, in a convoluted and incendiary manner, tries to connect dots between Palestinian claims of IDF organ harvesting, to a murky incident in 1992 where a Palestinian family alleged the IDF snatched the organs from their son, to a campaign for Israeli organ donors that same year, to alleged illegal purchases of organs in Israel in the early 2000s, and to the recent story of American Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, who was among those arrested recently in New Jersey and accused of illegally trafficking in human organs.
In addition to Barak's conversations with Bonnier, Israel's Ambassador to Sweden Benny Dagan has been in contact with the Swedish Foreign Ministry about the matter. He has also contacted the newspaper itself for an apology, but has not received a reply.
Israeli officials said there was some talk inside of Sweden of suing the paper over the article, although this would have to be done by private individuals, not the State of Israel.
Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, meanwhile, termed the article "a blood libel and the worst type of anti-Semitism." Ayalon called on the Swedish government to "condemn the accusations," and said, "we see a correlation between the government public statements, which are extremely critical of Israel, and anti-Semitism in the press."
In recent months there has been some diplomatic tensions between the two countries. Earlier this month, after the eviction of two Palestinian families from Jewish-owned homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, the Swedish Foreign Ministry summoned Israel's ambassador to protest the move.
Israel responded by summoning Sweden's ambassador and saying that the Swedish government had taken an unfairly critical position toward Israel since assuming the EU presidency on July 1.
Bonnier declined a request to be interviewed on the matter Wednesday.
While the government in Stockholm had yet to be heard from, the article provoked strong reactions among Jews and non-Jews alike in Sweden itself, with some saying articles like this were not uncommon in the country.
"I think it's devastating and totally unacceptable," Swedish MP Birgitta Ohlsson, who sits on the parliament's committee on foreign affairs, told The Jerusalem Post. "It's not the first time that we've seen similar stories in this paper. Of course independent newspapers in a liberal democracy should have the opportunity to criticize other countries, but this is crossing the line."
The Jewish community in Sweden has not reacted as strongly, according to Lena Posner-Kerosi, the president of the official council of Jewish communities in Sweden, because of the fact that other newspapers haven't picked up the story and even rebuffed Aftonbladet for printing it.
"This article is written in one newspaper by one person who is well known as being anti-Israel and anti-Semitic," Posner-Korosi said. "It doesn't create a lot of reaction in the Swedish public."
While she wasn't surprised that Donald Bostrom, a freelance writer, wrote the piece, she said she was unclear as to why the newspaper, which has an estimated circulation of over 1 million readers daily, would publish it.
In a phone conversation with the Post, Bostrom held that the article was "serious" journalism and that he was not trying to take a stand or express an opinion but rather to convey the feelings of the Palestinians with whom he spoke in research for a book in 1992.
"For me this is normal journalistic work, it is not propaganda, it is not anti-Semitism," he said. "Nothing is fabricated."
That was inconsistent with comments he made earlier in the day to Israel Radio, where he said he had "no clue" if the claims of the Palestinians that he quotes in the article were true or not.
"It is time to shed light on this macabre activity and what has passed in the Israeli occupied territories since the intifada started," Bostrom wrote.
Lisa Abramowicz, secretary-general of the Swedish-Israel Information Center, a small organization which works to combat anti-Israel bias in the Swedish media, said that stories like this are common in Sweden.
"The situation is really, really, bad," she said of the anti-Israel sentiment in Swedish media.
Abramowicz said that Swedish newspapers often make Israel out to be the enemy, while championing the Palestinian cause. Aftonbladet is the "worst," but not the only newspaper, in publishing partial rhetoric against Israel, she said, not only in its news articles but on its editorial page and in the culture section.
"Some people are more equal than others, and Palestinians are more equal than any others in the Swedish media," Abramowicz said. "This is what we are force-fed with morning, day and night, even in the serious newspapers."
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1249418646869&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
[ Back to the Article ]
Aish has a video and a petition
http://www.aish.com/jw/me/55315672.html (http://www.aish.com/jw/me/55315672.html)
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"...while praising the Swedish envoy for her statement, said a similar one needed to be heard from the government in Stockholm and aimed not at the Israeli public, but at the Swedish one."
Thanks for that story. Last March in 'Islam in Europe' I posted what I thought was an amazing story about how Sweden did not allow spectators to see the Davis Cup match (the world cup of tennis and tennis is HUGE in Sweden) for fear of uncontrollable riots. The match was Sweden vs. Israel and the city was Malmo, now largely Muslim (27% of the people are foreign born) and Sweden's 3rd largest city.
Needless to say the riots went on anyway. Take a look and see if this is the civilized Scandinavian country one might have expected. Or has it been invaded by immigrants on a takeover mission, abusing the world's greatest welfare system, along with a remaining populace, like in certain suburbs of Paris, afraid to speak an opposing view.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxX27Pe-AH0
Apology or no apology, it looks to me like the anti-semitism in either one of these stories is but the tip of an enormous iceberg.
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The next thing you know, muslims will flood into european supermarkets and rip Israeli products off of the shelves while American leftists try to defend it as free speech. Nah......That'd never happen. :roll:
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Well there is some recent news concerning Jews and body parts I am sad to say.
I don't know about taking these parts from Palestinians but I certainly wouldn't write it off.
When money is involved all bets are off - as always whether the people are Jews or non Jews.
I am not going to defend Jews just because they are Jews if they commit criminal acts.
****July 23: FBI agents lead arrested suspects from their headquarters as part of a corruption investigation in Newark, N.J.
NEWARK, N.J. — Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn called himself a "matchmaker," but his business wasn't romance.
Instead, authorities say, he brokered the sale of black-market kidneys, buying organs from vulnerable people from Israel for $10,000 and selling them to desperate patients in the U.S. for as much as $160,000.
The alleged decade-long scheme, exposed this week by an FBI sting, rocked the nation's transplant industry. If true, it would be the first documented case of organ trafficking in the U.S., transplant experts said Friday.
"There's certainly cross-national activity, but it hasn't touched the United States or we haven't known about it until now," said University of Pennsylvania medical ethicist Arthur Caplan, who is co-directing a U.N. task force on international organ trafficking.
Rosenbaum was arrested Thursday, 10 days after meeting in his basement with a government informant and an FBI agent posing as the informant's secretary. The agent claimed to be searching for a kidney for a sick uncle on dialysis who was on a transplant list at a Philadelphia hospital.
"I am what you call a matchmaker," Rosenbaum said in a secretly recorded conversation. "I bring a guy what I believe, he's suitable for your uncle." Asked how many organs he had brokered, he said: "Quite a lot," the most recent two weeks earlier.
As part of the scheme, the organ donors were brought from Israel to this country, where they underwent surgery to remove the kidneys, authorities said. Prosecutors did not identify which hospitals in the U.S. received the donors and their kidneys.
"The allegations about an organ trafficking ring in the United States are appalling," said John Davis, CEO of the National Kidney Foundation.
Israel Medical Association spokeswoman Orna Cohen said the organization had no reports there of Israelis selling organs. "If it's true, then it's shocking," she said.
Related StoriesInformant, Rabbi's Son Allegedly Aided Massive New Jersey Corruption Bust
New Jersey Mayors, Rabbis Allegedly Trafficked Knock-Off Gucci Bags With Laundered Money
Micky Rosenfeld, a spokesman for Israel's national police force, said Israeli police were not involved in the investigation, and he would not comment further.
Under 1984 federal law, it is illegal for anyone to knowingly buy or sell organs for transplant. The practice is illegal just about everywhere else in the world, too.
But demand for kidneys far outstrips the supply, with 4,540 people dying in the U.S. last year while waiting for a kidney, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. As a result, there is a thriving black market for kidneys around the world.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an anthropology professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of an upcoming book on human organ trafficking, said that she has been tracking the Brooklyn-connected ring for 10 years and that her contacts in Israel have called Rosenbaum "the top man" in the United States.
Scheper-Hughes said she was told Rosenbaum carried a gun, and when a potential organ seller would get cold feet, Rosenbaum would use his finger to simulate firing a gun at the person's head.
Scheper-Hughes said she was also told that some of the kidney transplants using sellers procured by Rosenbaum were performed at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.
The hospital said it is aware Rosenbaum has been charged but that its transplant screening process is rigorous and that it assesses each donor's motivation.
"All donors are clearly advised that it is against the law to receive money or gifts for being an organ donor," spokeswoman Brenda Perez wrote in an e-mail. "... The pre-transplant evaluation may not detect premeditated and skillful attempts to subvert and defraud the evaluation process."
Rosenbaum was arrested in a sweeping federal case that began as an investigation into money laundering and trafficking in kidneys and fake designer bags. It mushroomed into a political corruption probe, culminating in the arrests this week of 44 people, including three New Jersey mayors, various other officials, and five rabbis. The politicians and rabbis were not accused of involvement in the organ trafficking.
Rosenbaum, 58, is a member of the Orthodox Jewish community in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, where he told neighbors he was in the construction business.
For someone who was not a surgeon, Rosenbaum seemed in his recorded conversations to have a thorough knowledge of the ins and outs of kidney donations, including how to fool hospitals into believing the donor was acting solely out of compassion for a friend or loved one.
He was recorded saying that money had to be spread around liberally, to Israeli doctors, visa preparers and those who cared for the organ donors in this country. "One of the reasons it's so expensive is because you have to shmear (pay others) all the time," he was quoted as saying.
"So far, I've never had a failure," he bragged on tape. "I'm doing this a long time."
At a 2008 meeting with the undercover agent, Rosenbaum claimed he had an associate who worked for an insurance company in Brooklyn who could take the recipient's blood samples, store them on dry ice and send them to Israel, where they would be tested to see if they matched the prospective donor, authorities said.
Four checks totaling $10,000, a down payment on the fictitious uncle's new kidney, were deposited in the bank account of a charity in Brooklyn, prosecutors said.
An after-hours phone call to Rosenbaum's lawyer, Ronald Kleinberg, was not immediately returned Friday.
Dr. Francis Delmonico, a Harvard professor, transplant surgeon and board member of the National Kidney Foundation's Board of Directors, said similar trafficking is going on elsewhere around the world. He said an estimated 10 percent of kidney transplants — 5,000 to 6,000 each year — are done illegally. Hot spots are Pakistan, the Philippines and China, where it is believed organs are obtained from executed prisoners, he said.
Caplan, the University of Pennsylvania ethicist, said he expects the U.N. task force to make recommendations in October that would hold hospitals worldwide accountable for establishing the origins of each organ they transplant and whether it was freely donated without compensation.
"There is a black market, almost exclusively in kidneys," Caplan said. "All international medical groups and governments ought to condemn any marketing in body parts. It's simply too exploitative of the poor and vulnerable. The quality of the organs is questionable. People lie to get the money. The middle men are irresponsible and often criminals. They don't care about the people who sell."
Scheper-Hughes said her research has uncovered hundreds of cases of illegal organ transactions brokered by and for Israelis in Israel, South Africa, Turkey and other countries, with sellers recruited from poor communities in Moldova, Brazil and elsewhere.
In 2003 and 2004, 17 people were arrested in Brazil and South Africa on suspicion of participating in an international human organ trafficking organization. Investigators said Brazilians who passed a medical checkup were flown to South Africa, where their kidneys were extracted.
A few transplant surgeons support changing the law to allow a system of regulated compensation to increase the pool of donor kidneys.
Arthur Matas, a transplant surgeon who directs the kidney transplant service at the University of Minnesota Medical School, said donors could be compensated with some combination of lifetime access to medical care, life insurance, a tax credit, help with college and a small direct payment.
"It would minimize the extraordinary black market and exploitation of impoverished people internationally," Matas said.
Martin Weinfeld, who lives around the corner from Rosenbaum in Brooklyn, said the allegations bring shame on the community.
"It puts a bad name on good people," he said. "Religion is supposed to be about God, helping others, not about the cash."****
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CCP, Amazing story. Of course the perp. in the story is only a Jew by association or by family of origin, not Judeo-Christian in his beliefs - Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's organs for transplant.
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Hat tip to BBG, re-pasting here from the Rant thread.
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/135847.html
Buchanan: Everything You Know About Hitler's Foreign Policy is Wrong
Michael C. Moynihan | September 2, 2009, 6:19pm
Back in 1996, George Will wrote a column in Newsweek attacking Pat Buchanan's peculiar brand of conservatism; one that replaced the sunniness of Reaganism with a "snarl of resentment about people 'sitting on the corner playing bongo drums' in downtown Washington, about the economic onslaught from mighty Mexico, about the voicelessness of 'Euro-Americans' about the teaching of 'Godless evolution,' and other affronts to this 'Christian country.'" Will reminded readers of Pitchfork Pat's curious fixation on Nazi war criminals, and his revisionist view of how Jews were murdered at Treblinka:
In 1990 Buchanan, blithely misrepresenting "1,600 medical papers," ridiculed the "so-called 'Holocaust Survivor Syndrome'," which he said involves "fantasics" of martyrdom and heroics. He said that "reportedly" half the survivor testimonies on file at Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem are considered "unreliable." He did not say who reported that.
Regarding the use of diesel engine exhaust to asphyxiate Jews at the Treblinka concentration camp where 850,000 died, in 1990 Buchanan wrote: "Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody." How did he know? "In 1988, 97 kids trapped 400 feet underground in a Washington, D.C., tunnel while two locomotives spewed diesel exhaust into the car, emerged unharmed after 45 minutes." The source of that anecdote? "Somebody sent it to me." It had already appeared in a publication specializing in Holocaust denial.
Buchanan's eagerness to use such stuff that comes in, as it were, through his transom is telling. And as Jacob Weisberg wrote in The New Republic: "Carbon monoxide emitted by diesel engines is sufficient to asphyxiate people when they are crammed by the hundreds into thirteen-foot chambers. According to the 'Encyclopedia of the Holocaust,' suffocation at Treblinka took as much as half an hour: Buchanan's comparison only proves that the children he described had sufficient oxygen to survive whatever length of time they were trapped in the tunnel." Even though the tunnel was open at both ends, some children were made sick.
I covered much of the same territory responding to Buchanan's fact-free column on the John Demjanjuk case, in which he misunderstood the German penal code, compared a former concentration camp guard to Alfred Dreyfus, and generally made a hash of the facts surrounding the prosecution's case. And I took on Buchanan's view of the Holocaust—which he viewed as merely a consequence of a war started by Churchill—here.
And now Buchanan is back, with a column arguing that Hitler, the misunderstood Reichsfuehrer, didn't really want war, and could have been negotiated back from the brink. There is so much nonsense here that one barely knows where to begin, but here is a representative sample of Buchanan's argument:
The German-Polish war had come out of a quarrel over a town the size of Ocean City, Md., in summer. Danzig, 95 percent German, had been severed from Germany at Versailles in violation of Woodrow Wilson's principle of self-determination. Even British leaders thought Danzig should be returned. Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia? Because the Poles had a war guarantee from Britain that, should Germany attack, Britain and her empire would come to Poland's rescue.
Same was true of the Sudetenland, says Buchanan. These are, coincidentally, the very talking points one would find on the September 2, 1939 editorial page of the Völkischer Beobachter. And like much revisionism, such idiocy requires a significant refutation (which can be found in most any objective study of the war's origins). But let me just address a rhetorical question posed by Buchanan, and designed to convince readers that Hitler had no strategic designs on his neighbors:
But if Hitler was out to conquer the world — Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, India, Asia, Australia — why did he spend three years building that hugely expensive Siegfried Line to protect Germany from France?
This is pretty thin gruel, even by Buchanan's low standards of evidence. The Siegfried Line (or Westwall), a defensive structure built on Germany's western border, was by no means an indication of Germany's peaceful intentions. During the Sudeten crisis, which resulted in Czechoslovakia's incorporation into the Reich, "Hitler was hoping to prevent British intervention [by building the Westwall], and was certain the French would not act alone," writes historian Ian Kershaw. "A key deterrent, in his view, was the building of [the Westwall]...to provide a significant obstruction to any French invasion." There are piles of evidence to support this uncontroversial argument; simply, the German leadership constructed fortifications in the west in order to move on the east. As one book on the Westwall states flatly, the fortifications were "built not to protect against a French aggression per se but to deter France from attacking in support of her allies when Hitler sought to realize his territorial ambitions in the east."
And full credit to Adam Serwer at The American Prospect for his headline, "Pat Buchanan: Sotomayor? Racist. Hitler? Misunderstood."
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What's Israel Got to Do with It? -- By: Clifford D. May
By webmaster@nationalreview.com (Clifford D. May)
Bill Gates famously called George Gilder "very stimulating even when I disagree with him, and most of the time I agree with him." The issues on which Gilder has staked out stimulating positions over more than 30 years as a writer and public intellectual are wide-ranging. They include the causes of poverty and the creators of wealth; the consequences of modern feminism; and the possibilities opened by the high-tech revolution. His arguments are often surprising, always provocative, and generally controversial.
His latest book is titled The Israel Test. Much of what he says is dramatically different from what just about anyone else is saying. In particular: "Either the world, principally the United States, supports Israel, or Israel, one way or another, will be destroyed. There are no other realistic choices. And if Israel is destroyed, capitalist Europe will likely die as well, and America, as the epitome of productive and creative capitalism spurred by Jews, will be in jeopardy."
At this juncture, it is probably not just useful but necessary to note that George Gilder is not Jewish. In other words, the case he makes for Israel has no basis in religious or ethnic affiliation. At the same time, not being tethered to Israel or to Jews allows him to be blunt in a way few of Israel's Jewish defenders dare.
For example, he says that people "who obsessively denounce Jews have a name; they are Nazis." He does not hesitate to apply the term to Arab and Iranian leaders who exhibit such behavior. He contends, as well, that the "most dangerous form of Holocaust denial is not rejection of the voluminous evidence of long-ago Nazi crimes but incredulity toward the voluminous evidence of the new Holocaust being planned by Israel's current enemies. Two Iranian presidents have resolved to acquire nuclear weapons for the specific purpose of 'wiping Israel off the map.'"
What can be done to prevent a second Holocaust and to beat back the jihadis at America's gates? Gilder believes, first, we need to recognize the nature and gravity of the threat; second, we need more resolve; and third, we need more technology of the sort America and Israel have been most adept at producing.
It will require comprehensive missile defense and other high-tech means to prevent our sworn enemies from "infiltrating nuclear weapons into American cities, exploding them offshore near American ports, or detonating bombs above America's critical electronic infrastructure" -- destroying that infrastructure with an EMP (electromagnetic-pulse) attack, an offensive capability that Iran, for one, is known to be developing.
"No nation in history has succeeded in preserving its integrity and sovereignty without meeting the challenge of ever-advancing armaments," Gilder points out. "But many American intellectuals still imagine that the United States is different, that it is possible or desirable for us to negotiate an 'end to the arms race.' Our enemies will always want to end the arms race because they know only free nations can win it.#...#An end to the arms race would deprive the capitalist countries of their greatest asset in combating barbarism."
Gilder is convinced that the forces targeting Israel and America also are "targeting capitalism and freedom everywhere." Capitalism, he says, requires freedom -- for entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers alike. All benefit because "under capitalism the achievements of one group provide markets and opportunities for others."
He goes on to make this unfashionable observation: Any democracy not resting on a solid capitalist foundation is doomed. "Without an expanding capitalist economy," he writes, "democracy becomes dominated by its zero-sum elements -- by mobs and demagogues."
Over the centuries, such mobs and demagogues have, many times, turned against Jews. Today, Gilder adds, "they have turned against Israel." Sometimes, the root cause is simply greed and envy. But often it is the belief that "social justice" necessitates the dispossession of the "haves" and redistribution to the "have-nots" in the interest of "equality of outcome."
Over time, this can only lead to expanding poverty because it is based on a misunderstanding of what wealth is. Fundamentally, wealth inheres not in material resources but in "human minds and creations that thrive only in peace and freedom. In particular, the immiseration of the Middle East stems chiefly from the covetous and crippling idea among Arabs that Israel's wealth is not only the source of their humiliation but also the cause of their poverty."
Gilder has much more to say -- more challenging arguments and perplexing questions than I can summarize in a brief column. But his underlying thesis is straightforward: The future of freedom, democracy, capitalism, America, the West, and the tiny state of Israel are all tied together in a single knot. Israel is "not only a major source of Western technological supremacy and economic leadership -- it is also the most vulnerable source of Western power and intelligence."
Israel is, Gilder contends, "not only the canary in the coal mine -- it is also a crucial part of the mine." If Americans will not defend Israel, they will "prove unable to defend anything else. The Israel test is finally our own test of survival as a free nation."
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"Gilder contends, "not only the canary in the coal mine -- it is also a crucial part of the mine." If Americans will not defend Israel, they will "prove unable to defend anything else."
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Some negatives on Gilder have been posted previously and with some validity, but IMO he is a very brilliant guy. That's why many of us were reading his work for so long. He is an amazing researcher. (On the technologies he covered, I think he was spot-on every time, but that did not mean the correct response was to buy and hold shares in that particular company.)
I have not read his new book but agree with his security view of Israel. How do we downplay the fact that a major power is actively developing nuclear weapons and committed to destroying an ally? How does anyone not see a parallel to Hitler stating and writing his intentions to a world of busy people sure that he couldn't really mean it.
For those who will disagree with Gilder's conclusions, I think there will still be plenty of information and analysis of value to justify a read. Then you can draw your own conclusions, but I'm sure once you are drawn in you will find his very persuasive.
Further on Israel, I mentioned before that I have read but cannot find online Saddam Hussein's surrender speech of March 1991. Saddam goes on for 4 pages about the 'Imperialists and the Zionists' (America and Israel), all in one breath, over and over and over, before finally mentioning that he accepts the UN resolutions that equal surrender. To our Middle East and Islamic-extremism-based enemies, Israel and the US are one and the same and our destruction is their stated objective.
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CCP if it is true the acts of the Rabbi selling the kindeys were terribly wrong and a desecration of G-ds name. However your post does not belong in this forum antisemitism is not okay just because some Jews do bad things. One American who murders does not make all Americans murderers. There is no evidence at all the Swiss accusations were true you can just write it off. This is not something intelligent people can disagree on.
Doug,
Judaism differs from Christianity in that Judaism has an aspect of peoplehood it is not just about belief Your actions can be against everything Judaism stands for but you can still be Jewish.
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HI Rachel,
The Swiss article may have been motivated by anti semitism. I am not clear on that matter.
But there may also be truth to it.
Have you been watching CNN's special on organ smuggling.
Jewish Israelis were putting ads in Arab Israeli newspapers targeting the poor and basically taking their kidneys for small pittances and in at least some cased ripping them off altogether.
They would promise them 3K and then turn around and bill them for hotel stays food etc, and by the time it was done they might make almost nothing.
We Jews should stand up and condemn this stuff to the highest level.
Not exclaim the messengers are anti semites.
These are the actions of Jews that give us a bad name. These scum, these animals, these pigs tarnish all of us in a world that is happy to use this as a poster of how evil Jews are - the enemies of all Jews which are widespread.
And yes because of history we as a people should show no tolerance/mercy to those of our faith who commit such sins.
None of us are saints but this crap is an outrage.
And Mt. Sinai and the surgeons in NY and Cedar Sinai who look the other way because they have cash paying customers are NOT off the hook either.
It is not enough to state,
"well there are bad apples in every group".
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http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/world/08/24/09/swedish-daily-admits-no-proof-organ-smuggling-claim
STOCKHOLM - A Swedish newspaper admitted Sunday it did not have proof for an earlier story alleging Israeli soldiers had trafficked the organs of Palestinians, which sparked a diplomatic row with Israel.
In an editorial headlined "The week the world went crazy", Aftonbladet chief editor Jan Helin wrote that the first article on the case published last Monday "lacked" proof of any organ theft.
"I'm not a Nazi. I'm not an anti-Semite. I'm a responsible editing executive who gave the green light to the publication of an article because it asks a number of pertinent questions."
The tabloid followed up its original story that claimed Israeli soldiers had snatched Palestinian youths to steal their organs with an interview with the family of an alleged victim.
Two Aftonbladet reporters interviewed the mother and brother of Bilal Achmad Ghanem, a youth allegedly killed by Israeli troops 17 years ago when he was 19 on suspicion of being a ringleader in the first Palestinian uprising.
They asked his 32-year-old brother Bilal if they had any proof that his organs had been stolen.
"No, I don't have any," he replied. "But I have met people who told similar stories about their loved ones. We have heard many stories like this one."
Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, caught in the diplomatic storm provoked by the original story, was also interviewed by Aftonbladet.
Sweden, said Bildt, had to be "more careful in explaining to outsiders the way our freedom of expression and freedom of the press work".
Asked if Helin should apologise for the article, Bildt said: "Aftonbladet is responsible for the content it publishes, not the government."
On Friday, Bildt played down the diplomatic row with Israel sparked by the paper's claims.
When asked by reporters if the report would sour relations between the two countries, Bildt said: "I don't think so."
"We have very strong state relationship between Israel and our government. We are both open and democratic societies," he told reporters.
But Israel on Sunday pressed Stockholm to condemn the original report.
"We are not asking the Swedish government for an apology, we are asking for their condemnation," a senior official quoted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as telling ministers during the weekly cabinet meeting.
Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz of Netanyahu's rightwing Likud party said "the crisis will continue as long as the Swedish government doesn't change its attitude toward this anti-Semitic article.
"Those who do not condemn it are not welcome in Israel."
as of 08/24/2009 9:45 AM
If you would like to talk about organ trafficking on another thread. I would be happy to discuss it. There is a lot of really disgusting things going on with the organ trade including buying the organs of executed criminals from China. However you are feeding into hundreds of year old blood libels without proof. I couldn't find the article you mentioned on cnn or the issue covered in any reputable press . I watch very little TV and I never watch the news. I don't really care about Michael Jackson death etc Would you please locate a print source for your accusations. I think it is important that evil actions by human being are called out. However I never think it acceptable to refer to a human being as an animal -- referring to human beings as animals makes it easier for people to rationalize their own bad behavior.
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http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f8e_1252361650
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This goes along with the stereotye that if you mess with a Jew he/she will kick your tuchus. :wink:
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http://www.slate.com/id/2234010/pagenum/all/#p2
the spectator
The Evil of Banality
Troubling new revelations about Arendt and Heidegger.
By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Friday, Oct. 30, 2009, at 12:37 PM ET
Will we ever be able to think of Hannah Arendt in the same way again? Two new and damning critiques, one of Arendt and one of her longtime Nazi-sycophant lover, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, were published within 10 days of each other last month. The pieces cast further doubt on the overinflated, underexamined reputations of both figures and shed new light on their intellectually toxic relationship.
My hope is that these revelations will encourage a further discrediting of the most overused, misused, abused pseudo-intellectual phrase in our language: the banality of evil. The banality of the banality of evil, the fatuousness of it, has long been fathomless, but perhaps now it will be consigned to the realm of the deceitful and disingenuous as well.
The first of the two new reports—and the one most overlooked here in America, perhaps because it's not online—appeared in the sober pages of London's Times Literary Supplement on Oct. 9. It was titled "Blame the Victim—Hannah Arendt Among the Nazis: the Historian and Her Sources." Arendt—the German-born refugee intellectual, author of the influential The Origins of Totalitarianism and the controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil—has come under fire before for "blaming the victim" in her Eichmann trial book, but the author of the TLS piece, the distinguished British scholar Bernard Wasserstein, breaks new ground here with material I found shocking.
In a long, carefully documented essay, Wasserstein (who's now at the University of Chicago), cites Arendt's scandalous use of quotes from anti-Semitic and Nazi "authorities" on Jews in her Totalitarianism book.
Wasserstein concludes that her use of these sources was "more than a methodological error: it was symptomatic of a perverse world-view contaminated by over-exposure to the discourse of collective contempt and stigmatization that formed the object of her study"—that object being anti-Semitism. In other words, he contends, Arendt internalized the values of the anti-Semitic literature she read in her study of anti-Semitism, at least to a certain extent. Wasserstein's conjecture will reignite the debate over Arendt's contemptuous remarks on certain Jews who were victims of Hitler in her Eichmann book and in her letters.
Could these revelations help banish the robotic reiteration of the phrase the banality of evil as an explanation for everything bad that human beings do? Arendt may not have intended that the phrase be used this way, but one of its pernicious effects has been to make it seem as though the search for an explanation of the mystery of evil done by "ordinary men" is over. As though by naming it somehow explains it and even solves the problem. It's a phrase that sounds meaningful and lets us off the hook, allows us to avoid facing the difficult question.
It was the banality phrase—and the purported profundity of it in the popular mind—that elevated Arendt above the ranks of her fellow exile intellectuals in America and made her a proto-Sontag figure, a cerebral star of sorts and a revered icon in cultural-studies departments throughout America. It was the phrase that launched a thousand theses.
To my mind, the use of the phrase banality of evil is an almost infallible sign of shallow thinkers attempting to seem intellectually sophisticated. Come on, people: It's a bankrupt phrase, a subprime phrase, a Dr. Phil-level phrase masquerading as a profound contrarianism. Oooh, so daring! Evil comes not only in the form of mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash types, but in the form of paper pushers who followed evil orders. And when applied—as she originally did to Adolf Eichmann, Hitler's eager executioner, responsible for the logistics of the Final Solution—the phrase was utterly fraudulent.
Adolf Eichmann was, of course, in no way a banal bureaucrat: He just portrayed himself as one while on trial for his life. Eichmann was a vicious and loathsome Jew-hater and -hunter who, among other things, personally intervened after the war was effectively lost, to insist on and ensure the mass murder of the last intact Jewish group in Europe, those of Hungary. So the phrase was wrong in its origin, as applied to Eichmann, and wrong in almost all subsequent cases when applied generally. Wrong and self-contradictory, linguistically, philosophically, and metaphorically. Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn't know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on.
Arendt should have stuck with her original formulation for the Nazi crimes, "radical evil." Not an easy concept to define, but, you might say, you know it when you see it. Certainly one with more validity than banality. (Wasserstein dryly notes that "her epigones have tried valiantly to reconcile the two positions, she herself recognized the inconsistency"—between radical and banal evil—"but never satisfactorily resolved the fundamental self-contradiction.") But Arendt fled from radical evil into banality in more ways than one.
Where the Wasserstein article breaks new ground is in his citation of some of the anti-Semitic sources Arendt used for what is considered her major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Of course, Arendt has been called hostile to Jews, particularly those who lack the Germanic acculturation she was so proud of.
But The Origins of Totalitarianism has not, until now, come under fire on these grounds. And I must say that even though it's a book massively bloated by irrelevant show-your-work history, it serves as ballast for an important theoretical insight: that the similarities among police-state surveillance regimes are more important than the differences, that the similarities can be summed up by a single word—totalitarianism—that applies to dictatorships of the left and right, of any ideology and by extension any theocratic regime or movement.
It's a concept that has great relevance right now because there are still those who don't understand how theocratic police states can be called "fascist." Duh! It's because they're totalitarian. Whatever religion they profess, what they share with past fascist regimes is greater—in terms of denial of human rights—than what separates them. Just as political regimes adopt religious-type totalist worship of the state or the leader to enforce their oppression, religious or theocratic regimes adopt political oppression to enforce their orthodoxies.
But Wasserstein (who ironically delivered his conclusions originally at "the Hannah Arendt Lecture" at Holland's Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen in December 2008—probably not what they expected) has found some problems in her historical analysis of anti-Semitism.
He introduces his findings with a curt nod to the Arendt defenders: "In The New York Review of Books in 2007 Jeremy Waldron reproved the historian Walter Laqueur for having speculated that Arendt 'had read too much anti-Semitic literature for her own good.' " Waldron, Wasserstein observed, "considered the conjecture 'offensive.' "
"Actually," Wasserstein continues, "it merits serious consideration, as emerges if we examine the use of sources in her work. Consider, for example, Arendt's discussion, in the second section of Origins, of the role of Jews in the gold and diamond rushes in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. She relies here on the account by the British economist J.A. Hobson in which he referred to Jewish financiers 'leaving their economic fangs in the carcasses of their prey. They fastened on the Rand … as they are prepared to fasten upon any other spot on the globe'—part of a passage that Arendt quotes with explicit and unironic approval, commending it as 'very reliable in observation and very honest in analysis.' "
"Fangs"? You say this sounds like pure Hitlerite rhetoric that could have been lifted from Mein Kampf? Well, yes, it does, doesn't it?
And then there's this: "One of her authorities on South African Jews," Wasserstein reports, is an article by Ernst Schultze, "a longstanding Nazi propagandist, that appeared in … a German publication founded and directed by the prominent Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg."
And then "in a new preface [to The Origins of Totalitarianism] written in 1967, Arendt commends the work of the leading Nazi historian Walter Frank … whose 'contributions,' " Wasserstein quotes Arendt, " 'can still be consulted with profit.' "
Wasserstein wonders about her motives here: "Was she bending over backwards not to be totally dismissive of ideological opponents who despised her on categorical (i.e. racial) grounds?" he asks.
"But there must have been more to it than that," he answers, "because modern Jewish history was the only subject where she repeatedly relied on Nazi historians as external authorities, that is, other than as evidence of what the Nazis themselves thought or did. Moreover she internalized much of what the Nazi historians had to say about Jews, from the 'parasitism' of Jewish high finance to the 'internationalism' of [Walther] Rathenau [the Weimar German minister assassinated by anti-Semites.]"
Of course, there have always been Jewish critiques of Jews. But Arendt's "aversion clearly ran much deeper" than has been supposed, Wasserstein asserts. He concludes his piece by wondering, "Why?"
I believe the new Heidegger revelations may shed some light on that question. It's always been controversial to discuss Arendt's lifelong romantic infatuation with the Nazi-sympathizing professor and how it might have shaped her intellectual positions. Arendt's defenders dismiss these as "tabloid" concerns, irrelevant to the purported transcendental purity of her thought.
But leaving Heidegger out of the equation is becoming ever more difficult. Not only did Arendt have an affair with him when she was an 18-year-old student about half his age, before Hitler took over, but despite his public exaltation of the Fuhrer, despite his firing Jews once he became rector of Freiburg University. We now know that she later resumed some kind of warm relationship with the brownshirt philosopher (yes, it turns out he often wore one to his lectures). Arendt helped usher Heidegger back into the intellectual version of polite society, indeed assisted in preventing his ostracism as a Hitlerite, at least by those who considered his notoriously opaque use of philosophical language to offer something of value beneath it—apart from further opacity.
The new Heidegger material offers further evidence of his slavish devotion to the Fuhrer, not merely in his public speeches but also in his desire to find a philosophical grounding for Hitlerism in the elevated realms of his thought.
Consider this quotation from a delightfully acerbic review essay by Carlin Romano in the Oct. 18 Chronicle of Higher Education, which discusses new revelations about Heidegger's shameless adoption of Nazism.
Next month Yale University Press will issue an English-language translation of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy, by Emmanuel Faye, an associate professor at the University of Paris at Nanterre. It's the latest, most comprehensive archival assault on the ostensibly magisterial thinker who informed Freiburg students in his infamous 1933 rectoral address of Nazism's "inner truth and greatness," declaring that "the Führer, and he alone, is the present and future of German reality, and its law."
Faye, whose book stirred France's red and blue Heidegger départements into direct battle a few years back, follows in the investigative footsteps of Chilean-Jewish philosopher Victor Farias (Heidegger et le Nazisme, 1987), historian Hugo Ott (Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu Zeiner Biographie, 1988) and others. Aim? To expose the oafish metaphysician's vulgar, often vicious 1930s attempt to become Hitler's chief academic tribune, and his post-World War II contortions to escape proper judgment for his sins. "We now know," reports Faye, "that [Heidegger's] attempt at self-justification of 1945 is nothing but a string of falsehoods."
Romano's Chronicle piece generated an often-furious comments thread, a spectacle of postmodernists in temper tantrum mode.
I can understand the splenetic attacks on Romano for not taking Heidegger seriously, although the angry Heideggerian academics never explained exactly why we should.
In general, I'm in favor of separating the man (or woman) from the work, but it was Heidegger himself, his defenders don't seem to recognize, who claimed Nazism for his own. He didn't make the separation between man and philosophy that they conveniently claim to excuse his personal racism.
The debate about Heidegger reminded me of a conversation I had with philosopher Berel Lang on "the evolution of evil," an exchange I wrote about in Explaining Hitler. We discussed whether Hitler represented a new depth of evil and what the next step down into the abyss might be. Were there degrees of evil—that led to Hitler? And would Hitler lead to degrees of evil beyond his own? I had suggested Holocaust denial was such a next step, in the sense that it added insult to injury, but Lang disagreed, arguing that Heidegger's postwar silence on Nazism exemplified the next step in the evolution of evil. After the war, this purportedly great and comprehensive philosopher never published anything that addressed the fact of the Holocaust that his party perpetrated. It just didn't impinge on his worldview. He had time to write polemics against mechanized agriculture but not industrialized murder. Lang thought Heidegger's indifference was a whole new kind of evil. (He even wrote a book called Heidegger's Silence.)
Which brings us back to Arendt again. As the extent of Heidegger's enthusiastic embrace of Nazism becomes more apparent, and as it becomes ever clearer that the allegiance was not merely opportunistic and careerist but derived from a philosophical affinity with his Fuhrer's effusions, it becomes impossible not to reexamine certain questions. Such as: How much did Arendt know about the depth of Heidegger's allegiance? Did Heidegger lie to her? Did she believe him the way she believed Eichmann? Did she assume his complicity with the genocidaires was something careerist and banal? Or worse, did she know? And did she disingenuously (or self-deceptively) construct her false banal Eichmann from her false banal Heidegger?
Writer Paul Roazen once speculated on this question:
If Eichmann was simply following orders, and his conduct was certifiably normal within the context of Nazi Germany, her own defense of Heidegger can reflect the way a social thinker such as herself might be conditioned by circumstances and advantage to curry favor in the midst of the most vile forms of evil. Having as a Jew escaped from Germany in 1933, Arendt remained for the rest of her life loyal to the whole philosophic tradition that had helped lead to Hitlerism. ...
It may forever remain a mystery, even more so now. Wasserstein believes she internalized anti-Semitic literature; I would perhaps modify this to say she internalized the purported universalism of Germanic high culture with its disdain for parochialism. A parochialism she identified with, in her own case, her Jewishness, something she felt ashamed of on intellectual grounds, so primitive, this tribal allegiance in the presence of intellects who supposedly transcended tribalism (or at least all tribes except the Teutonic).
One can still hear this Arendtian shame about ethnicity these days. So parochial! One can hear the echo of Arendt's fear of being judged as "merely Jewish" in some, not all, of those Jews so eager to dissociate themselves from the parochial concerns of other Jews for Israel. The desire for universalist approval makes them so disdainful of any "ethnic" fellow feeling. After all, to such unfettered spirits, it's so banal.
Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2234010/
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From: Emily Yoffe
Subject: The Missing
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2009, at 12:54 PM ET
_____
http://www.slate.com/id/2235642/entry/2235779/
The old man at the tram stop overheard us puzzling over our map and remarked in English, "Ah, you are practically natives!" He was the only Praguer to initiate a conversation with us. He asked where we were from, and when Rachel said New York, he told us that at one time he had lived in Hell's Kitchen. He said his name was Josef Hruska, then he added, unexpectedly, "Not only am I 81, I am also Jewish!" He said that when the Communists took over, he fled for Israel, then he went to Colombia and later the United States, and now he was back happily living in Prague. Our tram came, and Josef Hruska, a living miracle—a Czech Jew who escaped being murdered as a boy—said goodbye.
(http://www.slate.com/id/2235642/slideshow/2235608/entry/2235890/fs/0//)
Since I was on a cultural trip to Prague, an unanswerable question loomed over my visit: What happens to your culture when your Jews are killed? The numbers are overwhelming. In Prague: A Cultural and Literary History, Richard Burton writes that in 1939 there were 118,310 Jews in Czechoslovakia (the Czech portion of which was renamed the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia by the Germans), many of them refugees fleeing Germany and Austria. Of those, 78,154 were murdered. When the Communists took over after the war, only about 5,000 Jews remained in Prague, and many of them fled, like Hruska, when the purges—targeting Jews—began.
(http://img.slate.com/media/1/123125/2068716/2209692/2235605/2235606/2235881/4.jpg)
Vanished Jews are big business these days. Prague's old Jewish Quarter, called Josefov, is perpetually crammed with tourists. Native son Franz Kafka, whose work was banned during much of the Communist period, is now iconic. His name and face are everywhere, and a new Kafka-themed museum recently opened near the Charles Bridge. Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924 at the age of 40 and is buried in Prague next to his parents. His three younger sisters—Gabriele, Valerie, and Ottilie—were exterminated. It is believed Ottilie passed through the Czech concentration camp Terezin (also known by its German name, Theresienstadt), a former fortress about 40 miles outside Prague, and finally perished at Auschwitz.
Jews first came to Prague at the end of the 10th century. For much of their time there, they were confined to a small section of the city, were excluded from most professions, and had to wear a special badge to identify themselves (a practice later revived by the Nazis). Anti-Jewish riots and pogroms broke out from time to time, but for the most part, it was a relatively peaceful existence. So much so that Burton writes that in the Jewish diaspora, it was referred to as "City and Mother of Israel."
At the site of a new shopping, office, and residential development in Prague, archaeologists have been allowed to assess the buried artifacts before construction begins. Emerging from deep in the earth are pieces of medieval Jewish tombstones that had been taken centuries ago from the Jewish cemetery to use as building materials. The Jewish history of Prague, even in the few days I'm there, has a similar way of unexpectedly disinterring itself.
One day, Francesco, Rachel, and I stopped for lunch in a nontouristy part of town at a nondescript basement restaurant called the Piano Bar. Next to our table, attached to the wall, partially hidden by a heating pipe, was a piece of writing under Plexiglas, two paragraphs in Czech, German, English, and—this is what caught my eye—Hebrew. It was titled "Terezin Artists," and it concisely told the story of the imprisonment and death of some of the country's most celebrated musicians, composers, singers, and other artists at the camp. I asked a table of English-speaking Czech patrons if they knew why the memorial was there. They had never noticed it, but they asked the non-English-speaking staff. A waitress shrugged and said that it was left behind by the last owner; he sold the place years ago, and nobody knew more than that.
The buildings of Prague may have come through World War II essentially unscathed, but since it was one of the first countries occupied by Germany, it's remarkable that its synagogues are still standing. It turns out that they survived for a most malign reason. As Hitler's army marched across Europe, he ordered the continent's Judaica to be looted and sent to Prague. There, he was going to establish a "Museum to an Extinct Race."
But what is called the Old-New Synagogue, completed around 1270, is still used by the remaining Jewish community. On the Gothic ceiling, a fifth rib was added to each arch so that the congregants didn't look up to contemplate a pattern resembling a cross. Outside is the Old Jewish Cemetery. Because the Jews were confined to a small area, they could not expand their cemetery outward to accommodate the dead. Instead, they went up. There are 12 layers here, and 12,000 visible headstones, the oldest dating from the 15th century. The stones lean hither and yon, like teeth in a long-neglected mouth. These are the lucky Jews, I think. These are the Jews who got graves.
The most famous marker belongs to the chief rabbi of Prague, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, who died in 1609. A scholar and a mystic, Loew fought anti-Semitism and harsh government decrees. He is most famous today for his anachronistic association, starting in the 18th century, with the legend of the golem.
According to the tale, Rabbi Loew fashioned a creature out of the earth and gave it the breath of life. It was a simple being, a servant of its maker, created to protect the Jews of Prague. In one telling, it becomes violent, and the emperor begs the rabbi to destroy it. The rabbi gets the emperor to promise he will protect the Jews and then places the slumbering golem in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue, ready to return to life in case he's needed again. During the 20th century, the golem must have slept the sleep of the dead.
Next door is the Pinkas Synagogue, built in 1535, which is now the city's Holocaust museum. I usually avoid Holocaust museums. Not because I want to pretend it didn't happen, but because confronting both the scale and the specificity is too much to bear. I forced myself into this one, though. It is simple and effective: The walls are covered with the names of 77,297 dead, handwritten in block script. I stagger at what almost 80,000 names looks like, floor to ceiling, room after room.
Upstairs is a small art exhibit: the works of the children of Terezin. Terezin was an unusual concentration camp, a Potemkin village in which the inmates were actively encouraged to produce artwork of all kinds. The children were given drawing instruction; famous Czech musicians composed and performed. This helped to convince officials from the Red Cross that the Jewish citizens who had been rounded up from their homes and imprisoned were being held in decent circumstances. By the end of the war, almost everyone at Terezin, including most of the 15,000 children, had been murdered.
In this gallery, the children's drawings are grouped by subject—things like memories of home, dreams of returning, life before deportation, transport. What is there to say? That Ruth Weissova was a promising young artist who was gassed to death just after her 14th birthday? I came to Prague to make art and to look at art. It all seems useless when you're looking at the art of obliteration.
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FYI This is mostly a religious text
Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust
by Rabbi Shraga Simmons
Unique in its universality, intensity, longevity and irrationality, what is the root of anti-Semitism?
History provides far too many examples of man's inhumanity to man: social injustice, religious oppression, cultural clashes, ideological wars, class hatred, and most every other form of racism and intolerance.
One particular form, however, stands out amongst all others: Anti-Semitism. Unique in its universality, intensity, longevity and irrationality, anti-Semitism is a historical phenomenon which falls outside of normal sociological bounds.
In 1987, President Chaim Herzog of Israel commissioned a colloquium on anti-Semitism. Professor Michael Curtis of Rutgers University spoke there about the irrationality of anti-Semitism:
“The uniqueness of anti-Semitism lies in the fact that no other people in the world has ever been charged simultaneously with alienation from society and with cosmopolitanism, with being capitalistic exploiters and also revolutionary communist advocators. The Jews were accused of having an imperious mentality, at the same time they’re a people of the book. They’re accused of being militant aggressors, at the same time as being cowardly pacifists. With being a chosen people, and also having an inferior human nature. With both arrogance and timidity. With both extreme individualism and community adherence. With being guilty of the crucifixion of Jesus and at the same time held to account for the invention of Christianity.”
As historian Martin Gilbert observes in the Jewish History Atlas:
"As my research into Jewish history progressed, I was surprised, depressed, and to some extent overwhelmed by the perpetual and irrational violence which pursued the Jews in every country and to almost every corner of the globe. If, therefore, persecution, expulsion, torture, humiliation, and mass murder haunt these pages, it is because they also haunt the Jewish story."
Which leaves us with one question: What is the root of anti-Semitism?
"Jews Are Rich, Powerful and Control The World"
Many claim that anti-Semitism is a reaction to Jewish political and economic power. Consider the "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a book invented by the Russian secret police, purporting to be the discussions of Jewish elders plotting to take over the world. It was -- next to the Bible -- the best-selling book in the world during the 1920s. In the United States, Henry Ford sponsored its publication. It has since been printed in numerous languages internationally, and presently has widespread distribution in Japan.
But could Jewish wealth and power really be the cause of anti-Semitism? The Jews of Poland and Russia (17th-20th centuries) were poor and powerless. Yet they were still persecuted. Cossacks didn’t check bank accounts before initiating pogroms. When the Nazis liquidated the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jews lived there under incredibly impoverished conditions. The reality is that poor Jews have been just as hated as rich Jews.
As Jews were being slaughtered en masse, the claim that Jews control governments becomes painfully absurd.
Furthermore, if it is true that Jews control the governments, then why didn’t even one country accept Jewish refugees struggling to escape Europe during the Holocaust? Surely with all their wealth and political power, at least one government would have allowed the Jews in! When government after government buried its head in the sand as Jews were being slaughtered en masse, the claim that Jews control governments becomes painfully absurd.
Jewish "success" may make an anti-Semite gnash his teeth, but that’s clearly not the root cause of anti-Semitism.
"Jews Claim to be the Chosen People"
The University of California at Berkeley conducted a survey, asking a group of non-Jewish Americans whether they believed a series of negative statements about Jews. By far the number one belief (held by 59%) was that Jews consider themselves as God’s chosen people.
It is true that Jews have always claimed to be different. Throughout history, Jews have kept to themselves, didn’t socialize with non-Jews, and had a completely different ethical, cultural and social system -- including different dress, laws, and language. To top it all off, Jewish allegiance was never primarily to the countries in which they lived. The Jew always dreamt of going back to Zion. They were the ultimate outsiders.
If anti-Semites hate Jews because they claim to be chosen, then what happens when Jews dropped their claim of chosenness? When the Enlightenment came to Europe, many Jews said “Now’s our chance!” They shed their foreign dress, shaved their beards, enrolled in universities -- and intermarried. In Germany and Austria, Jews for the first time said: "We’re no longer chosen. We’re going to become like you. Our home is here. Berlin is our Jerusalem.” After centuries of hatred, the Jews anticipated a warm welcome from their gentile neighbors.
Where do we see the most vicious outpouring of anti-Semitism? Precisely in Germany and Austria -- at the time and place that Jews dropped the claim of chosenness!
If chosenness is, in fact, the real explanation for anti-Semitism, then many of peoples should be hated for similar claims of chosenness. Americans have the concept of Manifest Destiny -- i.e. that it was the divine will of God to annex territory stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The name China means “center of the universe.” The name Japan means “the sun only shines for them.” But nobody hates them for this!
Other reasons have been suggested for anti-Semitism, but they also are lacking. Some say Jew-hatred stems from being different, or being outsiders, but as we have seen even when Jews been as German as the Germans, anti-Semitism has not lessened (usually the opposite). Others say Jews were a convenient scapegoat – but hatred must exist as a precondition to be chosen a scapegoat (i.e. no one ever chose midgets as the scapegoat for a country's problems).
Others suggest that anti-Semitism exists because of Deicide: Jews killed their God. But historians show that anti-Semitism existed much before Christianity, and has appeared in countless non-Christian countries.
We can see then that all the stated 'reasons' are not reasons at all, but rather are excuses for anti-Semitism. What is the real reason?
The Attempt to De-Judaize Anti-Semitism
In her diary, on April 11, 1944, Anne Frank wrote:
“Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God who has made us as we are, but it will be G-d, too, who will raise us up again. Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason and that reason only do we now suffer. We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English or representatives of any country for that matter. We will always remain Jews.”
Anne Frank said, in effect, that Jews have something special to contribute to the world -- and because of that they have been persecuted.
But by and large, the world would rather de-Judaize anti-Semitism. When The Diary of Anne Frank was adapted into a Broadway play, we hear her explanation of anti-Semitism quite differently:
“Why are Jews hated?” she asks, “Well, one day it’s one group, and the next day another...”
In other words, the reasons for anti-Semitism have absolutely nothing to do with being Jewish. The Jews went through a Holocaust, the most systematic attempt to murder a people in the history of all humanity -- and it was not for Jewish reasons. Dumb luck. We were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Hitler’s Reason for Anti-Semitism
There was one individual, however, who stated clearly that hatred of Jews is because there’s something unique about the Jews: Adolf Hitler.
His driving ambition was to turn the world away from monotheism and bring it back to paganism. He stood for the superiority of the Aryan race: "Might makes right... survival of the fittest... eliminate the infirmed and handicapped."
There was only one obstacle standing in Hitler’s way: The Jews. Hitler knew it was the Jews who introduced the ideas of love your neighbor, helping the poor and the sick, and all men are created equal. Hitler hated the message of the Jews because it totally contradicted what he wanted the world to become.
As Hitler said:
“Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing man from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge, from the dirty and degrading self-mortifications of a false vision called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and personal independence which only a very few can bear.”
and
“The Ten Commandments have lost their validity. Conscience is a Jewish invention; it is a blemish like circumcision.”
Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not a means to an end. It was his goal. Long after the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 had effectively dismantled the Jewish community of Germany, Hitler was still not satisfied. In 1942, at the Wansee Conference, Hitler launched the "Final Solution" of genocide.
Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not a means to an end. It was his goal.
Then, with the Nazi invasion of Hungary in 1944, top German military officers determined that railway lines must be prioritized to transport vital troops and equipment to the battlefront. The Wehrmacht urged Hitler to provide this infusion of desperately-needed supplies. Ignoring their warnings, Hitler instead gave orders to allocate the precious rail-lines to deport hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews en masse to the extermination camps. Historians acknowledge this decision as a key factor in further debilitating the German war effort. Hitler, it seems, regarded the killing of Jews even more important than winning World War Two.
He said:
“If only one country, for whatever reason, tolerates a Jewish family in it, that family will become the germ center for fresh sedition. If one little Jewish boy survives, without any Jewish education, with no synagogue and no Hebrew school; it’s in his soul.”
The Torah View of Anti-Semitism
The Torah itself teaches that anti-Semitism will exist and that Jews will be hated for precisely the reasons echoed in Hitler’s words.
The Talmud (Shabbat 69) declares:
“Why was the Torah given on a mountain called Sinai? Because the great “sinah,” the great hatred of the Jew, emanates from Sinai.” (Sinah, the Hebrew word for hatred, is pronounced almost identically to Sinai.)
Before the Torah was given, people built their lives on a subjective concept of right and wrong. At Sinai the Jewish People were told that there is one God for all humanity who makes moral demands on human beings. You can’t just live as you please; there is a higher authority you are accountable to.
That’s why the Russians were threatened by a handful of Jews who wanted to study Hebrew.
The Jews were given the responsibility to represent that morality and be a light unto the nations. So, despite the fact that they were never more than a tiny fraction of the world’s population, Jewish ideas became the basis for the civilized world. And with that, they became a lightening rod for those opposed to the moral message. That’s why the Russians, although they were a huge superpower in the 1970s, were threatened by a handful of Jews who wanted to study Hebrew.
Why would people hate the Jewish message?
Consider the words of Aldous Huxley, in his book, Confessions of an Atheist:
“I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently, I assumed that it had none and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.”
For the one who rejects morality and conscience, the only way to get of rid of the message… is to destroy the messenger.
Why Be Jewish?
The solution to anti-Semitism is the flip-side of the cause. Jewish values are the cause of anti-Semitism, and Jewish values are the solution. Only by studying Torah – and teaching it to others -- can we ever hope to bring the world to a point where evil is eradicated.
When human beings embrace the moral doctrine that Judaism brought to the world from Sinai -- that there is a God who demands ethical behavior from every human being -- then there will be no holocausts.
And that is the exquisite irony of Jewish history.
The world cannot get the message unless the messengers learn it and teach it. The world desperately needs the Jewish message. Now go and study.
* Based on the seminar, Why the Jews, by Rabbi Raphael Shore.
* Hitler quotes from Herman Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, Kessinger Publishing, 2006.
* Anne Frank quotes from Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, Why the Jews, Touchstone, 2003.
Click here to see the Online Seminar, "Why the Jews?"
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Priest leads attack on Moldova menorah
Dec. 14, 2009
elana kirsh and ap , THE JERUSALEM POST
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgBXfpFGSGI&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
The Anti-Defamation League on Monday condemned the "despicable" removal of a Hannukiah in Moldova, apparently led by an Orthodox priest. Video footage of the event, uploaded to YouTube, shows a group of dozens of people looking on as the menorah is pulled down down with hammers and iron bars and replaced with a cross.
Officials in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau said that the 1.5 meter-tall ceremonial candelabrum was retrieved, reinstalled and is now under police guard.
The video shows an Orthodox priest, identified by Moldovan media as Fr. Anatoliy Chirbik, leading the Sunday demonstration at Stefan the Great Square and saying, "We are an Orthodox country. Stephan the Great defended our country from all kinds of kikes, and now they come and put their menorah here. This is anarchy."
Police said they were investigating, and that there was no official reaction from Moldova's Orthodox Church, which is part of the Russian Orthodox Church and counts 70 percent of Moldovans as members.
The national government said in a statement that "hatred, intolerance and xenophobia" are unacceptable.
Jewish leader Alexandr Bilinkis called on the Orthodox Church to take a position over the priest's actions.
In a statement released Monday, the ADL urged both the Moldovan government and the Orthodox Church to bring those responsible to justice.
"The Moldovan government and the Orthodox Church must punish the perpetrators of this despicable anti-Semitic crime and send a clear signal to Moldovan society and to the Jewish community that the government and the church will not tolerate anti-Semitism," ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman said in the statement.
The Jewish community in Moldova was thriving before World War II but there are now estimated to be just 12,000 Jews in the former Soviet Republic. Twenty years ago there were 66,000 Jews. Many emigrated to Israel.
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1260447439754&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
[ Back to the Article ]
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Anti-semitism is making a loud comeback
Dec. 13, 2009
Laura Kam , THE JERUSALEM POST
Leading experts from around the world will gather in Jerusalem this week for the Foreign Ministry's Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism where there will be much sobering discussion.
This year witnessed an upsurge in violent anti-Semitic attacks unprecedented in recent times. Perceptions of the 22-day defensive war in the Gaza Strip in December 2008-January 2009 certainly triggered this most recent spasm of worldwide anti-Semitic activity, but that event in and of itself cannot explain the phenomenon away. It was the way certain media covered the event that was the key factor.
The US was practically the only global bright spot with respect to anti-Semitic attitudes and incidents in the past year, notwithstanding isolated yet serious and potentially deadly incidents of its own to contend with. This, at a time, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll, when a plurality of Americans agree that the US "should mind its own business internationally, constituting a significant shift since 2002 when nearly two-in-three disagreed with this sentiment." It was therefore particularly heartening to note that a similarly timed The Israel Project (TIP) poll finds that the number of Americans that think the US should support Israel doubled over the same period of time to 60 percent.
CLEARLY, THE media plays a leading role in nurturing and solidifying such beliefs. While many in the US strenuously believe the American media is biased toward Israel, in fact the press in the US is quite tame and balanced in its depiction of Israel and its Jewish majority compared to its counterparts in Europe, Latin America and the Arab world.
In a landmark study of Europeans, Edward Kaplan and Charles Small of Yale University found unequivocally that individuals with extreme anti-Israel views were more likely to be anti-Semitic. As media outlets proliferate via satellite and 24/7 cable TV, the platform for spreading anti-Israel views and consequently anti-Semitism has increased exponentially.
It is for that reason that it is critical to recognize that the vast majority of Americans, Latin Americans, Europeans and Arabs form their opinions about international affairs largely by what they see on television. According to polls conducted for The Israel Project in the US, TV news is cited by 62% as the way their views on the Middle East are shaped, and to a lesser extent the Internet (mostly through mainstream news sites) and newspapers.
In the Arab world, a full 90% of people get their information about the Middle East from TV. Throughout the world today, wherever television watching is pervasive, family, universities and religious institutions all have a far lesser impact in forming opinions on the issues that so clearly impact on foreign policy views than in decades and centuries before.
Outside of the US much of the international media uses the language of "genocide," "Holocaust" and the names of concentration camps drawing a parallel between Nazi Germany and Israel on a regular basis. Such language and imagery serve to delegitimize any Israeli action, while fueling the image of the Jew as the new Nazi. Cartoons with anti-Semitic themes are rampant throughout the world where the juxtaposing of brutal Israelis in the guise of the stereotypical Jew or as a Nazi is the norm. Especially during times of war, Israeli soldiers are relentlessly depicted as war criminals, murderers of innocent civilians and children, militant beasts whose disappearance would obviously be a blessing.
It is therefore no surprise that the aftermath of the Gaza war, a war reported on tirelessly on TV news stations throughout the world, the number of anti-Semitic incidents exploded.
In France, home to the world's third largest Jewish community after Israel and the US, the first half of this year saw significantly more violent anti-Semitic acts and threats - 631 recorded incidents, more than in the entire previous year. As in other European capitals, these include arson attacks against schools and community centers and physical attacks on individuals. Richard Prasquier, the head of CRIF, France's main Jewish umbrella group, was quoted as saying earlier this year that "anti-Semitism is back" and that although France itself is not an anti-Semitic country, "there is a climate of hatred against Jews that manifests itself through insults and often physical attacks."
Almost identically in the UK, the Jewish Community Security Trust recorded double the amount of anti-Semitic incidents in the first half of 2009 as compared to the same period in the previous year. CST head Mark Gardner said, "British Jews are facing ever higher levels of racist attack and intimidation that threaten the well-being of our otherwise happy and successful Jewish community."
In Latin America, with 250,000 Jews in Argentina alone, the climate is becoming increasingly hostile. Anti-Semitic incidents, including swastikas drawn on Jewish schools and graffiti ordering Jews to leave the country have, according to Julio Schlosswer, secretary-general of Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, "created a climate of worry, a climate of terror." Particularly worrisome in Latin America is the atmosphere that has been created by regional leaders such as Hugo Chavez who consistently berate Israel in the Latin American press with vile comparisons of Israeli defensive actions to those of the Nazis, thus fostering an official imprimatur on hatred.
And in places where there are virtually no Jews, anti-Semitism abounds. In a recent poll done in the Arab world by The Israel Project, we found Jews are simply reviled, with 98% of Jordanians saying they have unfavorable opinions of Jews. Egypt was a veritable bright spot with only 69% saying they had an unfavorable view of Jews. The fact that Al Jazeera is the most watched news station throughout the Arab world can, to some extent though obviously not wholly, explain why Israelis/Jews - most Arabs do not recognize the difference - are so incredibly despised.
Clearly we are entering an era where increased vigilance with respect to the press as well as in the political and diplomatic arenas will necessarily take on a new urgent focus as Jews around the world are facing increasing threats to their safety and way of life.
It will take concerted and persistent action on the parts of governments, NGOs, law enforcement officials and individuals with international standing and gravitas to stem the tide of this new wave of anti-Semitism. But enhancing Israel's image in the media in today's non-stop news environment is crucial. The great progress that has been made in the US can be replicated. These and other issues will be strenuously dissected and debated during the meetings in Jerusalem.
The writer is the senior director for European affairs and special projects at The Israel Project and is the former co-director of ADL's Israel office.
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1260447430597&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/auschwitz-arbeit-macht-frei-sign-stolen-1844856.html
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OY to the world (Christmas in Boca)
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'Twas the night before Christmas
and down here in Boca,
I was sitting at Starbucks,
drinking my mocha.
I know we're all Jewish,
but was wondering still,
if Santa would come here
and give us a thrill.
On my way home,
no Christmas lights did I see,
on the houses, the windows,
not even the trees.
What a strange feeling.
Not a decoration in sight.
Was it really December
or a warm summer's night?
I drove past Toojay's,
there were lines out the door.
People were waiting
for kishka and more.
The restaurants were busy,
Christmas dinners not planned.
Never, not here
we're in Boca Land.
At home all was quiet.
I left out Kosher wine,
In case Santa came to Boca
for the very first time.
Snoozing came easy
to me Christmas Eve.
I wasn't waiting for presents
to be left under a tree.
I could hope all I want.
I could fuss and then see,
if Santa would make time
for little old me.
Then all of a sudden
he pulled up in his Jag,
with a sack full of presents
each sporting a tag.
Oh Bloomies, oh Saks
Oh Nieman's and more.
He knows where to shop,
he frequents my stores!
He looked for the lox,
the bagels and deli.
He came to Boca first
to fill up his belly!
"I have a long night ahead,
I want you to know.
From Boca I leave
for New York and the snow."
He stayed for a while,
he chatted and ate.
Then he left in a flash
before it got late.
What a great night
I thought with a sigh.
That jolly old Santa
is a really nice guy.
As I cleared off the table
I heard with delight
"Shalom to you all,
and OY, what a night
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I lived in Boca for two and a half years.
One estimate was it was 70% Jewish.
I've seen Santa at Toojays in the off season.
How do you think he got that belly. :-)
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Buying Lives
Judy Feld Carr's Secret Rescue of Syrian Jews
By Miriam Metzinger
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1027071/jewish/Buying-Lives.htm
Judy Feld Carr with Jews she helped escape from Syria.
For 28 years, Judy Feld Carr not only knew, but also lived, "the best-kept secret in the Jewish world." The Canadian musicologist and mother of six supported her household and raised a family while almost single-handedly rescuing 3,228 Syrian Jews. "There were no typical days," recalls Judy Feld Carr. "This wasn't like the Russian exodus that was done by the world. This was me running the operation at home and in secret." While Judy Feld Carr has received many honors for her work on behalf of Syrian Jewry, including the Order of Canada (the highest award given by the citizens of Canada to an individual), the labor was not easy. "The rescue was very difficult and stressful," she said. "When you are buying somebody's life, it can be horrible."
Syria vented its rage by burning synagogues and forbidding Jews from leaving the countryJudy Feld Carr and her late husband, Dr. Ronald Feld, developed a mutual interest in the plight of Syrian Jewry in the 1970's. An article in the Jerusalem Post about twelve young Jews whose bodies were mutilated when they stepped on a minefield while trying to escape from Qamishli, Syria, captured the sympathy of the couple, and they brainstormed for ways they could help Syrian Jews. Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Syria vented its rage by burning synagogues and forbidding Jews from leaving the country. Restrictions reminiscent of the Nuremberg Laws which ushered in the Holocaust were passed in Syria; Jews were not allowed to travel more then three kilometers without a permit and were forced into ghettos. Business and educational opportunities for Jews were strictly limited, and those who tried to escape were often tortured or killed.
Raising awareness about Syrian Jewry was one thing, "but if you had told me in those days that I would eventually be running a rescue operation, I would have told you that you're mad," said Judy Feld Carr. She made the one and only phone call she ever placed to Syria, a call which began her 28 year journey of international intrigue. She managed to reach the home of a Jew who was in the service of the secret police and he gave them the address of Ibrahim Hamra, the Chief Rabbi of Syria. "To this day, I cannot comprehend why we were allowed to make that first contact," she recalls. "Never again did I make another phone call."
The Feld's sent a pre-paid telegram to Rabbi Hamra and asked if he needed Hebrew books, and received a telegram a week later with a list of titles. They were careful to remove any evidence that the books were printed in Israel, and they removed the first page which contained the name of the publisher; these precautions were necessary, or the books would have been confiscated. Like the Marranos of Spain 500 years earlier, the Feld's and Rabbi Hamra communicated in code using verses of Psalms.
Judy Feld Carr was approached by a friend in Toronto who had returned from Syria and said her brother, a rabbi in Aleppo, was ill with cancer and had been tortured in prison because two of his children had escaped. She was dedicated to the task of getting her brother to Canada, and asked Judy Feld Carr if there was anything she could do. After a year and a half of negotiating prices for the prisoner and facing a myriad of obstacles, the message arrived that Rabbi Eliyahu Dahab was released from prison and sent to Canada for medical care. Judy recalls Rabbi Dahab weeping tears of joy when the nurse said "Baruch Habah," meaning "welcome" in Hebrew. When he was told he would only have a brief time to live, he told Judy Feld Carr of his dream to have coffee with his mother in Jerusalem one last time. He died on Tisha B'Av, a few weeks after the reunion with his mother, but not before making a dying wish that his daughter also be released from Syria.
All they knew was that their way out of Syria was "Mrs. Judy in Canada"Rabbi Dahab's words sparked a cycle of rescues that led to the creation of Judy Feld Carr's underground network, of which only she knew the details. After her young husband died of a heart attack in 1973, Judy's rescues were done solo, and the pressure was often almost unbearable. "I was going to quit almost every second day, but I couldn't, because I had figured out an underground system and I had people depending on me. And all they knew was that their way out of the country was 'Mrs. Judy in Canada.' It was hard, but I had no choice." Judy Feld Carr added, "I never contacted one Jew in Syria. They or their relatives had to find me, and that was difficult because they didn't even know my last name."
Donations for the rescue missions arrived to a synagogue in Toronto, Beth Tzedek Congregation, by word of mouth and covered the expenses of paying for the release of Syrian Jews. When ransoms could not be negotiated, escapes were planned. It is amazing that of the 3,228 individuals Judy Feld Carr helped rescue, there were no casualties. Often this required splitting up families, and parents giving up children. On one occasion she was able to rescue almost an entire family unit; Judy Feld Carr recalls delaying her father's funeral an hour because she had to plan an escape of the mother and six children. "The last day of the mourning period, I got a call – 'Judy, we have them.' It was very difficult to worry the entire week."
To thousands of Syrian Jews who reached safety, their rescuer was known simply as "Mrs. Judy from Canada," a person to whom they owed everything, but didn't expect to meet. A few, however, enjoyed the privilege. Judy Feld Carr and her husband Donald Carr attended an event in a senior home in Bat Yam, Israel. A man named Zaki Shayu spoke about his experiences as a prisoner in Aleppo. He suffered four years of torture during which the authorities had told his mother that he died.
After the speech, Donald Carr asked him, "How did you get out?"
"There was a lady in Canada. Her name was Judy," Zaki replied.
"Do you want to meet her?"
Zaki Shayu's eyes widened in excitement. "Do you know her?" he asked.
"She's sitting right here. She's my wife."
"The whole hall got very emotional," recalls Judy. "It was the most amazing thing. Everyone was crying."
"I put all these flags in the window in case one day she will come"A Toronto antiques dealer went to shop in the old section of Jaffa, Israel and saw a small shop with Canadian flags in the window. Curious, she asked the shopkeeper, "Why do you have Canadian flags here?"
"Maybe you know Mrs. Judy. She arranged my escape. I put all these flags in the window in case one day she will come into my store."
The shopkeeper's wish was granted when Judy Feld Carr visited the shop during a trip to Israel. He gave her an inlaid box which he had made for Judy and been saving for years as a present to express his gratitude.
The last rescue took place an hour before the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. A grueling, yet rewarding, 28 years of rescue missions came to a close. During those moments when the task seemed impossible, Judy remembered a neighbor from her childhood, a woman named Sophie who lost a daughter in Auschwitz. "She told me, 'You can never let this happen again to the Jewish people.' I never forgot those words."
By Miriam Metzinger More articles... |
Miriam Metzinger is a freelance writer and editor who lives in Jerusalem with her husband and 3 children. She also writes a column for "Living Jewish," an English-language publication and is the Jewish Family blogger at Families.com.
The content on this page is copyrighted by the author, publisher and/or Chabad.org, and is produced by Chabad.org. If you enjoyed this article, we encourage you to distribute it further, provided that you comply with the copyright policy.
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February 18, 2010
God Said Multiply, and Did She Ever
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/nyregion/21yitta.html?em=&pagewanted=print
By JOSEPH BERGER
WHEN Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants.
Mrs. Schwartz was a member of the Satmar Hasidic sect, whose couples have nine children on average and whose ranks of descendants can multiply exponentially. But even among Satmars, the size of Mrs. Schwartz’s family is astonishing. A round-faced woman with a high-voltage smile, she may have generated one of the largest clans of any survivor of the Holocaust — a thumb in the eye of the Nazis.
Her descendants range in age from a 75-year-old daughter named Shaindel to a great-great-granddaughter born Feb. 10 named Yitta in honor of Mrs. Schwartz and a great-great-grandson born Feb. 15 who was named Moshe at his circumcision on Monday. Their numbers include rabbis, teachers, merchants, plumbers and truck drivers. But these many apples have not fallen far from the tree: With a few exceptions, like one grandson who lives in England, they mostly live in local Satmar communities, like Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Kiryas Joel, near Monroe, N.Y., where Mrs. Schwartz lived for the last 30 years of her life.
Mrs. Schwartz had a zest for life and a devotion to Hasidic rituals, faithfully attending the circumcisions, first haircuts, bar mitzvahs, engagements and weddings of her descendants. With 2,000 people in the family, such events occupied much of the year.
Whatever the occasion, she would pack a small suitcase and thumb a ride from her apartment in Kiryas Joel to Williamsburg or elsewhere.
“She would appear like the Prophet Elijah,” said one of her daughters, Nechuma Mayer, who at 64 is her sixth-oldest living child, and who has 16 children and more than 100 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. “Everybody was fighting over her!”
There were so many occasions that, to avoid scheduling conflicts, one of her sons was assigned to keep a family calendar. But her family insists that Mrs. Schwartz had no trouble remembering everyone’s name and face.
Like many Hasidim, Mrs. Schwartz considered bearing children as her tribute to God. A son-in-law, Rabbi Menashe Mayer, a lushly bearded scholar, said she took literally the scriptural command that “You should not forget what you saw and heard at Mount Sinai and tell it to your grandchildren.”
“And she wanted to do that,” he said, without needing to add her belief that the more grandchildren, the more the commandment is fulfilled. Mrs. Schwartz gave birth 18 times, but lost two children in the Holocaust and one in a summer camp accident here.
She was born in 1916 into a family of seven children in the Hungarian village of Kalev, revered as the hometown of a founder of Hungarian Hasidism. During World War II, the Nazis sent Mrs. Schwartz, her husband, Joseph, and the six children they had at the time to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
At the shiva last month, another Bergen-Belsen survivor recalled her own mother dying at the camp; Mrs. Schwartz took it upon herself to prepare the body according to Jewish ritual, dig a grave and bury the woman.
“For her it was a matter of necessity,” Nechuma Mayer said of her mother’s actions.
When the war ended, the family made its way to Antwerp, Belgium. There, Mrs. Schwartz put up refugees in makeshift beds in her own bombed-out apartment.
In 1953, the Schwartzes migrated to the United States, settling into the Satmar community in Williamsburg. She arrived with 11 children — Shaindel, Chana, Dinah, Yitschok, Shamshon, Nechuma, Nachum, Nechemia, Hadassah, Mindel and Bella — and proceeded to have five more: Israel, Joel, Aron, Sarah and Chaim Shloime, who died in summer camp at age 8. Sarah came along after Mrs. Schwartz had already married off two other daughters.
While her husband sold furniture on Lee Avenue, Williamsburg’s commercial spine, Mrs. Schwartz, who never learned English well, tended the family. She sewed her daughters’ jumpers with mother-of-pearl buttons and splurged for pink-and-white blouses — 20 for 99 cents each — at that late lamented discount emporium on Union Square, S. Klein.
With so many children, Mrs. Schwartz had to make six loaves of challah for every Sabbath, using 12 pounds of dough — in later years, she was aided by Kitchenaid or Hobart appliances. (Mrs. Mayer said her mother had weaknesses for modern conveniences, and for elegant head scarves.) For her children’s weddings, Mrs. Schwartz starched the tablecloths and baked the chocolate babkas and napoleons.
After her husband died 34 years ago, relatives said, Mrs. Schwartz never burdened others with her new solitude.
“We didn’t feel even one minute that she was a widow,” Mrs. Mayer said. “She used to say, ‘When there are so many problems in life, I should put myself on the scale?’ ”
Mrs. Schwartz did not want her children to collect photographs of her and, given that modesty, her family was reluctant to provide more than one to accompany this article. “Just keep me in your heart,” she used to say. “If you leave a child or grandchild, you live forever.”
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Looks like we are going to need more Yitta Schwartzes:
Jews leave Swedish city after sharp rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes
Sweden's reputation as a tolerant, liberal nation is being threatened by a steep rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes in the city of Malmo.
By Nick Meo in Malmo, Sweden
Published: 7:30AM GMT 21 Feb 2010
When she first arrived in Sweden after her rescue from a Nazi concentration camp, Judith Popinski was treated with great kindness.
She raised a family in the city of Malmo, and for the next six decades lived happily in her adopted homeland - until last year.
In 2009, a chapel serving the city's 700-strong Jewish community was set ablaze. Jewish cemeteries were repeatedly desecrated, worshippers were abused on their way home from prayer, and "Hitler" was mockingly chanted in the streets by masked men.
"I never thought I would see this hatred again in my lifetime, not in Sweden anyway," Mrs Popinski told The Sunday Telegraph.
"This new hatred comes from Muslim immigrants. The Jewish people are afraid now."
Malmo's Jews, however, do not just point the finger at bigoted Muslims and their fellow racists in the country's Neo-Nazi fringe. They also accuse Ilmar Reepalu, the Left-wing mayor who has been in power for 15 years, of failing to protect them.
Mr Reepalu, who is blamed for lax policing, is at the centre of a growing controversy for saying that what the Jews perceive as naked anti-Semitism is in fact just a sad, but understandable consequence of Israeli policy in the Middle East.
While his views are far from unusual on the European liberal-left, which is often accused of a pro-Palestinian bias, his Jewish critics say they encourage young Muslim hotheads to abuse and harass them.
The future looks so bleak that by one estimate, around 30 Jewish families have already left for Stockholm, England or Israel, and more are preparing to go.
With its young people planning new lives elsewhere, the remaining Jewish households, many of whom are made up of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, fear they will soon be gone altogether. Mrs Popinski, an 86-year-old widow, said she has even encountered hostility when invited to talk about the Holocaust in schools.
"Muslim schoolchildren often ignore me now when I talk about my experiences in the camps," she said. "It is because of what their parents tell them about Jews. The hatreds of the Middle East have come to Malmo. Schools in Muslim areas of the city simply won't invite Holocaust survivors to speak any more."
Hate crimes, mainly directed against Jews, doubled last year with Malmo's police recording 79 incidents and admitting that far more probably went unreported. As of yet, no direct attacks on people have been recorded but many Jews believe it is only a matter of time in the current climate.
The city's synagogue has guards and rocket-proof glass in the windows, while the Jewish kindergarten can only be reached through thick steel security doors.
It is a far cry from the city Mrs Popinski arrived in 65 years ago, half-dead from starvation and typhus.
At Auschwitz she had been separated from her Polish family, all of whom were murdered. She escaped the gas chambers after being sent as a slave labourer. Then she was moved to a womens' concentration camp, Ravensbrück, from where she was then evacuated in a release deal negotiated between the Swedish Red Cross and senior Nazis, who were by then trying to save their own lives.
After the war, just as liberal Sweden took in Jews who survived the Holocaust as a humanitarian act, it also took in new waves of refugees from tyranny and conflicts in the Middle East. Muslims are now estimated to make up about a fifth of Malmo's population of nearly 300,000.
"This new hatred from a group 40,000-strong is focused on a small group of Jews," Mrs Popinski said, speaking in a sitting room filled with paintings and Persian carpets.
"Some Swedish politicians are letting them do it, including the mayor. Of course the Muslims have more votes than the Jews."
The worst incident was last year during Israel's brief war in Gaza, when a small demonstration in favour of Israel was attacked by a screaming mob of Arabs and Swedish leftists, who threw bottles and firecrackers as the police looked on.
"I haven't seen hatred like that for decades," Mrs Popinski said. "It reminded me of what I saw in my youth. Jews feel vulnerable here now."
The problem is becoming an embarrassment for the Social Democrats, the mayor's party.
Their national leader Mona Sahlin - the woman who is likely to become the next prime minister after an election later this year - last week travelled to Malmo to meet Jewish leaders, which they took to be a sign that at last politicians are waking to their plight. After the meeting, the mayor, Mr Reepalu, also promised to meet them.
A former architect, he has been credited with revitalising Malmo from a half-derelict shipbuilding centre into a vibrant, prosperous city with successful IT and biotech sectors.
His city was - until recently at least - a shining multicultural success story, and has taken in proportionally more refugees than anywhere else in Sweden, a record of which it is proud.
Sweden has had a long record of offering a safe haven to Jews, the first of whom arrived from the east in the mid-nineteenth century. Today the Jewish population is about 18,000 nationally, with around 3000 in southern Sweden.
The mayor insisted to The Sunday Telegraph that he was opposed to anti-Semitism, but added: "I believe these are anti-Israel attacks, connected to the war in Gaza.
"We want Malmo to be cosmopolitan and safe for everybody and we have taken action. I have started a dialogue forum. There haven't been any attacks on Jewish people, and if Jews from the city want to move to Israel that is not a matter for Malmo."
Sweden has had a long record of offering a safe haven to Jews, the first of whom arrived from the east in the mid-nineteenth century. Today the Jewish population is about 18,000 nationally, with around 3000 in southern Sweden.
“Jews came to Sweden to get away from persecution, and now they find it is no longer a safe haven,” said Rabbi Shneur Kesselman, 31. “That is a horrible feeling.”
One who has had enough is Marcus Eilenberg, a 32-year-old Malmo-born lawyer, who is moving to Israel in April with his young family.
"Malmo has really changed in the past year," he said. "I am optimistic by nature, but I have no faith in a future here for my children. There is definitely a threat.
"It started during the Gaza war when Jewish demonstrators were attacked. It was a horrible feeling, being attacked in your own city. Just as bad was the realisation that we were not being protected by our own leaders."
Mr Eilenberg said he and his wife considered moving to Stockholm where Jews feel safer than in Malmo. "But we decided not to because in five years time I think it will be just as bad there," he said.
"This is happening all over Europe. I have cousins who are leaving their homes in Amsterdam and France for the same reason as me."
Malmo's Jews are not the only ones to suffer hate crimes.
At the city's Islamic Centre, the director Bejzat Becirov pointed out a bullet hole in the window behind the main reception desk.
Mr Becirov, who arrived in 1962 from the former Yugoslavia, said that windows were regularly smashed, pig's heads had been left outside the mosque, and outbuildings burnt down - probably the acts of Neo-Nazis who have also baited Jews in the past.
He said that the harassment of Jews by some young Muslims was "embarrassing" to his community. Many of them are unemployed and confined to life on bleak estates where the Scandinavian dream of prosperity and equality seemed far away.
For many of Malmo's white Swedish population, meanwhile, the racial problems are bewildering after years of liberal immigration policies.
"I first encountered race hatred when I was an au pair in England and I was shocked," said Mrs Popinski's friend Ulla-Lena Cavling, 72, a retired teacher.
"I thought 'this couldn't happen in Sweden'. Now I know otherwise."
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This is what happens to any group that is used for political expediency by socialist, it's not just Jews. As soon as Dem's get elected they turn their backs on gays, environmental groups and blacks and pit one group against another to created a smoke screen to cover their failings. Jews are a politically expedient, easy target and have been used in this manner by the likes of Hitler and others that have a political ideology that sees people as cattle, to be herded and tended to like animals. These grand political ideas always end in the deaths and poor treatment of millions of a state's own citizens.
P.C.
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PC:
We agree on most things, but here I think you wide of the mark.
This is a far different matter than not delivering for a support group after election. This is cowardice in the face of Muslim intimidation and bigotry, plain and simple.
"The mayor insisted to The Sunday Telegraph that he was opposed to anti-Semitism, but added: "I believe these are anti-Israel attacks, connected to the war in Gaza."
Why is attacking Jews in Sweden an "anti-Israel" attack?!? :x :x :x
"and "Hitler" was mockingly chanted in the streets by masked men. , , , "This new hatred comes from Muslim immigrants. The Jewish people are afraid now." Malmo's Jews, however, do not just point the finger at bigoted Muslims and their fellow racists in the country's Neo-Nazi fringe. They also accuse Ilmar Reepalu, the Left-wing mayor who has been in power for 15 years, of failing to protect them. Mr Reepalu, who is blamed for lax policing, is at the centre of a growing controversy for saying that what the Jews perceive as naked anti-Semitism is in fact just a sad, but understandable consequence of Israeli policy in the Middle East. While his views are far from unusual on the European liberal-left, which is often accused of a pro-Palestinian bias, his Jewish critics say they encourage young Muslim hotheads to abuse and harass them."
Exactly so.
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Woof Guro Craftydog,
It may be that I am wide the mark or you could be short my point. :lol: My point wasn't that Muslims don't hate Jews, my point was that politicians, like the left-wing mayor, uses that hate as a tool for their own political reasons and that they do that with any group. Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler took it to the extreme but it starts with pitting one group against the other for political gain. Is using gay issues to gain votes and then dropping them at the same level? No, but can it foment hatred between rival groups and then that hate be used as an even more powerful political tool? Yes. It's got to start somewhere and left unchecked it can and has and will turn into genocide.
P.C.
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I suspect we will just go in circles in this one and leave it simply by noting that Europe's Euro population is declining and that in order to try to maintain the euro-socialist economic model they need immigration. In their case this means Turks and Arabs-- which of course are both overwhelmingly Muslim. Not only does the widespread and deep anti-semitism of these two groups find easy reasonance with the still existing anti-semitism centuries-old and continent-wide anti-semitism of Europe, but the simple fact is that just like Mussolini's brown shirts in the streets intimidated people in Italy here too the good people of Europe are being intimidated. Cowardice is being exhibited by more than a few. Once again Jews are being driven from their homes.
Last word yours.
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Woof,
I think we both agree that Europe is in trouble, Jews are going to bear the brunt of it and if things continue in this manner history could repeat itself.
P.C.
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Agreed!
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7 Questions: Unsung Hero
by Jenny Hazan
http://www.aish.com/print/?contentID=86339857§ion=/jw/s
Defying U.S. policy, Harry Bingham IV saved thousands of Jews fleeing the Nazis with fraudulent visas.
An American Vice-Consul stationed in Marseilles, France in 1940, Hiram (Harry) Bingham IV defied U.S. policy and issued false life-saving visas for thousands of Jews fleeing the Nazis, among them Marc Chagall, Max Ernst and the family of the writer Thomas Mann.
Even after Washington lost patience with him and shuffled him off to Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1941, Bingham continued to annoy his superiors by reporting on the movements of Nazis there. Eventually, he was forced out of the American diplomatic service.
Because he went against U.S. policy, he never received national credit, and because he was a man of action and not of words, his story went with him when he died in 1988. That is until his son, Robert Kim Bingham Sr., 67, discovered some of his father’s documents hidden in the family farmhouse in Salem, Connecticut, and embarked on a journey to bring his father’s heroic story to light.
(http://articles.aish.com.s3.amazonaws.com/HBIV_StampDesign.gif)
Q1: Describe the drama of discovering your father’s documents.
In 1996, eight years after my father’s death, my mom, a few of my 10 siblings and I started finding documents at the farmhouse in Salem. There were letters, visa papers, and photos from my father’s time in Marseilles. Until then, our family was aware that he had a hand in the rescue of a handful of luminaries, but we had no idea of the scope of his activity, that he was sought out by thousands of people who went to him for their one last chance to live.
We found out that in addition to issuing false visas, he sheltered Jews in his home in Marseilles and worked with the French underground to smuggle Jews out of France into Spain, or across the Mediterranean. He even contributed to their expenses out of his own pocket. I have heard estimates that he saved anywhere from 2,500 to 5,000 people.
About five years ago, we found a letter to him from Leon Feuchtwanger, an anti-Nazi writer, thanking my father for hiding him and his wife Marta in my father’s residence for some six weeks while my father prepared a false visa for him under the name of ‘Wet Cheek’. Feuchtwanger had written the letter while on board the Excalibur, heading to New York City, and signed it ‘Mr. Wet Cheek’.
Read Related Article: Seven Questions: The Noachide
My mother and brother, Thomas, sent some of the Marseilles documents to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and to Eric Saul, curator of the Visas for Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats Project and the Jewish Rescuers Project, who should really be credited with bringing my father’s story to life.
Q2: How did the remembrance project get started?
In 1998 I went to Israel, on the 50th anniversary of the country, as part of a mission of diplomat children. I was very moved when I saw the exhibit at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. My father had been singled out for special honor. It was the first time I was really struck by what he had done.
There were many people who were so grateful to him for what he did during the early days of the nightmare of the Holocaust, and many people stepped forward to tell me so. We heard wonderful stories in different parts of the country of righteous gentiles, and it was as though it was my father’s turn to be recognized. That trip to Israel is what triggered my whole incentive to go forward with the remembrance project.
Q3: What is the remembrance project?
The unveiling of postage stamps in honor of righteous diplomats at Yad Vashem gave me the idea to petition our own government to issue a stamp in honor of my father. I started a stamp drive in December, 1998, and in May, 2006, a stamp in honor of Harry Bingham IV was finally minted.
Forty representatives of government and 40 U.S. senators forwarded their support for the stamp to the Postmaster General. We had the entire legislature of Connecticut supporting the drive. It was a thrilling bipartisan experience for me.
My book, Courageous Dissent: How Harry Bingham Defied His Government to Save Lives (2007) was part of the same effort.
Q4: What is your primary drive behind all of this?
For over 50 years, the U.S. State Department resisted any attempts to honor my father. To them, he was an insubordinate member of the U.S. diplomatic service.
At the same time, my father didn’t reveal any details. It was typical of diplomatic families that we traveled with that the fathers did not bring to light their activities to their children. I guess because it was such a terrible period and the memories must have been overwhelmingly negative, perhaps because of those they could not rescue.
Our family thought he deserved to be honored; he put humanity above his career.
For me personally, as a former government employee in the U.S. -- I retired in July after 41 years of service as Inside Counsel to the Department of Homeland Security -- it impressed upon me what my father had done.
Read Related Article: Seven Questions: From Phishhead to Israeli Army
Q5: What drove your father to take such risks?
He came from a long and illustrious line of risk-takers. His father, Hiram Bingham III -- on whom the Hollywood character Indiana Jones is based -- discovered the ruins of the Inca city of Machu Picchu, Peru in 1911.
My father was a deeply religious man who saw his role as saving lives during that nightmare. He felt tremendous compassion for human beings and that each person had a spark of divinity.
Jacques Bodner's visa issued by Hiram Bingham IV on Feb. 27, 1940
Q6: What is one of your fondest memories of your father?
He taught all of his 11 children that we should live according to the golden rule. One instance that made a deep impression on me goes way back to when I was six years old. We used to go to the beach in Connecticut, near an amusement park called Ocean Beach.
We were walking along the sand and snuck into the park without paying the three-cent ‘pedestrian fee’. When he found out he was very angry with us. It’s one of many examples of my father’s deep moral fiber.
Of course I loved my father. He was a wonderful father and we all adored him.
Q7: Is your father finally getting the recognition he deserves?
Besides the stamp, the State Department made a 180-degree turn in 2002 and Colin Powell invited our family to Washington to present us with a posthumous ‘Constructive Dissent’ award in my father’s honor. I was happy about that. He has also been honored by the United Nations and by the State of Israel. Yad Vashem opened an exhibit in his honor called ‘Harry’s Wall’.
But more than these things are the people who continue to come forward and tell us that our father saved their family. During the stamp drive, one 85-year-old lady told us that she and her sister were just teens when they got visas from my father.
Last October, one of my daughter's professors at Harvard, the Dean of the Literature College, originally from Austria, told her that her grandfather had saved his family. The two of them cried together. It is very emotional. He is alive today because of my father. When we hear these stories, it comes very close to home.
This article can also be read at: http://www.aish.com/jw/s/86339857.html
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http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2009/winter/a-jew-in-prison
A Jew in Prison
A Reflection on Anti-Semitism on the Yard
David Arenberg had everything going for him. He was smart, the son of a research scientist and a teacher. He graduated in 1980 from the elite University of Chicago with a degree in psychology, and went on to become a left-wing tenants' rights organizer in New York City for seven years. But in 1987, he suffered a "personal tragedy" and a "political defeat" that he doesn't want to discuss but that prompted him to leave his organizing work. Always a moderate drug user, he says, he began abusing cocaine and "generally living a seedy life." His brother tried to rescue him by recruiting him to run a small trucking company in a western state, and for a time Arenberg did all right. But despite that work, and later taking up tenants' rights once more, he continued his drug use and also adopted a new line of work — using computers to engage in sophisticated financial ripoffs. Arenberg was arrested and jailed briefly for forgery in 1996, but only became an even more active con man when he was released. Finally, in 2001, he was arrested for driving under the influence. The arrest led to more serious charges of fraud, forgery, identity theft and vehicle theft, culminating in consecutive sentences totaling more than 13 years. Today, with about four years left to serve, Arenberg, 53, is trying to sort his life out. He sent the Intelligence Report the following account of his experiences as a Jew in a state prison — a harrowing tale of surviving severe prejudice in an unforgiving environment, but also the story of a remarkable journey of self-discovery.
I am always the last person to eat. It's part of a compromise I worked out with the skinheads who run the western state prison complex where I am incarcerated. Under this compromise, I'm allowed to sit at the whites' tables, but only after the "heads," and then the "woods," and then the "lames" have eaten. I am lower on the totem pole than all of them, the untouchable. I should feel lucky I'm allowed to eat at the whites' tables at all.
Not that there's anywhere else I could eat. The prison yard is broken down into five distinct racial categories and segregation is strictly enforced. There are the "woods" (short for peckerwoods) that encompass the whites, the "kinfolk" (blacks), the "Raza" (American-born people of Mexican descent), the "paisas" (Mexico-born Mexicans), and the "chiefs" (American Indians). Under the strict rules that govern interracial relations, different races are allowed to play on the same sports teams but not play individual games (e.g., chess) together; they may be in each others' cubicles together if the situation warrants but not sit on each others' beds or watch each others' televisions. They may go to the same church services but not pray together. But if you accidentally break one of these rules, the consequences are usually pretty mild: you might get a talking to by one of the heads (who, of course, claims exemption from this rule himself), or at worst, a "chin check."
Eating with another race, however, is a different story. It is an inviolate rule that different races may not break bread together under any circumstances. Violating this rule leads to harsh consequences. If you eat at the same table as another race, you'll get beaten down. If you eat from the same tray as another race, you'll be put in the hospital. And if you eat from the same food item as another race, that is, after another race has already taken a bite of it, you can get killed. This is one area where even the heads don't have any play.
This makes it difficult for me, of course, to fit into the chow hall. Jews, as we all know, are not white but imposters who don white skin and hide inside it for the purpose of polluting and taking over the white race. The skinheads simply can't allow me to eat with them: that would make them traitors of the worst kind — race traitors! But my milky skin and pasty complexion, characteristic of the Eastern European Ashkenazi, make it impossible for me to eat with other races who don't understand the subtleties of my treachery and take me for just another wood. So the compromise is that I may sit at certain white tables after all the whites have finished eating. In exchange, I must do free legal work as directed by the heads (Jewish lawyers, even jailhouse lawyers, are hard to come by in prison) and remit to them a portion of the legal fees I collect from everyone else I do legal work for on the yard.
This compromise was brokered by the more "mainstream" Nazis on the yard, the Aryan Brotherhood. They became involved because when I first got here, one of the first cases I handled resulted in my getting a 21-year sentence for one of their members vacated. This gave me instant credibility: even if a "hands-off-the-Jew" policy could not be established, a "hands-off-the-Jewish-lawyer" policy could be and was. It was this factor, I think, more than any other, that has kept me safe here.
The Aryan Brotherhood (AB) is the political rival of the skinheads. They are the old guard, the white leadership that has run the yards for years. They control the drug markets, the poker tables, the tattoo shops. Their membership consists mostly of long-term inmates who have been on the yards for 15, 20, 25 years. Their average age is probably well over 40. By contrast, the skinheads have a much younger membership (albeit also with long-term sentences) that is rapidly advancing upon AB turf. So the AB's "defense" of me has a political component as well: I am the enemy of their enemy and therefore their friend. The AB understands that I provide a service they can exploit. But they also perceive the skinheads' hatred of me and realize they can use championing my cause to their advantage. So they allow me to stay on the yard, taking credit for my providing legal work and inadvertently discrediting the anti-Semitism of the skinheads in the process.
This was all allowed to happen because the AB, notwithstanding the swastikas, lightning bolts and KKK hoods tattooed on their arms and their vile racist rhetoric, are not fundamentally ideological. Their racism derives primarily from economic considerations: by enjoining the different races from trading with each other, they enforce their share of the highly lucrative drug market. The price of drugs on the yards is 10 times higher than it is on the street, and the AB is the largest single supplier, with drugs smuggled in not only by would-be recruits trying to "earn their ink" by getting their girlfriends to hide them in their body cavities when they come to visit, but by guards who are in their employ (and sometimes in their membership) as well. The Raza's drugs may be cheaper and better, but because of the segregation, they are not available to the woods.
The skinheads, by contrast, claim to be fundamentally ideological. They exist as a political entity dedicated, they say, to organizing to fight the big war, the race war, which will reassert white political dominance in the world. They therefore take the public position that they do not approve of drugs, and they try to foster the image that they are serious warriors, that they keep their minds clean and spirits pure by reading Nietzsche and Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, and that their bodies are highly trained fighting machines that will kill the enemy without a second thought. Every afternoon you can see them marching around the yard in locked step, their polished boots gleaming in the baking sun, with "SKINHEAD" tattooed on their foreheads and "SHAVED FOR WAR" carved on the backs of their skulls and encircling swastikas made up of interlocking axe handles. I used to wonder why skinheads made such a fuss over insisting that whites fold their clothes in a specific way and display them on their shelves. The party line is that we do this because other races look to us as setting the standard, and it is therefore our burden to do so. But I finally figured out the real reason: the skinheads want the whites to appear totally disciplined, a tight fighting unit ready to spring into war at the drop of a hat. Uniforms that are folded and pressed maintain this posture.
The skinheads are so ridiculous, both in the way they present themselves and in their social views, that it is easy to caricature and dismiss them. But that would be a mistake. The skinheads are the fastest growing segment of the prison population. If at one time they were a fringe group within prison, that is no longer the case.
I grew up in a Chicago suburb, Evanston, Ill., next door to Skokie, the infamous site of an attempted march by Nazis in the late 1970s through a city with a large Jewish population, including a high number of concentration camp survivors. Because Evanston and Skokie shared a high school, I knew many of these survivors, whose children were friends of mine. When the Nazis threatened to march, these were the people who were prepared to take their places on the front lines, baseball bats in hand, ready to meet the fascists. There is no question in my mind that the Nazis ultimately backed down at the last minute not because they were put off by the Skokie City Council when it hastily enacted an ordinance preventing the march, nor because the Anti-Defamation League made the Nazis "irrelevant" by advising people to ignore them, nor because the ACLU helped the Nazis "make their point" that free speech is allowed and this made the march moot. Rather, it was because they were afraid of the Jewish and other anti-fascist demonstrators who organized against them and made it clear that they were going to offer armed resistance. The Nazis knew that if they came to Skokie, no amount of police protection could keep them safe.
This was the climate I grew up in. My parents were left-liberals, one-time fellow travelers of the Communist Party who had become more conservative over the years but in whom political activism, especially against fascism, was instinctual. And it was one of their guiding principles that there is no debating with fascists. Fascists are not interested in ideas but in political power. So every time the Nazis did publicly organize since then, I was there to oppose them, not with the force of my intellect but with the strength of my fists.
But despite my lifelong opposition to Nazis, this opposition stemmed from political, not religious, considerations. I grew up with essentially no identity as a Jew. My father, while of German-Jewish origins (and a World War II vet), was a stone atheist and a scientist, and my mother, while being a little fuzzy on the God question, sided with my father in not providing my brother and me with any religious training. I did not attend shul on the high holidays or go to Hebrew school. Instead, I went to socialist summer camp where I was taught that the most important spiritual value is "thou shalt never cross a picket line."
Nor did the neighborhood I grew up in or the schools I went to do anything to confer a sense of Jewish identity on me. Although Evanston was not as heavily Jewish as Skokie, my neighborhood was at least a third Jewish and the high school even more so. But being immersed in a heavily Jewish environment did not have the effect of enhancing my identity as a Jew; if anything, it made being Jewish taken for granted and therefore largely irrelevant. Jews were everywhere and represented all perspectives. We were jocks and nerds, boozers and freaks, businessmen and scientists, Republicans and radicals. Our Jewishness was not a common denominator to us (because it was too common a denominator) and therefore being Jewish was no big deal.
Similarly, when I moved to New York City after college, I lived in a heavily Jewish city in which I was part of the majority. If it was something of a thrill to be living in a city where everything shut down on Yom Kippur, the main identity I felt as a Jew was no identity: being Jewish was as common and therefore as taken for granted as finding a taxicab on Fifth Avenue.
I suppose this paradoxical lack of a Jewish identity in people who live in an overwhelmingly Jewish environment is characteristic only of those for whom the environment is a privileged one. When Jews living together is a feature of their oppression rather than privilege, such as in the case of those who were forced to live in the shtetls of Russia or in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, Jewish identity becomes something that is not shunned but clung to. The practice of Judaism now becomes a raison d'etre, a thing which gives life meaning. If you are oppressed because of your race, religion or national origin, you seize that heritage as something bigger than yourself to give you the will to go on.
When I went to prison, it was the first time in my life that I really stood out as a Jew. Jews are virtually unheard of in the state prison system, and if going to prison was a cultural shock and eye-opening experience for me, meeting a Jew was a cultural shock and eye-opening experience for a good number of young men on the yard, some of whom had never traveled more than 50 miles from their backwoods homes. I suppose it should not have come as a surprise to me, then, that anti-Semitism would be so rampant. Nevertheless, I was shocked by the blatant hatred (and misperceptions) of Jews. All the old stereotypes — of Jews being stingy, greedy and dishonest, of Jews controlling the world's money supply, of Jews running the entertainment industry and establishing the cultural standards of the world (thus allowing the proliferation of homosexuality and interracial relationships); in short, all the old stereotypes about Jews which I never really believed existed — were in full force and effect on the yard. I have been able to remain safe, but only because I reached an accommodation with my Nazi tormentors limiting my presence and activities on the yard. But the bottom line is, I am, and will remain, a pariah.
Thus, it was precisely my own oppression by skinheads and others when I went to prison that has caused me to discover a Jewish identity and has allowed me to come into my own as a Jew. I had dealt with Nazis before, as I mentioned above, but only in the aggregate, when I was part of a large force opposing a clearly unwelcome and alien presence. But on the prison yards, if Nazis are not in the mainstream, certainly hatred of Jews is taken for granted. And for most of the time I have been in prison I have been the only Jew here. As a result, the isolation and extreme prejudice against Jews here has finally forced me to consider myself to be, for the first time in my life, fundamentally a Jew; that is, I am a Jew before I am a socialist, an activist, a lawyer, a convict or a musician.
When I first came to jail, I tried to hide my Judaism. I even thought about changing my name so it would sound less Jewish. Not any more! The oppression I suffered, the alienation and loneliness I felt, and the spiritual thirst that is starting to be quenched, have caused me to finally come into my own. I am a Jew! And this has become my fundamental defeat of the Nazis. Because I have finally come to this bone-deep understanding, I will walk out of the prison gates as a changed man, a man who has returned to the mark after having strayed for so many years. I will have finally come home.
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Wow, who knew neo-nazi prison gangs would be anti-semetic? :roll:
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He was a lefty-liberal-progressive. :roll:
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With a drug problem. Which is also pretty redundant.
Funny enough, today's racially segregated prison came out of the 60's/70s racial militants.
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despite the gagging caused the URL- about the only point I got from that article is that Racism breeds more racists, and pushing on someone because of his percieved heritage can radicalize him into such a creature. Balance seems to be what is desired by the universe, so action against provokes action against to maintain a balance. A person identifying as a socialist has statrted identifying as a jew due to the environment he is in............ {eybrow} interesting {/eyebrow}
He has managed to cope, but what is his point?
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It is not so much "his" point that I posted the piece for as for the reflections in us readers that it triggers.
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If I recall correctly, the Aryan Brotherhood was originally the "Diamond Tooth" gang, and then the "Bluebird" gang before taking on overt nazi symbolism. The gang originated in the CA. prison system as a reaction to white inmates being targeted by black and hispanic inmates. Some AB OGs can be identified by the bluebird tattoo.
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I am not sure what thread this would go under. It could be immigration (legal and Jewish), anti semitism (to a small extent), Israel, etc.
I saw one episode last night of a three part documentary of Jews in America. For those with an interest one get see the broadcast schedule here.
http://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/about/watch.html
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A Hatred That Resists Exorcism
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: July 5, 2010
Is there anything left to be said about anti-Semitism? By now surely the outline is clear: how hatred of Jews grew out of early Christianity’s attempts to supplant Judaism; how the demonization of Jews in the Middle Ages turned violent; how the hatred was given its name by a 19th-century German journalist; and how it reached cataclysmic fulfillment in the Holocaust.
Enlarge This Image
Special Collection and Rare Books/Mu Libraries, University of Missouri
A George Cruikshank illustration of Fagin for “Oliver Twist.”
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Al-Dustour, Jordan
“The Blood of a Palestinian Child, a Gift for Mother’s Day,” a 1994 cartoon in a Jordanian newspaper.
There are other landmarks: the expulsion of the Jews from England, Spain and Portugal; intermittent massacres in Muslim lands; the construction of European ghettos; the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe; the Dreyfus Affair; the Nazification of Europe; Stalin’s purges and show trials.
And then, of course, there are the triumphs that act as a kind of remonstrance: the Enlightenment success of Jews in secular European societies, the myriad opportunities in the United States, the birth of modern Hebrew and, after a half-century of settlement, land purchases and institution building, the creation of Israel, whose founding principles incorporated both democratic and Judaic ideals.
Why then during the last six months have new tomes been published devoted to the hatred of Jews? “A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism From Antiquity to the Global Jihad” (Random House) weighs in at about 1,200 pages, a compendium of a career’s research by Robert S. Wistrich, professor of modern Jewish history at Hebrew University in Israel. And more than 800 pages are devoted just to British anti-Semitic history in “Trials of the Diaspora” (Oxford) by Anthony Julius, a learned British lawyer whose clients included Diana, Princess of Wales, and whose book on T.S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism was widely praised for its supple understanding.
Surely this attention is a bit overwrought? Aren’t we in an age that must be “post” all such sentiments — postmodern, post-Auschwitz and post-anti-Semitic? Haven’t many anti-Semitic doctrines (or their consequences) been largely overturned? How many people today would advocate ghettos or extermination? Who still believes that Jews bake Christian children’s blood into matzo? Many countries have forbidden hate speech; hasn’t that enforced a decorous social tact? And while it is difficult to ignore the vulgar hatreds expressed by Muslim protestors or in the newspapers of the Arab world or even among Westerners, aren’t those just frustrated expressions of justifiable political grievances?
Besides, anti-Semitism, we now understand, is a form of racism. Like all forms of group hatred, it is subject to reform and to the modern cure of sensitivity training. We learn about such hatreds in order to exorcise them. It seems every museum exhibition, textbook and children’s story about racism provides a similar moral prescription: tolerance.
So isn’t there something a little tasteless about bringing up anti-Semitism all the time, let alone drumming its theme page after page? Sure, racism may still flourish, but given the modern success of Jews, hasn’t this particular form of it become an anomaly? Or worse, hasn’t the term become a manipulative attempt to deflect judgment? As is often pointed out, criticism of Israel is not necessarily anti-Semitic any more than criticism of any particular Jew is.
But spend some time submerged in these books — by no means a pleasant or an easy task — and these notions recede into irrelevance. Mr. Wistrich’s volume presents itself as an encyclopedic history, and is so full of details and citations, it overwhelms. We hear from a 17th-century Viennese preacher (“After Satan Christians have no greater enemies than the Jews”), Karl Marx (“What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money”) and the Hezbollah secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah (“If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew”).
Mr. Wistrich offers less a history, though, than a contemporary indictment with historical background. This makes his book difficult to read. Its approach is one of cumulative examples culminating in jihadists and their apologists. Its rosterlike style can become tedious but the examples are powerfully dispiriting.
“Trials of the Diaspora” has a similar effect, though Mr. Julius is more focused and analytical, dissecting types of enmity, the nature of anti-Semitic myth and its influence on the greatest examples of English literature. From his analysis, we begin to see too just how different anti-Semitism is from other forms of racism.
Racism attaches negative attributes onto people bearing a particular biological heritage. Such characteristics are passed on; they are inherited. The hatred is focused; the perceived threat can be excised. In a way, racism is a materialist or physical passion: the problem and the solution are concrete.
While anti-Semitism has tapped into racial hatreds in modern times, Mr. Julius and Mr. Wistrich highlight its traditional reliance on conspiracy: the hidden plot. Anti-Semitism isn’t just a matter of asserting unpleasant or reprehensible attributes. It sees the Jew as an antinomian threat, overturning all ethical laws. The Jew works in secret, creating invisible alliances, pulling elaborate strings, undermining society’s foundations. This is why the Protocols of the Elders of Zion has found such a fertile international ground. That 19th-century document purports to be the secret minutes of such a plotting ensemble of Jews. It is the counterfeit confirmation of a long-held belief.
Anti-Semitism is a metaphysical passion, not a materialist one. It doesn’t even require a Jewish presence.
One reason anti-Semites have been so obsessed with the issue of finance in the modern world is that money is the circulatory system of capitalist society. It is mysterious, manipulable: the Jew’s perfect instrument. The Jew, first seen as a theological spoiler, becomes a metaphysical and monetary spoiler. The medieval image of the Jew was related to the vampire, Mr. Julius shows; the modern anti-Semitic vision sees the Jew as a guzzler of a society’s lifeblood.
This amplifies virulence as well: the Jew, for the anti-Semite, is not just a danger, but the greatest danger exerting the greatest powers. In current paradoxical parlance, the Jew is, in essence, a Nazi. The Jew does not just devour a Christian child’s blood, but the blood of all innocent children, and more completely, the blood of all innocents.
Is any evidence needed? Appearances are irrelevant; argument is illusion. What use is visible fact when the power of the Jew is in the web woven below the surface? Jewish autonomy is itself evidence of Jewish threat. Moreover, confrontation requires courage. Anti-Semitism never sees itself as a hatred; it views itself as a revelation. An attack on the Jew is never offensive; it is always defensive. This is precisely how the Nazis portrayed it. It is precisely how Islamist ideology does as well, evident, for example, in the principles and founding documents of Hamas and Hezbollah.
In a recent book, “Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World” (Yale), the historian Jeffrey Herf shows how Nazi propagandists literally taught Arab audiences the language of anti-Semitism through popular radio programs in Arabic. Nazi ideology bears many resemblances to that of contemporary Islamic extremism, some the consequence of careful teaching. That teaching is still present in the Arab world, amplified by political leaders and imams, often annexed to denigrations of Jews taken from Islamic sources
The result, Mr. Julius and Mr. Wistrich recognize, has been one of the most historically noxious forms of anti-Semitic mythology, which has also fed into political debates in the West and cannot be overlooked or easily dismissed. It is easy enough to discern when responsible criticisms of Israel veer into something reprehensible: the structure of anti-Semitic belief is not subtle. There is a wildly exaggerated scale of condemnation, in which extremes of contempt confront a country caricatured as the world’s worst enemy of peace; such attacks (and the use of Nazi analogies) are beyond evidence and beyond pragmatic political debate or protest. Israel’s autonomy — it’s very presence — is the problem. Mr. Julius writes, “Israel is the only state in the world whose legitimacy is widely denied and whose destruction is publicly advocated and threatened; Israelis are the only citizens of a state whose indiscriminate murder is widely considered justifiable.”
But even if we leave aside such manifestations, it is clear enough that anti-Semitism requires much deeper understanding than it usually gets. Last week, for example, Hannah Rosenthal, the United States’ special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, spoke in Kazakhstan, asserting the similarity of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
This is not an uncommon assertion (and cases of unwarranted discrimination are always similar) but Islamophobia is a concept developed within the last two decades by those who wish to elevate Islam’s reputation in the West; anti-Semitism was a concept eagerly embraced and expanded by haters of Jews. One was constructed by a group’s supporters, the other by a group’s enemies.
Moreover, much of what is characterized as Islamophobia today arises out of taking seriously the impassioned claims of doctrinal allegiance made by Islamic terrorist groups and their supporters. Anti-Semitism, though, has nothing to do with any claims at all.
Connections is a critic’s perspective on arts and ideas.
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Are Jews Different from History’s Other Victims?
Posted By David Solway On July 6, 2010 In FrontPage
Hatred and revulsion for distinct ethnic and tribal groups, and the cleansing operations and genocides that accompany these obsessions, are obviously all-too commonplace phenomena. In recent historical times alone we have seen the Turkish genocide of its Armenian population, the Cambodian hecatomb, the Hutu massacre of nearly one million Tutsis, the Serbian slaughter of Bosnian Muslims, the Sudanese carnage in Darfur and other parts of the country, the ongoing bloodbath in the Congo and, of course, the still unassimilable abomination of the Holocaust.
The question that often arises among those who want to diminish the scale of Jewish suffering involves orders of magnitude and, so to speak, degrees of unimaginableness. What makes the Holocaust different in “the roll-call of genocides” (to use Theodore Dalrymple’s phrase [1]) and assures it a signal place in the history of human evil? Have not other peoples beside the Jews suffered persecution, segregation, pogroms and official campaigns of extermination? Are six to seven million Ukrainians starved to death by Josef Stalin in the forced collectivization program known as the Black Famine [2] any less to be mourned than six million dead Jews at the hands of Adolf Hitler? Do Jews have a monopoly on affliction?
Trading in such mass obituaries is always grotesque, but the issue comes up again and again whenever Jews, or those who sympathize with their trials, define the Holocaust as an unprecedented atrocity in the annals of collective suffering. Historian Peter Novick, for example, regards [3] the Jewish focus on the Holocaust as a form of cultural pathology, an aspect of Jewish narcissism and an attempt to acquire the cachet of victimhood. Have not other minority groups endured equivalent or near-equivalent tragedies? The late Nobel laureate José Saramago, a diehard communist and one of the world’s most notable antisemites, wrote [4] in the Spain’s leading newspaper El Pais, “educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted…will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner… Israel wants all of us to feel guilty, directly or indirectly, for the horrors of the Holocaust.” Philosopher Pascal Bruckner recognizes [5] the seductiveness of this argument; however, unlike Novick and Saramago, he deplores the growing propensity to cheapen the Holocaust among those who deem Jewish memory as “the potential for winning an inalienable immunity or irresponsibility,” and as “purloining the maximum misfortune and declaring yourself its only legitimate owner.”
This anti-Jewish proclivity and “envious hatred,” Bruckner contends, is really a movement to confiscate the Holocaust for disreputable purposes, to open “a kind of perpetual line of credit for immorality.” It is the gambit practiced by the “Serbian extremists” and, for that matter, by the Palestinians and their supporters, who claim a “Holocaust” of their own as a “source of unlimited moral and political advantages” that gives them “permission for all forms of abuse.” The abuse, we might say, is a double one for it leads not only to the “ambiguity of the ethnic theology” predicated on a false identification to advance a political or religious cause, but deprives Jews of the density and meaning of their own history and expropriates their suffering. In this way, the Holocaust is, once again, relativized and debased.
If we assume that Novick, Saramago and their congeners are right, what, then, would distinguish Jews from their fellow victims of unparalleled barbarism? Are there really no gradations of evil? One answer to this question that is frequently met with has to do with the bureaucratic and industrialized nature of the monstrosity perpetrated against the Jewish people. The Shoah was meticulously planned at the highest levels of government, a blueprint for infamy carefully prepared and a complex technology devised to carry it out. This is certainly true, for even Stalin’s Black Famine relied upon a comparatively simpler process. Stalin merely increased grain quotas for State procurement, thus depriving Ukrainian farmers of the means of subsistence. Though savagery is what it is, there is something incommensurable about the closely meditated intricacies of the Nazi Endlösung, or Final Solution. Stalin did not wish to depopulate Ukraine; Hitler’s consuming passion was to destroy an entire people, and he developed a detailed and methodical strategy to accomplish his purpose.
And yet there is much more to the matter than scientific malice and administrative elaboration. Unlike the Ukrainians who succumbed to a political calculation, Jews were targeted for who and what they were or believed to be, decimated on racial grounds as a people of impure blood contaminating the racial purity of a “superior” nation, much like the gypsies and the “defectives.” “And still there is a difference,” writes Norman Cohn in Warrant for Genocide[6]. “The Jews were hunted down with a fanatical hatred reserved for them alone,” the killed amounting “probably to more than two-thirds of all European Jews.” But it is not only a matter of brute numbers—the tally of Mao Zedong’s murdered innocents far eclipses that of Hitler’s or Stalin’s victims. Yet, as with Stalin’s policy concerning the Ukrainians, Mao did not set out to liquidate the Chinese people. Neither wanted to erase a “nation.” Hitler did. This is a fact that cannot be scanted and casts its lurid shadow over the Holocaust. And still there is a difference. Nor, as I have suggested, is it exclusively a question of cold, administrative calibrations in which human beings are transformed into abstract ciphers.
The dimension of Time must also be taken into account.
For the campaign against the Israelite has an inordinately long pedigree, going back to the Egyptian captivity, the Babylonian exile, the Roman wars and dispossession, the mass killings of Jews during the First Crusade, the Edict of Expulsion from England during the reign of Edward I, the Alhambra Decree in Spain ordering the expulsion of the Jews, the Chmielnicki massacre in 17th century Ukraine, and the innumerable purges in between and since, in both Christian and Muslim lands, leading to its culmination in the Holocaust.
In other words, Jews have the unique status of being singled out for millennial execration, malevolence, hostility and extirpation. It is a prejudice that knows no surcease. The spectre of discrimination, xenophobia, pogroms and even annihilation never disappears and always threatens to re-emerge, as it has once again today with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran vowing to “wipe Israel off the map” in a second Holocaust. As I have written before [7], the destiny of the Jews, unlike other minorities, “is to be eternally unsafe in this world,” which is precisely the factor that differentiates the Jewish people from other peoples on the historical continuum of human ignominy. It keeps happening.
There is yet another element to reflect upon. The religious wars that drenched the European continent in blood for centuries are now, for the most part, a thing of the past and have been superseded in the West by secular antagonisms expressed as an ideological conflict. The Cold War is over, presumably, but the culture wars persist. The battle between socialism and conservatism, the left and the right, Democrat and Republican, transnationalism and nationalism, statism and individualism, and, yes, between Europe and Israel, as well as between a left-oriented, terror-appeasing American presidency and Israel, is gathering momentum with every passing hour. Religious violence still exists, of course, but this is largely a prerogative of the Islamic world, manifest in the divide between Sunni and Shi’ite and the ubiquitous desire to exterminate the Jews. As Jonathan Kellerman writes in a symposium hosted by Commentary magazine (June, 2010), “the war being waged against Israel by the Muslim world is, at the core, a religious dispute. Radical Islamists no longer talk about Zionists, they come right out and broadcast their goal of eradicating worldwide Jewry.”
Thus, the forces at work in the contemporary world render Jews even more vulnerable than is usually the case, for they are now assaulted on two fronts: by secularists on the left who regard Israel as a colonial implant in the Middle East and by Muslims commanded by the Koran and the Ahadith to kill Jews wherever they may be found. Jews are perhaps the only people in the world who live in the crosshairs of two implacable enemies, one avowedly secular and the other driven by a theological mandate. The paradox is as mordant as it gets. Coming or going, for the Jew there is no acquittal, no peace and no relenting. If the secular left doesn’t get him, the Islamic right will—or devote itself to trying. It is a vise of world-historical proportions. And this means, clearly, that the menace Jews have always had to face will continue to flourish and quite possibly to augment.
I believe that most Jews are instinctively aware of the world’s undying hatred and misprision, but few are willing or capable of consciously acknowledging the scope of so unpalatable a truth. As Sarah Honig astutely writes [8], it is “disagreeable to realize that de rigueur Israel-bashing has unleashed latent predilections which, despite their transitory abeyance, festered beneath the floorboards of human decency.” The allusion to the great but antisemitic Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky is apt. In Notes from Under the Floorboards [9], Dostoevsky depicted in the novel’s protagonist an insectal longing for abasement and a contempt for all that is good, decent and noble in life, an embodiment of moral catastrophe. “I am angry,” the character says, “my irritability keeps me alive and kicking.” This tendency is, to use Dostoevsky’s term, “representative.” It appears to be inherent in the human psyche, and the Jew has ever been its most reliable outlet.
Norman Cohn refines the diagnosis for the modern age. “The drive to exterminate the Jews,” he writes, springs from “a quasi-demonological superstition,” namely, “the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy…set on ruining and then dominating the rest of mankind.” The myth, whose chief repository is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery dating back to the early 20th century, is “designed to appeal to all the paranoid and destructive potentialities in human beings.” And myths, as we know, guarantee longevity of belief, precisely because of human credulity and innate aggression.
But we can go further and posit that Jews have ever been the casualties of one or another myth, which are constantly pupating from one form into another, whether of plotting world conquest, or of poisoning wells, or of baking the blood of Christian children into Passover matzot, or of being the carriers of diseases—or of robbing the Palestinians of their land irrespective of the fact that, as Joan Peters, among other respectable scholars, has convincingly shown in her seminal study, From Time Immemorial [10], a substantial influx of Arab migrants, late arrivals to the region from the surrounding Arab countries, appropriated the identity of “Palestinians.” One myth will replace another to ensure that the engine of hatred keeps running and that a destination for bigotry and delirium remains always attainable.
The current myth, as we have noted, is that Jews are usurpers—in the very land in which they have maintained a continuous presence for 3,500 years and which, despite the vicissitudes of history, bears archeological, textual and demographic witness to their tenure from antiquity to the present moment. As the Reverend James Parkes spells out for us in his scrupulously researched Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine [11], the Jewish connection with the land “has been continuous from the 2nd millennium B.C.E. up to modern times.” Recent genetic findings [12] have reinforced the evidence for geographical origins. But myths are insidiously potent. “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,” as notorious Press Corps reporter Helen Thomas [13] recently demanded [13]. Not to be undone, deputy leader of Canada’s National Democratic Party Libby Davies [14] parroted Thomas’ ultimatum a few days later, asserting [15] that Israel’s “occupation of Palestinian lands” began in 1948 with its formal recognition as a legitimate state—a tirelessly reiterated jihadist theme. We cannot predict what the next such myth will be. We can only be sure that anti-Jewish myths, bordering on caricature, multiply like rabbits on aphrodisiacs.
This is what makes Jews, wherever they may find themselves, different from history’s other genocidal victims: they must always prepare for yet another round of social resentment, another irruption of ostracism and rejection, another flotilla (really an armada) of bogus “peace activists” aimed at dislodging them from their toehold on the Mediterranean, another barrage of denunciations from the so-called “international community,” and another calamity waiting in the offing. For what sets Jews apart from other victims of human malignancy is that the hatred and violence, the demonising, never go away.
Such is the nature of antisemitism: it is not a singular event but a perpetual sentence of condemnation. It is what we might call an ontological compulsion, an antipathy that has been reified. Regardless of the effort of Jews to assimilate, to forget the past, to deny their heritage or even to work against the very existence of the Jewish state and to trivialize the Holocaust, and despite the protestations of Western intellectuals and scions of the Enlightenment, who disingenuously claim they are not anti-Jewish but only anti-Zionist, the return of the same, or the will to re-enact it, is preordained.
And this is what makes numbers, methods, reasons and intentions as a medium of comparative judgment—albeit factors by no means insignificant in themselves—in the deepest sense irrelevant in determining the relative weights of the ordeals of peoples. For others who have suffered the saturnalia of blood, what happened once is always remembered; for Jews, what is remembered has occurred not once but many times before, in greater or lesser measure, and always threatens to recur. The essential difference resides in the unbroken cycle, the periodicity of the world’s “longest hatred [16],” the irresistible urge toward the replication of the unthinkable. What happened in the Treblinka of God’s eye was prepared in the crucible of time by hideous increments and may conceivably happen again.
Saramago, like so many others, lashes out at the Jews as “contaminated by the monstrous and rooted ‘certitude’…that there exists a people chosen by God.” Deeply religious Jews certainly believe they have a special relationship with God, which is exactly why the Holocaust continues to defeat their understanding, no matter how they struggle to explain it. Secular, Reform, Reconstructionist and Sabra Jews, by far the majority (I am not speaking of the apostates), do not place particular emphasis on this biblical tenet. They do not regard themselves as better or worse than anyone else but as a coherent people upholding a cultural tradition and a ritual sense of patrimony. They are not so much baffled by the Holocaust—human evil, after all, is pandemic—but horrified by both its occurrence and its possible imminence. This is what makes the Jew different and constitutes the real meaning of “chosenness.”
In other words, unlike other peoples, Jews have been selected for vilification, injury and even destruction from time immemorial. Or to put succinctly, the Jewish people bleeds history.
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All of this stuff, cultural, racial, and other form of bigotry/ prejudice goes right to evolution. Limited resources means tribes are competing, those tribes usually had different shamen so they were different religiously. The leadership of the tribes varied, and they also used different methods in dealing with the environment, they were different cuturally. Given that pre modern man was living close to starvation and the end of "his" people constantly. ANY differences between tribes, and any "strangeness" was a threat on life. Tribes often developed their own look too, so the basis of telling tribe members was "looks" as well.
Mankind has come a long way from being on the margins, but has been on that road for a LONG (&&^*& time. Hundred of thousands of years at least it is not surprising that these hang over habit patterns are hard to remove, especially when tribes like the Islamics keep cropping up hostile and threatening the peace.
Now in the modern era we have developed a certain amount of tolerance of differences, and in a lot of cases this can be an advantage, but the earlier pattern has been embedded so long, that people can drop into it without thinking. The non-thinkers accept this common sense because it feels right, it is hard wired that way. What various distinct people and cultures have to do in the modern era to help defuse this stuff is generally play the "just like you" game. I put on my pants one leg at at time, I bleed red, we have kids the same way, yes they code we raise them with is different, but .... we follow the laws the same as you, we pitch in when the community needs us same as you............
Given time this softens the edges that were originally drawn between the religions, cultures and territories and allows tollerance and respect to develop despite various setbacks. The problem is that it takes time, generations and centuries, on a scale that most people do not think in.
Now to get more specific. cultures that are different and start to emphasis that difference in the presence of a majority culture often place themselves at risk. where there are complementary strengths and weeknesses (Usury in midaevel terms, Jews can, Chritians can't) that provide a certain efficiency, people tolerate this. Tolerance is limited and if situations happen where the "old agreement" between tribes is destabilized you get outbreaks of violance based on the percieved Inequities (differences become risks again). The Weimar Republic? Jews were more economically sophiticated than the newly arrising German people. That caused SERIOUS inequities to appear and the situation becomes exploitable............
Since the Jews obviously needed a homeland due to their value as a tribe to everyone else (a bunch of stuff- the same qualities a lot of anti-semites use, when they aren't telling lies). Enter the Palestinian equation.... Now it is going to take generations and centuries for the Muslim nations to accept they have a strong and sucessful tribe for neighbors. That tribe will brook no nonsense against its members and has a solid warrior element willing to defend their tribal lands and rights against those who would take it. Most Arab states are pragmatic enough to tacitly accept the fact if the Muslim faith is still having issues.
There in lies the problem- this tit for tat back and forth is irritating, inconvenient, and a general PITA to the rest of the world. That lends fuel to the other anti semites out there and fuels their belly fire. It is going to take a whole lot of time, and an equal amount of blood, to fully solve the issue. That is what trully sucks the infected, flea infested balls of the camel in this situation............
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"The Weimar Republic? Jews were more economically sophiticated than the newly arrising German people. That caused SERIOUS inequities to appear , , ,"
I do not know this history. Would you flesh this out please?
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I am thinking that we are looking at what the industrial revolution did with the development of the "tradesman" middle class. A lot of these folks went from a hand to mouth peasant existance to having money to spend on luxuries in just a couple of generations. Money and its management , from my understanding, was either a templar or jewish domain item during the middle ages, hence tens of generations of experience. When the Weimar republic and the massive inflation kicked in the jews/ long time money traders saw it coming better than the average, and therefore coped with the problem better. That made them a high nail for Hitler to start pounding and getting the majority to fall in with him. It is play ground games you see kids play, the "leader" coalesces a gang/followers around him by picking the "strange" kid out.
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http://bigpeace.com/dpipes/2010/07/14/farrakhan-demands-reparations-from-jews/
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yeah, I thought that was gonna be the case.........
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Again it is the Jews who get singled out for their abuse of blacks with slavery and other issues. Were there not Catholics, Presbyterian, Prostestant slave owners.
And why does not Farrakhan note the Muslim "white" Arab slave traders who brought Black Africans from the interior of the continent to the coast and sell them to white slave traders?
Where is his outrage of this?
So Blacks are outraged about Al Quada using Blacks from Africa as cannon fodder for their war against the West?
Arabs enslaved blacks for hundreds of years. So what's the surprise?
Again, it is get the Jews.
This is one reason why I am annoyed at liberal Jews who think that they have so much in common with Blacks with discrimination and all and think Blacks appreciate there is long history of fighting for the rights of Blacks during civil rights along with fighting for their own civil rights.
They think Blacks appreciate them. Well let me tell you, most don't.
Again liberal Jews are dupes imo.
It doesn't take high IQ to connect the dots. Farrakhan hates Jews, as does Reverend Wright. Bamster sat in Wright's church for decades. Bamster is pressuring Israel and clearly has altered the balance of power with the Israelis/Palestinians towards the latter. Gee, and liberal Jews are surprised? And yet many still support Bamster?
Like I said the alternative is worse then Nazism to liberal Jews - Republicans! Crafty, I really think we will see Clinton getting more and more support from many Jews.
They could never stand voting for a Repub alternative to Bamster. They will either sit at home during the polls, or come up with an alternative - and Hillary is number one at this time. Or they will vote for Bamster anyway and sell Israel down the river.
They are that stubborn and stupid while they shot themselves in the head tryiing to pretend how they are such humanitarians and do gooders.
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http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/119595-helen-thomas-receiving-lifetime-achievement-award-from-cair
Muslim Brotherhood-USA honors Helen Thomas.
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Hat tip to CCP:
http://www1.yadvashem.org/exhibitions/album_Auschwitz/mutimedia/index.HTML
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Thanks,
I got this from my sister who emailed this to me.
I responded thus,
If Ahmadinejad has his way, as did Hitler, this will happen again.
Remembering my father a WW2 vet and who is long gone said, if Hilter had his way he would have been dead and I wouldn't be here.
As long as I live I will remember that he said he could forgive the Japanese who were poor uneducated peasants who were following their emperor, but he could never forgive the Germans.
Crafty, did you parents also refuse for the rest of their lives to buy anything German?
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Now that is a very interesting question. I don't think they made a point of it, but I can't remember any VWs, BMWs, or Mercedes in the garage of any of my extended family-- some of whom were well-to-do.
I remember the first time I did a seminar in Switzerland. The dominant language was German (and Swiss German which is quite different. I am told a German usually does not understand Swiss German, but the Swiss Germans also speak German) which naturally served as an NLP anchor to every WW2 Euro theater movie memory that I ever had (and remember I am a born and raised New York City Jew). The specific trigger for my emotions was one particular man who was the viusal archetype of a death camp guard. A moment of deep introspection was triggered. Of course he actually was a very nice person!-- as was everyone there and I had a wonderful time.
While I think the DBMA/Dog Brothers message attracts the kind of people for whom this most certainly is NOT an issue, I think on a continent wide level anti-semitism never died ouot. In part out of fear of the Muslims within Europe and in part out of desire to model modern multi-culteralism, the Pravdas of mainstream Euro media have fed a stream of poppycock about Israel and Jews which has been imbibed as naturally and thoughtlessly as a fish breathes water.
Tragically, I think it is ready to be sparked in the fertile fields of human nature for scapegoating when times are bad the old hatred lurks.
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Funny, hearing german spoken or english with german accent elicits all sorts of unhappy WWII images with me as well.
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Photo by: Courtesy
US Jewish students now protected from anti-Semitic abuse
By MORTON A. KLEIN AND SUSAN TUCHMAN
17/11/2010
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=195753
Schools will feel a greater need to respond to incidents, knowing they could face a loss of federal funding.
After a six-year Zionist Organization of America campaign, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced an important policy benefiting Jewish students in elementary, secondary and post-secondary schools. In a letter issued on October 26, OCR declared that it will enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect Jewish students from harassment, intimidation and discrimination at federally funded schools.
This is a breakthrough. Until this announcement, OCR wouldn’t enforce Title VI to protect Jewish students, leaving them without the same civil rights protections that have been afforded to other ethnic and racial groups since Title VI’s enactment in 1964.
It was OCR’s policy denying Jews the protection of Title VI that largely accounted for the agency’s decision to dismiss the complaint the ZOA filed in 2004 on behalf of Jewish students at the University of California at Irvine. UCI students had been subjected to years of anti-Semitic harassment and intimidation, described in detail in the ZOA’s 11-page complaint to OCR.
Campus programs – with titles such as “A World Without Israel” and “Israel: The Fourth Reich” – routinely demonized Jews and Israel. Campus speakers condoned and even advocated terrorism against Israeli Jews. One frequently-invited speaker compared Jews to Satan, called them baby-killers and referred to them as “the new Nazis.” The verbal bigotry escalated into violence. Students were physically threatened and assaulted. A Holocaust memorial was destroyed, and swastikas defaced campus property.
UCI students repeatedly complained to administrators about feeling harassed and intimidated. Some were afraid to wear a Star of David or a pro-Israel T-shirt. Some even feared for their physical safety. At least two students left UCI and went to study elsewhere, because they couldn’t endure the anti- Semitic hostility anymore. Yet the administration either ignored students’ concerns or made superficial efforts to address them.
ZOA’s complaint sought to compel the administration to finally rectify the unrelenting campus anti- Semitism. OCR agreed to investigate the case – a landmark development. But after three years of OCR dragging its feet, the agency eventually dismissed the ZOA’s case. An article in September’s Commentary magazine confirmed that the agency’s dismissal was due primarily to its determination not to protect Jewish students under Title VI. The article also revealed that OCR investigators had actually concluded that the “ZOA was right that Irvine students faced levels of discrimination that were so severe, pervasive or objectively offensive as to limit their educational opportunities.”
IN CLARIFYING that it will now protect Jewish students from anti-Semitic harassment under Title VI, OCR has made several crucial points. First, while disciplining the perpetrators of the harassment is important, OCR says that it’s not enough. A school must take other remedial steps, such as counseling the perpetrators about their hurtful conduct, reaffirming the school’s antidiscrimination policy, publicizing how students may report harassment, training teachers to recognize and address anti- Semitic incidents and creating age-appropriate programs to educate students about the history and dangers of anti-Semitism.
In addition, OCR recommends that schools publicly label specific incidents as anti-Semitic. This is critical. We know firsthand from students that a school’s failure to publicly identify and condemn an incident as anti-Semitic is almost as hurtful as the incident itself. Intentionally or not, silence or beating around the bush about an anti- Semitic incident sends the message to the school community that anti-Semitism is acceptable and tolerable. It isn’t and, as OCR has recognized, school leaders should clearly and publicly condemn an incident as anti-Semitic when it occurs.
OCR says that schools not only must take steps to end the harassment; they must also prevent its recurrence. Speaking out will help reach that goal. OCR’s new policy of enforcing Title VI is a much needed development. UCI is just one example of campus anti-Semitism; Jewish college students have had problems from Columbia, to the University of North Dakota, to UC Berkeley and elsewhere. Anti-Semitic incidents have also occurred at elementary and secondary schools.
In Naples, Florida, middle schoolers held “kick a Jew” day in November 2009. Two students came to school that day wearing Adolph Hitler moustaches. The superintendent’s response was as offensive as the event itself. He said, “These kids kicked a bunch of kids. What’s the real crime here?” All schools will now feel a greater imperative to respond to these horrific incidents if they know that they could face consequences from OCR, including a loss of federal funding.
OCR should be praised for its new Title VI policy, but more work needs to be done. It’s critical that Title VI be amended so that the law explicitly protects Jewish students from harassment, intimidation and discrimination, thereby preventing an agency from undoing or diminishing that protection.
ZOA has been working closely with federal lawmakers to amend Title VI; in September, Sen. Arlen Specter and US Rep. Brad Sherman introduced a bill to fill the legal loophole so that religious discrimination is explicitly prohibited under Title VI, in the same way that racial and national origin discrimination is already forbidden. All of us should urge our senators and representatives to support this bill if we care about the ability of our children and grandchildren to get their education in an environment that’s physically and emotionally safe and conducive to learning.
Morton A. Klein is the president of the Zionist Organization of America, and Susan Tuchman is director of its Center for Law and Justice.
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http://blog.rabbijason.com/2011/01/open-letter-to-glenn-beck.html
Friday, January 28, 2011
Open Letter to Glenn Beck
What follows is the Wall Street Journal full-page ad of an open letter from the Jewish Funds for Justice and signed by 400 rabbis calling on Fox News to sanction commentator Glenn Beck for his "over-the-top" attacks on George Soros. Kudos to Simon Greer and Mik Moore of Jewish Funds for Justice on this initiative.
Glenn Beck:
George Soros, who as a child in Hungary survived the Holocaust by living with a non-Jewish family "used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off. And George Soros was part of it. He would help confiscate the stuff. It was frightening. Here's a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps."
November 11, 2010
Roger Ailes:
There are some "left-wing rabbis who basically don't think that anyone can use the word 'Holocaust' on the air."
November 16, 2010
"[NPR] are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left-wing of Nazism."
November 17, 2010
Rabbis to Rupert Murdoch: 'Sanction Glenn Beck'
An open letter on the occasion of UN Holocaust Remembrance Day
January 27, 2011 - Dear Mr. Murdoch, We are rabbis of diverse political views. As part of our work, we are devoted to preserving the memory of the Shoah, and to passing its lessons on to our future generations and to all humankind. All of us have vigorously defended the Holocaust's legacy. We have worked to encourage the responsible invocation of its symbols as a powerful lesson for the future.
We were therefore deeply offended by Roger Ailes' recent statement attributing the outrage over Glenn Beck's use of Holocaust and Nazi images to "left-wing rabbis who basically don't think that anybody can ever use the word 'Holocaust' on the air."
In the charged political climate in the current civic debate, much is tolerated, and much is ignored or dismissed. But you diminish the memory and meaning of the Holocaust when you use it to discredit any individual or organization you disagree with. That is what Fox News has done in recent weeks, and it is not only "left-wing rabbis" who think so.
Abe Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, a child survivor of the Holocaust, described Beck's attack on George Soros as "not only offensive, but horrific, over-the-top, and out-of-line." Commentary Magazine said that "Beck's denunciation of him [Soros] is marred by ignorance and offensive innuendo." Elan Steinberg, vice president of The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, called Mr. Beck's accusations "monstrous." Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, called them "beyond repugnant." And Deborah Lipstadt, professor of Holocaust Studies at Emory University, says Beck is using traditional anti-Semitic imagery.
"I haven't heard anything like this on television or radio -- and I've been following this kind of stuff," Lipstadt said. "I've been in the sewers of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial more often than I've wanted."
We share a belief that the Holocaust, of course, can and should be discussed appropriately in the media. But that is not what we have seen at Fox News. It is not appropriate to accuse a 14-year-old Jew hiding with a Christian family in Nazi-occupied Hungary of sending his people to death camps. It is not appropriate to call executives of another news agency "Nazis." And it is not appropriate to make literally hundreds of on-air references to the Holocaust and Nazis when characterizing people with whom you disagree.
It is because this issue has a profound impact on each of us, our families and our communities that we are calling on Fox News to meet the standard it has set for itself: "to exercise the ultimate sensitivity when referencing the Holocaust." We respectfully request that Glenn Beck be sanctioned by Fox News for his completely unacceptable attacks on a survivor of the Holocaust and that Roger Ailes apologize for his dismissive remarks about rabbis' sensitivity to how the Holocaust is used on the air.
Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson
Vice President, American Jewish University, Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies
Rabbi Ellen Weinberg Dreyfus
President, Central Conference of American Rabbis
Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz
President, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
Rabbi Daniel Nevins
Dean, Jewish Theological Seminary Rabbinical School
Rabbi Yael Ridberg
President, Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association
Rabbi Steven Wernick
Executive Vice President, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism
Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie
President, Union for Reform Judaism
All organizations are listed for informational purposes only.
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Sol | Rabbi Marc Soloway | Rabbi Ned Soltz | Rabbi Abby Sosland | Rabbi Adam Spilker | Rabbi Brent Spodek | Rabbi Mychal Springer | Rabbi Israel Stein | Rabbi Stephen Julius Stein | Rabbi Frank Stern | Rabbi Keith Stern | Rabbi Yvonne Strassmann | Rabbi Mark Strauss-Cohn | Rabbi Ron Symons | Rabbi Elliott Tepperman | Rabbi David Teutsch | Rabbi Mervin Tomsky | Rabbi Daniel Treiser | Rabbi Lawrence Troster | Rabbi Jan Uhrbach | Rabbi Jason van Leeuwen | Rabbi Arthur Waskow | Rabbi Donald Weber | Rabbi Ezra Weinberg | Rabbi Michael Weinberg | Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt | Rabbi Jay Weinstein | Rabbi David Widzer | Rabbi Avi Winokur | Rabbi Amiel Wohl | Rabbi Sarah Wolf | Rabbi Bridget Wynne | Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz | Rabbi David Young | Rabbi Michael Zedek | Rabbi Daniel Zemel | Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman | Rabbi Misha Zinkow | Rabbi Leonard Zukrow
http://www.aish.com/j/jt/Jtube_What_Would_You_Do_Anti-Semitism.html
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O Donnel had a couple of rabbis on yesterday discussing this though I came to it late.
L. O Donnel who after watching the rabbis sound like a bunch of cackling yentas exclaimed how he can see how one can never get two rabbis to ever agree.
"We share a belief that the Holocaust, of course, can and should be discussed appropriately in the media. But that is not what we have seen at Fox News. It is not appropriate to accuse a 14-year-old Jew hiding with a Christian family in Nazi-occupied Hungary of sending his people to death camps."
I would agree with this in a second. Perhaps Beck does use the word Nazi too indiscriminantly. I think it highly likely Beck will respond to this and it will be interesting to see what he says.
OTOH I am offended by Soros subversive and behind the scenes tactics in changing America towards a progressive big government agenda that restricts our freedoms and is actually does have some similarities to the political upheavels of Europe IMHO.
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http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2011/01/27/rabbis-spend-100k-to-slam-beck-for-slamming-soros/?singlepage=true
Rabbis Spend $100K to Slam Beck for Slamming Soros
January 27, 2011 - by Roger L Simon
Four-hundred lib rabbis — the kind that give sanctimonious sermons about the environment at Westchester synagogues — have banded together to slam Glenn Beck with a $100K ad in the Wall Street Journal. According to the clerics, Beck has been unfairly attacking George Soros for collaborating with the Nazis in WWII when the billionaire was a fourteen-year old — something that Soros himself admits and, incredibly, doesn’t feel guilty about.
Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes interviewed Soros about his “youth.” Given the rabbis’ WSJ ad, it seems worth reprinting a transcript of a significant part of that interview here:
KROFT: (Voiceover) And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.
Mr. SOROS: Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that’s when my character was made.
KROFT: In what way?
Mr. SOROS: That one should think ahead. One should understand and–and anticipate events and when–when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a–a very personal experience of evil.
KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.
Mr. SOROS: Yes. Yes.
KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.
Mr. SOROS: Yes. That’s right. Yes.
KROFT: I mean, that’s–that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?
Mr. SOROS: Not–not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t–you don’t see the connection. But it was–it created no–no problem at all.
KROFT: No feeling of guilt?
Mr. SOROS: No.
KROFT: For example that, ‘I’m Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.’ None of that?
Mr. SOROS: Well, of course I c–I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was–well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets–that if I weren’t there–of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would–would–would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the–whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the–I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.
Wow. All I can say is wow. That lack of guilt has always been astounding to me and an indication of who Soros really is. (Hello, rabbis.)
Nevertheless, these goody-goody rabbis think Beck is the problem, not Soros. They blame Beck for going over the top in his speech (where have we heard that before?), misusing the memory of the Holocaust, etc., but no word of the “misuse of speech” by Soros-funded MoveOn.org that famously made a video comparing George Bush to Hitler, something that has been scrubbed from the Internet but can be found here.
Talk about misusing the memory of the Holocaust. But I guess it wasn’t worth $100K.
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Attack on Glenn Beck Shames The Rabbinical Profession and Desecrates God’s Name
Posted By Jeff Dunetz On January 27, 2011 @ 2:00 pm In Anti-Semitism,Email,Feature,Right to Exist | 7 Comments
As the Torah says Thou shalt not go up and down as a tale-bearer among thy people (Lev. 19:16). The ancient Jewish Sages took that passage and said that there are three transgressions that would cause a man to lose his place in the world to come: murder, adultery, and idol worship, and that loshon hora (evil speech) is equivalent to all three (Bab. Erchin 15b). Jews believe that the harm done by telling tales about people is worse than the harm done by something like theft because one can repay stolen money, but harm done by speech can never be repaired.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, 400 Rabbis joined with a socialist Jewish organization called Jewish Funds for Justice (JFJ) to bring shame upon themselves, their holy profession and the entire Jewish people, and even worse have committed a Chillul Hashem (desecration of God’s name) with an open letter to Fox News against Glenn Beck (the full ad is embedded below).
The letter states, “In the charged political climate in the current civic debate, much is tolerated, and much is ignored or dismissed. But you diminish the memory and meaning of the Holocaust when you use it to discredit any individual or organization you disagree with. That is what Fox News has done in recent weeks, and it is not only ‘left-wing rabbis’ who think so.”
Mr. Beck’s three-day series defaming Holocaust survivor George Soros sparked the letter from rabbis. At that time, Mr. Beck claimed Mr. Soros survived the Holocaust as 14-year-old boy by collaborating with the Nazis to send other Jews to the death camps. Mr. Beck said, that Mr. Soros “used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off. And George Soros was part of it. He would help confiscate the stuff. It was frightening. Here’s a Jewish boy helping send Jews to the death camps.”
Mr. Beck’s three-day attack on Mr. Soros was hardly the first time he has misused the Holocaust to incite viewers. The rabbis’ note Mr. Beck has made “literally hundreds of on-air references to the Holocaust and Nazis when characterizing people with whom [Beck] disagree.” Beck routinely compares American leaders to Nazis, has likened his crusade against progressives to that of “Israeli Nazi Hunters,” and has said that putting the “common good” first leads to “death camps.”
In the face of mounting criticism by Jewish groups, Fox News chief Roger Ailes dismissed criticism of Mr. Beck in an interview with the Daily Beast as nothing more than “left-wing rabbis who basically don’t think that anybody can ever use the word ‘Holocaust’ on the air.”
We respectfully request that Glenn Beck be sanctioned by Fox News for his completely unacceptable attacks on a survivor of the Holocaust and Roger Ailes apologize for his dismissive remarks about rabbis’ sensitivity to how the Holocaust is used on the air.”
Loshen Hora is not permitted even when true, but in this case there is nothing to worry about because it’s not true. I can guarantee you not one of these Rabbis are listeners of Beck, because if they were, they would know that he hadn’t as the letter they signed said made, literally hundreds of on-air references to the Holocaust and Nazis when characterizing people with whom [Beck] disagree. According to Jewish law, if they sign a letter saying that Beck made hundreds of on air references they should see the proof. So I ask Rabbi Steven Wernick, Executive Vice President, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the movement of Judaism of which my family and I are members, where’s the proof? To Rabbi Daniel Nevins, Dean, Jewish Theological Seminary Rabbinical School which recognized my wife and me for community service who also signed the letter, I ask: is this what you want to teach the rabbis of tomorrow? I invite any of the Rabbis who signed this letter did you watch the three day Soros series or did you just read the partial transcript sent to you? Did you know that almost everything that Beck said in those three days came directly out of the mouth of George Soros?
If any of these 400 rabbis has any proof for the charges you signed, contact me and show me the proof if you can–but they can’t. Even worse, they didn’t even ask for the proof before they lent their names to organized loshen hora.
The Jewish Fund for Justice is waging this battle against Glenn Beck as an agent of George Soros. The group receives significant funding Soros’ Open Society Institute, which gave the organization $30,000 in 2008, $150,000 in 2009 and $200,000 in 2010, (H/T Ken Larrey). I wonder if any of the Rabbis who signed this letter knew the motivation, or that before Beck did his three day special on Soros, there was a meeting between senior staff of the two and Soros’ guy warned Beck’s not to do the expose? Of course not! A true rabbi would have called Beck and asked for his side; none did.
Soros’ funding is only part of the story, the Jewish Funds for Justice’ progressive message of redistribution of income and social justice, and the continued collective guilt of Whites (especially Men) is antithetical to Beck’s call for personal (vs government) responsibility and charity, along with a constitutional guarantee of equal opportunity for all (as opposed to a guarantee of equal result).
On its website the Jewish Funds For Justice has a online library of articles, leadership and facilitation exercises, templates, and other helpful resources for you to utilize in your organizations. Feel free to download and share any of these materials.
An entire section of the library is about the “White Man” as the oppressor. A series of articles which say even if they don’t know it, the Caucasian is a racist and an oppressor, which gives insight into their beliefs behind social justice. This position seems to echo some of the positions of Black Liberation Theology, which have been exposed by the Fox broadcaster. The thought that we are collectively guilty and our salvation will only come if we collectively repent against the social crimes that we have done.
For example, one of the articles in their library is called Male Privilege and White Privilege” by Peggy McIntosh
I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. This paper is a partial record of my personal observations and not a scholarly analysis. It is based on my daily experiences within my particular circumstances.
I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, code-books, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks.
Another called The Culture of White Supremacy argues that the culture in the US is “White Culture” and that culture
…is intertwined with other major cultural manifestations of the is U.S: the greed competition and individualism of capitalism; male supremacist fear and hatred of the power of women; historical Christianity’s hatred and fear of sexuality, and its compulsion to divide humankind into the “saved” and the “dammed;” and the militarism’s glorification of war and conquests as proof of manhood and nationhood that has roots in European culture going back thousands of years.
White culture is a melting pot of greed, guys, guns and God. Its a deadly brew.
The document also claims that calls for people to take personal responsibility is just another way of keeping the non-White races inferior.
Many of the other documents in that section promote the same view that all Whites (especially White Men) are racist oppressors including:
* Systemic Racism, Injustice from Cradle to Grave
* Interview with Lani Guinier, Tracking the Miners Canary
* Being a Strong White Ally
* Basic Tactics
* Article: ”Building Diversity in Organizations” by Tyra Sidberry
* A Few Thoughts on Racism and Leadership
* STAND UP: An Exercise on Oppression for Leaders
* Class Race Exercise
* Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing
* Quotations
With the belief that Whites continue to oppress the non-whites, it’s no wonder they believe in Government-led social justice. The Government has to do it, because the Caucasian Man either wont or doesn’t realize that he should.
JFJ has developed seminary programs to prepare rabbinical students for “the challenges of engaging their communities in the critical and profoundly Jewish work of meaningful social justice” — i.e., the redistribution of wealth. These seminary programs are outgrowths of JFJ’s emphasis on “congregation-based community organizing” (CBCO), which is described by Benjamin Ross, JFJ’s Director of Organizing, as “a social change strategy developed by Saul Alinsky.” Aiming to “challenge [religious] congregations to address systemic issues relating to poverty and social injustice,” this type of organizing is spearheaded by four major national CBCO networks: the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation, the PICO National Network, the Direct Action Research and Training Center, and the Gamaliel Foundation. JFJ works in partnership with local affiliates of each of these organizations.
Another part of the motivation behind the attacks is many of the key figures of the JFJ are involved with other organizations/people who have been exposed by Beck. For example:
* Rabbi David Saperstein, who is on the JFJ Board, serves on Obama’s faith advisory board and served on many boards with of Rev. Jim Wallis who has also led attacks on Glenn Beck. Saperstein is also on the board of the People for the American Way Foundation, which was formed by the Tides Foundation. The Tides Foundation gets much of its funding from George Soros.
* Mik Moore Chief Strategy Officer at Jewish Funds for Justice is the former Deputy Political Director at SEIU Local 32B
* Until 2008 Simon Greer attended the residency program of the Windcall Institute, a project of the Common Counsel Foundation. Van Jones serves on the advisory board of the Windcall institute.
* Si Kahn who is on the board of JFJ was the founder and until last year the Executive director of Grassroots Leadership, which received $130,000 from Soros’ Open Society Institute in 2008 (which was the latest tax return I could find).
Notice the pattern?
In the end what the Wall Street Journal ad today represents is a slander made by 400 Rabbis who did not even bother to check to see if what they were signing is true, driven by JFJ a political organizations whose politics run contra to those of Glenn Beck. Both the organization and its leadership are beholden to George Soros who sent a Representative to threaten Beck for his expose’ and/or others who have campaigned against Glenn Beck. In other words, this “open letter” published in today’s Wall Street Journal, is nothing but an attempt to slander someones name for political reasons.
I hope that the 400 rabbis who have committed this Loshen Hora, caused all of this shame and have desecrated the name of god Chillul Hashem (desecration of God’s name) realize the error of their ways, not that their offense could ever be totally rectified.
As an old Chasidic tale teaches: A man once went around spreading lies about the rabbi. Eventually he began to feel remorse for the wrong he had done. He went to the rabbi and begged his forgiveness, saying he would do anything to make amends. The rabbi said, “Take a feather pillow, cut it open, and scatter the feathers to the winds.” The man followed the request gladly. When he told the rabbi that he had done the task, the rabbi said, “Now, go try and gather the feathers.” The man said, “But Rabbi I cannot gather the feathers they are all scatter to the winds.” The Rabbi replied, “Exactly! You cannot take back the damage your words have done, the same way you cannot than recollect the feathers.”
Jewish Funds for Justice Wall Street Journal Ad
Article printed from NewsReal Blog: http://www.newsrealblog.com
URL to article: http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/01/27/attack-on-glenn-beck-shames-the-rabbinical-profession-and-desecrates-gods-name/
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Great find GM! What do you say to this Rachel? Here is Soros himself admitting he felt no guilt. It wasn't even "difficult"! While I don't blame him for doing what he had to to save himself 14 years old is enough to know what one is doing. How do you explain this? Why are not these same liberal rabbis not offended by this? To think one could watch and even be forced to participate sending your own people away to their death and admit to not one ioda of regret or guilt??
Well I doubt this master of Wall Street who spends his entire life beating the hell out of everyone he can in trying to make a buck is just as ruthless there as he seems here in this interview:
KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.
Mr. SOROS: Yes. Yes.
KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.
Mr. SOROS: Yes. That’s right. Yes.
KROFT: I mean, that’s–that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?
Mr. SOROS: Not–not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t–you don’t see the connection. But it was–it created no–no problem at all.
KROFT: No feeling of guilt?
Mr. SOROS: No.
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I am sickened by the attack on Soros. If you don't understand the world Soros was living in and you prefer him to be murdered that is your problem. Glenn Beck deserved harsh condemnation for his comments.
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"If you don't understand the world Soros was living in and you prefer him to be murdered that is your problem."
Soros is a problem for the United States.
If you don't see that, that is your problem. You didn't answer my question about his lack of any guilt, or seeming concern. I don't want a put down on my undestanding of the Holocaust.
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Glenn Beck rightly condemns Soros for Soros' acts.
Soros is a bad guy. So, why the sympathy for the devil, Rachel?
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Did Beck actually condemn Soros? Or did he note the fact of what Soros did?
I am a regular viewer of Beck and I have never seen or heard him say anything I would regard as even vaguely anti-semitic.
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http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=589
George Soros is one of the most powerful men on earth. A New York hedge fund manager, he has amassed a personal fortune estimated at about $13 billion (as of 2009). His management company controls billions more in investor assets. Since 1979, Soros' foundation network -- whose flagship is the Open Society Institute (OSI) -- has dispensed more than $5 billion to a multitude of organizations whose objectives are consistent with those of Soros. (The President of OSI and the Soros Foundation Network is Aryeh Neier, former Director of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy.) With assets of $1.93 billion as of 2008, OSI alone donates scores of millions of dollars annually to these various groups, whose major agendas can be summarized as follows:
* promoting the view that America is institutionally an oppressive nation
* promoting the election of leftist political candidates throughout the United States
* opposing virtually all post-9/11 national security measures enacted by U.S. government, particularly the Patriot Act
* depicting American military actions as unjust, unwarranted, and immoral
* promoting open borders, mass immigration, and a watering down of current immigration laws
* promoting a dramatic expansion of social welfare programs funded by ever-escalating taxes
* promoting social welfare benefits and amnesty for illegal aliens
* defending suspected anti-American terrorists and their abetters
* financing the recruitment and training of future activist leaders of the political Left
* advocating America’s unilateral disarmament and/or a steep reduction in its military spending
* opposing the death penalty in all circumstances
* promoting socialized medicine in the United States
* promoting the tenets of radical environmentalism, whose ultimate goal, as writer Michael Berliner has explained, is “not clean air and clean water, [but] rather ... the demolition of technological/industrial civilization”
* bringing American foreign policy under the control of the United Nations
* promoting racial and ethnic preferences in academia and the business world alike
To view a list of many of the more important organizations that support these agendas and have received direct funding from Soros and his Open Society Institute in recent years, click here. (Comprehensive profiles of each are available in the "Groups" category of DiscoverTheNetworks.org.)
There are also numerous “secondary” or “indirect” affiliates of the Soros network. These include organizations which do not receive direct funding from Soros and OSI, but which are funded by one or more organizations that do. These secondary affiliates also include organizations that work collaboratively or synergistically with Soros-funded groups. To view a list of some of these organizations, click here. (Comprehensive profiles of each are available in the "Groups" category of DiscoverTheNetworks.org.)
In one of his most significant and effective efforts to shape the American political landscape, Soros was the prime mover in the creation of the so-called "Shadow Democratic Party," or "Shadow Party," in 2003. This term refers to a nationwide network of more than five-dozen unions, non-profit activist groups, and think tanks whose agendas are ideologically to the left, and which are engaged in campaigning for the Democrats. This network's activities include fundraising, get-out-the-vote drives, political advertising, opposition research, and media manipulation.
The Shadow Party was conceived and organized principally by George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Harold McEwan Ickes -- all identified with the Democratic Party left. Other key players included:
* Morton H. Halperin: Director of Soros' Open Society Institute
* John Podesta: Democrat strategist and former chief of staff for Bill Clinton
* Jeremy Rosner: Democrat strategist and pollster, ex-foreign policy speechwriter for Bill Clinton
* Robert Boorstin: Democrat strategist and pollster, ex-national security speechwriter for Bill Clinton
* Carl Pope: Co-founder of America Coming Together, Democrat strategist, and Sierra Club Executive Director
* Steve Rosenthal: Labor leader, CEO of America Coming Together, and former chief advisor on union matters to Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich
* Peter Lewis: Major Democrat donor and insurance entrepreneur
* Rob Glaser: Major Democrat donor and Silicon Valley pioneer
* Ellen Malcolm: Co-founder and President of America Coming Together, and founder of EMILY’s List
* Rob McKay: Major Democrat donor, Taco Bell heir, and McKay Family Foundation President
* Lewis and Dorothy Cullman: Major Democrat donors
To develop the Shadow Party as a cohesive entity, Harold Ickes undertook the task of building a 21st-century version of the Left's traditional alliance of the "oppressed" and "disenfranchised." By the time Ickes was done, he had created or helped to create six new groups, and had co-opted a seventh called MoveOn.org. Together, these seven groups constituted the administrative core of the newly formed Shadow Party:
* America Coming Together
* America Votes
* Center for American Progress
* Joint Victory Campaign 2004
* Media Fund
* MoveOn.org
* Thunder Road Group
These organizations, along with the many leftist groups with which they collaborate, have played a major role in helping Soros advance his political and social agendas.
According to Richard Poe, co-author (with David Horowitz) of the 2006 book The Shadow Party:
"The Shadow Party is the real power driving the Democrat machine. It is a network of radicals dedicated to transforming our constitutional republic into a socialist hive. The leader of these radicals is ... George Soros. He has essentially privatized the Democratic Party, bringing it under his personal control. The Shadow Party is the instrument through which he exerts that control. ... It works by siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions that would have gone to the Democratic Party in normal times, and putting those contributions at the personal disposal of Mr. Soros. He then uses that money to buy influence and loyalty where he sees fit. In 2003, Soros set up a network of privately-owned groups which acts as a shadow or mirror image of the Party. It performs all the functions we would normally expect the real Democratic Party to perform, such as shaping the Party platform, fielding candidates, running campaigns, and so forth. However, it performs these functions under the private supervision of Mr. Soros and his associates. The Shadow Party derives its power from its ability to raise huge sums of money. By controlling the Democrat purse strings, the Shadow Party can make or break any Democrat candidate by deciding whether or not to fund him. During the 2004 election cycle, the Shadow Party raised more than $300 million for Democrat candidates, prompting one of its operatives, MoveOn PAC director Eli Pariser, to declare, 'Now it’s our party. We bought it, we own it…'"
Soros in 2004 spent some $26 million trying, unsuccessfully, to defeat President Bush’s reelection bid, a task Soros called “the central focus of my life” and “a matter of life and death.” He has likened Republicans generally, and the Bush administration in particular, to “the Nazi and communist regimes” in the sense that they are “all engaged in the politics of fear.” “Indeed,” he wrote in 2006, “the Bush administration has been able to improve on the techniques used by the Nazi and Communist propaganda machines by drawing on the innovations of the advertising and marketing industries.” Soros elaborated on this theme at the January 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he told reporters: “America needs to . . . go through a certain de-Nazification process.”
Soros has been a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton, who, in turn, has long admired Soros and shares many of his agendas. At a 2004 "Take Back America" conference in Washington, DC, Mrs. Clinton introduced Soros with these words:
“Now, among the many people who have stood up and said, ‘I cannot sit by and let this happen to the country I love,’ is George Soros, and I have known George Soros for a long time now, and I first came across his work in the former Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe, when I was privileged to travel there, both on my own and with my husband on behalf of our country. ... [W]e need people like George Soros, who is fearless, and willing to step up when it counts.” (Cited in David Horowitz and Richard Poe, The Shadow Party, p. 53)
In December of 2006, Soros met with Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama in his (Soros') New York office. Soros had previously hosted a fundraiser for Obama during the latter's 2004 campaign for the Senate. On January 16, 2007, Obama announced the creation of a presidential exploratory committee, and within hours Soros sent the senator a contribution of $2,100, the maximum amount allowable under campaign finance laws. Later that week the New York Daily News reported that Soros would back Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton, whom he had supported in the past. Soros' announcement was seen as a repudiation of Clinton's presidential aspirations, though Soros said he would support the New York senator were she to win the Democratic nomination.
By the time Obama was elected, it was clear that his economic and political prescriptions for America were quite consistent with those of Soros. For example, in a November 2008 interview with Spiegel, Soros made some comments which foreshadowed precisely the course that President Obama's administration would eventually pursue in 2009. Said Soros:
"I think we need a large stimulus package which will provide funds for state and local government to maintain their budgets ... For such a program to be successful, the federal government would need to provide hundreds of billions of dollars. In addition, another infrastructure program is necessary. In total, the cost would be in the 300 to 600 billion dollar range…. I think this is a great opportunity to finally deal with global warming and energy dependence. The U.S. needs a cap and trade system with auctioning of licenses for emissions rights. I would use the revenues from these auctions to launch a new, environmentally friendly energy policy."
The interviewer then said: "Your proposal would be dismissed on Wall Street as 'big government.' Republicans might call it European-style 'socialism.'" Soros replied:
"That is exactly what we need now. I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful -- but also very harmful to our society…. I think it is better to have a government that wants to provide good government than a government that doesn't believe in government…. At times of recession, running a budget deficit is highly desirable."
To gain some perspective on the massive levels of funding that George Soros lavishes on the far Left, be sure to view this vital document:
Organizations Funded Directly by George Soros and his Open Society Institute
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Reading this I conclude that Soros is the "chosen one" in his own mind.
Obama is his front man.
Like I said without some very liberal Jews Obama would never have been President.
European style socialism already has proven to be a dud like every other socialistic government.
Why he thinks that government is the answer to all of human kinds ills, when it is run by people with same frailties as the rest of us is a mystery to me.
He is clearly an enemy of the US as we know it.
Yet we have MSM like SoloDAD acting like the front man Obama is not a far lefty. And anyone who even states that is nuts or brainwashed.
Beck is certainly no anti semite from anything I have seen or heard.
You know what? Jews do NOT have some sort of monopoly on hos to speak or mention genocide or even specifically the Jewish holocaust. They do not own genocide or have some special right to decide who gets to refer to it or how. Like their attack on Sarah Palin because she used a phrase. If she were a Democrat liberal we would never had heard a peep from any of the Liberal Jews.
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http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2011/01/media-matters-blames-jews-for-egyptian.html
Monday, January 31, 2011
Media Matters Blames The Egyptian Crisis on Those Foreign Policy-Controlling, Media-Owning JEWS
The George Soros funded Media Matters has been waging a months-long attack on Glenn Beck trying to brand the commentator as a card carrying anti-Semite. Perhaps before making false charges against Beck, Media Matters should examine its own house of cards.
In a column published today on Media Matters political correction site, MJ Rosenberg claimed that the current Egyptian crisis was the fault of AIPAC and the "Israel Lobby." For those of you who have lived on a different planet till today, "Israel Lobby" is a polite way of saying "Jews." It is based on the old anti-Semitic canard that it is the Jews who control the United States government.
Two years ago, Media Matters who has received major funding from financier George Soros, hired Rosenberg, a Jew to chip away at the image of the Jewish State, similar to what Soros did in creating J-Street. MJ Rosenberg was perfect for this role as Jewish-Lobby conspiracy theorist, bully with a keyboard, and a self-proclaimed violator of national security.
To be honest I have only crossed paths with Rosenberg's writing twice before, in the matter of Chas Freeman President Obama's pick for NIC Chairman who was a tool for both the Saudi and Chinese government and in the matter of Steve Rosen, the former AIPAC who was wrongly charged with espionage (the charges were dropped this year). In both cases, Rosenberg’s strategy has been is to attack people personally, throw around the “N” word (neo-con), twist words around (including mine) and accuse those of us who differ from his point of view as hell-bent to run the foreign policy of the United States of America.
In today's piece, Rosenberg says the reason for the Egyptian rebellion is the failure to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian issue:
If one needs additional proof that the "pro-Israel" lobby and the policies it dictates to US policymakers are bad for both the U.S. and Israel, look no further than what is happening in Egypt.
The regime that the Israeli government and its U.S. lobby have depended upon to enforce the status quo is going down. It is not clear when, but it's going to be soon, much sooner than anyone ever anticipated. And you can be sure that any democratic government that takes Mubarak's place is not going to play the role of America's (let alone Israel's) enforcer in the Middle East.
Hopefully, the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty will survive — thousands of lives on both sides have been saved by President Carter's Camp David Treaty — but there are no guarantees. Far from it.
Of course, no one would even be worried about the peace treaty if the Israelis had agreed to implement the critical second part of the Camp David Accords.
That was the part that would have ended the occupation. But the Israelis chose to ignore it and the lobby and the ever-faithful Congress blocked Carter's efforts to push it through.
Its interesting that when one goes through the Wikileaks documents about the Middle East not the secret cables ties the Palestinian/Israel to issues in the other countries. In both the recent unrest in Tunisia and in Egypt not once was there a mention of the Palestinians or Israelis except for mentioning the fact that both parties would prefer to see Mubarak remain in power.
Rosenberg indicates that the reason for the lack of Israeli/Palestinian peace is Israel, Congress and of course the Israel (Jewish) Lobby. I guess he forgot the fact that Yasser Arafat walked away from a favorable deal at the end of the Clinton Administration and Mahmoud Abbas walked away from a similar deal at the end of the Bush Administration.
I am often accused of harping on the lobby's baleful influence. I plead guilty. But it's my obligation because (1) I know from personal experience — 15 years on Capitol Hill and four at AIPAC — how it operates, (2) I know how little it really cares about Israel, and (3) I am free to tell the truth about it. If I worked in the mainstream media or in the U.S. government, I wouldn't be.
How do you like that, we Jews control US foreign policy and the run the media--damn we are good. But wait there is more, according to MJ Rosenberg of Media Matters if it wasn't for the Jews, American would be best friends with Iran.
Another area where the lobby has done so much damage is in our relations with Iran.
AIPAC is dedicated to "crippling" sanctions and eventually war with Iran if sanctions don't bring down the regime. Later this spring, AIPAC will host its annual conference which will, as has been the case for a decade, feature mind-numbing warnings about the danger posed by an Iranian nuclear bomb.
Dang those Jews are so horrible. Not only do we control everything, but we made the last two Presidents push sanctions on those innocent Iranians and those sanctions are only being imposed to help Israel. Wow the guilt is going to keep me awake for days.
Perhaps the Media Matters columnist should have read the recent accounts released by Wikileaks
According to the leaked document, part of the conversation between King Abdullah and the US officials touched on Saudi attitudes towards Iran, its influence in Iraq and the need to increase pressure on the Islamic Republic.
**Read it all.
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http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/anti-semitic-imagery-at-egypt-protests-draws-yawns-from-western-media/?singlepage=true
Glenn Beck's fault.
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A friend sent me these:
www.newsrealblog.com/2011/02/17/the-anti-semites-who-swarmed-us-at-cpac-and-the-future-of-the-right/
www.newsrealblog.com/2011/02/17/ron-paul-is-a-vicious-anti-semite-and-anti-american-and-conservatives-need-to-wash-their-hands-of-him/
By themselves, they do not present a lot of evidence. OTOH Ron Paul has a very dicey history on this front. A newsletter sent out under his name for several years had some pretty bad stuff in it, which RP blamed on an unsupervised employee. Also, not proof, but a favorite RP theme is "international banker conspiracy", a possibility I don't deny, but an idea often intertwined with some pretty vile anti-semitism.
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There is an awful lot of smoke there, suggesting a fire.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/the_ron_paul_campaign_and_its.html
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Interesting two post above about Paul.
I didn't have any clue of that. David Horowitz is a strong conservative.
"international banker conspiracy"
I don't think there is a Jewish conspiracy in that regard but there may be a disproportionate number of Jews who are bankers, like doctors, and lawyers.
There is without a doubt a disproportionate number of Jews who are progressive.
From the alleged jornolist posted on this board a fully 40% of the names were consistent with Jewish names. Jews make up what? 1 or 2% of the US population.
My guess is Jews are not running around trying to get non Jews but happen to just be active in this area and since there is a disprotionate number of them in the forefront it may give the appearance of a "conspiracy".
As for a "conspiracy" for supporting Israel - I would prefer to look at it as Jews working hard to preserve and protect fellow Jews who are threatened with annhilation every day.
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I don't get it CCP!!! What the heck!!!
You said, "but there may be a disproportionate number of Jews who are bankers, like doctors, and lawyers."
Gosh, if I had a son or daughter, isn't that what I would want them to become? Did I miss something?
Jews are "progressive"?
I didn't know that was bad!
"since there is a disprotionate number of them in the forefront". "Jews make up what? 1 or 2% of the US population."
yet they are in the "forefront". Why I ask? Success? Hard work? Discipline? Religious? Academic? Educated? Entrepreneurial? Loyal? Intelligent?
Hmmm it all sounds good to me.
And "conspiracy" for supporting Israel.....
CCP, I would have no respect for you if you didn't support Israel everyday. I regret that Jews migrate to Israel only because America
loses good people. I may disagree with you on some issues, I support what's good for America first, I don't think Israel's policy always coincides with America,
and I am not a Jew, but there is no "conspiracy" among the Jews that I can see; only love for one's homeland as a refuge for having been oppressed. And I don't think that's bad.
Hardly a "conspiracy".
:-)
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JDN, I think CCP did not want to directly say that Jewish people in America are disproportionately successful. So I said it and you said it. Of course that is not a bad thing but people with small minds resent other people's success.
Hopefully Ron Paul is old enough to stop running for anything and focus on pushing his best issue which is smaller government. He was also at the forefront of 'end the Fed', a misguided, lost cause (IMHO) and in opposing foreign military operations. I think he largely opposes our strong commitment to defending Israel for isolationist type non-interventionist reasons, not anti-semitism. That is where conservatism and libertarianism split. There is a moral case for defending Israel, freeing Iraq etc. and a strategic reason: Israel is on the front line of our fight. If you disagree with the strategic reason, there is still a moral reason IMO.
Attracted to Ron Paul's viewpoint to not defend Israel might be people with anti-semitism. Like Reagan has said, if they endorse his view it doesn't mean he endorses theirs.
Jewish people have a connection with defending Judaism in Israel, just like I want golf protected in Scotland (okay I'm bad with analogies). Given the small proportion of Jews in America, I would explain the interest in defending of Israel by most of the rest of us differently. We support and defend Israel because they are under attack. In other words the attackers chose the venue and the motive, not those of us defending them. If India or Japan today or Canada was under similar attack, I would hope our foreign policy would put the focus in those places.
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Doug, I was trying to be humorous; yet serious in my sincere compliments towards Jews and their success.
I know little of Ron Paul. I ignored him in my post.
That said, I am not sure that we always support and agree with the policies of India, Japan, or Canada. Nor do we always or blindly support them.
For example, we support Pakistan, India's enemy. We remained quiet as GM pointed out in Japan's dispute over their Islands although we have
a defense pact. Nor do we give billions of dollars every year in foreign aid to these countries.
People criticize Obama, yet despite criticism from both sides he vetoed a UN Resolution condemning further settlements at great cost to America.
Frankly, I think there is a reasonable argument to stop and or postpone further settlements. But this belongs on another post.
My sole point here; I think one can be pro Jew and yet disagree with some of the policies of Israel. That does not make me anti-semetic.
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Thanks JDN. Good points. The reference to those countries that I meant was that IF they were in the same situation, with 10 or 12 countries around them actively committed to their destruction, I would hope our foreign policy would have a focus on helping them. Obviously we don't blindly support Israel, I think we condemned them this week for peaceful activities that offend people trying to destroy them. People like you or Obama are not anti-semitic for disagreeing on specific policies. We just rightfully argue the wisdom of our policies.
Obama wants to be even-handed to settle ancient differences. I see that like wanting to be even handed with a rapist and a young woman walking down a street.
I drifted to Ron Paul because of previous points in the thread. I think racism is a form of stupidity, and anti semitism loosely defined is a form of racism. Ron Paul I would argue isn't stupid, (maybe unwise in some of his positions) certainly inattentive in what got posted on his site. In the case of Hitler and today's dangerous movements, it may be more a form of empowering themselves by praying off of the stupidity of others. In the Cairo crowd attacking the reporter, they were hollering 'Jew'. They were wrong about her but still how other than stupidity would that justify what THEY were doing? No one here, nor Ron Paul nor our President nor any serious or intelligent person would believe that it did.
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Hi JDN,
Yes, I am proud of my fellow Jews accomplishments!
However,
"Jews are "progressive"?
I didn't know that was bad!"
Yes this IS bad and annoying and actually infuriating to me as well as to many other Jews who consider themselves (if not) strict conservatives at least Republican.
Such Jews like Jackie Mason, Aaron Klein, David Horowitz, Marc Levin, Bernine Goldberg, Jonah Goldberg, Eric Cantor, etc.
Indeed it is very bad. Bad for the United States and a big phoney fraud in my opinion. Actully quite hypocritical. Think Soros. I despise what he is doing.
I respect him only as a holocaust survivor but not otherwise as a person. He is full of BS and a selfish, hypocrite IMO.
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Anti-Semitism flares in Greece
Greece, more than many European nations, continues to wrestle with strong anti-Jewish feelings. Such sentiments have been revived amid the angst and anger of the Greek economic crisis.
By Anthee Carassava, Los Angeles Times
February 21, 2011
Reporting from Athens
Nearly 70 years later, Athens, one of the last European capitals to commemorate those who perished at the hands of Nazi forces, finally has a Holocaust memorial.
But since its dedication in May, synagogues have been targeted, Jewish cemeteries desecrated, Holocaust monuments elsewhere in Greece vandalized and the Jewish Museum of Greece, in the capital, defaced with swastikas. What's more, an alarming chunk of Athenians in November supported the election of a neo-Nazi candidate to the capital's city council.
The ocher-colored marble sculpture in the shape of a broken-up Star of David, its triangular tips dismembered, points toward the 29 Greek cities from which at least 60,000 Jews were gathered and deported to the Auschwitz and Treblinka extermination camps between 1943 and 1944.
The deaths of these victims are memorialized amid striking serenity. Set within a patch of olive and almond trees, and its pieces embedded alongside an herb garden of lavender, marjoram and thyme, the sculpture symbolizes survival and healing. Or is supposed to.
Although anti-Semitism is an old and shameful part of Europe's history, Greece, more than many European nations, continues to wrestle with strong anti-Jewish feelings.
Such sentiments have been revived amid the angst and anger of the Greek economic crisis.
"We've always been under siege by fanatics and far-right political movements here," said David Saltiel, president of the Central Jewish Board of Greece, which represents the country's 6,000 Jews. "The fear now is that anti-Semitism will get worse with the financial crisis."
Well into the nation's worst recession in 17 years, the government in Athens was thrown a bailout lifeline of $146 billion by the European Union and International Monetary Fund last year in exchange for draconian reforms and cost-cutting measures designed to slash the country's yawning budget deficit, equal to 15.4% of gross domestic product.
The measures are thought to be responsible for a surge in hate crimes against minorities by Greeks venting rage over rising unemployment and immigration.
Strapped for cash, the Socialist government has been aggressively wooing rich sovereign investors, tapping into deep pockets in China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and, now, Israel.
This month, scores of Jewish American leaders arrived in Athens to advance Israel's revived relations with Greece, but not all here were happy to see yarmulkes on Greek streets, much less in the offices of senior politicians, including the country's president.
"We're in danger!" warned renowned composer Mikis Theodorakis, who in the course of a television interview openly conceded that he was an anti-Semite. "Zionism and it leaders are here, meeting in our country!
"This is no laughing matter," he railed, berating Zionism and its "control over America and the banking system that Greece is now a victim of."
Such beliefs aren't new. Nor are they just Greek.
What's different in Greece is the level of tolerance for anti-Semitism.
"There is zip, zilch, zero reaction to any semblance of anti-Semitism," said human rights activist Panayotes Dimitras, "leaving the door wide-open for extremists to come in and exploit this phobic society, more so now, in this time of crisis."
Some critics fault the country's Jewish organizations for shunning quick public reaction to attacks; others point to the attitude of some church prelates and to Greece's failure to come to terms with its once-multicultural identity and harrowing past.
"Whatever the cause," said Anna Stai of the Anti-Nazi Initiative, "Greece can no longer sit in denial about its anti-Jewish feelings. It's dangerous."
Take the case of Konstantinos Plevris.
A self-avowed anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, the 70-year-old lawyer was sentenced to 14 months in prison in 2007 for inciting racial hatred with his book "Jews: The Whole Truth." In 2009, the decision was overturned, and a year later, the Supreme Court upheld Plevris' acquittal, arguing that his "scientific work" did not target the Jews as a race or religion but, rather, their "conspiratorial pursuit of global domination," according to a copy of the 2010 decision.
World Jewish organizations kicked up a storm in protest, but in Athens, mainstream news media offered scant coverage of the ruling and the government remained silent.
Two weeks ago, Stai and other members of the Anti-Nazi Initiative traveled to Brussels to lobby for support from European lawmakers.
"There is such a strong undercurrent of anti-Jewish feeling in Greece," said Dimitras, the human rights activist, "that any hope of drawing attention to the problem must now come from outside pressure."
Others say there is still hope within.
"We're at a turning point as a society today," said Zanet I. Battinou, standing before a scale model of the Holocaust memorial showcased at the Jewish Museum of Greece, which she directs. "If we found the courage to take on responsibility for the financial mess we find ourselves in today, then we can take responsibility in facing down one of our worst traits."
If anything, she quips, "we're running out of scapegoats."
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Anti-Semitism flares in Greece
Greece, more than many European nations, continues to wrestle with strong anti-Jewish feelings. Such sentiments have been revived amid the angst and anger of the Greek economic crisis.
By Anthee Carassava, Los Angeles Times
February 21, 2011
Reporting from Athens
Well, I have been living in Greece for quite a few years now, and although I haven't checked the facts of this article, my personal opinion is that it is not quite accurate. Living and working in Greece, I feel that people here are A LOT more concerned with other matters, than anti-semitism. The "lets blame the Jews" slant of this article seems to be designed to ruffle Jewish and American feathers. I can say from personal experience, the many Pakistanis, Bulgarian Gypsies, Albanians, and Romanians living in the center of Athens, concern everyday Greeks much more than Jewish people.
Greeks are more concerned about rising prices, crime rate, and loss of income, than being anti-semetic. These are very serious and very real concerns that are affecting me, and many people around me. I have yet to personally see or hear of a single case of anyone blaming the Jews. I have seen and heard numerous cases of other peoples (I referred to above) being blamed. In fact, I have also heard many Greeks declaring that they dislike Americans (or more specifically American Foreign Policy). Not heard any complaint about the Jewish though.
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Kostas,
Thanks for the inside scoop.
One question on this statement you made,
"In fact, I have also heard many Greeks declaring that they dislike Americans (or more specifically American Foreign Policy)"
Here the main stream media would have us believe that Obama has done alot to improve our image overseas.
Do you think this is true from you vantage point?
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Kostas,
Thanks for the inside scoop.
One question on this statement you made,
"In fact, I have also heard many Greeks declaring that they dislike Americans (or more specifically American Foreign Policy)"
Here the main stream media would have us believe that Obama has done a lot to improve our image overseas.
Do you think this is true from you vantage point?
Obama is perceived as not quite so ready to resort to military action, as was his predecessor and those around him (Cheney, et al).
So I do believe that yes, the current US administration, is viewed more favorably than the previous one.
Clinton was very UNpopular due to his bombing of Serbia - not just because of Greece's traditional relationship
with Serbia (both are of the Eastern Orthodox faith), but also because Greeks were worried that the actual
compounds used in the bombs themselves contained cancer-causing agents, and would affect the health
not just of the Serbs, but also the population of Northern Greece.
However, the Greeks right now have a lot of problems they themselves have created, and have to face up to. The
more "responsible" Greeks will admit that Greek society itself is largely to blame. But there are also many who
prefer to lay most of the blame elsewhere.
As for racism in Greece, there is a strange sort of "reverse racism", that has some (especially the media) being
extremely sensitive to minority rights, so much so that it leaves me wondering. Greeks are not usually so
concerned about their fellow man. Many involved in business think little of cheating one another.
It is interesting to note that successive governments have cynically exploited immigrants by charging them quite
a bit of money to renew their residency permits. That money does not necessarily find its way into state coffers.
In Greek politics, the digger one deeps, the more disgusted one becomes. But as for the Jewish, who here really thinks that
they are an issue ? The waves of immigrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Albania, Africa, etc are an issue. The Jewish are not.
P.S. Mikis Thedorakis, the famous composer quoted in the article may or may not be anti-semetic. As he ages, he is known
to do or say things that will attract attention to him. I don't think his attention-seeking statements are taken seriously
by many. He was, in his youth, courageous and a revolutionary, but he is now in his 80's and not at the forefront of things
anymore (unless it is to receive some sort of award)
As for the far-right, they are more concerned with Pakistanis, Afghans, blacks - the visible minorities, than the Jews. The
far right, just like the far-left, have always existed - they play on people's insecurities.
Greeks have always been a seafaring nation, a nation in contact with many cultures - though they have their faults, in my
opinion, they are not racist in the sense that they instinctively dislike foreigners. Greeks are concerned about what the
legions of ill-paid young men from other countries will do, now that there are less jobs and less money.
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Kostas:
Glad to have you with us to help evaluate the article about Greece and to aid our understanding of your country.
BTW, I hereby nominate you for the Understatement of the Year Award:
"Obama is perceived as not quite so ready to resort to military action, as was his predecessor and those around him (Cheney, et al)."
:lol:
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Kostas,
Great post and thank you for your thoughts.
"Obama is perceived as not quite so ready to resort to military action, as was his predecessor and those around him (Cheney, et al)."
And to add to Crafty's comment,
Our enemies certainly love Obama for the this reason IMHO.
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"Obama is perceived as not quite so ready to resort to military action, as was his predecessor and those around him (Cheney, et al)."
Unlike most on this Forum, I think Kostas and our allies mean this as a compliment... :-)
As he said,
"So I do believe that yes, the current US administration, is viewed more favorably than the previous one."
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JDN,
I thought you are a TR man, you know, speak softly and carry a big stick.
Unlike Obama who is speaks softly and carries a little stick.
TR strentghened us overseas not weakened us. I doubt very much he apologized for us either.
As for TR, well;
TR was the guy who on San Juan Hill after shooting a guy in the belly while running up the hill cackled with glee and excitement at the experience OF SHOOTING ANOTHER HUMAN BEING!. War is/was war no doubt. However, his own record of how great he thought shooting someone else was, is something I never could forget about him. Could anyone imagine the same of say Grant, or Eisenhower?
Ans , you know the same guy whose pleasure was to go around the world and kill animals for sport.
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I'm glad that my impressions were of value...there are things I did not quite get much into...perhaps for another time. BTW, it was Crafty who encouraged me to join in the discussion...I tend to avoid political discussions, by and large.
As for Obama, I am aware of the greatly differing views that different Americans have of him, though lately I think that even his supporters wish he was doing a better job. Yes, Americans are viewed in a more positive light in Greece because of his "less forceful" foreign policy. I don't think Greeks believe that America is becoming timid; Greeks are well aware that America is quite ready to use its military muscle, if it felt it had to. But to this day, Greeks remain suspicious of American intentions - especially after the Kosovo issue...but then I am rambling in a thread meant for Anti-Semitism..sorry..over and out..and again, thanks for the positive feedback.
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Clinton's Kosovo strategy was a mystery to me, and, I suspect, an important error.
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it ruin the fun :lol:
US Navy cruiser anchored in Mississippi for a week's shore leave.
The first evening, the ship's Captain received the following note from
the wife of a wealthy plantation owner:
"Dear Captain, Thursday will be my daughter Melinda's Debutante Ball.
I would like you to send four well-mannered, handsome, unmarried
officers in their formal dress uniforms to attend the dance.. They
should arrive promptly at 8:00 PM prepared for an evening of polite
Southern conversation. They should be excellent dancers, as they will
be the escorts of lovely refined young ladies. One last point: No
Jews, please!!
"Sending a written message by his own yeoman, the captain
replied: Madam, thank you for your invitation. In order to present
the widest possible knowledge base for polite conversation, I am
sending four of my best and most prized officers. One is a lieutenant
commander, and a graduate of Annapolis with an additional Masters
degree from MIT in fluid technologies and ship design. The second is
a Lieutenant, one of our helicopter pilots, and a graduate of
Northwestern University in Chicago , with a BS in Aeronautical
Engineering. His Masters Degree and PhD. in Aeronautical and Mechanical
Engineering are from Texas Tech University and he is also an
astronaut candidate The third officer is also a lieutenant, with
degrees in both computer systems and information technology from SMU
and he is awaiting notification on his Doctoral Dissertation from Cal
Tech. Finally, the fourth officer, also a lieutenant commander, is
our ship’s doctor, with an undergraduate degree from the University of
Georgia and his medical degree is from the University of North
Carolina . We are very proud of him, as he is also a senior fellow in
Trauma Surgery at Bethesda .
Upon receiving this letter, Melinda’s mother was quite excited and
looked forward to Thursday with pleasure. Her daughter would be
escorted by four handsome naval officers without peer (and the other
women in her social circle would be insanely jealous).
At precisely 8:00 PM on Thursday, Melinda's mother heard a polite rap
at the door which she opened to find, in full dress uniform, four
handsome, smiling black officers. Her mouth fell open. But pulling
herself together, she stammered, "There must be some mistake."
"No, Madam," said the first officer. "Captain Goldberg never makes
mistakes."
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Bwahahahahaha!
Not going anywhere near snopes.
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It is very difficult to hate babies.
It takes a special person.
As morally wrong as it is to murder innocent adults, mankind seems to have a built-in revulsion against killing babies. If a baby does not evoke any tenderness, if a baby is regarded as worthy of being deliberately hurt or murdered, we know that we have encountered a degree of evil that few humans -- even among murderers -- can relate to.
That is why what Palestinian terrorists did to a Jewish family on the West Bank this past weekend deserves far more attention than it received.
Normally, Palestinian atrocities get little attention -- certainly far less attention than Israeli apartment-building on the West Bank receives. But this particular atrocity got even less attention than usual because the world was focused on the terrible tsunami that hit Japan.
On Friday night, Palestinian terrorists slipped into a Jewish settlement, entered a home and stabbed the father, the mother and three of their children to death: an 11-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a three-month-old baby.
In order to understand what those actions mean, a seemingly separate incident needs to be recalled: the prolonged sexual attack by up to 200 Egyptian men on Lara Logan, chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, in Tahrir Square, Cairo a few weeks ago. It was reported that after stripping her naked and then molesting and beating her, the men kept shouting, "Jew, Jew!"
The two incidents tell the same tale. In much of the Arab Muslim and some of the non-Arab Muslim world today (such as Iran), "Jew" is not a person. "Jew" is not even merely the enemy. In fact, there is no parallel on Earth to what "Jew" means to a hundred million, perhaps hundreds of millions of Muslims.
Think of any conflict in the world -- Pakistan-India, China-Tibet, North Korea-South Korea, Tamil-Sinhalese. There are some deep hatreds there, and atrocities have been committed on one or both sides of those conflicts. But in none of those conflicts nor anywhere else is there something equivalent to what "Jew" means to millions of Muslims.
There really is only one historical parallel, and it, too, involved the word "Jew." The Nazis also succeeded in fully dehumanizing the word "Jew." Thus, for Nazism, it was as important (if not more so) to murder Jewish babies and children -- often through as cruel a means as possible (being burned alive, buried alive or thrown up in the air and impaled on bayonets) -- as it was to murder Jewish adults.
The human being does not have to learn to hate. It seems to come pretty naturally. Nor does the human being have to learn to murder, steal or rape. These, too, seem to be in the natural human repertoire of evils.
But the human being does have to learn to hate children and babies, and to regard the torture and murder of them as morally desirable acts. It takes years of work to undo normal protective human attitudes toward children.
That is precisely what the Nazis did and what significant parts of the Muslim world have done to the word "Jew." To them, the Jew is not just sub-human; the Jew -- and his or her children -- is sub-animal.
Palestinian and other Muslim spokesmen and their supporters on the left argue that this unique hatred is the fruit of Israeli policies, not decades of Nazi-like Jew-hatred saturating Islamic education, television, radio and the mosque. But for this to be true, unique hatred would have to be matched by unique evil on the Israelis' part.
Yet, among the injustices of the world, what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians would not even register on a moral Richter scale. The creation of Israel engendered about 750,000 Palestinian refugees (and an equal number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries) and the death of perhaps 10 thousand Palestinian Arabs. And all of that came about solely because Arab armies invaded Israel in order to destroy it at birth. Yet, when Pakistan was yanked from India and established as a Muslim state at the very same time Israel was established, that act engendered 12.5 million Muslim refugees and about a million dead Muslims (and similar numbers of Hindu refugees and deaths). Why then doesn't "Hindu" equal "Jew" in the Muslim lexicon of hate?
Here are some answers in brief:
First, many groups have been hated, but none have been hated as deeply as the Jews.
Second, Jew-hatred is often exterminationist, which is why Jew-hatred has little in common with ethnic bigotry, religious intolerance or even racism. Rarely, if ever, do any of them seek the extermination of the disliked or hated group.
Third, exterminationist Jew-haters are particularly dangerous people. Non-Jews who do not recognize Jew-hatred as the moral cancer it is are fools. Nazism was born in Jew-hatred and led to the death of more than 40 million non-Jews. Islamic terror started against Israeli Jews but has spread around the world. More fellow Muslims have now been murdered by Islamic terror than Jews have.
That is why the tsunami the world ignored this weekend -- the Palestinian-Arab-Muslim flood of Jew-hatred -- is the one that will prove far more dangerous to it than the Japanese one it understandably focused on.
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"First, many groups have been hated, but none have been hated as deeply as the Jews."
Sadly, I don't doubt this statement. And, while this article focuses on Muslims, it does not only pertain to Muslims.
Look at Europe. Even America. There is a large wide diverse group that "hates" Jews.
But why? I mean why have the Jewish people been hated by seemingly all other groups?
I simply don't understand. Among the Jewish people I know personally, some are good friends, and some
irritate me. For me, it's about the same ratio as most groups; nothing distinctive about being Jewish. And I don't "hate"
any group.
But why, throughout history do Jews seem to be consistently hated? I simply don't understand why.
Any thoughts?
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- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com -
Farrakhan: Jews Behind Mideast Crisis
Posted By Frontpagemag.com On March 3, 2011 @ 12:29 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 24 Comments
Louis Farrakhan, the reliably anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam, claimed Tuesday at the Nation’s annual meeting in the Chicago area that Jews and Zionists were “trying to push the US into war” and — in a revival of hoary anti-Semitic clichés — that “Zionists dominate the government of the United States of America and her banking system.”
The elderly Jew-hater also directed a warning to the president not to move against the man Farrakhan called “my brother and my friend,” Muammar Gaddafi: “President Obama, if you allow the Zionists to push you, to mount a military offensive against Gaddafi and you go in and kill him and his sons, as you did with Saddam Hussein and his sons… I’m warning you this is a Libyan problem, let the Libyans solve their problem among themselves.”
Farrakhan at the same time denied that he was – despite appearances — “just somebody who’s got something out for the Jewish people.” Farrakhan directly addressed those who might get such a crazy idea: “You’re stupid.” And he explained: “Do you think I would waste my time if I did not think it was important for you to know Satan? My job is to pull the cover off of Satan so that he will never deceive you and the people of the world again.”
A rational analyst would be hard-pressed to explain why Zionists might wish the U.S. to embark upon a military operation to remove Gaddafi, when the successor to his odious regime is likely to be an Islamic state that is even more virulently anti-America and anti-Israeli than that of the aging rock star who is still quixotically holding the fort in Tripoli. But Farrakhan’s anti-Jewish conspiracy paranoia is not entirely irrational, either: it is founded in a book revered by Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, albeit not in a wholly conventional fashion: the Koran.
Neither Sunni nor Shi’ite Muslim authorities generally regard the Nation of Islam as an orthodox expression of Islam; nevertheless, its adherents identify themselves as Muslims and read the Koran. And the Koran, whether or not it really is, in the words of Michael Potemra, Deputy Managing Editor of National Review magazine, “one of the loveliest books ever written…full of spiritual wisdom,” is undeniably full of venomous hatred toward the Jews.
The Koran puts forward a clear, consistent image of the Jews: they are scheming, treacherous liars and the most dangerous enemies of the Muslims. This theological tenet provides a basis for Islam’s deeply rooted anti-Semitism, and illuminates Farrakhan’s latest outburst. For the Koran depicts the Jews as a gang of corrupt, deceitful cut-throats.
The Koran condemns Jews for speaking “a lie concerning Allah knowingly” (3:75). The Jews are “men who will listen to any lie” (5:41). They also spread them: “There is a party of them who distort the Scripture with their tongues, that ye may think that what they say is from the Scripture, when it is not from the Scripture. And they say: It is from Allah, when it is not from Allah; and they speak a lie concerning Allah knowingly” (3:78). They are so deceitful that they dare to distort “Divine Revelation and Allah’s Sacred Books. Allah says in this regard: ‘Therefore woe be unto those who write the Scripture with their hands and then say, ‘This is from Allah,’ that they may purchase a small gain therewith. Woe unto them for that their hands have written, and woe unto them for that they earn thereby’” (2:79).
The Jews in the Koran are so obstinate before Allah that they refuse to believe in the prophets Allah has sent them, even Moses, telling him: “O Moses! We will not believe in thee till we see Allah plainly” (2:55). They are hypocrites (2:14; 2:44) who “grow arrogant” before the messengers of Allah, refusing to believe in some and killing others (2:87). They are so arrogant and haughty that they “claimed to be the sons and of Allah and His beloved ones” – a fault they share with the Christians: “The Jews and Christians say: We are sons of Allah and His loved ones” (5:18).
The Jews also try to lead others away from the truth: “Many of the People of the Scripture long to make you disbelievers after your belief, through envy on their own account, after the truth hath become manifest unto them” (2:109). They rejoice in others’ ill-fortune: “If a lucky chance befall you, it is evil unto them, and if disaster strike you they rejoice thereat” (3:120).
And so when Farrakhan refers to Jews as Satanic deceivers, he is actually being more moderate than the Koran itself. For Farrakhan and his ilk, eliminating the Jewish state is not just a foreign policy goal; it is a religious imperative.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/03/03/farrakhan-jews-behind-mideast-crisis/
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/03/028659.php
New and exciting trends.
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I watched the video on that page Everyone should see it :cry: :cry: :cry:
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Did you watch the video?
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No; I don't have the 23 minutes to watch. But I will try to do so later.
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I assume everyone here saw on Drudge that Egyptian airlines now no longer shows Israel on its maps.
And Obama has Gates telling Israel "they" have to get out in front of this middle east "populist wave".
It is too early but I am not liking what I am seeing here.
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JDN: IMHO it is well worth the time.
CCP: It may get lively by the time I am scheduled to be in Israel! :lol:
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Did you watch the video?
Thoughts?
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Per your request, I watched this morning; or at least two thirds of it. I don't have the time for the full video and
it seems a bit redundant. I am usually not a fan of small snippets of quotes taken from various individuals and various times to
make a story. Nor do I know who are the speakers; although regardless of who they are, what they say is vile and wrong.
It is disturbing, but not entirely surprising. Muslims in the Middle East blindly hate Jews.
I doubt if this comes as a surprise to anyone.
My question earlier, which no one seems to want to address is why are Jews hated so deeply throughout the world by non Muslims?
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"My question earlier, which no one seems to want to address is why are Jews hated so deeply throughout the world by non Muslims?"
Excellent question, and one which I though I have tried to address.
Perhaps it has been in part to the success of Jews throughout history, their above average numbers in banking finance, legal system, academia and certianly in politics.
It is interesting to note the inordinate number of Jews involved in "progressive" as well as socialist movements.
Many are jealous of anyone who is successful. Many don't like other preaching to them. I am proud of Jewish success and scientific and other major contributions to mankind. With regards to socialism, marxism, communisim, I certianly believe the intentions are well meaning but in my view misguided.
I think their forefront in many of these areas have made Jews, us, who are different than Christians, Muslims easy to spot and apparently the objects of scapegoating.
I even hate to say it but I find my own fellow liberal Jews who get on cable and tell us it is *our responsibility* as a wealthy free strong nation to stop the bloodshed in Libya like one guy yesterday. Oh really? It is now our responsibility to be the world' policemen and emergency medical personel?
Who says? You? I find it insulting annoying and condescending. And unfortunately all liberals annoy me this way. Yet many in the forefront are Jewish.
I say to them you want to send your children in harms way, you want to spend your hard earned money to free and save the world go ahead but do not tell the resto of America it is OUR duty to do so.
I don't know if this helps.
But sometimes I wish my fellow liberal Jews would just shut up and stop telling other people what they must do.
My personal standard is to be a law abiding honest human being. I believe in the golden rule. I honr those who want to be kind or charitable. But that is their choice.
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Per your request, I watched this morning; or at least two thirds of it. I don't have the time for the full video and
it seems a bit redundant. I am usually not a fan of small snippets of quotes taken from various individuals and various times to
make a story. Nor do I know who are the speakers; although regardless of who they are, what they say is vile and wrong.
It's kind of relevant that they are most all imams/religious scholars. One being Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who addressed cheering throngs of Egyptians post-Mubarak.
It is disturbing, but not entirely surprising. Muslims in the Middle East blindly hate Jews.
As do muslims in asia, africa, europe, australia, the americas. Don't forget those.
I doubt if this comes as a surprise to anyone.
Would it surprise someone who has asserted that the jihad against Israel would stop if the "palestinians" were just treated better?
My question earlier, which no one seems to want to address is why are Jews hated so deeply throughout the world by non Muslims?
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JDN: I doubt if this comes as a surprise to anyone.
GM Would it surprise someone who has asserted that the jihad against Israel would stop if the "palestinians" were just treated better?
MARC: This seems to me a well pin-pointed question.
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No, I don't think it "stop" if the palestinians were just treated better. But it might help.
And it would definitely improve the world's opinion of the situation.
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"And it would definitely improve the world's opinion of the situation."
Remember all the protests over Hama?
Me either.
Funny thing, that global opinion.
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Hell, look at the President's passionate statements of support today for the brave people standing up to Hassad. "Hassad must go!" President Baraq Hussein Obama said.
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By ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ
I recently completed a tour of Norwegian universities, where I spoke about international law as applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the tour nearly never happened.
Its sponsor, a Norwegian pro-Israel group, offered to have me lecture without any charge to the three major universities. Norwegian universities generally jump at any opportunity to invite lecturers from elsewhere. When my Harvard colleague Stephen Walt, co-author of "The Israel Lobby," came to Norway, he was immediately invited to present a lecture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Likewise with Ilan Pappe, a demonizer of Israel who teaches at Oxford.
My hosts expected, therefore, that their offer to have me present a different academic perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be eagerly accepted. I have written half a dozen books on the subject presenting a centrist view in support of the two-state solution. But the universities refused.
The dean of the law faculty at Bergen University said he would be "honored" to have me present a lecture "on the O.J. Simpson case," as long as I was willing to promise not to mention Israel. An administrator at the Trondheim school said that Israel was too "controversial."
The University of Oslo simply said "no" without offering an excuse. That led one journalist to wonder whether the Norwegian universities believe that I am "not entirely house-trained."
Only once before have I been prevented from lecturing at universities in a country. The other country was Apartheid South Africa.
Despite the faculties' refusals to invite me, I delivered three lectures to packed auditoriums at the invitation of student groups. I received sustained applause both before and after the talks.
It was then that I realized why all this happened. At all of the Norwegian universities, there have been efforts to enact academic and cultural boycotts of Jewish Israeli academics. This boycott is directed against Israel's "occupation" of Palestinian land—but the occupation that the boycott supporters have in mind is not of the West Bank but rather of Israel itself. Here is the first line of their petition: "Since 1948 the state of Israel has occupied Palestinian land . . ."
The administrations of the universities have refused to go along with this form of collective punishment of all Israeli academics, so the formal demand for a boycott failed. But in practice it exists. Jewish pro-Israel speakers are subject to a de facto boycott.
The first boycott signatory was Trond Adresen, a professor at Trondheim. About Jews, he has written: "There is something immensely self-satisfied and self-centered at the tribal mentality that is so prevalent among Jews. . . . [They] as a whole, are characterized by this mentality. . . . It is no less legitimate to say such a thing about Jews in 2008-2009 than it was to make the same point about the Germans around 1938."
This line of talk—directed at Jews, not Israel—is apparently acceptable among many in Norway's elite. Consider former Prime Minister Kare Willock's reaction to President Obama's selection of Rahm Emanuel as his first chief of staff: "It does not look too promising, he has chosen a chief of staff who is Jewish." Mr. Willock didn't know anything about Mr. Emanuel's views—he based his criticism on the sole fact that Mr. Emanuel is a Jew. Perhaps unsurprisingly, fewer than 1,000 Jews live in Norway today.
The country's foreign minister recently wrote an article justifying his contacts with Hamas. He said that the essential philosophy of Norway is "dialogue." That dialogue, it turns out, is one-sided. Hamas and its supporters are invited into the dialogue, but supporters of Israel are excluded by an implicit, yet very real, boycott against pro-Israel views.
Mr. Dershowitz is a law professor at Harvard. His latest novel is "The Trials of Zion" (Grand Central Publishing, 2010).
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In the world of political correctness, this term is new to me:
[He was]"not entirely house-trained."
The 'house' is no longer Scandinavian nor is it open to other viewpoints.
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This is part of the islamification of europe.
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I appreciate my time on this forum I received exponetionally more from it than I gave. I am sort of returning to the board but I will probably only be posting interesting articles mos in the power of the word thread. I apologize in advance but I probably won't be posting much my own writing. This is because of my time constraints not because I am angry or upset. Even if I became Glenn Beck's Number One Fan I won't have a lot of time to post on the forum. I have a new job (again) that is keeping me very busy.
I m not going pretend that I didn't get upset and leave because that is what happened. However, I had been thinking about quitting the
board for a while because of the time commitment.
I want to clarify a few things ---I'm sorry I am not particularly interested in discussing it further. If you believe that is because I am incapable of defending my thoughts--- the evidence certainly fits. Please feel free to have the last word.
I don't like either Glenn Beck or George Soros. I think Glenn Beck has a better record on Israel than George Soros. I don't think Glenn Beck
is an anti-Semite. However I found Glenn Beck's comment on George Soros's Holocaust activities very upsetting and insulting to all Holocaust victims. I can see that not making any sense to some and I am lacking the ability to explain it.
I have no tolerance at all for Democrats or Republicans who use Holocaust analogies to make other unrelated political points or those who criticize those who were murdered and therefore are unable to defend themselves. To be clear I generally think any Holocaust analogy is an insult to Holocaust victims because it trivializes their suffering. My thinking it obviously doesn't make it true and not all Jews agree with me but don't expect me to respond well if you make a Holocaust analogy.
Best Wishes,
Rachel
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Rachel,
Just a few points to consider:
Liberal Jews who support Israel should stop and contemplate who your true friends really are. You might roll your eyes at Sarah Palin and her kind, but we are the one demographic that would readily pick up a rifle and go toe to toe with those that chant "Khaybar Khaybar ya Yahud, jaysh Muḥammad sayaud"on your behalf.
Take a hard look at the leftist values taught to you in academia and compare them to your Jewish values. Notice some profound contradictions there? So what are your values?
I almost always read what you post in "Word" even though I'm about as kosher as a bacon double cheeseburger. Why? Because there is some very good stuff there that transcends the theological divisions between judiasm and christianity. Wisdom is wisdom, truth is truth.
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I would add to this discussion there were many people "as kosher as a bacon double cheeseburger" such as my father and his friends who went to Europe and fought Hitler ending that chapter in history, obviously many of those were lives lost and injured due to what happened under Nazi rule and the process of stopping it. We call them heroes, but mostly we forget and we forgot what they did. I would just add that in my opinion they are all victims, in different ways, of the atrocities of that era.
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I don't know how much influence Soros had in all that is going on in the Middle East using his denial of being a "puppit master" his terminolgy. It is interesting he used this term as a Mickey Mouse puppit was thrown at me while Katherine and I were stuck on a highway while moving from Fla. to NJ some years back by the group of people who have been stealing all her music lyrics. I find it odd Soros himself would use this adjective if he were *not* a puppit master. In any case it is hard to know what is going on behind scenes. Beck is in my view doing a service trying to connect dots. I have learned not to underestimate the power of wealthy people who certainly *can* manipulate average people easier than I ever imagined. One thing does seem certain and that is what we see in the Middle East is exactly as Soros has been hoping for for many years. It is as he calls it the Jewish Right that is the problem. Isn't it interesting that this survivor of the Holocaust is himself now blaming some Jews for what it the main problem in the Middle East??
See Soros below: "Israel is unlikely to recognize its own best interests because the change is too sudden and carries too many risks"
Oh really?
****February 03, 2011
Soros: 'The Main Stumbling Block Is Israel'
President Obama personally and the United States as a country have much to gain by moving out in front and siding with the public demand for dignity and democracy. This would help rebuild America's leadership and remove a lingering structural weakness in our alliances that comes from being associated with unpopular and repressive regimes. Most important, doing so would open the way to peaceful progress in the region. The Muslim Brotherhood's cooperation with Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate who is seeking to run for president, is a hopeful sign that it intends to play a constructive role in a democratic political system. As regards contagion, it is more likely to endanger the enemies of the United States - Syria and Iran - than our allies, provided that they are willing to move out ahead of the avalanche.
The main stumbling block is Israel. In reality, Israel has as much to gain from the spread of democracy in the Middle East as the United States has. But Israel is unlikely to recognize its own best interests because the change is too sudden and carries too many risks. And some U.S. supporters of Israel are more rigid and ideological than Israelis themselves. Fortunately, Obama is not beholden to the religious right, which has carried on a veritable vendetta against him. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is no longer monolithic or the sole representative of the Jewish community. The main danger is that the Obama administration will not adjust its policies quickly enough to the suddenly changed reality.****
As for Beck I have mixed feelings about him. I watched his show for a few minutes yesterday when he had the 12 yr old Asperger's boy who is a mathematical genius on his show. There is just something about Beck - he is just so goofy. I can't watch him for more then a few minutes.
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Rachel,
Welcome back.
Your point is an excellent one and ultimately you are right.
Although not exactly in reference to Holocaust analogies in a somewhat parallel argument I remember seeing Elie Weisel speak in WPB in the 90s and he spoke about how a whole holocaust "industry" exists and while in some ways it functions as a means be which we remember what happened there is still something perverse about some aspects of it. The idea of an "industry" feeding off this corner of history?
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http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2011/04/19/rabbi-obama-expounds-on-the-true-meaning-of-passover-remember-the-muslims/
So, does this belong here or not?
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I don't know how much influence Soros had in all that is going on in the Middle East using his denial of being a "puppit master" his terminolgy. It is interesting he used this term as a Mickey Mouse puppit was thrown at me while Katherine and I were stuck on a highway while moving from Fla. to NJ some years back by the group of people who have been stealing all her music lyrics. I find it odd Soros himself would use this adjective if he were *not* a puppit master. In any case it is hard to know what is going on behind scenes. Beck is in my view doing a service trying to connect dots. I have learned not to underestimate the power of wealthy people who certainly *can* manipulate average people easier than I ever imagined. One thing does seem certain and that is what we see in the Middle East is exactly as Soros has been hoping for for many years. It is as he calls it the Jewish Right that is the problem. Isn't it interesting that this survivor of the Holocaust is himself now blaming some Jews for what it the main problem in the Middle East??
See Soros below: "Israel is unlikely to recognize its own best interests because the change is too sudden and carries too many risks"
Oh really?
****February 03, 2011
Soros: 'The Main Stumbling Block Is Israel'
President Obama personally and the United States as a country have much to gain by moving out in front and siding with the public demand for dignity and democracy. This would help rebuild America's leadership and remove a lingering structural weakness in our alliances that comes from being associated with unpopular and repressive regimes. Most important, doing so would open the way to peaceful progress in the region. The Muslim Brotherhood's cooperation with Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate who is seeking to run for president, is a hopeful sign that it intends to play a constructive role in a democratic political system. As regards contagion, it is more likely to endanger the enemies of the United States - Syria and Iran - than our allies, provided that they are willing to move out ahead of the avalanche.
The main stumbling block is Israel. In reality, Israel has as much to gain from the spread of democracy in the Middle East as the United States has. But Israel is unlikely to recognize its own best interests because the change is too sudden and carries too many risks. And some U.S. supporters of Israel are more rigid and ideological than Israelis themselves. Fortunately, Obama is not beholden to the religious right, which has carried on a veritable vendetta against him. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is no longer monolithic or the sole representative of the Jewish community. The main danger is that the Obama administration will not adjust its policies quickly enough to the suddenly changed reality.****
As for Beck I have mixed feelings about him. I watched his show for a few minutes yesterday when he had the 12 yr old Asperger's boy who is a mathematical genius on his show. There is just something about Beck - he is just so goofy. I can't watch him for more then a few minutes.
a quick symbolic reminder of the "problem" in the Middle East
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Qe1wgxDiEdU/S61vKresyTI/AAAAAAAAAaw/jInENKoSC0s/s1600/israel-palestine-map.jpg
ever wondered why sun tzu said, give a surrounded enemy a way out ? What I see in the midst of this conflict, that drives the majority of the so called global geopolitical sphere is an incredibly hotblooded minority, with burdens of history that little other Western countries can compare, cornered, nay, squelched between two pillars, without a way out, fighting to the death. And some of you guys want to tighten the squeeze.....
It should be noted that the Arab states were hardly ever united before our century. They were constantly disputing over territories, oil revenues, clean water, etc. But lately, one thing has united them: the destruction of the state of Israel, and Iran is apparently the leader.
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Andrew, you are a bright, well-educated thoughtful guy with a good heart. Like all of us, you are also the result of the air which you breathe, which in the case of Europe has reverted to its traditional anti-semitism, which is compounded in many areas by its pre-emptive dhimmitude towards the Muslims in its midst. As you know, I have been to Europe and I have seen iaccuracies and attitudes in the press there that leave me looking like a Jewish Don King (the black American boxing promoter with the hair that goes straight up).
I'm not seeing a source for the maps you cite which I suspect draw things in a way that is subject to dispute, but the larger point is to expand the area in question. Once we do this we see that it is, and I say this with love, wildly deranged to see the Palestinians as surrounded! There IS a Palestinian homeland-- it is called Jordan. The West Bank used to be part of Jordan, but because of Arafat and PLO perfidy, they fg abandoned it.
Mein Kampf was a best-seller throughout the Arab word (Under the name "My Jihad" if I am not mistaken) in the 1930s, well before WW2 and Hitler's final solution. Jews have been the majority population of Jerusalem since 1500, and due to Islamic oppression (dhimmitude) nearly as many Jews emmigrated to Israel from Arab countries as did from Europe.
It is the Jews who are surrounded and who have had to fight for their very lives against Arab onslaught many times and who haved lived for decades with their women and children specifically targeted by suicidal killers (whose families were paid $25,000 a hit by Saddam Hussein by the way). Despite this, Israeli Arabs are citizens who vote and can bring lawsuits (which they sometimes win) have their mosques and their religion. Find me this in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, etc!
Yet despite all their genocidal attacks on the Jews, good people such as yourself do not hold the Palestinians to blame for the natural consequences of their actions. Indeed you speak of the Jews surrounding the Arabs/Palestinians!?!
In Europe we allowed ourselves to be led to the gas chambers.
Never again.
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I went searching for some clips to support my case, but it appears that youtube has deleted the following :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x
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deleted as "schocking and disgusting"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqHUdwePfbM
violating terms of use
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM0HHYNVPKY&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?search=&mode=related&v=19mpJRq11Hg
Concentration Camps #1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvViOT_Aqqc&NR=1
#2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ObmI8xfk7Y&mode=related&search=
#3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=be-F9KyxaFs&mode=related&search=
#4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuVmS1tMXZE&mode=related&search=
#5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no8RaAEkuWc&mode=related&search=
#6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47GOtpV9I6E&mode=related&search=
#7
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y95nCydzC-s&mode=related&search=
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However this little gem from Palestinian TV year 2000 survives
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmnpMXOpaM4&NR
Would you trust this congregation to keep and agreement with you?
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And making sure to keep it alive with the next generation , , ,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM-XeaIn06g&NR
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Youtube has shown it's very leftist/jihadist oriented.
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And/or it is intimidated by Islamic Fascism, just as Mussolini's Brown Shirts intimidated in the streets of Italy.
Andrew, you are a good person, but in my opinion your opinion is the result of being denied both sides.
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And/or it is intimidated by Islamic Fascism, just as Mussolini's Brown Shirts intimidated in the streets of Italy.
Andrew, you are a good person, but in my opinion your opinion is the result of being denied both sides.
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/youtube_jihad/
Perhaps intimidated is more correct.
GM-- would you please post that link on Media Matters as well please? TIA, Marc
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Hello all !
Since my note has flown in a bit of a different direction, let me explain some stuff further.
a)
There IS a Palestinian homeland-- it is called Jordan. The West Bank used to be part of Jordan, but because of Arafat and PLO perfidy, they fg abandoned it.
Here I am afraid, things are a bit more complicated. Jordan, is NOT palestinian homeland. When shuffling with historicisms, one has to be careful. Palestinian people, means something else than Palestinian descent, and Palestinian state. Most Arabic speaking Palestinians are of the Levantian descent with origins from Palestine, Israel, Gaza and West Bank. The Palestinians from Jordan, are part of the big Palestinian diaspora, a consequence of a bigger wave of exodus of peoples of Arabic descent (and of course Christians) in 19.century, under the oppression of the Ottoman rule and NOT only the wars in 48, and 67 as most people think.
It holds true however, that around 60% of Jordanian nationals are of Palestinian descent (again, do not mix with Palestinian people, Palestinians, because it is not the same stuff etc.) and have the biggest diaspora percentage. Palestinians have mostly Mediterranean genetic ancestry, and represent the descendants of ethnic groups that lived in the area since at leat 1.5 millenia ago. The descendants „accepted“ the muslim culture only after the the Muslim golden age, their conquests in the 6th and 7th century. The question of distinct national identity I will leave out of this debate since it is gravely debated area even as we speak. What holds ground thought, that the start of the national identity in both cases, started only in the 19.century, as with most other countries in the world. The first popular use of endonym "Palestinian" as a concept of a nation of the Palestinian people by the Arabs of Palestine began just before Franz Ferdinand was shot i.e. WW1.
Seek Civantos, Ignacio Klich, Geoff Lesser and even Helen Shiblak (Jewish scholar) for high level expert research on the topic.
b)
Mein Kampf was a best-seller throughout the Arab word (Under the name "My Jihad" if I am not mistaken) in the 1930s, well before WW2 and Hitler's final solution. Jews have been the majority population of Jerusalem since 1500, and due to Islamic oppression (dhimmitude) nearly as many Jews emmigrated to Israel from Arab countries as did from Europe.
I do not understand the Adolf comment, hence I will rather not comment it. I will however tackle the majority pop numbers.
First of all, any and all population data pre-1900 is based on guesswork at best,from travellers, merchant diaries, organisations...etc. One of the only primary sources on the topic is the so called Ottoman Tahrir Defter (think of it as a tax census book). If you specifically need sources, you can check the „Turkish tax register, Jewish history timeline“ for exact numbers, but for the year 1553, the estimated number of Jews is 2 thousand, and Muslims 12 thousand (for Jerusalem only). Only in the second half of 19.century the numbers are placed on a more even table, around 5.5 thousand on each side, which coincides with the reason stated above, extremely harsh Ottoman religious doctrine and exodus. Check „Ellen Clare Miller, Eastern Sketches – notes of scenery, schools and tent life in Syria and Palestine. Edinburgh: William Oliphant and Company. 1871“ if you wish to analyze exact numbers and the difficulties ANY demographic analysis pre 1900 entails.
At the end of 19.century, during the 5 Aliyahs, or the immigration periods, an estimated 3.million Jews migrated to Palestine area, under the Zionist motives, mostly from Europe. In the Modern era, apart from a few natural disasters, the only reason for Jews immigrating from „Arab countries“ is because of the Ottoman restrictions on Zionist land acquisition and immigration. Settler numbers prior to that are marginal, compared to the Aliyah migrations from Europe.
The first big step in the question that I partly opened with my answer is the year 1917, and the Ottoman defeat under Britain and the passing of the Balfour declaration. Quote :
„His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."[ „
Wiki : The declaration was made in a letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Baron Rothschild (Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild), a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The letter reflected the position of the British Cabinet, as agreed upon in a meeting on 31 October 1917. It further stated that the declaration is a sign of "sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations."
c)
It is the Jews who are surrounded and who have had to fight for their very lives against Arab onslaught many times and who haved lived for decades with their women and children specifically targeted by suicidal killers (whose families were paid $25,000 a hit by Saddam Hussein by the way). Despite this, Israeli Arabs are citizens who vote and can bring lawsuits (which they sometimes win) have their mosques and their religion. Find me this in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, etc!
For the first part of the comment, see what I wrote above, histories of nations (mind the word story in history) tend to be very complicated fishies, very easily bent and broken.
I have nothing to add to your „exercising ones religion“ comment, it rings completely true. But we do not debate modern day ideologies here, rather opposite, if anything, we should debate ancient ideologies, since they are the root of the poisonous wound.
About the killings, and terror attacks etc. I post this table from 2008, about the „effectiveness“ of the Palestinian war machine
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Israelis_killed_by_Palestinians_in_Israel_and_Palestinians_killed_by_Israelis_in_Gaza_-_2008.png
d)
Yet despite all their genocidal attacks on the Jews, good people such as yourself do not hold the Palestinians to blame for the natural consequences of their actions. Indeed you speak of the Jews surrounding the Arabs/Palestinians!?!
I will not comment on the video links, I do not consider this type of argumenting viable for such a seriously delicate topic. Likewise I can return the favor with the link to the Massada2000 website and the s.h.i.t. list, and give you a counter argument for the frightenly imbecilic zionistic groups, but where would that lead us ?
All in all, in the first posting I may have come across ignorant for which I am sorry, but truth be told, the only reason I have, is, ironically, the same one with which you have attacked my reasoning. You saw them purely as terrorists, I posted that, as a balance check to the other side, whereas in reality my personal opinions on the whole matter are very mixed, and quite frankly, not appropriate for this portion of the forum.
I appologize if I hurt anyones feelings with the first, unexplained answer, I may have acted out of line. I am sorry.
Andrew
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http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=32942
A Mid-East FictionBy: David Solway
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, November 03, 2008
The feral antipathy towards Israel, the concerted bid to leverage it out of the community of nations, accounts for the obstinate reluctance on the part of Western academics, intellectuals, professionals, churchmen and journalists to examine the true history of the region, which would expose the Palestinian claim to plenary proprietorship as largely fraudulent while buttressing the Jewish and Israeli title to rightful occupancy. As Joan Peters has shown in her scrupulously researched seven-year study From Time Immemorial, examining census reports and internal memoranda during the British Mandate, perhaps a majority of the “original” Palestinian inhabitants were relative newcomers to the territory in question, having migrated into the Holy Land from the surrounding Arab countries, mainly from what was then known as Greater Syria (i.e., Syria and Lebanon) when still part of the Ottoman empire, and afterward during the post-Balfour period.
Analogously, the Reverend James Parkes, in Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine, has built a powerful case for the Jewish, not the Palestinian, hereditament. His thesis has been recently strengthened by genetic research which has corroborated the provenance of Jews from the Middle East, basing its conclusions on the recently discovered DNA signature, called the Cohen Modal Haplotype, pointing toward a common ancestor dating back to the time of Aaron and Moses, circa 1000 B.C.E. (See also, among many such studies, the American Journal of Human Genetics, 2003, treating of Y-chromosome evidence for the origin of Ashkenazi Levites.)
As for the national collectivity we refer to as “Palestine,” it does not exist. There is, rather, a phenomenon we may call “Palestinianism,” a historically recent political movement rooted in hatred of Israel, palpable anti-Semitism, constructed memory and the Islamic summons to territorial conquest. No settlement in the land of Israel, with the possible exception of Ramla, has a name that indicates Arab extraction—they are mostly of Hebrew origin with a sprinkling of Greek and Latin, covered up at a later time with Arab appellations. There was not even a Palestinian national anthem until one was hastily dreamed up at the onset of the 1987 Intifada. In an Internet letter posted on November 6, 2002, Yashiko Sagamori asks “a few basic questions” about this imaginary Palestinian country: inter alia, “When was it founded and by whom? What were its borders? What was its form of government? Was Palestine ever recognized by [another] country? What was the name of its currency? And finally, since there is no such country today, what caused its demise and when did it occur?”
The historical record conclusively shows not only that there was never any such thing as a Palestinian nation but also that there is no Palestinian ethnicity—in the sense that there is a Jewish or Tibetan ethnicity—and that there was no coherent political grouping known as “Palestinians” until after the 1967 war. A Palestinian entity was only recognized by the Arab countries at the 1974 Rabat Summit Conference. (Although the Palestinian Liberation Organization was founded in 1964, it was largely an Egyptian affair controlled by Gamel Abdel Nasser.) 1967 is the founding year of the hypothesis now known as “Palestine.” What we call “Palestinian history” has just celebrated its forty-first birthday!
The designation “Palestinians” was not in official use under the Ottoman imperium and the British applied the term only to the Jewish inhabitants of the region. Local Arabs rejected the term “Palestine” and pressed for “Southern Syria” and even “Iraq.” Eli Hertz, president of Myths and Facts Inc., points out that the Territories “are filled with families named Elmisri (Egyptian), Chalabi (Syrian), Mugrabi (North Africa)”; and Habash, the surname of arch-terrorist George Habash, originates in Ethiopia (MythsandFacts.com, May 16, 2008). Unlike the original Jewish inhabitants of the area, these emigrant families were not driven out over the historical continuum—they were never there in the first place.
Dafna Yee, director of the JWD website, also explains that since “the borders of the Palestine territory were never clearly defined, it is safe to assume that a great many, if not most, of the ‘Palestinians’ never set foot in any part of what is now Israel and have as flimsy a claim to that identity as Arafat did”—Arafat was born in Egypt. She might also have mentioned Edward Said, another self-proclaimed Palestinian, who did in fact set foot in what is now Israel—he was born in a Jerusalem hospital where his parents calculated that the probability of a safe delivery was higher than in an Arab hospital, and was subsequently raised in Cairo where he spent the first twelve years of his life before moving to the West. With regard to Israel, fictions tend to multiply exponentially. In particular, that Israel was built on something called “Palestinian land” through a process of invasion and displacement is a myth that continues to gather momentum. On the contrary, Israel is not only the ancient Jewish homeland, but in modern times it was founded as nation by legal land purchases and legitimized by the United Nations.
Undeterred, Palestinian human rights activists continue to propound a bald-faced lie. For example, Susan Abulhawa, author of the novel The Scar of David, asserted in an article for the Paris magazine Libèration (March 18, 2008) that Israel was established on “the ancient land of Palestine,” a historical artifice created on the instant. The reader will look in vain in Abulhawa’s piece for any mention of the fact that between 1932 and 1944 half a million Arabs poured into Palestine to profit from conditions prevailing in the Jewish communities. That she claims in the same article that “Jesus was Palestinian,” in direct contravention of the Christian Gospels, may tell us something about the Palestinian style of argument. The Palestinian “narrative” is a synthetic athenaeum whose textual repertory is, for the most part, either forged or imagined. Palestinians fall back on what is by now a classic maneuver: the attempt to achieve unity and manufacture purpose by the denial of fact. But the fact is that the “Palestinian entity” as such is non-historical and would more accurately be defined as a Palestinian nonentity, its documentary grounding largely fabricated and its political aspirations dependent on a volatile mix of ignorance and deception.
In How to Do things with Words, Philosopher J.L. Austin has made a useful distinction between two kinds of speech acts, the referential and the constative. The referential delineates an actual state of affairs, the constative establishes not a quality but a social function. Austin offers an analogy from baseball: the ball may travel across the center of the plate, a perfect strike, but if the umpire calls “ball,” that’s how it registers on the scoreboard and operates in the game. For much of the world today, umpires (and crowds) engaged in the production of their own referents and bent on the reconstruction of reality, an Israeli “strike” will almost always count as a “ball.” The referential has been reconfigured as the constative, despite what a later replay may bring to light—the Gaza beach hoax, the Lebanese ambulance hoax, the al-Durah hoax, and so on. When it comes to Israel, the constative will almost always trump the referential and a collective assessment obliterate an objective factor. The Israeli pitcher throws a strike; the Arab batter receives a base on balls. An intimate congruence has been performatively created between the report and the referent minus the slightest hint of the semantic distance that stretches between the two. The former remains parasitic upon the latter.
Archeologist and historian David Meir-Levy makes this clear in his new book, with its Austinesque title History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression, in which he tries to dig up the buried facts and return to the referential. He points out that “the Arabs of the area had their own designation for the region: Balad esh-Sham (the country, or province of Damascus.)” It was only after the 1967 war that the PLO reframed the issue by “inventing a ‘historic Palestine’ ex nihilo, an ancient ‘Palestinian people’ who had lived in their ‘homeland’ from ‘time immemorial’ [and] who were forced from their homeland by the Zionists…” The idea of a Palestinian nation was hatched, principally by Yasser Arafat, “for political purposes and to justify and legitimize terrorism and genocide.” Arafat himself did not disguise his intentions. In his own words, the aim of the PLO was “not to impose our will on [Israel], but to destroy it in order to take its place.” Further, no Palestinian leader, neither Arafat nor Abbas nor any of their chief negotiators, have acknowledged that there are no 1967 borders to which Israel is required to return. In fact, there are only armistice lines, and the Jordanian peace agreement with Israel specified that these armistice lines would have no bearing on future negotiations to determine final borders.
In this context, it is obvious that the propaganda war against Israel, joined by many in the West, is an indispensable part of the violent campaign to erase the country from the map. The strategy at work in all these instances of malfeasance is obvious: if the lie about Israel is repeated often enough, it will eventually be accepted as truth. Strike three will be called as ball four. The effectiveness of this strategy is borne out by the findings of a BBC global survey, released in March 2007, which skewers Israel as the most negatively-viewed country in the world and shows how successful the BBC and the like-minded media have been in pursuing their hatchet job on the Jewish state.
This clandestine design has penetrated into the domain of presumably objective scholarship as well. The prestigious Macmillan Reference USA encyclopedia contains an entry on anti-Semitism culled in part from a controversial article in the journal Race Traitor, authored by the anti-Zionist Jew Noel Ignatiev. The brunt of the article makes Jews themselves responsible for anti-Semitism, which brings the rationale for the creation of the Jewish state into question. Cognitive distortion is the name of the game. As Aldous Huxley has one of his characters reflect in Brave New World, suggesting the famous dicta of Hitler and Goebbels about the reiterative efficacy of the “Big Lie,” “Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!”
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David Solway is the award-winning author of over twenty-five books of poetry, criticism, educational theory, and travel. He is a contributor to magazines as varied as the Atlantic, the Sewanee Review, Books in Canada, and the Partisan Review. He is the author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity. A new book on Jewish and Israeli themes, Hear, O Israel!, will be released by CanadianValuesPress this fall.
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Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' sells 50,000 copies in Turkey in three months March 18, 2005 12:00 AM (Last updated: January 01, 0001 12:00 AM) By Agence France Presse (AFP)
ANKARA: Cheap cover prices and a rise in nationalist sentiment have made an unlikely best-seller in Turkey of Adolf Hitler's infamous autobiography, "Mein Kampf." The book was first published in Turkey in 1939, when Axis and Allied countries were competing for Turkey's soul as they tried to woo it away from the neutrality it would maintain until the very end of World War II.
But since January, the book has sold more than 50,000 copies and is number four on the best-seller list drawn up by the D&R bookstore chain.
"'Mein Kampf' has always been a sleeper, a secret best-seller," said Oguz Tektas of Mefisto editions, one of several publishing houses to re-release the book Hitler wrote while in jail in 1925. "We took it out of the closet for purely commercial reasons." His company's sole aim, he stressed, was "to make money," which they did by slashing the cover price.
"Mein Kampf," published by about a dozen companies over the years, always sold at a fairly steady annual rate of about 20,000 copies at some 20 New Turkish Lira ($15) a copy.
The Mefisto edition retails at YTL5.90 and sold 23,000 copies in two months.
The readership? "Those who want to know about a man who wreaked death and destruction on the world," Tektas said.
"Mostly young people," said Sami Kilic, owner of the Emre publishing house, another company on the "Mein Kampf" bandwagon, which sold 26,000 copies from a run of 31,000, released in late January.
"The times we live in have a definite impact on sales," Kilic said. "It is an astonishing phenomenon." He linked interest in the book to Turkey's bid to join the EU, seen by the right wing as a desertion of national values, and rising sentiment against the U. S. and its ally Israel over the treatment they are perceived as meting out to the Iraqis and the Palestinians, respectively.
"This book, which does not contain a single ounce of humanity, unfortunately appears to be taken seriously in this country," political scientist Dogu Ergil complained in a recent newspaper interview.
He agreed that the unexpected popularity of "Mein Kampf" in this Muslim-majority country has its roots in a rise in anti-American sentiment sparked by the occupation of Iraq and anti-Semitism resulting from Israel's Palestinian policy.
"Nazism, buried in the dustbin of history in Europe, is beginning to re-emerge in Turkey," he warned.
But despite what the sales may imply, Turkey has never been an anti-Semitic country - on the contrary, it has been a safe haven for Jews ever since the 15th century, when Sultan Bayezit II first took in Spanish Jews fleeing the inquisition.
Throughout Ottoman times, Jews fleeing pogroms and extermination camps were always welcome in Turkey.
Silvyo Ovadya, the head of Turkey's Jewish community, said he was "troubled" by the book's popularity.
Ovadya said he was "astonished a 500-page book that sows the seeds of racism and anti-Semitism can sell at such a low price." But, he said, his complaints to the publishers have gone unheeded.
Most of Turkey's 22,000 Jews - out of a total population of 71 million - live in Istanbul, where there are 18 synagogues.
In November 2003, two of them were targeted by car bombs blamed on an Al-Qaeda linked organisation, killing 25 people and wounding hundreds of others. - AFP
Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Culture/Arts/Mar/18/Hitlers-Mein-Kampf-sells-50000-copies-in-Turkey-in-three-months.ashx
(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)
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http://www.jihadwatch.org/2007/02/mein-kampf-anti-christian-polemics-big-sellers-at-cairo-book-fair.html
Mein Kampf, anti-Christian polemics big sellers at Cairo Book Fair
It's My Jihad in an Islamic context. "Massive Cairo book fair sets religious tone," by Alain Navarro for AFP, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:
CAIRO (AFP) - At the Cairo Book Fair, the largest and most important event of its kind in the Arab world, religious works dominate, while literature and scientific texts are often pushed to the margins.
Millions of Cairenes have been thronging to the fair giving it an air of carnival on the vast exhibition grounds covering 80,000 square meters (861,000 square feet) in northern Cairo and featuring some 1,400 stands of books and CDs.
By Sunday, when the 39th annual fair comes to a close, organisers estimate some two million people will have visited, dwarfing similar events in Beirut, Casablanca and Abu Dhabi -- though many complain that the crowds are just there to picnic and buy religious books....
Of the 700 Egyptian and Arab publishers at the fair, the vast majority stock religious books on their shelves. "Even we reserve about a quarter of our catalog for them," said publisher Ansari.
Korans of all styles, from the simple to the leather-bound, share shelf space with collections of religious sayings and fatwas as well as their more modern incarnations on cassettes and compact disks.
The collected works of late venerable preachers like Egypt's Sheikh Mohammed Shaarawi and Saudi Arabia's Abdel Aziz bin Baz were present as well, though there was stiff competition from the young "new look" television preachers like Amr Khaled.
"It's become a real business, but this fundamentalism comes from Saudi Arabia and stays with the cynical encouragement of the powers that be," said best-selling Egyptian author Aswani whose social satire the "Yacoubian Building" has achieved fame far beyond Egypt's borders....
The fair also has its darker sides, with anti-Christian polemics advocating conversion to Islam as the only solution to a flawed religion and of course plenty of editions of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" for sale.
"It makes up a big part of our success, especially among the 18 to 25 crowd," said Mahmud Abdallah of the Syrian-Egyptian Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi publishing house.
"Allowing the sale of books like 'Mein Kampf' is a total scandal," said Mohammed Arkoun, professor emeritus of Islamic history at the Sorbonne, for whom the Arab cultural production, at least as seen through the lens of the Cairo Book Fair, "reflects above all, a certain emptiness."
And worse than emptiness.
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http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=764
JIHAD'S NAZI CONNECTIONS
(See also: Fascism and Nazism; Islamo-fascism)
The Muslim groups which today threaten the West with terrorism, subversion and insurgency are not only “fascist” in the broad sociological sense, but can trace their literal historical origins to Nazism and its genocidal ambitions.
The ideology of the Islamists whose ranks today include not only al-Qaeda but also Hamas and Hezbollah, originated with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in 1928 by Sheikh Hassan al-Banna. The Muslim Brotherhood finds not just its roots, but much of its symbolism, terminology, and political priorities deep within the heart of Nazi fascism.
For al-Banna, as for many other Muslims worldwide, the end of the caliphate, although brought about by secular Muslim Turks, was a sacrilege against Islam for which they blamed the non-Muslim West. It was to strike back against these evils that al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928.
Al-Banna’s antipathy towards Western modernity soon moved him to shape the Brotherhood into an organization seeking to check the secularist tendencies in Muslim society and return to traditional Islamic values. Al-Banna recruited followers from a vast cross-section of Egyptian society by addressing issues such as colonialism, public health, educational policy, natural resources management, social inequalities, Arab nationalism, and the weakness of the Islamic world. Among the perspectives he drew on to address these issues were the anti-capitalist doctrines of European Marxism and especially fascism.
As the Muslim Brotherhood expanded during the 1930s and extended its activities well beyond its original religious revivalism, al-Banna began dreaming a greater Muslim dream: the restoration of the Caliphate. He would describe, in inflammatory speeches, the horrors of hell expected for heretics, and consequently, the need for Muslims to return to their purest religious roots, and resume the great and final holy war, or jihad, against the non-Muslim world.
The first big step in the international jihad al-Banna envisioned came in the form of trans-national terrorism during the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-39, when one of the most famous of the Muslim Brotherhood’s leaders, the Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti (Supreme Muslim religious leader) of Jerusalem, incited his followers to a three-year war against the Jews in Palestine and against the British who administered the Palestine Mandate. In 1936 the Brotherhood had about 800 members, but by 1938, just two years into the Revolt, its membership had grown to almost 200,000, with fifty branches in Egypt alone. By the end of the 1930s, there were more than a half million active members registered, in more than 2,000 branches across the Arab world.
To achieve that broader dream of a global jihad, the Brotherhood developed a network of underground cells, stole weapons, trained fighters, formed secret assassination squads, founded sleeper cells of subversive supporters in the ranks of the army and police, and waited for the order to go public with terrorism, assassinations, and suicide missions. It was during this time that the Muslim Brotherhood found a soul mate in Nazi Germany.
The Reich offered great power connections to the movement, but the relationship brokered by the Brotherhood was more than a marriage of convenience. Long before the war, al-Banna had developed an Islamic religious ideology which previewed Hitler’s Nazism. Both movements sought world conquest and domination. Both were triumphalist and supremacist (in Nazism the Aryan must rule, while in al-Banna’s Islam, the Muslim religion must hold dominion). Both advocated subordination of the individual to a central power. Both were explicitly anti-nationalist in the sense that they believed in the liquidation of the nation-state in favor of a trans-national unifying community. And both rabidly hated the Jews and sought their destruction.
As the Brotherhood’s political and military alliance with Nazi Germany developed, these parallels facilitated a full-blown alliance, with all the pomp and panoply of formal state visits, de facto ambassadors, and overt as well as sub rosa joint ventures. Al-Banna’s followers easily transplanted into the Arab world a newly Nazified form of traditional Muslim Jew-hatred, with Arab translations of Mein Kampf (translated into Arabic as My Jihad) and other Nazi anti-Semitic works, including Der Sturmer hate-cartoons, adapted to portray the Jew as the demonic enemy of Allah.
When the Second World War broke out, Al-Banna worked to firm up a formal alliance with Hitler and Mussolini. But the best known Nazi sympathizer in the Muslim Brotherhood was the Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and one-time President of the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine. The Grand Mufti was a bridge figure in terms of transplanting the Nazi genocide in Europe into the post-war Middle East and creating a fascist heritage for the Palestinian national movement.
Al-Husseini used his office as a powerful bully pulpit from which to preach anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist, and (turning on his patrons) anti-British vitriol. He was directly involved in the organization of the 1929 riots which destroyed the 3,000-year-old Jewish community of Hebron. And he was quick to see that he had a natural ally in Hitler. As early as spring 1933, he assured the German consul in Jerusalem that "the Muslims inside and outside Palestine welcome the new regime of Germany and hope for the extension of the fascist, anti-democratic governmental system to other countries."
The youth organization established by the Mufti used Nazi emblems, names and uniforms. Germany reciprocated by setting up scholarships for Arab students, hiring Arab apprentices at German firms, and inviting Arab party leaders to the Nuremberg party rallies and Arab military leaders to Wehrmacht maneuvers. Most significantly, the German Propaganda Ministry developed strong links with the Grand Mufti and with Arabic newspapers, creating a propaganda legacy that would outlast Husseini, Hitler, and all the other figures of World War II.
In September 1937, Adolf Eichmann and another SS officer carried out an exploratory mission in the Middle East lasting several weeks, and including a friendly productive visit with the Grand Mufti. It was after that visit, in fact, that the Mufti went on the Nazi payroll as a Nazi agent and propagandist. During the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-39, which al-Husseini helped organize and which Germany funded, the swastika was used as a mark of identity on Arabic leaflets and graffiti. Arab children welcomed each other with the Hitler salute, and a sea of German flags and pictures of Hitler were displayed at celebrations.
After meeting with Hitler on November 21, 1941, Husseini praised the Germans because they “know how to get rid of the Jews, and that brings us close to the Germans and sets us in their camp.” On March 1, 1944, the Mufti called out in a broadcast from Zeesen: “Arabs! Rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. Kill them with your teeth if need be. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor.” His own memoirs, and the testimony of German defendants at the Nuremberg trials later on, showed that he planned a death camp modeled on Auschwitz to be constructed near Nablus for the genocide of Palestine’s Jews.
It was the Mufti who urged Hitler, Himmler, and General Ribbentrop to concentrate Germany’s considerable industrial and military resources on the extermination of European Jewry. The foremost Muslim spiritual leader of his time, he helped in this effort by lobbying to prevent Jews from leaving Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, even though those governments were initially willing to let them go. As Eichmann himself recounted: “We have promised him [the Mufti] that no European Jew would enter Palestine any more.”
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Andraz:
While GM brings some citations to bear, I will merely offer two points
a) The purpose of my reference to the sales of Mein Kampf in the Arab world prior to WW2 was to establish the existence of vicious, virulent hatred of Jews well prior to the establishment of Israel i.e. the problem is not the existence of Israel, the problem is intolerance of Jews (and in the absence thereof of Coptic Christians and in the absence thereof any kind of Christian and in the absence thereof Muslims of other schools of thought that ones own etc etc etc) I see GM is fleshing this point out.
b) Please do not confuse the vigor of the conversation for anger. We do not seek here an echo chamber. To the contrary we seek Truth. Your presence and participation here are most welcome.
c) I will seek to answer some of the particulars of your most recent post tomorrow.
Marc
PS: Although I missed wishing Happy Passover a few days ago, I would like to take the occasion to wish Happy Easter to our Christian friends here. The Christian message of forgiveness is a most worthy one.
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Andrew, I do think you make some good points; most of the world is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, so there must two sides to the story.
I find your maps rather interesting, but I too would like to see the source.
Your reference was:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Qe1wgxDiEdU/S61vKresyTI/AAAAAAAAAaw/jInENKoSC0s/s1600/israel-palestine-map.jpg
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Off to do some Easter Egg Hunt stuff with the family (my wife is Catholic btw), but a quick addition to the comments in my previous post:
If I am not mistaken, Persia changed its name to Iran (i.e. a form of the word "Aryan") due to Nazi influence in the 1930s. Can anyone find a citation for or against this? Assuming it to be true for the moment, again we see virulent Jew hatred prior to the existence of Israel-- so the problem is not the existence of Israel, the problem is religious hatred fomented within the ranks of Islam.
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Off to do some Easter Egg Hunt stuff with the family (my wife is Catholic btw), but a quick addition to the comments in my previous post:
If I am not mistaken, Persia changed its name to Iran (i.e. a form of the word "Aryan") due to Nazi influence in the 1930s. Can anyone find a citation for or against this? Assuming it to be true for the moment, again we see virulent Jew hatred prior to the existence of Israel-- so the problem is not the existence of Israel, the problem is religious hatred fomented within the ranks of Islam.
http://articles.sfgate.com/2006-01-08/opinion/17275472_1_third-reich-hitler-iran
Denial of Holocaust nothing new in Iran / Ties to Hitler led to plots against British and Jews
January 08, 2006|By Edwin Black
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has shot to the forefront of Holocaust denial with his rabble-rousing remarks last month. But it's more like self-denial. The president of Iran need only look to his country's Hitler-era past to discover that Iran and Iranians were strongly connected to the Holocaust and the Hitler regime, as was the entire Islamic world under the leadership of the mufti of Jerusalem.
Iran's axis with the Third Reich began during the prewar years, when it welcomed Nazi Gestapo agents and other operatives to Tehran, allowing them to use the city as a base for Middle East agitation against the British and the region's Jews.
Key among these German agents was Fritz Grobba, Berlin's envoy to the Middle East, who was often called "the German Lawrence," because he promised a Pan-Islamic state stretching from Casablanca to Tehran.
Relations between Berlin and Tehran were strong from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933. At that time, Reza Shah Pahlavi's nation was known as Persia. The shah became a stalwart admirer of Hitler, Nazism and the concept of the Aryan master race. He also sought the Reich's help in reducing British petro-political domination.
So intense was the shah's identification with the Third Reich that in 1935 he renamed his ancient country "Iran," which in Farsi means Aryan and refers to the Proto-Indo-European lineage that Nazi racial theorists and Persian ethnologists cherished.
The idea for the name change was suggested by the Iranian ambassador to Germany, who came under the influence of Hitler's trusted banker, Hjalmar Schacht. From that point, all Iranians were constantly reminded that their country shared a common bond with the Nazi regime.
Shortly after World War II broke out in 1939, the Mufti of Jerusalem crafted a strategic alliance with Hitler to exchange Iraqi oil for active Arab and Islamic participation in the murder of Jews in the Mideast and Eastern Europe. This was predicated on support for a pan-Arab state and Arab control over Palestine.
During the war years, Iran became a haven for Gestapo agents. It was from Iran that the seeds of the abortive 1941 pro-Nazi coup in Baghdad were planted. After Churchill's forces booted the Nazis out of Iraq in June 1941, German aircrews supporting Nazi bombers escaped across Iraq's northern border back into Iran.
Likewise, the mufti of Jerusalem was spirited across the border to Tehran, where he continued to call for the destruction of the Jews and the defeat of the British.
His venomous rhetoric filled the newspapers and radio broadcasts in Tehran. The mufti was a vocal opponent of allowing Jewish refugees to be transported or ransomed into Jewish Palestine. Instead, he wanted them shipped to the gas chambers of Poland.
In the summer of 1941, the mufti, with the support of key Iranian military and government leaders, advocated implementing in Iran what had failed months earlier in Iraq. The plan once again was for a total diversion of oil from the Allies to the Nazis, in exchange for the accelerated destruction of the Jews in Eastern Europe and the Nazis' support for an Arab state. Through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., Iran had already been supplying Hitler's forces in occupied Czechoslovakia and Austria.
Now, the mufti agitated to cut off the British and the Allies completely and supply Germany in its push against Russia.
In October 1941, British, USSR other allied forces invaded Iran to break up the Iran-Nazi alliance. Pro-Nazi generals and ministers were arrested, and the shah's son was installed in power. The mufti scampered into the Italian embassy, where he shaved his beard and dyed his hair. In this disguise, he was allowed to leave the country along with the rest of the Italian delegation.
Once the mufti relocated permanently to Berlin, where he established his own Reich-supported "bureau," he was given airtime on Radio Berlin. From Berlin and other fascist capitals in Europe, the mufti continued to agitate for international Jewish destruction, as well as a pan-Islamic alliance with the Nazi regime.
He called upon all Muslims to "kill the Jews wherever you see them." In Tehran's marketplace, it was common to see placards that declared, "In heaven, Allah is your master. On Earth, it is Adolf Hitler."
When the mufti raised three divisions of Islamic Waffen SS to undertake cruel operations in Bosnia, among the 30,000 killers were some volunteer contingents from Iran. Iranian Nazis, along with the other Muslim Waffen SS, operated under the direct supervision of Heinrich Himmler and were responsible for barbarous actions against Jews and others in Bosnia. Recruitment for the murderous "Handschar Divisions" was done openly in Iran.
Iran and its leaders were not only aware of the Holocaust, they played both sides. The country offered overland escape routes for refugee Jews fleeing Nazi persecution to Israel -- and later fleeing postwar Iraqi fascist persecution -- but only in exchange for extortionate passage fees.
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http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=84
NEW ANTI-SEMITISM: DISGUISED AS "ANTI-ZIONISM"
While traditional anti-Semitism remains prevalent among extremist fringe groups and populations where xenophobic attitudes persist, a “new” anti-Semitism manifests itself in opposition to Zionism and to the existence or policies of the state of Israel.
Traditional anti-Semitism, with its historic linkage to Nazism and fascism, tends to be overt and is considered unacceptable and illegitimate by much of the mainstream in Western Europe, North America, and beyond. Its hallmarks include:
drawing on the age-old blood libel that depicts Jews as bloodthirsty murderers and cannibals
perpetuating the timeless conspiracy theory of undue and unseen Jewish influence politically or economically
denying the reality and scope of the Nazi Holocaust
branding Jews as "Christ-killers"
accusing Jews of usury
depicting Jews as uniformly dishonest, treacherous, and evil
By contrast, "new anti-Semitism" is characterized by anti-Zionist and anti-Israel criticism that is anti-Semitic in its effect — whether or not in its intent — and is more subtle and thus frequently escapes condemnation.
According to the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), anti-Zionist and anti-Israel criticism -- regardless of the motive -- become anti-Semitic when they entail:
denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination;
applying double standards to the state of Israel;
using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism to characterize Israel or Israelis;
drawing comparisons between contemporary Israeli policy and that of the Nazis; or
holding Jews collectively responsible for actions by the state of Israel.
In his classic 1969 article, “The Socialism of Fools—The Left, the Jews and Israel,” Seymour Martin Lipset wrote: "There is a dangerous confluence between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, though the two concepts are not always identical. Anti-Zionism is often used to conceal hatred of Jews." He then enumerated the following criteria for distinguishing between anti-Semitism and "legitimate criticism of Israel":
"Consider the source. Is the speaker someone with a history of anti-Jewish attitudes?"
"Critics who habitually single out Israel for condemnation while ignoring far worse actions by other countries (especially other Middle Eastern countries) are anti-Semitic."
"Likening Israel to Nazi Germany, or to traditional anti-Jewish stereotypical behavior is another sure sign of Jew-baiting."
"Attacks on the merits of Israel's existence rather than individual government policies are anti-Semitic."
In a similar vein, a 2008 State Department report says:
"New forms of anti-Semitism often incorporate elements of traditional anti-Semitism. However, the distinguishing feature of the new anti-Semitism is criticism of Zionism or Israeli policy that—whether intentionally or unintentionally—has the effect of promoting prejudice against all Jews by demonizing Israel and Israelis and attributing Israel’s perceived faults to its Jewish character. This new anti-Semitism is common throughout the Middle East and in Muslim communities in Europe, but it is not confined to these populations.... [T]he collective effect of unremitting criticism of Israel, coupled with a failure to pay attention to regimes that are demonstrably guilty of grave violations, has the effect of reinforcing the notion that the Jewish state is one of the sources, if not the greatest source, of abuse of the rights of others, and thus intentionally or not encourages anti-Semitism."
Adapted from "Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism: A Report Provided to the United States Congress," by The U.S. Department of State (2008).
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Tail wags everyone.
Buckle up, this is long.
Ok, about the picture...as I recall correctly I first saw it in a Nouvel Observateur version quite long ago, when I was visiting mother in France, but I am not definitive on that. Recently I found it in this article from Tristam, but since the pic is mutilated with ads, I looked for another one.
http://middleeast.about.com/b/2009/07/24/israel-bans-al-naqba-from-textbooks.htm
@ GM : Mannn, you are a hardliner no doubt. But last I checked we are talking on a DISCUSSION forum, not a linking referenced articles forum. In contrast to you I can link you AT LEAST 15 articles from different sources and different viewpoints that tackle different areas of interest on the topic, not just those that stick to my version. Make that twice as many books. But what will we acomplish with this ? Im writing my ass of here, thinking and argumenting my point, but for you linking articles and sources that support your view on things is a self suficient argument in a debate. Actually I would rather call shoving other peoples opinions down your collegues throats, indoctrination.
Moreover, seems like you havent really read my post that well. Citing Solway will hardly get you credit points with people in the know, but ok ill play. First of, some of what he talks about in the article is exactly the same stuff I have already written in my post.
“Palestine,” it does not exist.
Gee diddly do, oh really. What he calls „Palestinianism“ is really a „coming together“ of a people, a national identity, which of course hasnt existed before 18 century for the simple fact, that nations and states in the modern term (monoply on violence, subject/sovereign, centralised government, etc. ) havent existed anywhere.
Word Palestine alone is a cognant, that derives fom the archaism „Philistine“ or Land of the Philistines. They were a people, apparently of Aegean origins, who occupied the southern coast of Canaan in Iron Age. The fact that there are archaic greek, byzantine greek AND Latin words for Palestine derails the argument that „Palestine“ is a modern construct. It is and WAS a conventional name since around 5BC up to the 1948 war to describe a region between the Mediterannean and the Jordan river. Like most of the stuff in history its borders changed, bent,destroyed, reappeared, etc..the area has given ground to the most diverse and dominant cultural forces in history. From Persians, to Greeks to Seleucids to Romans,then the Arabian conquest, Abbasids and Umayads, to Byznatine rule, Crusaders, Mamluks to Ottoman rule. In most of these cases the lands were divided differently, since they had different socio-economical formations, from slavery to european feudalism to byzantine feudalism to Ottoman Beylerbey provincial administration. This alone makes it IMPOSSIBLE to draw any type of historicistic conclusions of what we think of Palestine today, used to mean.
The historical record conclusively shows not only that there was never any such thing as a Palestinian nation but also that there is no Palestinian ethnicity—in the sense that there is a Jewish or Tibetan ethnicity
I would most certainly like to see these historical records, and what they entail that shows a nation as „a nation“. Solway typically misadresses the term nation from a modern standpoint, whereas, again, nations in that modern context can start being thought of in above mentioned manner from about 1800. Traditionally every person that individualised himself with the traditional core ethos of a certain group was thought as a member of that group. Thats why the different ethnical structures in Europe varied so harshly. Take the term Germanians for example. To your average person, it calls to mind, giant, violent, noble savages, wheres in truth, Germania was a name for a region, and the notion for a historical ethno lingusitic group that used Indo-European Germanic languages. Germania was inhabited by different tribes, including some Celtic, Baltic, Scythian, and proto-Slavic peoples. The tribal and ethnic makeup changed over the centuries as a result of assimilation and, most importantly, migrations. The Germanic people spoke several different dialects.
In some cases, especially involving transnational migration, or colonial expansion, ethnicity is linked to nationality. Anthropologists and historians, following the modernist understanding of ethnicity as proposed by Benedict Anderson, see nations and nationalism as developing with the rise of the modern state. Thus, in the West, the notion of ethnicity, like race and nation, developed in the context of European colonial expansion.In the nineteenth century, modern states generally sought legitimacy through their claim to represent "nations." Nation-states, however, invariably include populations that have been excluded from national life for one reason or another. Under these conditions—when people moved from one state to another,or one state conquered or colonized peoples beyond its national boundaries—ethnic groups were formed by people who identified with one nation, but lived in another state.
Is there such thing as an American ethnicity ? Is/was there any such thing as Czechoslovakian ethnicity ? Is there na Italian ethnicity ? This implication that the nation cannot exist or have history since it does not have intro and outrovertive reflective ethnicity is completely irrelevant.
Again Solway makes a common mistake of „amateur historians“ who do not recall the differences between national, political and ethnical borders, which ARE NOT and DO not imply the same conclusion.
1967 is the founding year of the hypothesis now known as “Palestine.” What we call “Palestinian history” has just celebrated its forty-first birthday!
If anything what he should have written there is „what we call as Palestinian peoples history“. Even that would have been horribly wrong. What hypothesis ? Palestinian what, people or land ? Or both ? Palestine within Byzantine borders meant something different to Palestine under the Assyrian empire and something different to what the WZO proposed at the 1919 Paris peace conference.
As I already wrote, the endonym „Palestinian“ as a concept of a nation of the Palestinian people by the Arabs of Palestine began just before WW1. And this concept still changes to this day.
Solway really should stick to poetry and literal critique.
@ Guro Crafty
Thank you for the thoughts. I look forward to reading your post.
Before I finish, a few words about the Nazis, Iran, Aryans, Persia, etc..
First off, we need to settle something regarding the word Aryan. It is a loanword from sanskrit Arya, meaning Noble. It can imply several different things.
In scholary usage it refers mostly to the Indo Iranian languages and their speakers. In dated usage it refers to Indo European languages and their speakers.
Besides that, the word is getting thrown out and about, to whatever meaning and reason. From Hindu nationalists, to Nazi racial theory, the „nordic“ type of person with blonde hair, blue eyes, high growth, to the white supremacy theory about the peoples who are native Indo-Europeans of the Western or European branch of the Indo-European peoples, as opposed to the Eastern or Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European peoples.
What you guys, and Gms article say above is propagandist misconstruction at its finest. Even though It holds true, that the Shah had nascent ties to Nazi Germany, it was not, by any means the reason they changed the name from Persia to Iran.The Zend persian „ariya“ refers to „venerable“ or even a national name.
The term „Iran“ has been in use natively preety much since the Sassanid empire, up to the year 1940, when the term became known internationally, and replaced the ethnonym Persia. Both "Persia" and "Iran" are used interchangeably in cultural contexts. The name "Iran" is a cognate of "Aryan", and really roughly means "land of the Aryans"and in modern Persian derives from the Proto-Iranian term Aryānā, first attested in Zoroastrianism's Avesta tradition. In historiography, Ariya- and Airiia- are even attested as an ethnic designator in Achaemenid inscriptions.
When reading about Hitler and his ideology and propaganda et al. You have to be very careful, since he is an epitome of „picking what you like from all around and stuff it into one big neat pile of WTF“. At one point in his „career“ he became obsessed with finding the pure race, and traveled almost off world to find his agenda. From aryans in Iran to Tibet. Now as some may know he was obsessed with Nietzsche, although he read it in a completely oppurtunistic manner. Nietzche on the other hand had a thing (to put it bluntly :)) for Zoroaster/Zarathustra the prophet. Through this prism he started to plow around Iran to find the „aryan“ he read so largely about in Zoroaster texts, sadly little did he know that this „aryan“ meant something totally other to what his version of „aryan“ was all about. The reason why alot of Iranians/Persians got excited about the book was, since it was promoted as a book that promotes the domination of the aryan race, the aryan ideology. Needless to say, the aryan race in that or any other context doesnt exist, and what they read about, and were so excited about was not their Aryan, but that of the NSDAP.
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Andrew,
"Palestinian" is a modern propaganda construct. The islamic ideal is the "umma" rather than ethnicity based nations. The "Palestinian" identity is false to anyone who knows the history. The dialect of levantine arabic spoken in that region doesn't even use a "P" sound. "Filistin" is as close as then can get to saying "Palestine".
The arabs that lived in Israel and fled awaiting the jews to be pushed into the sea were not "Palestinians", they were arabs. The "Palestinian" claim is like Americans of european ancestry claiming they are member of the Lakota tribe because they lived in Fargo.
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"Is there such thing as an American ethnicity ?"
No. There is such a thing as American culture and philosophy, but not ethnicity. Americans come from every spot on the planet.
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Andrew,
Are you claiming that Iran just coincidentally decided to become Iran rather than Persia in 1935? What of all the muslim member of the SS? Coincidental again?
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http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/crcc/engagement/resources/texts/muslim/hadith/bukhari/052.sbt.html
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 177:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah's Apostle said, "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. "O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him."
Note that the islamic antipathy towards jews long predates the existence of Israel.
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I have a particularly busy day today, so again I must beg off a most extensive reply.
I note that Rachel's post today at http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1327.400 tells a story that if the roles were reversed and it were Israel were doing it to Palestinian Arabs would have received quite a bit more coverage, both in Europe and here.
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This is long. Probably my last incursion in this, I am loosing to much time with this type of research.
The arabs that lived in Israel and fled awaiting the jews to be pushed into the sea were not "Palestinians", they were arabs. The "Palestinian" claim is like Americans of european ancestry claiming they are member of the Lakota tribe because they lived in Fargo.
Ok, first of all. These things are far from solved and noted like you portray them to be. The only thing that is clear to someone who „knows the history“ is that it cant even be called history. What it is, is an open discussion panel on principal historic conceptions and facts based on scientific apparatus, that are inherent to historical studies. One sided interpretations of facts or sources of any kind that nudge the totality of context in your favor isnt exactly an objective debate, unless of course you want that ? Hmmm, where have I spoken of indoctrination before ??
Again, History means a very specific thing, we are loooong past the 19.century Rankean notion of „wie es eigentlich gewesen“ that history is a sequence of tools that search for what „actually“ transpired.
This a very Marxist linear traditionalistic perception of time, which makes me surprised, since a while ago you actually encouraged me NOT to read anything with the term Marx in it.
The islamic ideal is the "umma" rather than ethnicity based nations...
Second of all, I see you have adopted the Solway method of understanding what a nation is. OR you just dont read what I write. Ethnicity and nation have absolutely nothing in common and are in no shape or form connected as pre or post (if thats even a word) requisites. And I have no idea what the city of ancient Sumer, Umma has anything to do here ? Unless you mean the Ummah, collection of nation states. You oversimplify here, since ummah can be understood in several meanings. One is the context of the so called pan Arabism (connected to the arabic nationalism, that all arabs comprise a single nation, etc etc). Then we have the context of Islam :
The phrase Ummah Wahida in the Qur'an (the "One Community") refers to all of the Islamic world unified. The Quran says: “You [Muslims] are the best nation brought out for Mankind, commanding what is righteous (Ma'ruf, lit. "recognized [as good]") and forbidding what is wrong (Munkar, lit. "unrecognized [as good]")…” [3:110].
On the other hand, in Arabic, Ummah can also be used in the more Western sense of nation, for example: Al-Umam Al-Muttahida, the United Nations.
The dialect of levantine arabic spoken in that region doesn't even use a "P" sound. "Filistin" is as close as then can get to saying "Palestine"....
Ok, which dialect ? Which specific region ? There are several dialects of levantine arabic. And for the record, the dialect spoken in the region is actually called Palestinian Arabic, it has 3 subgroups : Rural, urban and bedouin. Whereas each of them has tremendous differences not only in phonetics but in grammatical structures.
There are noticeable differences between Palestinian Arabic and other forms of Levantine Arabic such as Syrian Arabic and Lebanese Arabic. However, none of these is invariable, given the differences of dialect within Palestinian Arabic itself.
Until relatively recently the Arabic spoken in the Ottoman sanjak of Syria was considered a single Syrian dialect, see F. Crow if you are more interested in this.
And what kind of role does phonetics play here ? Anglo saxon languages also dont use the word Č, for Črna gora for example, but you call it Montenegro, which is a literal transliteration of the word. How does that make the concept of a Montenegrean nation not viable just because it is pronounced differently in native tongue ??
"Palestinian" is a modern propaganda construct.. The "Palestinian" identity is false to anyone who knows the history.
Ok, lets see now. 717 BC, annales of Sargon 2, the akkadian, records the region as Pilistu.
Herodotus, as far back as 430BC in his Histories, clearly speaks of a wider area than the Philistia from the bible. He literally refers to a "district of Syria, called Palaistinê" (Herodotus' Description of the East Mediterranean Coast, Anson F. Rainey, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 321 (Feb., 2001), pp. 57–63 )
340Bc, Aristotle speaks in his Meteorology, "Again if, as is fabled, there is a lake in Palestine, such that if you bind a man or beast and throw it in it floats and does not sink, this would bear out what we have said.“ (http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/meteorology.2.ii.html)
100 AD, Plutarch, in Parallel Lives : "Armenia, where Tigranes reigns, king of kings, and holds in his hands a power that has enabled him to keep the Parthians in narrow bounds, to remove Greek cities bodily into Media, to conquer Syria and Palestine, to put to death the kings of the royal line of Seleucus, and carry away their wives and daughters by violence." (http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/lucullus.html)
lets skip a few years, too many to point out.
1225AD : Yaqut al-Hamawi, Dictionary of Geographies "Filastin is the last of the provinces of Syria towards Egypt. Its capital is Jerusalem." (Guy le Strange (1890). Palestine Under the Moslems from AD 650 to 1500 )
1856 AD : James Redhouse, An English and Turkish dictionary: Regarded as the original and authoritative Ottoman-English dictionary, translates Holy Land as dari-filastin (House of Palestine)
So, construct of Palestine, land of Palestine, Palestinian people, Palestinian territory are all different horses.You do not perceive that the situation has many different levels on which it is problematic. The ethnogenesis of the Arabians, Palestinians, Jews whoever you wanna take isnt really anything special, you have impossible cases like these and even worse, with complete lack of ALL primary sources all over the place in Europe, but the catch in this specific case is, it is the most potent, most viral case of political inflammation and misuse, or better said ab-use of, what is generally a perfectly normal case of historical progression/analysis.
Are you claiming that Iran just coincidentally decided to become Iran rather than Persia in 1935? What of all the muslim member of the SS? Coincidental again?
Not at all. I wonder whom are my hours of writing this dedicated to. Shortly repeating myself, at that time the word „Iran“ went in international use, correctly stated by you, the act of „change“ was set in the wake of the NSDAP influence, but the word itself hasnt got anything to do with it.
You can read up on the word ĒRĀN, its phonetics, and history in more detail here : http://www.iranica.com/articles/eran-eransah
And some more info about the muslim members of the SS which you like to bring up so fast in other topics also. It sounds very useful, as an argument to your cause. All the muslims in the SS. Legioons and legions of them.Untill you start digging around of course. Let me do it for you, if you will even read it that is.
The notorious Waffen Schutzstaffel, or the Wafen SS was a MULTI ETHNICAL force of the Reich. It comprised people from Muslim Bosniaks, to Catholic Croats, to Orthodox Serbs and Soviet Muslims, to Finnish, Bulgarian, Netherlandian and even British nationals.. Its main objectives were to aid in fighting the more and more troubling local Partisan forces in Yugoslavia, Russia and to an extent Poland. Although they werent directly connected in the Holocaust, they were used in the more drastic cases of military violence and killings. Besides the largest Russian Cossacks division, the biggest division of non German SS personnel were the Croatian Hanđar divisions, that included around 20 thousand Bosnian Muslims ( who were, by the way, considered ethnic Croats during WW2), which was by and large the biggest muslim division in the whole military apparatus of the Reich. There was a reason behind this, since Himmler had an idea that the Balkan Muslims were special, and different to other Muslims in the case that they were neither Slavs nor Turks, but actually Aryans that adopted Islam.
Additionally, there were pockets of SS units consisting primarily of American, Indian, some Arabs, Tartars amongst others. The numberwork on the aforementioned is based on gueswork at best. In fact, there were even units, such as the Dirlewanger brigade that accepted persecuted peoples such as Homosexuals, Gypsies and political prisoners.
This opens up a very specific, different and mindboggingly deep topic of collaborations during the WW2, but lets just put it this way. Most of the collaborators sought to work with the Nazis in specific ways that would let them realize some of their own nationalistic/rasistic proliferation of their specific space/state, most probably from some semi-deluded history of half truths. Slovenia had a very grey post WW2 period of dealing with collaborators, and I guess you wouldnt try to argument the fact since part of my nation worked with the Nazis, that our underlining reasoning had something to do with the Jews ? What about Vichy France ? The Quisling Norway ? What about your own, American SS brigade, the George Washington brigade ?
I find your oversimplifications of the matters in this case, strongly disconcerting.
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah's Apostle said, "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. "O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him."
Note that the islamic antipathy towards jews long predates the existence of Israel.
Oh man GM, you have a way about you. You can twist and attenuate parts of a text so far out of context to suit your view on things, I almost see it fascinating. Almost.
For starters, Hadith are narrations concerning the deeds of the prophet Muhammad and are regarded by even the most traditional Islamic schools of jurisprudence as merely prisms through which better understanding the Qur'an, the socalled Qur'an exegesis. The texts were gathered and evaluated in bigger collections only in the 9th century and to this day are being investigated by even Muslims scholars of being authentic or not. Their semantic value, however, is unquestionable.
There are also different versions how Shia and Sunni muslims look at Hadith. Generally they both accept the authenticity of the majority of the Hadith, though they often disagree over the authenticity of certain hadith or how others might be interpreted, and have different canonical collections. Shi'as also believe that narrations of the Fourteen Infallibles, especially Ali bin Abi Talib, are valid as hadith, whereas Sunnis accept only narrations traceable to Muhammad.
What on earth are you trying to prove with this ? Islamic antipathy ? The worst, most hardocre „antipathy“ towards Jews was built, improved and perfected in Europe indicrectly because of the Catholic church. „They killed Jesus, they must suffer“. I am so tired of writing history lessons, but just for fun, lets do one more.
From the 9th century CE, the medieval Islamic world classified Jews (and Christians) as dhimmi, and allowed them to practice their religion more freely than they could do in medieval Christian Europe. Under Islamic rule, there was a Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain that lasted until at least the 11th century. It holds true though, that despite the Qur'an's prohibition, Jews were also forced to convert to Islam or face death in some parts of Yemen, Morocco and Baghdad several times between the 12th and 18th centuries. Faced with the choice of either death or conversion, many Jews and Christians emigrated. Some fled east to more tolerant Muslim lands.
During the Middle Ages in Europe some of the worst times for Jews transpired in many places, with blood libels, expulsions, forced conversions and massacres. A main justification of prejudice against Jews in Europe was religious. The persecution hit its first peak during the Crusades. In the First Crusade flourishing communities on the Rhine and the Danube were destroyed. In the Second Crusade the Jews in Germany were subject to several massacres. The Jews were also subjected to attacks by the Shepherds' Crusades. The Crusades were followed by expulsions, including, in 13.century, the banishing of all English Jews; in 14 century, the expulsion of 100,000 Jews in France; and in 15century, the expulsion of thousands from Austria. Many of the expelled Jews fled .
In medieval and Renaissance Europe, a major contributor to the deepening of antisemitic sentiment and legal action among the Christian populations was the popular preaching of the zealous reform religious orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans,, who combed European promoting antisemitism through their often fiery, emotional appeals.
As the Black Death epidemics devastated Europe in the mid-14th century, annihilating more than half of the population, Jews were used as scapegoats. Rumors spread that they caused the disease by deliberately poisoning wells. Hundreds of Jewish communities were destroyed.
So yeah lets judge Christianity by Exodus, Leviticus, Job and Revelations. Kill those that work on sabbath, sell your daughter as a slave, stone gays, beat slaves, even God negotiatiating with the devil just to prove a point ! A haaaaaa.
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So yeah lets judge Christianity by Exodus, Leviticus, Job and Revelations. Kill those that work on sabbath, sell your daughter as a slave, stone gays, beat slaves, even God negotiatiating with the devil just to prove a point ! A haaaaaa.
A more accurate evaluation would be to compare the violence from muslims globally vs. the violence from christians. You see many honor killings in the Bible Belt? I know the Baptists are famous for suicide bombings. Everyone has of course seen where Lutherans flew planes into the WTC. Remember when Catholics butchered those kids in Beslan? So why are so many horrific acts done by those motivated by christian theology and so few by muslim theology?
Or is it the other way around?
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This is long. Probably my last incursion in this, I am loosing to much time with this type of research.
It's good that you've started reading up on islamic theology. If you actually develop a good grasp of it, you'll find that all the politically correct slogans you've made about it are utterly bogus.
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"Ok, first of all. These things are far from solved and noted like you portray them to be. The only thing that is clear to someone who „knows the history“ is that it cant even be called history. What it is, is an open discussion panel on principal historic conceptions and facts based on scientific apparatus, that are inherent to historical studies. One sided interpretations of facts or sources of any kind that nudge the totality of context in your favor isnt exactly an objective debate, unless of course you want that ? Hmmm, where have I spoken of indoctrination before ??"
So, what are the OBJECTIVE sources you wish to cite?
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"Again, History means a very specific thing, we are loooong past the 19.century Rankean notion of „wie es eigentlich gewesen“ that history is a sequence of tools that search for what „actually“ transpired.
This a very Marxist linear traditionalistic perception of time, which makes me surprised, since a while ago you actually encouraged me NOT to read anything with the term Marx in it."
The concept of cause and effect and the linear nature of time well predates any marxist psuedo-science. I would note that you'd probably be in a good position to look at the horrors that marxism has inflicted and I'd think would want to reject anything tainted by it.
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Second of all, I see you have adopted the Solway method of understanding what a nation is. OR you just dont read what I write. Ethnicity and nation have absolutely nothing in common and are in no shape or form connected as pre or post (if thats even a word) requisites. And I have no idea what the city of ancient Sumer, Umma has anything to do here ? Unless you mean the Ummah, collection of nation states. You oversimplify here, since ummah can be understood in several meanings. One is the context of the so called pan Arabism (connected to the arabic nationalism, that all arabs comprise a single nation, etc etc). Then we have the context of Islam :
The phrase Ummah Wahida in the Qur'an (the "One Community") refers to all of the Islamic world unified. The Quran says: “You [Muslims] are the best nation brought out for Mankind, commanding what is righteous (Ma'ruf, lit. "recognized [as good]") and forbidding what is wrong (Munkar, lit. "unrecognized [as good]")…” [3:110].
Gee, ya think maybe I was referring to a Sumerian city? :roll:
When the victorious western powers were carving up the Ottoman empire post WWI, they made nation-states of regions of the empire that were based not on the idea of states, but clan, tribe and religion. Thus we have places like Iraq where there are fault lines when national boundaries were made that did not reflect the populations within.
Let's look at the Kurds, (An actual identity that wasn't recently invented for propaganda purposes) who are unfortunate enough to be horribly oppressed, but not by Jews, thus their suffering and lack of a independent Kurdistan attract no international attention and outrage. Go to Turkey and Syria and tell them to create a Kurdish nation out of their territory. I'm sure Syria will get right on it after they finish crushing their "arab spring" with automatic weapons fire.
Yes, I was referring to the islamic concept of "Umma". Now go look up "dar al islam" and "dar al harb". You live in a continent labled "dar al harb" and they are working on making it into "dar al islam" so you have a personal stake in these concepts.
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Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah's Apostle said, "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. "O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him."
Note that the islamic antipathy towards jews long predates the existence of Israel.
Oh man GM, you have a way about you. You can twist and attenuate parts of a text so far out of context to suit your view on things, I almost see it fascinating. Almost.
Please explain what it really means then.
For starters, Hadith are narrations concerning the deeds of the prophet Muhammad and are regarded by even the most traditional Islamic schools of jurisprudence as merely prisms through which better understanding the Qur'an, the socalled Qur'an exegesis. The texts were gathered and evaluated in bigger collections only in the 9th century and to this day are being investigated by even Muslims scholars of being authentic or not. Their semantic value, however, is unquestionable.
No kidding. Now, do you know the importance of the ahadith I cited above to sunni muslims? Can you find for me a sunni scholar that has a nice, non-violent interpretation of the above hadith?
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http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2008/10/01/islam%E2%80%99s-jew-hating-hadith-matter-today/
Islam’s Jew-Hating Hadith Matter Today
October 1st, 2008 by Andrew Bostom |
Muslim soldiers of the Waffen SS Hanjar Division reading from a German translation (or directly from the Arabic text) of a pamphlet written by ex-Mufti of Jerusalem Haj-Amin el-Husseini in 1943 entitled, “Islam und Judentum,” “Islam and the Jews.” (Photo from Jennie Lebel’s 2007 biography of the Mufti , p. 311)
Saudi cleric Muhammad Al-Arifi made the following “observations” which recently aired on Palestinian Arab Al-Aqsa TV, September 12, 2008:
Studies conducted in Tel Aviv and in the Palestinian lands occupied by the Jews showed that they plant trees around their homes, because the Prophet Muhammad said that when the Muslims fight the Jews, each and every stone and tree will say: “Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” The only exception is the gharqad tree, which is one of the trees of the Jews, and if they hide behind it, it will not reveal their presence. According to reports of people who went there and saw it with their own eyes, many Jews plant gharqad trees around their homes, so that when the fighting begins, they can hide behind them. They are not man enough to stand and fight you.
While such hatemongering statements appear utterly bizarre to non-Muslims devoid of any understanding of Islam’s foundational texts, Al-Arifi’s inflammatory references to Jews have sacralized origins immediately apparent to Muslim audiences. The crux of Al-Arifi’s remarks, in fact, merely reiterate verbatim, a canonical hadith, specifically Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985, which is also featured prominently in the Hamas Covenant, article 7.
Briefly (go here for an in depth online discussion), what are the hadith, and which specific antisemitic motifs do they contain? Hadith, which means “story” (“narrative”), refers to any report of what the Muslim prophet Muhammad said or did, or his tacit assent to something said or done in his presence. (Hadith is also used as the technical term for the “science” of such “Traditions”). As a result of a lengthy process which continued for centuries after Muhammad’s death (in 632), the hadith emerged for Muslims as second in authority to the Koran itself. Sunna, which means “path” refers to a normative custom of Muhammad or of the early Islamic community. The hadith “justify and confirm” the Sunna. Henri Lammens, a seminal early 20th century scholar of Islam, highlighted the importance of the Sunna (and, by extension, the hadith):
As early as the first century A.H. [the 7th century] the following aphorism was pronounced: “The Sunna can dispense with the Koran but not the Koran with the Sunna”. Proceeding to still further lengths, some Muslims assert that “in controversial matters, the Sunna overrules the authority of the Koran, but not vice versa”…all admit the Sunna completes and explains it [the Koran].
The hadith compiled by al-Bukhari (d. 870) and Muslim b. al-Hajjaj (d. 875) are considered, respectively, to be the most important authoritative collections. The titles Sahih (“sound”) or Jami, indicating their comprehensiveness, signify the high esteem in which they are held.
Their comprehensive content includes information regarding religious duties, law and everyday practice (down to the most mundane, or intimate details), in addition to a considerable amount of biographical and other material. Four other compilations, called Sunan works, which indicates that they are limited to matters of religious and social practice, and law, also became authoritative. Abu Dawud (d. 888), al-Tirmidhi (d. 892), Ibn Maja (d. 896), and al-Nasi (d. 915) compiled these works. By the beginning of the 12th century, Ibn Maja’s collection became the last of these compilations of hadith to be recognized as “canonical.”
Before one can fully appreciate the major antisemitic themes in the hadith (summarized herein), it is critical to understand the antecedent Koranic motifs of Jew hatred which these hadith “complete and explain.” The Koran’s central antisemitic motif decrees an eternal curse upon the Jews (Koran 2:61/ reiterated at 3:112) for slaying the prophets and transgressing against the will of Allah. It should be noted that Koran 3:112 is featured just before the pre-amble to Hamas’ foundational Covenant. This central motif is coupled to Koranic verses 5:60, and 5:78, which describe the Jews transformation into apes and swine (5:60), or simply apes, (i.e. verses 2:65 and 7:166), having been “…cursed by the tongue of David, and Jesus, Mary’s son” (5:78). Muhammad himself repeats this Koranic curse in a canonical hadith (Sunan Abu Dawoud, Book 37, Number 4322), “He [Muhammad] then recited the verse [5:78]: ‘…curses were pronounced on those among the children of Israel who rejected Faith, by the tongue of David and of Jesus the son of Mary’ ”. And the related verse, 5:64, accuses the Jews—as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas did in a January 2007 speech, citing Koran 5:64—of being “spreaders of war and corruption,” a sort of ancient Koranic antecedent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The centrality of the Jews’ permanent “abasement and humiliation,” and being “laden with God’s anger” is clearly enunciated in the most authoritative Muslim exegetic literature on Koran 2:61/3:112, both ancient and contemporary. By nature deceitful and treacherous, the Jews rejected Allah’s signs and prophets, including Isa, the Muslim Jesus. Classical and modern Koranic commentators, when discussing Koran 5:82, which includes the statement (“Thou wilt surely find the most hostile of men to the believers are the Jews..” , also concur on the unique animus of the Jews towards the Muslims, which is repeatedly linked to the curse of Koran 2:61/3:112. For example, in his commentary on 5:82, the great Muslim historian and renowned Koranic exegete al-Tabari (d. 923) writes,
In my opinion, [the Christians] are not like the Jews who always scheme in order to murder the emissaries and the prophets, and who oppose God in his positive and negative commandments, and who corrupt His scripture which He revealed in His books.
Tabari’s classical interpretations of Koran 5:82 and 2:61, as well as his discussion of the related verse 9:29 mandating the Jews payment of the jizya (Koranic poll-tax), represent both Antisemitic and more general anti-dhimmi views that became, and remain, intrinsic to Islam to this day. Here is Tabari’s discussion of 2:61 and its relationship to verse 9:29, which emphasizes the purposely debasing nature of the Koranic poll tax:
…“abasement and poverty were imposed and laid down upon them”, as when someone says “the imam imposed the poll tax (jizya)on free non-Muslim subjects”, or “The man imposed land tax on his slave”, meaning thereby that he obliged him [to pay ] it, or, “The commander imposed a sortie on his troops”, meaning he made it their duty.…God commanded His believing servants not to give them [i.e., the non-Muslim people of the scripture] security—as long as they continued to disbelieve in Him and his Messenger—unless they paid the poll tax to them; God said: “Fight those who believe not in God and the Last Day and do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden—such men as practice not the religion of truth [Islam], being of those who have been given the Book [Bible]—until they pay the poll tax, being humble” (Koran 9:29)..
The dhimmis [non-Muslim tributary’s] posture during the collection of the jizya- “[should be lowering themselves] by walking on their hands, …reluctantly
… His words “and abasement and poverty were imposed upon them”, ‘These are the Jews of the Children of Israel’. ..‘Are they the Copts of Egypt?’…“What have the Copts of Egypt to do with this? No, by God, they are not; but they are the Jews, the Children of Israel.…By “and slain the prophets unrightfully” He means that they used to kill the Messengers of God without God’s leave, denying their messages and rejecting their prophethood.
Indeed the Koran’s overall discussion of the Jews is marked by a litany of their sins and punishments, as if part of a divine indictment, conviction, and punishment process. The Jews’ ultimate sin and punishment are made clear: they are the devil’s minions (4:60) cursed by Allah, their faces will be obliterated (4:47), and if they do not accept the true faith of Islam—the Jews who understand their faith become Muslims (3:113)—they will be made into apes (2:65/ 7:166), or apes and swine (5:60), and burn in the Hellfires (4:55, 5:29, 98:6, and 58:14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19). The Koranic curse (verses 2:61/3:112) upon the Jews for (primarily) rejecting, even slaying Allah’s prophets, including Isa/Jesus (or at least his “body double” 4:157-4:158), is updated with perfect archetypal logic in the canonical hadith: following the Muslims’ initial conquest of the Jewish farming oasis of Khaybar, one of the vanquished Jewesses reportedly served Muhammad poisoned mutton (or goat), which resulted, ultimately, in his protracted, agonizing death. And Ibn Saad’s sira (i.e., one of the earliest pious Muslim biographies of the Muslim prophet) account maintains that Muhammad’s poisoning resulted from a well-coordinated Jewish conspiracy.
George Vajda’s seminal 1937 analysis of the anti-Jewish motifs in the hadith remains the definitive work on this subject. Vajda concluded that according to the hadith stubborn malevolence is the Jews defining worldly characteristic: rejecting Muhammad and refusing to convert to Islam out of jealousy, envy and even selfish personal interest, lead them to acts of treachery, in keeping with their inveterate nature: “…sorcery, poisoning, assassination held no scruples for them.” These archetypes sanction Muslim hatred towards the Jews, and the admonition to at best, “subject [the Jews] to Muslim domination,” as dhimmis, treated “with contempt,” under certain “humiliating arrangements.”
The annihilationist sentiments regarding Jews expressed by Saudi cleric Muhammad Al-Arifi, and incorporated permanently into the foundational 1988 Hamas Covenant, are also rooted in Islamic eschatology. As characterized in the hadith, Muslim eschatology highlights the Jews’ supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjâl—the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ—or according to another tradition, the Dajjâl is himself Jewish. At his appearance, other traditions maintain that the Dajjâl will be accompanied by 70,000 Jews from Isfahan wrapped in their robes, and armed with polished sabers, their heads covered with a sort of veil. When the Dajjâl is defeated, his Jewish companions will be slaughtered— everything will deliver them up except for the so-called gharqad tree, as per the canonical hadith included in the 1988 Hamas Charter (article 7). Another hadith variant, which takes place in Jerusalem, has Isa (the Muslim Jesus) leading the Arabs in a rout of the Dajjâl and his company of 70,000 armed Jews. And the notion of jihad “ransom” extends even into Islamic eschatology—on the day of resurrection the vanquished Jews will be consigned to Hellfire, and this will expiate Muslims who have sinned, sparing them from this fate.
Professor Moshe Sharon recently provided a very lucid summary of the unique features of Shi’ite eschatology, Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s deep personal attachment to “mahdism,” and the key point of consistency between Shi’a and Sunni understandings of this doctrine—which emphasizes Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985—noting:
both Shi’ites and Sunnis share one particular detail about “the coming of the hour” and the dawning of messianic times: The Jews must all suffer a violent death, to the last one. Both Shi’ites and Sunnis quote the famous hadith [Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985] attributed to Muhammad…
Professor Sharon further observes,
Not one Friday passes without this hadith being quoted in sermons from one side of the Islamic world to the other.
The rise of Jewish nationalism—Zionism—posed a predictable, if completely unacceptable challenge to the Islamic order—jihad-imposed chronic dhimmitude for Jews—of apocalyptic magnitude. As historian Bat Ye’or has explained,
…because divine will dooms Jews to wandering and misery [pace Koran 17:4-5/ 7:168; and 2:61/3:112], the Jewish state appears to Muslims as an unbearable affront and a sin against Allah. Therefore it must be destroyed by Jihad.
This is exactly the Islamic context in which the widespread, “resurgent” use of Jew annihilationist apocalyptic motifs, would be an anticipated, even commonplace occurrence. And for more than six decades, promoters of modern jihad genocide have consistently invoked Islam’s Jew-exterminating eschatology. Hajj Amin el-Husseini, ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, and Muslim jihadist, who became, additionally, a full-fledged Nazi collaborator and ideologue in his endeavors to abort a Jewish homeland, and destroy world Jewry, composed a 1943 recruitment pamphlet (see Jennie Lebel’s 2007 biography of the Mufti , pp. 311-319) for Balkan Muslims entitled, “Islam and the Jews.” This incendiary document hinged upon antisemitic motifs from the Koran (for example, 5:82), and the hadith (including Muhammad’s alleged poisoning by a Khaybar Jewess), and concluded with the apocalyptic canonical hadith describing the Jews’ annihilation.
Forty-five years later the same hadith was incorporated into the 1988 Hamas Covenant, making clear the jihad terrorist organization had its own aspirations for Jew annihilation. Sheer ignorance of this history and theology are pathognomonic of much larger and more dangerous phenomena: the often willful, craven failure to examine and understand the living legacy of Islam’s foundational anti-Jewish animus, or acknowledge the depth of Jew hatred that pervades contemporary Islam’s clerical leadership, including within major Muslim communities of the United States.
For example, Fawaz Damra, the former Imam of the Islamic Center of Cleveland, was touted as a promoter of interfaith dialogue even after evidence of his participation in fundraising events for the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), was produced, along with a videotape of the Imam telling a crowd of Muslim supporters in 1991 that they should aim “…a rifle at the first and last enemy of the Islamic nation, and that is the sons of monkeys and pigs, the Jews.” Convicted in 2004 for lying to immigration officials about his links to the PIJ, Damra, who was born in Nablus in 1961, was subsequently deported back to the West Bank in January 2007. And last October 30, 2007 it was announced that Imam Ahmed Alzaree—the first permanent successor to Damra—resigned as the new “spiritual leader” of the Islamic Center of Cleveland three days prior to officially beginning the job. Alzaree, who at one stage of the vetting process expressed the unusual reservation that “he would not come to Cleveland because a reporter was inquiring about his background,” ostensibly accepted the position as noted on October 26, 2007, then pre-emptively resigned a few days later, after the contents of two “khutbahs” (sermons) he had delivered on March 7, 2003, were revealed. Alzaree concluded the second sermon with the same apocalyptic canonical hadith (Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985)—repeated in the 1988 Hamas Covenant.
Recently, the combined efforts of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and Rabbi Aron Hier of The Simon Wiesenthal Center, focused attention on the hadith collections—specifically Sahih Muslim Book 041, Numbers 6981 to 6985—posted at a website run by the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at the University of Southern California (USC). USC Provost, C. L. Max Nikias, first learned of these hadith when Rabbi Aron Hier approached USC trustee Alan Casden. Hier expressed his concerns over the five hadith advocating the Jews’ annihilation by Muslims to hasten the coming of the “final hour.” Upon reviewing these contents, Nikias declared that “the passage cited is truly despicable…The passage in the Hadith that you brought to our attention violates the USC Principles of Community, and it has no place on a USC website.” Nikias’ letter of August 11, 2008 (which can be viewed here) also stated, “I have ordered that the passage be removed.”
The USC-MSA—in grudging compliance—removed, but refused to condemn these living, sacralized invocations to genocidal violence. Moreover, another Muslim student organization at USC the Muslim Student Union also failed to repudiate the contents of these hadith, and declared it was “outraged” at the university’s “unprecedented and unconscionable” censorship. David Horowitz responded aptly to this statement by noting that the hadith which were removed from the USC website, “…may be part of the religious canon, but that doesn’t make them less hateful.” Horowitz’s sober reflection recalls the lament of the late Dr. John Garang, who lead the Southern Sudanese Christian and Animist populations in their fight against the genocidal jihad campaign’s of the Arab Khartoum north during the 1990s. Garang left us with this critical question in 1999, which, almost beyond belief, remains largely ignored, and for certain, unresolved in the appropriate manner:
Is the call for jihad against a particular people a religious right by those calling for it, or is it a human rights violation against the people upon whom jihad is declared and waged?
Almost 850 years ago, elaborating on the depth of Muslim hatred for the Jews in his era, Maimonides (in ~ 1172 C.E.) made this profound observation regarding the Jewish predilection for denial, a feature that he insists will hasten their destruction.
We have acquiesced, both old and young, to inure ourselves to humiliation…All this notwithstanding, we do not escape this continued maltreatment [by Muslims] which well nigh crushes us. No matter how much we suffer and elect to remain at peace with them, they stir up strife and sedition.
The Jews and their communal leaders like Maimonides living under Islamic rule in the Middle Ages—vanquished by jihad, isolated, and well-nigh defenseless under the repressive system of dhimmitude—can be excused for their submissive denial. There is no such excuse in our era given the existence of an autonomous Jewish State of Israel, and a thriving Western Jewish diaspora, particularly here in the United States, living under the blanket of hard won protections for their religious freedom, physical security, and dignity.
As a pre-condition to real dialogue—not its miserable simulacrum—Jews and their leadership—religious, political, and intellectual—must demand from their Muslim counterparts acknowledgment and wrenching reform of the sacralized Islamic Jew hatred which is still being taught and promoted in Islamic schools, religious institutions, and even on US university campuses. Speaking as a Jew, let us demonstrate as Jews that we are no longer content living with Maimonides’ 12th century expectations of Muslims, otherwise they will oblige us.
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Or "Palaestina" at the least.
http://people.usd.edu/~clehmann/erp/Palestine/history.htm
In the aftermath of the Bar Cochba Revolt, the Romans excluded Jews from a large area around Aelia Capitolina, which Gentiles only inhabited. The province now hosted two legions and many auxiliary units, two colonies, and--to complete the disassociation with Judaea--a new name, Syria Palaestina. The center of Jewish settlement moved northward to Galilee and Gaulanitis The number of Jewish communities elsewhere declined, and many once-Jewish towns became Gentile or received large numbers of Gentile inhabitants. They lost their old Jewish names to new Roman names; eg, Sepphoris became Diocaesarea, Lydda Diospolis, and Beth Guvrin Eleutheropolis. Sebaste became a colony, like Caesarea and Aelia Capitolina. The ban on circumcision remained in effect until Antoninus Pius--probably recognizing its dangerously provocative effect--revoked it.
After 135 the Jews no longer had political, urban, or territorial institutions that could support another revolt, but they managed to maintain national identity as a result of the growth of rabbinical institutions and the patriarchate in the Galilee (see People and Places). Nor did the radical Messianism of earlier periods revive until the third century, when empire-wide economic crisis left the Jews too weak to mount any organized resistance. The rabbinic sources vividly reflect the poverty of the people in the troubled third century because of rampant inflation and the collapse of the money economy, famine and plague, and crime.
Syria Palaestina thus became a good deal less problematic for the imperial government than Judaea had been. The government continued to permit the Jews certain religious freedoms, such as exemption from the imperial cult, and gradually the Roman governors permitted the Jews to recover certain of their communal rights, such as local courts and internal government, under the overall authority of the patriarch in Tiberias. The Samaritans fared less well, as the Romans took steps to prevent a resurgence of Samaritan nationalism by founding a pagan temple on Mt Gerizim, just south of Neapolis, and refused to make concessions to Samaritan religious practices.
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AB said: "In the Modern era, apart from a few natural disasters, the only reason for Jews immigrating (emmigrating?) from "Arab countries“ is because of the Ottoman restrictions on Zionist land acquisition and immigration. Settler numbers prior to that are marginal, compared to the Aliyah migrations from Europe."
I'm not sure I understand here. Concerning "Ottoman restrictions on Zionist land acquistion": Wouldn't it be more accurate here to say "Jewish" than to say "Zionist"? Did the Ottoman Empire allow Jews who were not Zionists to acquire land? I find that doubtful. What then is the point/purpose for saying "Zionist" instead of saying "Jewish"? Is it to avoid having to acknowledge an example of the oppressive nature of dhimmitude throughout much/most/all the Ottoman Empire especially in the Arab regions?
Anyway, the point is tangential to the one that I was seeking to make: That upon the creation of the Jewish State of Israel by the United Nations there was massive Jewish emmigration from the oppressive nature of dhimmitude in Arab lands to Israel and that the numbers involved rival the numbers coming from Europe. I apologize for not being the scholar that you are in these matters Andrew and so lack citations, but my intended underlying point is to undercut the assertion sometimes made that Israel's creation is due simply to Europe dumping its Jews on the Arabs.
AB said "About the killings, and terror attacks etc. I post this table from 2008, about the „effectiveness“ of the Palestinian war machine
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Israelis_killed_by_Palestinians_in_Israel_and_Palestinians_killed_by_Israelis_in_Gaza_-_2008.png "
Although wikipedia is adequate for many kinds of citations, for others, particularly controversial issues such as the one we are discussing here, IMHO it is less than definitive. Just as we have cited in this thread how youtube is systematically removing material supportive of the Israel and Jews (due to intimidation?) given what I understand to be the nature of how Wikipedia works, it seems to me that the same forces can be at work. As one of GM's posts point out (accurately and fairly in my opinion) there are widely believed falsehoods against Israel out there about many things and and I am not ready to grant the accuracy of numbers skewed as heavily as these are. Indeed in one of your citations, the ratio is more like 3-1 instead of the numbers here.
That said, I agree that more Palestinians have been killed by the IDF than Israelis have been killed by Palestinians, a datum which is cited by some as an indication of , , , I'm not sure what-- moral virtue (!) on the part of the Palestinians? The logic eludes me. Does Israel have to wait for the efficacy of rockets launched from Gaza and suicidal kills to rise to higher death levels before acting to abate these attacks from an entity led by a democratically elected group (Hamas) formally dedicated to the destruction of Israel? Does not Israel have a right of self-defense?!?
I said: "Yet despite all their genocidal attacks on the Jews, good people such as yourself do not hold the Palestinians to blame for the natural consequences of their actions. Indeed you speak of the Jews surrounding the Arabs/Palestinians!?!
AB responded: "I will not comment on the video links, I do not consider this type of argumenting viable for such a seriously delicate topic. Likewise I can return the favor with the link to the Massada2000 website and the s.h.i.t. list, and give you a counter argument for the frightenly imbecilic zionistic groups, but where would that lead us ?"
I have heard of Zionist groups that Israeli friends tell me go too far, but they are stuff of the internet, not on official state TV of Israel as the Palestian clips I posted are on official West Bank TV-- so my reponse is that the comparison you seek to make is not valid.
Then there is the matter of "Who started it?" If we were to look at WW2 post D-day, the Allies certainly were imposing more casualties than they were receiving-- yet no one (I hope!) would use that datum to suggest that they were the aggressors (Russia excepted!!!)
The starting point needs to be that the the Arabs Surrounding Israel (hereinafter ASIs be they Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, West Bankers, Gazans, Egyptians) have sought to wipe out Israel-- which was created by the United Nations. Israel has defended itself-- righteously and effectively. THAT IS A GOOD THING. As is the case when aggressors lose wars, they sometimes lose land from which they launched their attacks. Those who accepted Israel's right to exist (Egypt) got their land back. Those who persisted in trying to wipe out Israel didn't. After years of murderous, indeed evil deliberate targeting of Jewish women and children, yes some Jewish groups have concluded that peace is not possible and that efforts at peace will be met with taquiya in preparation for the day when pretenses can be dropped and so hard-core, hard-line thought can be found, though the overwhelming majority of Israelis would be delighted to have genuine partners in peace.
AB said "You saw them purely as terrorists, I posted that, as a balance check to the other side, whereas in reality my personal opinions on the whole matter are very mixed, and quite frankly, not appropriate for this portion of the forum."
Well, that certainly is an intriguing dangle! And as the host here, I give you the green light to say what your personal feelings are.
Next: Thank you for this citation http://middleeast.about.com/b/2009/07/24/israel-bans-al-naqba-from-textbooks.htm
AB said "I'm writing my ass off here, thinking and argumenting my point, but for you linking articles and sources that support your view on things is a self suficient argument in a debate.Actually I would rather call shoving other peoples opinions down your collegues throats, indoctrination."
Well, you are not the first person around here to have commented on GM's propensity to post articles without personal commentary of his own! :-) Indeed, on occasion I have been amongst those so commenting :-) That said, I can also see the point of not wanting to get in the way of the expression of a journalist or writer who addresses the questions raised in an authoritative manner and in the case at hand here I think the articles GM cites are quite on point and well-reasoned; indeed I invite you to address the points they make or to share quality pieces which do address the points in question.
I'd also like to remind all of us (ahem GM, AB, and , , , um , , , me :-) ) that this is by its nature a subject subjected to intense emotions and that in some cases we come from different cultures which may or may not have subtly different understandings as to what constitutes good manners in communication. Let us avoid making snarky comments please and let us avoid getting irked by snarky comments. We have the raw material here for some really good conversation which can help each and everyone of us move forward in our understandings.
Concerning the discussion of Solway, from my point of view (and perhaps in search of simplicity I achieve merely the simplistic) about Palestine/Palestinians etc. I confess that on a certain level the significance of what I perceive to be the essence of AB's point eludes me; it seems to me on a par with arguing that the UN should have created not one but two Israels, one for Ashkenazi Jews and one for Sephardic. Certainly, as GM points out, the Kurds have a far stronger claim to deserving a separate nation (instead of being divided amongst Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran) than the particular subset of Arabs currently residing in the West Bank (thanks to AB's interesting commentary I am no longer sure whether I should be calling them Palestinians or not :-) ) but there does not seem to be much interest in that , , ,
AB wrote: "When reading about Hitler and his ideology and propaganda et al. You have to be very careful, since he is an epitome of „picking what you like from all around and stuff it into one big neat pile of WTF“. At one point in his „career“ he became obsessed with finding the pure race, and traveled almost off world to find his agenda. From aryans in Iran to Tibet. Now as some may know he was obsessed with Nietzsche, although he read it in a completely oppurtunistic manner. Nietzche on the other hand had a thing (to put it bluntly ) for Zoroaster/Zarathustra the prophet. Through this prism he started to plow around Iran to find the „aryan“ he read so largely about in Zoroaster texts, sadly little did he know that this „aryan“ meant something totally other to what his version of „aryan“ was all about. The reason why alot of Iranians/Persians got excited about the book was, since it was promoted as a book that promotes the domination of the aryan race, the aryan ideology. Needless to say, the aryan race in that or any other context doesnt exist, and what they read about, and were so excited about was not their Aryan, but that of the NSDAP."
I'm not clear on the point here. Perhaps GM and I are misled by propaganda. In my case I have come into this conversation with the understanding that the analysis offered by GM's article is correct. Are you saying that the government of Persia, which coincidentally was in bed at the time with the Nazis, changed its name to Iran for reasons not having to do with the Aryan racial theories of Hitler? If so, what were those reasons?
AB said to GM "I find your oversimplifications of the matters in this case, strongly disconcerting."
I confess to having a similar line of thought, though GM beat me to expressing it :-) The explanation of our oversimplications may be rather , , , simple. We are Americans and we are working with what we know! Certainly we would be in over our heads concerning the history of the various regions/republics/countries of what used to by Yugoslavia (oddly enough, I know a little bit due to a US legal decision about whether to grant political asylum to one "Artukovic" in the aftermath of WW2 due to his actions in Serbo-Croatia) but given the vicious Jew hatred of Iran's current regime (including its determination to completely wipe Israel out) and the connections of its prior government with the Nazis, it seems to me that it was not a strange leap of logic to infer Jew hatred from Iranian participation in the Waffen SS.
Next: As I Jew of course I am quite aware of vast stretches of terrible Christian behavior towards Jews. Indeed it was not until I was 8 years old that the Pope forgave me for killing Christ. As a somewhat educated man I am aware of a historical period many centuries ago wherein Jews were treated decently in parts of the Muslim world, certainly far better than we were treated in the Christian world. But what interests me in the world today is the reality of the world today. In most of the Christian world as a Jew I am safe (questionable: Russia, parts of eastern Europe, and increasingly the rest of Europe-- but is Europe really Christian or Secular Humanist now? , , , but I digress). Certainly, the issue is quite different in the Arab world!!! I certainly hope I do not need to expound further on this point!!!
Which brings me back to the starting point-- your idea that the "Palestians"/Arabs surrounding Israel are surrounded by the Jews (!) (who, if they were wise would allow them a way out,?) instead of the other way around. To the north is Hezbollah, armed by Iran (led by a man dedicated to the erradication of Israel) with some 50,000 plus rockets that cover a large % of Israel, to the northeast is Syria, which more than once in my lifetime has sought to invade and obliterate Israel but now is surprised that Israel holds and is reluctant to give back the Golan Heights before Syria recognizes Israel's right to exist, to the east is the West Bank, a land abandoned by Jordan rather than continue to deal with Arafat and the PLO and a land which continues to violate its promises in the Oslo Accords to recognize Israel's right to exist (yet its school books and military emblems continue to show "from river to sea") and to its south-west is Gaza, headed by democractically elected Hamas which is dedicated to the erradication of Israel. Then there is Egypt, which got Sinai back after recognizing Israel-- though the durability of that peace is now in deep question.
AB, does Israel have a right to exist? Does Israel have a right to self-defense?
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I too was given pause when Israeli v. Palestinian casualty rates were mentioned. Hamas, Fatah, et al practice asymmetric warfare, embed their fighting position among population centers, have well documented habits of producing very slanted media material, and have intimidated journalists to the point only stringers sympathetic to the Palestinian cause can operate in Palestinian areas. Hamas and Fatah work very hard to produce the casualties they then parade before the cameras, and yet you cite that as reason to indict Israel? Cognitive dissonance ensues.
If Palestinian apologists held Egypt and Jordan--who have harshly dealt with their Palestinian citizens--to the same standard as they do Israel, if they noted Palestinian citizens within Israel are some of the freest, most engaged in the economy non-oliogarchic Arabs in the region, and if indeed apologist could acknowledge that most the complaints they cite would evaporate if Palestinians stopped lobbing rockets and suicide bombers at Israeli citizens, then perhaps some progress as could be made. As it stands, pathologies embraced as a military tactic that then get cited as reason to indict Israel create a circular mishmash from which no winning hand can emerge on any side, at least for those who don't believe the body count is indeed the winning hand.
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A more accurate evaluation would be to compare the violence from muslims globally vs. the violence from christians. You see many honor killings in the Bible Belt? I know the Baptists are famous for suicide bombings. Everyone has of course seen where Lutherans flew planes into the WTC. Remember when Catholics butchered those kids in Beslan? So why are so many horrific acts done by those motivated by christian theology and so few by muslim theology?
Or is it the other way around?
Ok, guro Crafty said above that this is not an echo chamber, that we seek truth ? In my whole life I have maybe seen one or two cases of such virulent one sided stubornness. Man even my college kids can be brought to senses easier.
Violence from muslims globally vs violence from christians you say. The horrible truth is that, numerically and statistically speaking, Christian Civilization is the bloodiest and most violent of all civilizations in all of history, and is responsible for countless deaths. Even so, Muslims will never associate this with the teachings of Jesus, peace be on him.
Saint Augustine’s cognite intrare (“force them to convert”). In fact the Qur’an says the exact opposite: There is no compulsion in religion ( 2:256 ). Augustine had a frightening idea that all must be compelled to subdue to the true Christian faith.
Hundreds of thousands were tortured and slaughtered in the name of Christianity during the periods of the Arian, Donatist and Albigensian heresies
Still, Augustine remains one of the key figures in understanding the philosophy of the Christian theologic tradition. Hows that for an irony.
Thomas Aquinas, another key figure in Christian theology, has even perfected the concept of Just War.
Then lets see, the Crusades. 10 of them including the Northern ones. The European armies were saying, as they slaughtered both Christian and Muslim Arabs: “Kill them all, God will know his own.”
Europe's Reformation and Counter Reformation Era. TWO THIRDS of the European Chrstian population was slaughtered in this era.
The African slave trade, that claimed the life of approx. 9 million souls.
Colonial conquest. Estimates for the number of Native Americans slaughtered by the Europeans in North, Central and South America run as high as 20 million within three generations.
In the 20th century alone
Western and/or Christian powers have been responsible for at least twenty times more deaths than Muslim powers. In this most brutal of centuries, we created incomparably more civilian casualties than have Muslims in the whole of Islamic history.
a) In the 20th century, Rwanda, 1994. Witness the slaughter of 900,000 Rwandan in a population that was over 90 % Christian. Reports indicate the percentage of Muslims in Rwanda has doubled since the genocide due to Muslim sheltering and protection of Tutsis and to Hutus' during the genocide. Read up on Emily Wax' "Islam Attracting Many Survivors of Rwanda Genocide“.
b) 1992-1995 Bosnia. The genocide of over 300,000 Muslims and systematic rape of over 100,000 Muslim women by Christian orthodox Serbs
Add the numbers of ONLY those two incidents and try to compare them with the toll of muslim extremism in 20th and 21th century.
All I want when I write this mega essays is that you would catch a GLIMPSE of the other side, that maybe, just maybe what you think is so engrained in your brain, of which you are so sure that it is 100% undoubtedly true, DOES have a different point to it. This is what I mean by objective. There are no objective research in and of themselves, since any analysis is already a filtering of the author. What IS an objective analysis is reading (from your part) all the different points and opinions that constitute a problem, making a constelation of facts and concepts, so you can grasp the totality and fullness of the subject at hand. Otherwise you are just a saloon thinker know it all who sings his versions to ears that want to hear them.
It's good that you've started reading up on islamic theology. If you actually develop a good grasp of it, you'll find that all the politically correct slogans you've made about it are utterly bogus.
What I meant with research is, I actually go and read your articles and research the authors backgrounds and dig up my uni work and research while answering. Like stated a while ago in the Fascism thread, one of my main areas of research is history of South Eastern Europe (Balkans) and philosophy of religion. I consider myself an Annales school Marxist through and through. I will get to that in a bit.
And what you would discover, after reading actual scholars that focus their lifes research around this topic, not random bloggers and journalists ala Solway and Bostom (who is BTW an Associate professor of Medicine) is that there is NO SUCH THING as politically correct slogans in ancient texts, because they need to be treated historically, otherwise they are just another anacrhonism used as a political tool. What you would also discover is that it is a continuous dialogue between the past and the present that filters and recycles the problematic, constantly sharpening the ordeal and finding new dilemmas.
In no particular order here are a few from all kinds of different winds, so you wont ask for Objective stuff anymore :
Arthur John Arbery, Edward Sayid, Józef Bielawski, Karen Armstrong...and a few others who doubt the traiditional exegesis of Qur'an, John Wansbrough, Michael Cook, Martin Hinds, Patricia Crone...a few sunni and shia scholars, Mahdi al-Modarresi, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, Mohsen Kadivar, Abū Ḥanīfa, Al-Fakihi, Averroes...etc.etc.
This is just a few I consider a must study to get a short outline to the whole problematic spectrum, before even contemplating anything in more depth. Havent even included most of the bigger modern players, since most of their work cannot be understood without understanding the basic classic woodwork.
To all interested parties, here is a rather long-ish article by Patricia Crone, that speaks of the historical problematic of understandind classic terms with modern eyes. An actual professor for Islamic studies from Princeton about the history and the origin of the term Jihad. Highly recommended for anyone who doesnt wear ideology glasses with too much pride :
http://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-europe_islam/jihad_4579.jsp
The concept of cause and effect and the linear nature of time well predates any marxist psuedo-science. I would note that you'd probably be in a good position to look at the horrors that marxism has inflicted and I'd think would want to reject anything tainted by it.
Oh man what can I say here ? Marxist pseudo-science, linear nature of time...cmon, GM. You arent talking to a saloon ear that wants to be fed. I really do not wish to spoil this off topic, but such spam riles me up.
First of all, the main building block of what you call pseudo-science is Marx and Engels materialistic INTERPRETATION of history. Last I checked neither of those two have anything to do wtih science. What they do have to do with is a scientific METHOD. What linear nature of time here means, of course, is not cause and effect, but rather simply put, that things move solidly in a specific direction without derailing, being fueled by a deus ex machina, in marxist sense, the class struggle.
And second of all, the horrors of Marxism here werent really horrors at all, and most certainly they werent Marxists horrors. I beleive you refer to Yugoslavia. All recent studies and polls show that a vast majority of people said life back then was a lot more lax, less stresfull, happier and freer. Almost 0% crime rate, no unemployment, free health care with one of the best surgeons and doctors in central europe, a solid school system, sure work after graduation, economical vertical mobility, great national spirit and cameradery...I am not going to deny the facts here though, there were problems, and holes, and everything. But like there arent any now ? There are, alongside most of the positive facts said above, gone, and ¾ of the state of ex Yugoslavia set in turmoil and thrown 60 years in the past due to nationalist agendas and psychotic delusionists.
Yugoslavia was not Communist, but very openly socialist with the ideology that was INFLUENCED by Marx and subsequent thinkers. Feudalism, socialism, communism etc. are merely socio-economic formations, modules that have their place in Marxist thought. Comunism by far does not equate Marxism. What everyone tends to forget or fail to look up is that dialectial materialism, the most important drive behind the communist craze in 19.and 20. century, wasnt even Marx' work but Engels and Lenins adaptation of it, with some Hegels dialectics and Feuerbach materialism. At the split of the french party into reformist and revolutionary Marx himself wrote to Lafrague : "if that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist".
About the Hadith comments, I strongly advise you to read some of Patricia Crones opus. It will most definitely do you good.
@Guro Crafty
I have just noticed your post when I finished writing this, and thank you for some of the more articulated opinions, which I will sadly need to adress another time, as writing this in the last few days has put me in some SERIOUS behind time at work.
I will write this short response though, to tackle what I feel is the general vibe of your post. As much as I hate writing this but as a historian and philosopher, my task is not to give answers, to offer solutions. This very well might be the task of something else, politics, religion, warfare, science, I dont know. My task here is to RIGHTFULLY articulate the problem, so that the solution will be as most thorough as possible. And a huge part of this rightfull articulation is to problematise, open discussions, polemics, different builds, different views etc. because most frequently, the way we structure and view the problem, is part of the problem itself.
So in short I cannot honestly answer you to the question : does Israel have a right to exist? Does Israel have a right to self-defense? I mean of course from the basic context, there is no doubt that it does, but my pitch is, that the problem is WAY more layered and structured than this basic question.
The additional problem, like I said earlier, is that everything is colored and smudged by political rhetoric and different agendas, which makes an already difficult task of discovering national identities, ethnogenesis, ethnonyms origins, etc. impossible. I mean even with a tiny, insignificnat country such as Slovenia, there are hefty, fiery discussions about our past, that cannot be forgot, and to this day form the basis of political dialogue when warming up for the voters base. Who was pro who was contra. At one point it constantly divides the nation and makes tension, on the other hand it completely halts any type of cultural progress.Very sad.
But in such an extreme case as we talk about now, with so much blood spilled and revenges taken, I fear that this is slowly becoming symptomatic.
EDIT : Btw that wiki picture isnt from wiki its cited from B'Tselem, israeli information center for human rights in occupied territories. http://www.btselem.org/English/
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A more accurate evaluation would be to compare the violence from muslims globally vs. the violence from christians. You see many honor killings in the Bible Belt? I know the Baptists are famous for suicide bombings. Everyone has of course seen where Lutherans flew planes into the WTC. Remember when Catholics butchered those kids in Beslan? So why are so many horrific acts done by those motivated by christian theology and so few by muslim theology?
Or is it the other way around?
Ok, guro Crafty said above that this is not an echo chamber, that we seek truth ? In my whole life I have maybe seen one or two cases of such virulent one sided stubornness. Man even my college kids can be brought to senses easier.
I assume this is because you make some sort of coherent argument to the college kids. You have yet to do so here.
Violence from muslims globally vs violence from christians you say. The horrible truth is that, numerically and statistically speaking, Christian Civilization is the bloodiest and most violent of all civilizations in all of history, and is responsible for countless deaths. Even so, Muslims will never associate this with the teachings of Jesus, peace be on him.
I think if you look at the numbers, marxism in it's various forms has the record for deaths, but muslims at the grassroots level do their best to try to move up the list.
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Saint Augustine’s cognite intrare (“force them to convert”). In fact the Qur’an says the exact opposite: There is no compulsion in religion ( 2:256 ).
http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/crcc/engagement/resources/texts/muslim/hadith/bukhari/084.sbt.html
Volume 9, Book 84, Number 58:
Narrated Abu Burda:
Abu Musa said, "I came to the Prophet along with two men (from the tribe) of Ash'ariyin, one on my right and the other on my left, while Allah's Apostle was brushing his teeth (with a Siwak), and both men asked him for some employment. The Prophet said, 'O Abu Musa (O 'Abdullah bin Qais!).' I said, 'By Him Who sent you with the Truth, these two men did not tell me what was in their hearts and I did not feel (realize) that they were seeking employment.' As if I were looking now at his Siwak being drawn to a corner under his lips, and he said, 'We never (or, we do not) appoint for our affairs anyone who seeks to be employed. But O Abu Musa! (or 'Abdullah bin Qais!) Go to Yemen.'" The Prophet then sent Mu'adh bin Jabal after him and when Mu'adh reached him, he spread out a cushion for him and requested him to get down (and sit on the cushion). Behold: There was a fettered man beside Abu Muisa. Mu'adh asked, "Who is this (man)?" Abu Muisa said, "He was a Jew and became a Muslim and then reverted back to Judaism." Then Abu Muisa requested Mu'adh to sit down but Mu'adh said, "I will not sit down till he has been killed. This is the judgment of Allah and His Apostle (for such cases) and repeated it thrice. Then Abu Musa ordered that the man be killed, and he was killed. Abu Musa added, "Then we discussed the night prayers and one of us said, 'I pray and sleep, and I hope that Allah will reward me for my sleep as well as for my prayers.'"
Andrew, do you understand the role of naskh in islamic theology and why the "verses of the sword" override the nicer verses like what you posted above? Can you tell me where in the muslim world there is the freedom of religion?
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http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=3790
The Religion of Peace?
By: Andrew G. Bostom
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, June 28, 2006
During the discussion period after a recent talk by the courageous secular Muslim “apostate” Wafa Sultan, Judea Pearl, father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl (who was barbarously murdered by pious Muslim terrorists), alluded to the Koran’s “verses of peace”—which certain votaries of Islam uphold as the religion's exclusive legacy. According to an observer at the event, Judea Pearl derided Ms. Sultan’s critical view of Islam by further contending that the Koran's bellicose and brutal verses were mere “cultural baggage”, akin to “similar” pronouncements in the Old Testament. The comparison was naïve, if not absurd.
Naïve because the Koran’s “verses of peace”, frequently cited by both Muslim and non-Muslim apologists, most notably verse 2:256, “There is no compulsion in religion”, were all abrogated by the so-called verses of the sword. These abrogating verses of the sword recommend beheading or otherwise murdering and mutilating non-Muslims, and Muslim apostates. According to classical Muslim Koranic commentators verse 9:5 (perhaps the most infamous verse of the sword), “Slay the idolators wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush…”, for example, cancels 124 verses that promote patience and toleration.
The sacralized Islamic sources indicate that as the Muslim prophet Muhammad accrued political and military power, he evolved from a proselytizer and persuader, to a warrior (i.e., a prototype jihadist; see: The Prophet Muhammad as a Jihad Model), and dictatorial legislator. Thus the sword and other similar Koranic verses—as per the linkage between Muhammad’s biography and the Koranic narrative—capture the Muslim prophet at his most dogmatic, belligerent, and intolerant. Muslims are enjoined to fight and murder nonbelievers—woe unto those who shirk these campaigns—but those who are killed fighting for the one true religion, i.e., Islam, will be rewarded amply in the afterlife. A sampling of such verses, which established these eternal injunctions, are included below:
47:4: “Now when ye meet in battle those who disbelieve, then it is smiting of the necks until, when ye have routed them, then making fast of bonds”
9:29: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.”
4:76: “Those who believe fight in the way of Allah, and those who disbelieve fight in the way of the Shaitan. Fight therefore against the friends of the Shaitan; surely the strategy of the Shaitan is weak.”
8:12: “When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”
8:38-39: “Say to the Unbelievers, if (now) they desist (from Unbelief), their past would be forgiven them; but if they persist, the punishment of those before them is already (a matter of warning for them). And fight them on until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah altogether and everywhere; but if they cease, verily Allah doth see all that they do.”
9:39: “If you do not go forth, He will chastise you with a painful chastisement and bring in your place a people other than you, and you will do Him no harm; and Allah has power over all things.”
4:74: “Therefore let those fight in the way of Allah, who sell this world's life for the hereafter; and whoever fights in the way of Allah, then be he slain or be he victorious, We shall grant him a mighty reward.”
9:111: “Surely Allah has bought of the believers their persons and their property for this, that they shall have the garden; they fight in Allah's way, so they slay and are slain; a promise which is binding on Him in the Taurat and the Injeel and the Quran; and who is more faithful to his covenant than Allah? Rejoice therefore in the pledge which you have made; and that is the mighty achievement.”
As Ibn Warraq notes, aptly (p.69):
…“tolerance” has been abrogated by “intolerance”
And this doctrine of abrogation, necessitated by the many contradictions which abound in the Koran, originates as putatively taught by Muhammad, himself, at verse 2:106: “Whatever communications We abrogate or cause to be forgotten, We bring one better than it or like it. Do you not know that Allah has power over all things?” . This verse, in combination with verses* 16:101, 22:52, and 87:6, was elaborated into a formal system of abrogation (naskh in Arabic) by the greatest classical Muslim Koranic scholars and jurists, which entailed (p.72),
…the suppression of a ruling without the suppression of the wording. That is to say, the earlier ruling is still to be found in the Koran, and is still to this day recited in worship, but it no longer has any legal force [emphasis added]
But it is only when viewed in the larger context of the uniquely Islamic institution of jihad war—which derives substantively from the abrogating Koranic sword verses—that Judea Pearl’s naïve equation to “similar” verses from the Old Testament, becomes entirely fatuous. From the bellicose verses in the Koran, expounded upon in the hadith (the words and deeds of Muhammad as recorded by pious Muslim transmitters), Muslim jurists and theologians formulated the Islamic institution of permanent jihad war against non-Muslims to bring the world under Islamic rule (Shari’a law).
Since its earliest inception, through the present, jihad has been central to the thought and writings of prominent Muslim theologians and jurists. The precepts and regulations elucidated in the 7th through 9th centuries are immutable in the Muslim theological-juridical system, and they have remained essentially unchallenged by the majority of contemporary Muslims. The jihad is intrinsic to the sacred Muslim texts, including the divine Koranic revelation—“the uncreated word of Allah”. The Old Testament sanctions the Israelites conquest of Canaan—a limited domain—it does not sanction a permanent war to submit all the nations of humanity to a uniform code of religious law. Similarly, the tactics of warfare are described in the Old Testament, unlike the Koran, in very circumscribed and specific contexts. Moreover, while the Old Testament clearly condemns certain inhumane practices of paganism, it never invoked an eternal war against all of the world’s pagan peoples.
Uninformed ecumenical zeal in search of a fantasy Islam yet to be created, does not excuse making intellectual, let alone moral equivalences, between the severely limited and contextualized war proclamations of the Old Testament, and the permanent proto-jihad war injunctions of the Koran. Staking out the presumptive “higher” moral ground by a thinly veiled (and ahistorical!) attack on a courageous secularist seeking profound, not cosmetic (and meaningless) changes in Islamdom, is unsavory and destructive, regardless of the misguided motivations.
* 16: 101: “And when We change (one) communication for (another) communication, and Allah knows best what He reveals, they say: You are only a forger. Nay, most of them do not know.”; 22:52: “And We did not send before you any messenger or prophet, but when he desired, the Shaitan made a suggestion respecting his desire; but Allah annuls that which the Shaitan casts, then does Allah establish His communications, and Allah is Knowing, Wise”; 87:6: “By degrees shall We teach thee to declare (the Message), so thou shalt not forget”
The discussion of abrogation/naskh draws heavily upon the insightful analysis, here pp. 67-75, of my courageous mentor and colleague Ibn Warraq.
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Andrew G. Bostom is a frequent contributor to Frontpage Magazine.com, and the author of The Legacy of Jihad, and the forthcoming The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.
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"Thomas Aquinas, another key figure in Christian theology, has even perfected the concept of Just War."
Do you understand the concept of just war, or is it bad because it has the word war in it?
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Then lets see, the Crusades. 10 of them including the Northern ones. The European armies were saying, as they slaughtered both Christian and Muslim Arabs: “Kill them all, God will know his own.”
And the crusades grew out of what? Let's try hundreds of years of islamic aggression, enslavement and occupation of europe before the first crusade happened. I'd think as a european historian, you'd know this. Cause and effect and linerar history, do you think the islamic brutality experienced by the europeans might have shaped how they then fought in the crusades?
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"The African slave trade, that claimed the life of approx. 9 million souls."
And who were the first non-africans to take part in the african slave trade? Long before the europeans ever were involved.
April 12, 2005
The living legacy of jihad slavery
By Andrew G. Bostom
A public protest in Washington, DC, April 5, 2005 highlighted the current (ongoing, for centuries) plight of black Mauritanians enslaved by Arab masters. The final two decades of the 20th century, moreover, witnessed a frank jihad genocide, including mass enslavement, perpetrated by the Arab Muslim Khartoum government against black Christians and animists in the Southern Sudan, and the same governments continued massacres and enslavement of Animist—Muslim blacks in Darfur. These tragic contemporary phenomena reflect the brutal living legacy of jihad slavery.
Jihad Slavery
The fixed linkage between jihad— a permanent, uniquely Islamic institution— and enslavement, provides a very tenable explanation for the unparalleled scale and persistence of slavery in Muslim dominions, and societies. This general observation applies as well to 'specialized' forms of slavery, including the (procurement and) employment of eunuchs, slave soldiering (especially of adolescents), other forms of child slavery, and harem slavery. Jihad slavery, in its myriad manifestations, became a powerful instrument for both expansive Islamization, and the maintenance of Muslim societies.
Juridical Rationale and Role in 'Islamization'
Patricia Crone, in her recent analysis of the origins and development of Islamic political thought, makes an important nexus between the mass captivity and enslavement of non—Muslims during jihad campaigns, and the prominent role of coercion in these major modalities of Islamization. Following a successful jihad, she notes:
Male captives might be killed or enslaved, whatever their religious affiliation. (People of the Book were not protected by Islamic law until they had accepted dhimma.) Captives might also be given the choice between Islam and death, or they might pronounce the confession of faith of their own accord to avoid execution: jurists ruled that their change of status was to be accepted even though they had only converted out of fear. Women and children captured in the course of the campaigns were usually enslaved, again regardless of their faith...Nor should the importance of captives be underestimated. Muslim warriors routinely took large numbers of them. Leaving aside those who converted to avoid execution, some were ransomed and the rest enslaved, usually for domestic use. Dispersed in Muslim households, slaves almost always converted, encouraged or pressurized by their masters, driven by a need to bond with others, or slowly, becoming accustomed to seeing things through Muslim eyes even if they tried to resist. Though neither the dhimmi nor the slave had been faced with a choice between Islam and death, it would be absurd to deny that force played a major role in their conversion. [1]
For the idolatrous Hindus, enslaved in vast numbers during the waves of jihad conquests that ravaged the Indian subcontinent for well over a half millennium (beginning at the outset of the 8th century C.E.), the guiding principles of Islamic law regarding their fate were unequivocally coercive. Jihad slavery also contributed substantively to the growth of the Muslim population in India. K.S. Lal elucidates both of these points: [2]
The Hindus who naturally resisted Muslim occupation were considered to be rebels. Besides they were idolaters (mushrik) and could not be accorded the status of Kafirs, of the People of the Book — Christians and Jews... Muslim scriptures and treatises advocated jihad against idolaters for whom the law advocated only Islam or death... The fact was that the Muslim regime was giving [them] a choice between Islam and death only. Those who were killed in battle were dead and gone; but their dependents were made slaves. They ceased to be Hindus; they were made Musalmans in course of time if not immediately after captivity...slave taking in India was the most flourishing and successful [Muslim] missionary activity...Every Sultan, as [a] champion of Islam, considered it a political necessity to plant or raise [the] Muslim population all over India for the Islamization of the country and countering native resistance.
Vryonis describes how jihad slavery, as practiced by the Seljuks and early Ottomans, was an important modality of Islamization in Asia Minor during the 11th through the 14th century 3:
A further contributing factor to the decline in the numbers of Christian inhabitants was slavery...Since the beginning of the Arab razzias into the land of Rum, human booty had come to constitute a very important portion of the spoils. There is ample testimony in the contemporary accounts that this situation did not change when the Turks took over the direction of the djihad in Anatolia. They enslaved men, women, and children from all major urban centers and from the countryside where the populations were defenseless. In the earlier years before the Turkish settlements were permanently affected in Anatolia, the captives were sent off to Persia and elsewhere, but after the establishment of the Anatolian Turkish principalities, a portion of the enslaved were retained in Anatolia for the service of the conquerors
After characterizing the coercive, often brutal methods used to impose the devshirme child levy, and the resulting attrition of the native Christian populations (i.e., from both expropriation and flight), Papoulia concludes that this Ottoman institution, a method of Islamization par excellence, also constituted a de facto state of war: [4]
...that the sources speak of piasimo (seizure) aichmalotos paidon (capture) and arpage paidon (grabbing of children) indicates that the children lost through the devşirme were understood as casualties of war. Of course, the question arises whether, according to Islamic law, it is possible to regard the devşirme as a form of the state of war, although the Ottoman historians during the empire's golden age attempted to interpret this measure as a consequence of conquest by force be'anwa. It is true that the Greeks and the other peoples of the Balkan peninsula did not as a rule surrender without resistance, and therefore the fate of the conquered had to be determined according to the principles of the Koran regarding the Ahl—al—Qit�b: i.e. either to be exterminated or be compelled to convert to Islam or to enter the status of protection, of aman, by paying the taxes and particularly the cizye (poll—tax). The fact that the Ottomans, in the case of voluntary surrender, conceded certain privileges one of which was exemption from this heavy burden, indicates that its measure was understood as a penalization for the resistance of the population and the devshirme was an expression of the perpetuation of the state of war between the conqueror and the conquered... the sole existence of the institution of devshirme is sufficient to postulate the perpetuation of a state of war.
Under Shah Abbas I (1588—1626 C.E.), the Safavid Shi'ite theocracy of Iran expanded its earlier system of slave razzias into the Christian Georgian and Armenian areas of the Caucasus. Georgian, Armenian, and Circassian inhabitants of the Caucasus were enslaved in large numbers, and converted, thereby, to Shi'a Islam. The males were made to serve as (primarily) military or administrative slaves, while the females were forced into harems. A transition apparently took place between the 17th and 18th centuries such that fewer of the slaves came from the Caucasus, while greater numbers came via the Persian Gulf, originating from Africa. [5] Ricks notes that by the reign of Shah Sultan Husayn,
The size of the royal court had indeed expanded if the numbers of male and female slaves including white and black eunuchs are any indicators. According to a contemporary historian, Shah Sultan Husayn (d. 1722) made it a practice to arrive at Isfahan's markets on the first days of the Iranian New Year (March 21) with his entire court in attendance. It was estimated by the contemporary recorder that 5,000 male and female black and white slaves including the 100 black eunuchs comprised the royal party. [6]
Clement Huart, writing in the early 20th century (1907), observed that slaves, continued to be the most important component of the booty acquired during jihad campaigns or razzias: [7]
Not too long ago several expeditions crossed Amo�—Dery�, i.e. the southern frontier of the steppes, and ravaged the eastern regions of Persia in order to procure slaves; other campaigns were launched into the very heart of unexplored Africa, setting fire to the inhabited areas and massacring the peaceful animist populations that lived there.
Willis characterizes the timeless Islamic rationale for the enslavement of such 'barbarous' African animists, as follows: [8]
...as the opposition of Islam to kufr erupted from every corner of malice and mistrust, the lands of the enslavable barbarian became the favorite hunting ground for the 'people of reason and faith'—the parallels between slave and infidel began to fuse in the heat of jihad. Hence whether by capture or sale, it was as slave and not citizen that the kafir was destined to enter the Muslim domain. And since the condition of captives flowed from the status of their territories, the choice between freedom and servility came to rest on a single proof: the religion of a land is the religion of its amir (ruler); if he be Muslim, the land is a land of Islam (dar al—Islam); if he be pagan, the land is a land of unbelief (dar al—kufr). Appended to this principle was the kindred notion that the religion of a land is the religion of its majority; if it be Muslim, the land is a land of Islam; if it be pagan, the land is a land of kufr, and its inhabitants can be reckoned within the categories of enslavement under Muslim law. Again, as slavery became a simile for infidelity, so too did freedom remain the signal feature of Islam...The servile estate was hewn out of the ravaged remains of heathen villages — from the women and children who submitted to Islam and awaited their redemption...[according to Muslim jurist] al—Wanshirisi (d.1508), slavery is an affliction upon those who profess no Prophecy, who bear no allegiance to religious law. Moreover, slavery is an humiliation — a subjection— which rises from infidelity.
Based on his study and observations of Muslim slave razzias gleaned while serving in the Sudan during the Mahdist jihad at the close of the 19th century, Winston Churchill wrote this description (in 1899): [9]
all [of the Arab Muslim tribes in The Sudan], without exception, were hunters of men. To the great slave markets of Jeddah a continual stream of negro captives has flowed for hundreds of years. The invention of gunpowder and the adoption by the Arabs of firearms facilitated the traffic...Thus the situation in the Sudan for several centuries may be summed up as follows: The dominant race of Arab invaders was increasingly spreading its blood, religion, customs, and language among the black aboriginal population, and at the same time it harried and enslaved them...The warlike Arab tribes fought and brawled among themselves in ceaseless feud and strife. The negroes trembled in apprehension of capture, or rose locally against their oppressors.
All these elements of jihad slavery— its juridical rationale, employment as a method of forcible Islamization (for non—Muslims in general, and directed at Sub—Saharan African Animists, specifically), and its association with devshirme—like levies of adolescent males for slave soldiering— are apparent in the contemporary jihad being waged against the Animists and Christians of southern Sudan, by the Arab Muslim—dominated Khartoum regime. [10]
Extent and Persistence
The scale and scope of Islamic slavery in Africa are comparable to the Western trans—Atlantic slave trade to the Americas, and as Willis has observed (somewhat wryly), [11] the former '...out—distances the more popular subject in its length of duration.' Quantitative estimates for the trans—Atlantic slave trade (16th through the end of the 19th century) of 10,500,000 (or somewhat higher [12]), are at least matched (if not exceeded by 50%) by a contemporary estimate for the Islamic slave trade out of Africa. Professor Ralph Austen's working figure for this composite of the trans—Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean traffic generated by the Islamic slave trade from 650 through 1905 C.E., is 17,000,000. [13] Moreover, the plight of those enslaved animist peoples drawn from the savannah and northern forest belts of western and central Africa for the trans—Saharan trade was comparable to the sufferings experienced by the unfortunate victims of the trans—Atlantic slave trade. [14]
In the Nineteenth Century, slaves reached the ports of Ottoman Tripoli by three main Saharan routes, all so harsh that the experience of slaves forced to travel them bore comparison with the horrors of the so—called 'middle—passage' of the Atlantic.
This illuminating comparison, important as it is, ignores other vast domains of jihad slavery: throughout Europe (Mediterranean and Western Europe, as well as Central and Eastern Europe, involving the Arabs [Western/Mediterranean], and later the Ottoman Turks and Tatars [Central and Eastern Europe]); Muscovite Russia (subjected to Tatar depredations); Asia Minor (under Seljuk and Ottoman domination); Persia, Armenia, and Georgia (subjected to the systematized jihad slavery campaigns waged by the Shi'ite Safavids, in particular); and the Indian subcontinent (razzias and jihad campaigns by the Arabs in the 7th and 8th centuries, and later depredations by the Ghaznavids, during the Delhi Sultanate, the Timurid jihad, and under the Mughals). As a cursory introduction to the extent of jihad slavery beyond the African continent, three brief examples are provided: the Seljuks in Asia Minor (11th and 12th centuries); the Ottomans in the Balkans (15th century); and the Tatars in southern Poland and Muscovite Russia (mid—15th through 17th centuries).
The capture of Christians in Asia Minor by the Seljuk Turks was very extensive in the 11th and 12th centuries. [15] Following the seizure and pillage of Edessa, 16,000 were enslaved. [16] Michael the Syrian reported that when the Turks of Nur al—Din were brought into Cilicia by Mleh the Armenian, they enslaved 16,000 Christians, whom they sold at Aleppo. [17] A major series of razzias conducted in the Greek provinces of Western Asia Minor enslaved thousands of Greeks (Vryonis believes the figure of 100,000 cited in a contemporary account is exaggerated [18]), and according to Michael the Syrian, they were sold in slave markets as distant as Persia. [19] During razzias conducted by the Turks in 1185 and over the next few years, 26,000 inhabitants from Cappadocia, Armenian, and Mesopotamia were captured and sent off to the slave markets. [20] Vryonis concludes: [21]
...these few sources seem to indicate that the slave trade was a flourishing one. In fact, Asia Minor continued to be a major source of slaves for the Islamic world through the 14th century.
The Ottoman Sultans, in accord with Shari'a prescriptions, promoted jihad slavery aggressively in the Balkans, especially during the 15th century reigns of Mehmed I (1402—1421), Murad II (1421—1451), and Mehmed II (1451—1481). [22] Alexandrescu—Dersca summarizes the considerable extent of this enslavement, and suggests the importance of its demographic effect: [23]
The contemporary Turkish, Byzantine and Latin chroniclers are unanimous in recognizing that during the campaigns conducted on behalf of the unification of Greek and Latin Romania and the Slavic Balkans under the banner of Islam, as well as during their razzias on Christian territory, the Ottomans reduced masses of inhabitants to slavery. The Ottoman chronicler A�ikpa�azade relates that during the expedition of Ali pasha Evrenosoghlu in Hungary (1437), as well as on the return from the campaign of Murad II against Belgrade (1438), the number of captives surpassed that of the combatants. The Byzantine chronicler Ducas states that the inhabitants of Smederevo, which was occupied by the Ottomans, were led off into bondage. The same thing happened when the Turks of Mente�e descended upon the islands of Rhodes and Cos and also during the expedition of the Ottoman fleet to Enos and Lesbos. Ducas even cites numbers: 70,000 inhabitants carried off into slavery during the campaign of Mehmed II in Mor�e (1460). The Italian Franciscan Bartholom� de Yano (Giano dell'Umbria) speaks about 60,000 to 70,000 slaves captured over the course of two expeditions of the akinğis in Transylvania (1438) and about 300,000 to 600,000 Hungarian captives. If these figures seem exaggerated, others seem more accurate: forty inhabitants captured by the Turks of Mente�e during a razzia in Rhodes, 7,000 inhabitants reduced to slavery following the siege of Thessalonika (1430), according to John Anagnostes, and ten thousand inhabitants led off into captivity during the siege of Mytilene (1462), according to the Metropolitan of Lesbos, Leonard of Chios. Given the present state of the documentation available to us, we cannot calculate the scale on which slaves were introduced into Turkish Romania by this method. According to Bartholom� de Yano, it would amount to 400,000 slaves captured in the four years from 1437 to 1443. Even allowing for a certain degree of exaggeration, we must acknowledge that slaves played an important demographic part during the fifteenth—century Ottoman expansion.
Fisher [24] has analyzed the slave razzias conducted by the Muslim Crimean Tatars against the Christian populations of southern Poland and Muscovite Russia during the mid—15th through late 17th century (1463—1794). Relying upon admittedly incomplete sources ('...no doubt there are many more slave raids that the author has not uncovered' [25]), his conservative tabulations [26] indicate that at least 3 million (3,000,000) persons — men, women, and children — were captured and enslaved during this so—called 'harvesting of the steppe'. Fisher describes the plight of those enslaved: [27]
...the first ordeal [of the captive] was the long march to the Crimea. Often in chains and always on foot, many of the captives died en route. Since on many occasions the Tatar raiding party feared reprisals or, in the seventeenth century, attempts by Cossack bands to free the captives, the marches were hurried. Ill or wounded captives were usually killed rather than be allowed to slow the procession. Heberstein wrote... 'the old and infirm men who will not fetch much as a sale, are given up to the Tatar youths either to be stoned, or thrown into the sea, or to be killed by any sort of death they might please.' An Ottoman traveler in the mid—sixteenth century who witnessed one such march of captives from Galicia marveled that any would reach their destination — the slave markets of Kefe. He complained that their treatment was so bad that the mortality rate would unnecessarily drive their price up beyond the reach of potential buyers such as himself. A Polish proverb stated: 'Oh how much better to lie on one's bier, than to be a captive on the way to Tartary'
The persistence of Islamic slavery is as impressive and unique as its extent. Slavery was openly practiced in both Ottoman Turkey [28], and Shi'ite (Qajar) Iran [29], through the first decade of the 20th century. As Toledano points out, [30] regarding Ottoman Turkey, kul (administrative)/ harem slavery,
...survived at the core of the Ottoman elite until the demise of the empire and the fall of the house of Osman in the second decade of the 20th century.
Moreover, Ricks [31] indicates that despite the modernizing pressures and reforms culminating in the Iranian Constitutional Movement of 1905—1911, which effectively eliminated military and agricultural slavery,
The presence of domestic slaves, however, in both the urban and rural regions of Southern Iran had not ceased as quickly. Some Iranians today attest to the continued presence of African and Indian slave girls...
Slavery on the Arabian peninsula was not abolished formally until 1962 in Saudi Arabia, 32 and 1970 in Yemen and Oman. 33 Writing in 1989, Gordon [34] observed that although Mauritania abolished slavery officially on July 15, 1980,
...as the government itself acknowledges, the practice is till alive and well. It is estimated that 200,000 men, women, and children are subject to being bought and sold like so many cattle in this North African country, toiling as domestics, shepherds, and farmhands.
Finally, as discussed earlier, there has been a recrudescence of jihad slavery, since 1983 in the Sudan. [35]
An Overview of Eunuch Slavery—the 'Hideous Trade'
Eunuch slaves — males castrated usually between the ages of 4 and 12 (due to the high risk of death, preferentially, between ages 8 and 12), [36] were in considerable demand in Islamic societies. They served most notably as supervisors of women in the harems of the rulers and elites of the Ottoman Empire, its contemporary Muslim neighbors (such as Safavid Iran), and earlier Muslim dominions. The extent and persistence of eunuch slavery — becoming prominent within 200 years of the initial 7th century Arab jihad conquests [37], through the beginning of the 20th century [38] — are peculiar to the Islamic incarnation of this aptly named 'hideous trade'. For example, Toledano documents that as late as 1903, the Ottoman imperial harem contained from 400 to 500 female slaves, supervised and guarded by 194 black African eunuchs. [39]
But an equally important and unique feature of Muslim eunuch slavery was the acquisition of eunuchs from foreign 'slave producing areas' [40] , i.e., non—Muslim frontier zones subjected to razzias. As David Ayalon observed, [41]
...the overwhelming majority of the eunuchs, like the overwhelming majority of all other slaves in Islam, had been brought over from outside the borders of Muslim lands.
Eunuch slaves in China, in stark contrast, were almost exclusively Chinese procured locally. [42]
Hogendorn [43] has identified the three main slave producing regions, as they evolved in importance over time, from the 8th through the late 19th centuries:
These areas were the forested parts of central and eastern Europe called by Muslims the 'Bild as—Saqaliba' ('slave country'), the word saqlab meaning slave in Arabic (and related to the ethnic designation 'Slav'); the steppes of central Asia called the 'Bilad al—Atrak' ('Turks' country' or Turkestan); and eventually most important, the savanna and the fringes of the wooded territory south of the Sahara called the country of the blacks or 'Bilad as—Sudan'.
Lastly, given the crudeness of available surgical methods and absence of sterile techniques, the human gelding procedure by which eunuchs were 'manufactured' was associated with extraordinary rates of morbidity and mortality. Hogendorn describes the severity of the operation, and provides mortality information from West and East Africa: [44]
Castration can be partial (removal of the testicles only or removal of the penis only), or total (removal of both). In the later period of the trade, that is, after Africa became the most important source for Mediterranean Islam, it appears that most eunuchs sold to the markets underwent total removal. This version of the operation, though considered most appropriate for slaves in constant proximity to harem members, posed a very high danger of death for two reasons. First was the extensive hemorrhaging, with the consequent possibility of almost immediate death. The hemorrhaging could not be stopped by traditional cauterization because that would close the urethra leading to eventual death because of inability to pass urine. The second danger lay in infection of the urethra, with the formation of pus blocking it and so causing death in a few days.
...when the castration was carried out in sub—Saharan West and West—Central Africa...a figure of 90% [is] often mentioned. Even higher death rates were occasionally reported, unsurprising in tropical areas where the danger of infection of wounds was especially high. At least one contemporary price quotation supports a figure of over 90% mortality: Turkish merchants are said to have been willing to pay 250 to 300 (Maria Theresa) dollars each for eunuchs in Borno (northeast Nigeria) at a time when the local price of young male slaves does not seem to have exceeded about 20 dollars...Many sources indicate very high death rates from the operation in eastern Africa.. Richard Millant's [1908] general figure for the Sudan and Ethiopia is 90%
Conclusion
Contemporary manifestations of Islamic slavery—certainly the razzias (raids) waged by Arab Muslim militias against their black Christian, animist, and animist—Muslim prey in both the southern Sudan and Darfur—and even in its own context, the persistence of slavery in Mauritania (again, black slaves, Arab masters)—reflect the pernicious impact of jihad slavery as an enduring Muslim institution. Even Ottoman society, arguably the most progressive in Muslim history, and upheld just recently at a United Nations conference as a paragon of Islamic ecumenism, never produced a William Wilberforce, much less a broad, religiously—based slavery abolition movement spearheaded by committed Muslim ulema. Indeed, it is only modern Muslim freethinkers, anachronistically referred to as 'apostates,' who have had the courage and intellectual integrity to renounce the jihad, including jihad slavery, unequivocally, and based upon an honest acknowledgement of its devastating military and social history. When the voices of these Muslim freethinkers are silenced in the Islamic world—by imprisonment and torture, or execution—the outcome is tragic, but hardly unexpected. That such insightful and courageous voices have been marginalized or ignored altogether in the West is equally tragic and reflects the distressing ignorance of Western policymaking elites.
Dr. Bostom is an Associate Professor of Medicine and author of the forthcoming, The Legacy of Jihad on Prometheus Books
Notes
1. Patricia Crone. God's Rule. Government and Islam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. 371—72
2. K.S. Lal, Muslim Slave System India, New Delhi, Aditya Prakashan, 1994, pp. 46, 69.
3. Speros Vryonis, Jr. The Decline of Medieval Hellenism and the Islamization of Asia Minor, 11th Through 15th Century, 1971, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 174—175.
4. Vasiliki Papoulia. 'The impact of devshirme on Greek society' in East Central European society and war in the prerevolutionary eighteenth century. Gunther E. Rothenberg, B�la K. Kir�ly and Peter F. Sugar, editors. Boulder : Social Science Monographs ; New York : Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1982, pp. 555—556.
5. Thomas Ricks. 'Slaves and Slave Trading in Shi'i Iran, AD 1500—1900', Journal of Asian and African Studies, 2001, Vol. 36, pp. 407—418.
6. Ricks, 'Slaves and Slave Trading in Shi'i Iran', pp. 411—412.
7. Clement Huart. 'Le droit de la guerre' Revue du monde musulman, 1907, p. 337. English translation by Michael J. Miller.
8. John Ralph Willis. "Jihad and the ideology of enslavement", in Slaves and slavery in Muslim Africa— vol. 1. Islam and the ideology of enslavement, London, England; Totowa, N.J.: Frank Cass, 1985, pp. 17—18; 4.
9. Winston Churchill. The River War, Vol. II , London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899, pp. 248—50.
10. John Eibner. 'My career redeeming slaves', Middle East Quarterly, December, 1999, Vol. 4, Number 4, http://www.meforum.org/article/449 . Eibner notes:
...based on the pattern of slave raiding over the past fifteen years and the observations of Western and Arab travelers in southern Darfur and Kordofan, conservatively puts the number of chattel slaves close to or over 100,000. There are many more in state—owned concentration camps, euphemistically called "peace camps" by the government of Sudan, and in militant Qur'anic schools, where boys train to become mujahidun (warriors of jihad).
11. John Ralph Willis. Slaves and slavery in Muslim Africa, Preface, p. vii.
12. This controversial topic is discussed here: Philip D. Curtin, Roger Antsey, J.E. Inikori. The Journal of African History, 1976, Vol. 17, pp. 595—627.
13. John Ralph Willis. Slaves and slavery in Muslim Africa, Preface, p. x.
14. John Wright. 'The Mediterranean Middle Passage: The Nineteenth Century Slave Trade Between Triploi and the Levant', The Journal of North African Studies, 1996, Vol. 1, p. 44.
15. Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism, p.175, note 245.
16. Bar Hebraeus. The chronography of Gregory Ab�'l Faraj, the son of Aaron, the Hebrew physician, commonly known as Bar Hebraeus; being the first part of his political history of the world, translated from the Syriac by Ernest A. Wallis Budge, Oxford University Press, 1932, Vol. 1, pp. 268—273; Michael the Syrian, Chronique de Michel le Syrien, Patriarche Jacobite d'Antioche (1166—1199), translated by J—B Chabot, 1895, Vol. 3, p. 331.
17. Michael the Syrian, Chronique, Vol. 3, p. 331.
18. Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism, p.175, note 245.
19. Michael the Syrian, Chronique, Vol. 3, p. 369.
20. Michael the Syrian, Chronique, Vol. 3, pp. 401—402; Bar Hebraeus, The Chronography, Vol. 1, p. 321.
21. Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism, p.175, note 245.
22. M—M Alexandrescu—Dersca Bulgaru. 'Le role des escalves en Romanie turque au XVe siecle' Byzantinische Forschungen, vol. 11, 1987, p. 15.
23. Alexandrescu—Dersca Bulgaru, 'Le role des escalves en Romanie turque au XVe siecle', pp. 16—17.
24. Alan Fisher 'Muscovy and the Black Sea Slave Trade', Canadian American Slavic Studies, 1972, Vol. 6, pp. 575—594.
25. Fisher 'Muscovy and the Black Sea Slave Trade', p. 579, note 17.
26. Fisher 'Muscovy and the Black Sea Slave Trade', pp. 580—582.
27. Fisher 'Muscovy and the Black Sea Slave Trade', pp. 582—583.
28. Reuben Levy, The Social Structure of Islam, Cambridge University Press, 1957, p. 88.
29. Ricks, 'Slaves and Slave Trading in Shi'i Iran', p. 408.
30. Ehud Toledano. Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998, p. 53.
31. Ricks, 'Slaves and Slave Trading in Shi'i Iran', p. 415.
32. Murray Gordon. Slavery in the Arab World, New York: New Amsterdam, 1989, p. 232.
33. Gordon. Slavery in the Arab World, p. 234.
34. Gordon. Slavery in the Arab World, Preface, second page (pages not numbered).
35. Eibner, 'My career redeeming slaves'.
36. Jan Hogendorn. 'The Hideous Trade. Economic Aspects of the 'Manufacture' and Sale of Eunuchs', Paideuma, 1999, Vol. 45, p. 143, especially, note 25.
37. Hogendorn. 'The Hideous Trade', p. 137.
38. Ehud Toledano. 'The Imperial Eunuchs of Istanbul: From Africa to the Heart of Islam', Middle Eastern Studies, 1984, Vol. 20, pp. 379—390.
39. Toledano. 'The Imperial Eunuchs of Istanbul', pp. 380—381.
40. Hogendorn. 'The Hideous Trade', p. 138.
41. David Ayalon. 'On the Eunuchs in Islam', Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 1979, Vol. 1, pp. 69—70.
42. Hogendorn. 'The Hideous Trade', p. 139, note 5.
43. Hogendorn. 'The Hideous Trade', p. 139.
44. Hogendorn. 'The Hideous Trade', pp. 143, 145—146.
on "The living legacy of jihad slavery"
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Andrew, before you cite academics like Edward Said (Edward Sayid), you might want to examine their agendas and how the truth might not be one of them. Look up Ward Churchill as another academic who understood that as long as one is sufficiently post-modern and leftist, actually scholarship is not required.
http://www.meforum.org/191/edward-said-and-me
Edward Said and Me
A briefing by Justus Reid Weiner
September 20, 2000
In September 1999, Commentary magazine published an article by Justus Reid Weiner, a scholar-in-residence with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which demonstrated that the autobiographical references of Edward Said, a University Professor at Columbia University, were fundamentally inaccurate. In a September 20, 2000 discussion at the Middle East Forum in New York, Mr. Weiner spoke about repercussions of his widely publicized exposé.
The Article
In my article, I showed that contrary to his depiction, Said was in fact not exiled from Jerusalem by the Haganah in December 1947. Nor was there any basis to his claim that he "spent most of his formative years" in Jerusalem and that he "left with [his] family for Cairo" by "the end of 1947." Similarly Said's assertion that he lost his "beautiful old house" in the Talbieh neighborhood was revealed to be false. Actually, this avatar of the Palestinian refugees was the scion of a wealthy Cairene family. His father was an American citizen who moved to Cairo from Jerusalem a decade before Edward was born. Living in Cairo until his departure to attend prep school in America in 1951, Edward Said resided with his family in luxurious apartment buildings in the exclusive Zamalek neighborhood where he was attended to by maids and a butler, he played with childhood friends in the manicured private gardens of the Aquarium Grotto, he attended private English and American schools, he was driven around in his father's large black American cars by a chauffeur, and he enjoyed the facilities at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the son of one of its only Arab members.
In 1952 a revolutionary mob burned Said's father's flagship store (and a branch) to the ground, and several years later within a decade the nationalization program instituted by Egyptian president Nasser ultimately forced Said's father out of the country. Thus, the truly devastating financial losses suffered by Said's father were in no way connected to Israel, the country from which Edward Said demands reparations.
My Interest in Edward Said
Early on in the Oslo peace process, I was researching an article dealing with those who opposed the peace process, among whom Edward Said was an intellectual leader. In the course of my inquiry, I became fascinated with the way Said employed his childhood travails to advance his political argument, especially as I had lived in the Talbieh neighborhood of Jerusalem, a two-minute walk from the building Said had described as "my beautiful old house." Further, my former office overlooked the playground of Saint George's School in eastern Jerusalem, the very school Said said he attended before being driven out by Haganah forces in 1947.
Inquiring about Said's Past
To better understand Said's background, I began to conduct on-site research into his childhood. First, I went to St. George's School to inquire about Said's days as a pupil there. The headmaster showed me the pre-1948 student enrollment records, and I spent hours going through three leather-bound enrollment ledgers, page by page. To my astonishment, I found no mention of Edward Said. A second time page-by-page through the same records, and I found no evidence he was ever enrolled there.
This got me hooked. I located and interviewed six former residents of the "beautiful old house," none of whom had any recollection of Edward Said or his parents ever having lived there. Going through nine newspapers over a six-month period (November 1947-May 1948) I found that Said's claim of being driven out by a Haganah sound van in mid-December 1947 was without any support in these contemporaneous records.
I then located scores of who's who books, telephone directories, and business directories for Jerusalem and Cairo during the relevant years, which enabled me to ascertain that Edward Said and his parents had lived in Cairo, and where his father's business was located. I consulted the Jerusalem registry of deeds, sent Arabic-speaking researchers to interview Said's relatives, did researched in the declassified public records of the British Mandatory government in Palestine and the map and aerial photographs department at Hebrew University. I located Said's birth and baptismal certificates. I interviewed some eighty-five individuals. I discovered many interesting points: that Said was in fact "born in Jerusalem," but only because his parents feared hygienic conditions in Cairo hospitals after their previously born son died of an infection within days of his delivery. Thus, Edward Said's birth certificate bears no entry in the box marked "local address," but it does list a permanent address: "Cairo."
Several months of extensive research made clear that there was something fundamentally wrong with the picture Said presented of himself - that of a Palestinian exile/refugee deserving of reparations from Israel. When I began discovering discrepancies in Said's frequent autobiographic references, I telephoned his office at Columbia University to request an interview, but Said did not return the call.
Triggering a Media Controversy
The publication of my exposé detonated "one of the nastiest rows of its kind to rend New York's intelligentsia in years," according to the Observer of London. More than 150 articles appeared about my research, from Finland to India. A dichotomy emerged.
On the one side were dedicated journalists took the trouble to examine my evidence. On the other side were pro-Said responses by him and his network of friends (i.e., Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, Alexander Cockburn); they did not refute my evidence but attacked me and my work, often in similar ways and even using the same words. But Said's supporters faced an unenviable problem - a month after my article was published, Said's memoir Out of Place arrived in the bookstores, confirming the essence of what I had uncovered. Perhaps the 85 interviews I conducted alerted him to the urgency of fixing the record about his Cairo childhood.
Repercussions of the Exposé
Said's fraud continues to be important a full year later because it raises larger questions than simply the myth-making and selective memory of one person.
First, Said is a leading intellectual light in left-wing and Palestinian circles. People who never saw fit to scrape at Said's teflon surface have now begun to question his credibility. In just the last two months, for example, six major articles appeared in the Columbia Spectator, the university newspaper, dealing critically with Said's shenanigans. One article, "Said's Shameful Summer: Rocks and Terrorists," noted Said's having met with Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah the same day he was photographed heaving a stone at the Israeli side of the Lebanon-Israel border. The Columbia Spectator's criticism of Said culminated inincluded a staff editorial entitled "Said's Affinity for Fiction."
Second, Said's Palestinian supporters remain in complete denial. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and other groups have only hugged Said tighter after his exposure. This suggests that such groups take a rather callous attitude towards truth when it concerns matters close to their hearts.
Third, Palestinians and the Israeli Left have urged Israelis to reevaluate their country's formative experiences. Said has been touting Israeli post-Zionists, or New Historians, and tries to make it seem as though they are all in full agreement with him, which is not true. Why, I wonder, as Israelis give up their historical myths in the interest of moving closer to the Palestinians, do the latter clutch their myths ever tighter.
The Intellectual and the Truth
Edward Said writes in his book Representations of the Intellectual that the goal of the intellectual is to speak truth to power. Although in some ways a post-modern figure, in matters of truth - at least with regard to himself - Said insists on holding to a traditional standard of truth. This is particularly ironic because Said conspicuously does not live up to his own standard. Worse, even when he does use actual facts, Said deploys them in a way intended to deceive the reader.
Thus, he mentions a number of dates - occasions when he was present in Palestine between his birth in 1935 and 1947, then repeats them endlessly, suggesting to the listener or reader that he was continuously in Palestine during this twelve-year period. As it turned out, however, Said spent his entire childhood - except for a few summers and other visits abroad - living in a prestigious neighborhood in Cairo, surrounded by butlers, maids and the like. This was his life, and it had almost nothing to do with Palestine.
Summary account by Assaf Moghadam, a graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.
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"And second of all, the horrors of Marxism here werent really horrors at all, and most certainly they werent Marxists horrors"
When I say marxist horrors, this is what I'm talking about:
http://www.slate.com/id/2284198/pagenum/all/#p2
I find it hard to understand anyone who wants to argue that the murder of 20 million is "preferable" to anything, but our culture still hasn't assimilated the genocidal equivalence between Stalin and Hitler, because, as Applebaum points out, we used the former to defeat the latter.*
Consider the fact that downtown New York is home to a genuinely likable literary bar ironically named "KGB." The KGB, of course, was merely the renamed version of Stalin's NKVD, itself the renamed version of the OGPU, the secret police spearhead of his genocidal policies. And under its own name the KGB was responsible for the continued murder and torture of dissidents and Jews until the Soviet Union fell in 1991 (although of course an ex-KGB man named Putin is basically running the place now).
You could argue that naming a bar "KGB" is just a kind of Cold War kitsch (though millions of victims might take issue with taking it so lightly). But the fact that you can even make the kitsch argument is a kind of proof of the differential way Soviet and Nazi genocides and their institutions are still treated. Would people seek to hold literary readings at a downtown bar ironically named "Gestapo"?
The full evil of Stalin still hasn't sunk in. I know it to be true intellectually, but our culture has not assimilated the magnitude of his crimes. Which is perhaps why the cannibalism jolted me out of any illusion that meaningful distinctions could be made between Stalin and Hitler.
Perhaps we've failed to assimilate what we've learned about Stalin, Soviet communism, and Mao's communism (50 million may have died in the Great Leap Forward famine and the Cultural Revolution's murders) because for some time the simmering argument had a kind of disreputable side. In the mid-'80s there were German historians such as Jürgen Habermas accusing other German historians such as Ernst Nolte of trying to "normalize" the Nazi regime by playing up its moral equivalence to Stalinist Russia, by suggesting even that Hitler's murderous methods were a response to Stalinist terror and genocide, which some saw as an attempt to "excuse" Hitler.
But the disreputable uses to which the argument has been put—normalizing Hitler by focusing on Stalin's crimes—should not blind us to the magnitude and consequences of those crimes.
There is no algorithm for evil, but the case of Stalin's has for a long time weighed more heavily the ideological murders and gulag deaths that began in 1937 and played down the millions who—Snyder argues—were just as deliberately, cold-bloodedly murdered by enforced famine in 1932 and 1933.
Here is where the shock of Snyder's relatively few pages on cannibalism brought the question of degrees of evil alive once again to me. According to Snyder's carefully documented account, it was not uncommon during the Stalin-imposed famine in Soviet Ukraine for parents to cook and eat their children.
The bare statement alone is horrifying even to write.
The back story: While Lenin was content, for a time anyway, to allow the new Soviet Union to develop a "mixed economy" with state-run industry and peasant-owned private farms, Stalin decided to "collectivize" the grain-producing breadbasket that was the Ukraine. His agents seized all land from the peasants, expelling landowners and placing loyal ideologues with little agricultural experience in charge of the newly collectivized farms, which began to fail miserably. And to fulfill Five-Year Plan goals, he seized all the grain and food that was grown in 1932 and 1933 to feed the rest of Russia and raise foreign capital, and in doing so left the entire Ukrainian people with nothing to eat—except, sometimes, themselves.
I've read things as horrifying, but never more horrifying than the four pages in Snyder's book devoted to cannibalism. In a way I'd like to warn you not to read it; it is, unfortunately, unforgettable. On the other hand, not to read it is a refusal to be fully aware of what kind of world we live in, what human nature is capable of. The Holocaust taught us much on these questions, but alas, there is more to learn. Maybe it's better to live in denial. Better to think of human history Pollyanna-like, as an evolution upward, although sometimes I feel Darwin spoke more truly than he knew when he titled his book The Descent of Man. Certainly one's understanding of both Stalinism and human nature will be woefully incomplete until one does read Snyder's pages.
Here is an excerpt:
In the face of starvation, some families divided, parents turning against children, and children against one another. As the state police, the OGPU, found itself obliged to record, in Soviet Ukraine "Families kill their weakest members, usually children, and use the meat for eating." Countless parents killed and ate their children and then died of starvation later anyway. One mother cooked her son for herself and her daughter. One 6-year-old girl, saved by other relatives last saw her father when he was sharpening a knife to slaughter her. Other combinations were, of course, possible. One family killed their daughter-in-law, and fed her head to the pigs, and roasted the rest of her body."
According to Snyder "at least 2,505 people were sentenced for cannibalism in the years 1932 and 1933 in Ukraine, although the actual number of cases was most certainly greater."
One more horror story. About a group of women who sought to protect children from cannibals by gathering them in an "orphanage" in the Kharkov region:
"One day the children suddenly fell silent, we turned around to see what was happening, and they were eating the smallest child, little Petrus. They were tearing strips from him and eating them. And Petrus was doing the same, he was tearing strips from himself and eating them, he ate as much as he could. The other children put their lips to his wounds and drank his blood. We took the child away from their hungry mouths and we cried."
"And appetite, an universal wolf/ So doubly seconded with will and power/ Must make perforce an universal prey/ And last eat up himself." So Shakespeare wrote, but note that he is speaking not just of the appetite for food, but for power. Stalin was the true cannibal.
How should one react to this? There may only have been a few thousand cases, compared with the millions Stalin starved or murdered, compared with Hitler's slaughters, but there is something in these accounts that forces one to realize there are depths of evil one has not been able to imagine before. Killing another human being, killing millions of human beings. Evil. But forcing parents to cook and eat their children—did one know this was in the repertoire of human behavior? Must we readjust radically downward our vision of human nature? That any human could cause or carry out such acts must mean many are capable of it.
The point of the controversy really should be not whether Hitler or Stalin was worse, but that there was more than one of them, more than two of course: There are also Pol Pot and the Rwandan killers, among others.
Even if those 2,500 arrests for cannibalism were dwarfed by the numbers of those 2 million or more starved to death, they have something unspeakable to say, something almost beyond words. In the light of these reports, can those such as Slavoj Žižek still defend Marxism for its utopian universalism and dismiss the cannibalism as unfortunate unintended consequences of too much zealousness in pursuit of a higher cause? Just a detour on the road to Utopia. Tell us, Mr. Žižek, please. (And by the way, to scorn Postmodern Marxism is not to defend the failings of Postmodern capitalism.)
Should we hold different kinds of genocide differentially evil? One would think brutal direct mass slaughter to be the worst form, but forcing human beings to descend to cannibalizing their children goes beyond physical torture and killing. It is spiritual torture, murder of the souls. In a way more vicious and wicked because the enforced self-degradation is unimaginable in its suffering.
We know what it says about Stalin and his henchmen, all too willing to be accomplices of this horror. But what about the cannibals? How should we regard them? Purely as victims, with no choice? Certainly they must have suffered mentally and spiritually more than we can imagine. But does that mean they didn't have a choice? If we accept they had a choice are we blaming the victims? Or is it clear they were driven insane by starvation—and cannot be held fully culpable by reason of diminished capacity? On the other hand not every family that starved to death turned to cannibalism; were they of stronger moral constitution?
Snyder is very careful about this. He concedes "cannibalism is a taboo of literature as well as life, as communities seek to protect their dignity by suppressing the record of this desperate mode of survival. Ukrainians outside the Soviet Union have treated cannibalism as a source of great shame."
This is an almost too carefully, thus confusingly, worded sentence. It seems as if he's saying that some communities haven't sought to suppress the facts, but feel shame—"Ukrainians outside the Soviet Union." But there is no more Soviet Union. What did or do the Ukrainians who now have their own nation feel? What are they supposed to feel? Victimized into being perpetrators?
These are not easy questions, the ones about how to evaluate degrees of evil. I spend probably too much time thinking about them. Sometimes there are distinctions without a significant difference. Here are some very preliminary thoughts:
—Even if the cannibalism was confined to a few thousand and the larger genocides involved millions, they are not irrelevant to the heart of darkness revealed in the "bloodlands" that lay between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
—There are some distinctions, but no real difference, between Hitler's and Stalin's genocides. Once you get over 5 million, it's fair to say all genocidal monsters are alike.
Finally, the only other conclusion one can draw is that "European civilization" is an oxymoron. These horrors, Nazi and Communist, all arose out of European ideas, political and philosophical, being put into practice. Even the Cambodian genocide had its genesis in the cafes of Paris where Pol Pot got his ideas. Hitler got his ideas in the cafes of Vienna.
"After such knowledge," as Eliot said, "what forgiveness?"
But marxism is great, it just hasn't been properly applied yet?
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I am enjoying the back and forth of others with Andrew. No intent to pile on, but from my (American-centric) point of view I would add the small details that a) it was also a largely Christian nation ENDED slavery here and action from largely Christian countries that eventually ENDED the Bosnian atrocities. Jews and Christians elsewhere were not applauding and supporting any of that violence to my knowledge.
Meanwhile both Iran and more recently Egypt have issued maps with Israel removed, while more moderate and 'peaceful' Arab-Muslim nations still call for the destruction of Israel in their charter. The state press of Saddam's Iraq applauded bin Laden's attacks on America.
The NATO/American intervention in Bosnia and other examples of America and the west (with Jews, Christians, Muslims) helping Muslims are always conveniently absent from the rhetoric of bin Laden, militant Islamists and the propagandists. Historians would never make those omissions. :-)
The inference that at least at this point in time we are morally equivalent (or worse?) to those who call for our destruction I find preposterous but I am open to reading all that you can post to support that.
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Sorry for the 'echo' effect, but this passage from GM sums up very well what I also see (and don't see) here and what also I see from here as happening in Europe, the London subway, Madrid, riots in Paris and Malmo, the Danish free speech attacks, etc.:
"A more accurate evaluation would be to compare the violence from Muslims globally vs. the violence from Christians. You see many honor killings in the Bible Belt? I know the Baptists are famous for suicide bombings. Everyone has of course seen where Lutherans flew planes into the WTC. Remember when Catholics butchered those kids in Beslan? So why are so many horrific acts done by those motivated by christian theology and so few by Muslim theology?
Or is it the other way around?"
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There are nuts and psychos everywhere, whether we look at Timothy McVeigh or Hitler, but where in the teachings of the church does it call for what they did. The current fight as far as I know is from one particular intolerant theology.
"Muslims will never associate this (atrocities committed by 'Christians') with the teachings of Jesus, peace be on him."
- If they did, again, where in the teachings or life of Jesus would they point to justify the Bosnian atrocities?
Only in the churches that Obama has chosen have I seen hatred taught and disseminated and it is not from the teachings of Christ and it is not directed toward other religions or non-believers.
I have been to quite a variety of churches and heard the expression 'Peace be with you' and a lot of praying for peace all across the world. I have never heard the Judeo-Christian teaching: 'Peace only to those who follow the chosen path'.
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"There are nuts and psychos everywhere, whether we look at Timothy McVeigh or Hitler, but where in the teachings of the church does it call for what they did. The current fight as far as I know is from one particular intolerant theology."
Just a quick point Doug, as . McVeigh is often thrown out by islamic apologists (Not that you are, of course). McVeigh was motivated by a hatred of the US gov't, not christian theology.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/jun/11/mcveigh.usa4
In a letter to the Buffalo News daily in New York state yesterday, McVeigh used the word "sorry" for the first time, but instantly rendered it meaningless. "I am sorry these people had to lose their lives," he wrote. "But that's the nature of the beast. It's understood going in what the human toll will be."
There was anger in Oklahoma City yesterday after his claim that the bombing of a federal government building was a "legit tactic" in his war against the excesses of central government. Yesterday, his lawyer compared his role to that of a pilot who drops a bomb on a foreign country killing women and children. "He does feel for people but he doesn't feel like he did anything wrong," Mr Nigh said.
In his letter, McVeigh said he was an agnostic but that he would "improvise, adapt and overcome", if it turned out there was an afterlife. "If I'm going to hell," he wrote, "I'm gonna have a lot of company." His body is to be cremated and his ashes scattered in a secret location.
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By JOSEF JOFFE
In politics, shoddy theories never die. In the Middle East, one of the oldest is that Palestine is the "core" regional issue. This zombie should have been interred at the beginning of the Arab Spring, which has highlighted the real core conflict: the oppressed vs. their oppressors. But the dead keep walking.
"The plight of the Palestinians has been a root cause of unrest and conflict in the region," insisted Turkish President Abdullah Gul in the New York Times last week. "Whether these [recent] uprisings lead to democracy and peace or to tyranny and conflict will depend on forging a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace." Naturally, "the U.S. has a long overdue responsibility" to forge that peace.
Writing in the Financial Times, former U.S. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft intoned: "The nature of the new Middle East cannot be known until the festering sore of the occupied territories is removed." Read: The fate of democracy hinges on Palestine.
So do "Iran's hegemonic ambitions," he insinuated. This is why Tehran reaches for the bomb? Syria, too, will remain a threat "as long as there is no regional peace agreement." The Assad regime is slaughtering its own people for the sake of Palestine? And unless Riyadh "saw the U.S. as moving in a serious manner" on Palestine, Mr. Scowcroft warned, the Saudis might really sour on their great protector from across the sea. So when they sent troops into Bahrain, were they heading for Jerusalem by way of Manama?
Shoddy political theories—ideologies, really—never die because they are immune to the facts. The most glaring is this: These revolutions have unfolded without the usual anti-American and anti-Israeli screaming. It's not that the demonstrators had run out of Stars and Stripes to trample, or were too concerned about the environment to burn Benjamin Netanyahu in effigy. It's that their targets were Hosni Mubarak, Zine el Abidine Ben-Ali, Moammar Gadhafi and the others—no stooges of Zionism they. In Benghazi, the slogan was: "America is our friend!"
The men and women of the Arab Spring are not risking their lives for a "core" issue, but for the freedom of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria. And of Iran, as the Green revolutionaries did in Tehran in 2009.
View Full Image
Associated Press
Syrian anti-government protesters march during a demonstration in Banias, Syria, on April 17.
.Every "Palestine-first" doctrine in the end comes down to that fiendish "Arab Street": The restless monster must be fed with Israeli concessions lest he rise and sweep away our good friends—all those dictators and despots who pretended to stand between us and Armageddon. Free Palestine, the dogma goes, and even Iran and Syria will turn from rabid to responsible. The truth is that the American and Israeli flags were handed out for burning by those regimes themselves.
This is how our good friends have stayed in power: Divert attention and energy from oppression and misery at home by rousing the masses against the enemy abroad. How can we have free elections, runs a classic line, as long as they despoil our sacred Islamic lands? This is why anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are as rampant among our Saudi and Egyptian allies as among the hostile leaders of Iran and Syria.
The Palestinians do deserve their own state. But the Palestine-first strategy reverses cause and effect. It is not the core conflict that feeds the despotism; it is the despots who fan the conflict, even as they fondle their U.S.-made F-16s and quietly work with Israel. Their peoples are the victims of this power ploy, not its drivers. This is what the demonstrators of Tahrir Square and the rebels of Benghazi have told us with their silence on the Palestine issue.
So Palestine has nothing to do with it? It does, though not in the ways insisted by Messrs. Gul and Scowcroft. The sounds of silence carry a different message: "It's democracy, stupid!" Freedom does not need the enemy at the gate. Despots do, which is why they happily let the Palestinian sore fester for generations.
Israel, which has reacted in utter confusion to the fall of Mubarak, might listen up as well. If democracies don't have to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels," as Shakespeare has it in Henry IV, then Israel's reformed neighbors might at last be ready for real, not just cold peace. Mr. Mubarak was not. Nor is Mr. Assad of Syria, who has refused every Israeli offer to hand back the Golan Heights. If you rule at the head of a tiny Alawite minority, why take the Heights and give away a conflict that keeps you in power? Peace at home—justice, jobs and consent—makes for peace abroad.
Still, don't hold your breath. Yes, democracy is where history is going, but it is a long, perilous journey even from Tunis to Tripoli, let alone all the way to Tehran.
Mr. Joffe is senior fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies and a fellow at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford.
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Tzvi Freeman: Any Jew alive on the face of this planet today is a walking miracle. Our mere existence today is wondrous, plucked from the fire at the last moment again and again, with no natural explanation that will suffice. Each of us alive today is a child of martyrs and miracles.
AB wrote: "And second of all, the horrors of Marxism here werent really horrors at all, and most certainly they werent Marxists horrors. I beleive you refer to Yugoslavia. All recent studies and polls show that a vast majority of people said life back then was a lot more lax, less stresfull, happier and freer. Almost 0% crime rate, no unemployment, free health care with one of the best surgeons and doctors in central europe, a solid school system, sure work after graduation, economical vertical mobility, great national spirit and cameradery..."
As GM has already clarified, his comments were directed to the entirety of Marxism, the over twenty million killed by Stalin et al, the 50-70 million killed by Mao, etc. I would add a simple comment based upon my personal experience. When I was 11 years old my family and I (liberal NYC Jews btw so we were not predisposed to a negative experience) went into what was then northern Yugoslavia for several days. The oppression and fear in the air was palpable. As you know, last year I was in Slovenia which seemed to me to be a fine, wonderful place. Also, I went to Cuba for ten days in 1981, shortly before the Port Mariel exodus. I speak Spanish at an adult level, and Latin America was my region of specialization for my degree in International Relations from U. of PA-- the point being I did go in with some education and the ability to talk to people independently of government provided guides. Again, oppression in the air, and empty stomachs in a fertile tropical island. As for your description of central Europe, I have a hard time squaring that with the fact of the Berlin Wall and Soviet and East German guards shooting people trying to escape.
AB wrote "So in short I cannot honestly answer you to the question : does Israel have a right to exist? Does Israel have a right to self-defense? I mean of course from the basic context, there is no doubt that it does, but my pitch is, that the problem is WAY more layered and structured than this basic question."
I find your response here quite remarkable. It is PRECISELY as simple as whether Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself or not!!! Annale slice and layer all you want to concerning the etymology of the terms Palistine/Palestinian, Iran/Aryan, Jihad/Kampf but the simple facts are
a) that there are major strands of Jewish hatred in the Arab world today based upon portions of Islam;
b) that this hatred precedes the creation of Israel;
c) that almost as many Jews came to Israel to escape oppression in the Arab (and Aryan Iranian) world as came from Europe;
d) that the ASIs (Arabs Surrounding Israel) have tried to wipe it out various times;
e) that there are many, many ASIs currently dedicated to the destruction of Israel
f) Iran is building missiles and nukes that will give it the ability to wipe Israel out in a flash
g) that Israel gave the Sinai back to Egypt after it accepted Israel's right to exist
h) that this option was on the table for many years for the West Bank, though at this point many Israelis have decided to move on and keep land from which their security and survival has been attacked innumerable times and
i) those who would make peace and do business with Israel are killed
j) the rights of Arabs in Israel are far, far greater than the rights of Jews in Arab coutntries.
PS: I have looked in vain for your statement of your guiding philosophy "Annales Marxism" was it? I would like to read up on this a bit. This is what I have found so far-- is this it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_School
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1364891/Annales-school
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howdy,
man, I see you guys were productive. Anyway, my reply is in the works, but at the time I am too held back at work to finish it. Stay sharp !
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Looking forward to it. :-) BTW, I leave tomorrow evening for a seminar in Israel. (First time for this American Jew). I am very excited!
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The Eichmann Trial: 50 Years Later
The Eichmann Trial: 50 Years Later
http://www.aish.com/print/?contentID=118910959§ion=/ho/i
by Leah Abramowitz
A prosecutor and key witness reflect back on the event that transformed Israel.
In May 1960, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi officer in charge of orchestrating the Final Solution – the mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps – was captured by Israeli agents near Buenos Aires. Eichmann was given a choice between instant death or trial in Israel. He chose to stand trial, which began in Jerusalem on April 11, 1961.
During the trial, the Israeli public was exposed to the details of the Holocaust nightmare for the first time, as well as to the heroism and ingenuity of those who survived.
In his defense, Eichmann insisted that he was only "following orders." Yet scores of witnesses contradicted that contention – testifying to Eichmann's "fanatical zeal and unquenchable blood thirst." Throughout, Eichmann listened impassively to a translation of the entire trial from a specially-designed glass cubicle in the crowded Jerusalem courtroom.
One year later, after all the evidence was in and all appeals exhausted, the cold-eyed Nazi monster was hanged at a prison in the Israeli town of Ramla.
Former Supreme Judge Gavriel Bach – at the time an up-and-coming lawyer and deputy state attorney – was asked to join the team of prosecutors. Fluent in German, he conducted most of the interrogations of Eichmann. At a recent talk in Jerusalem, with the 50th anniversary of the Eichmann Trial approaching, Bach described the unforgettable influence that the trial left on him.
"We were three prosecutors. We gathered millions of pages of documentation and read a great deal of background sources. I don't think I slept more than three hours every night throughout the trial," Bach recalls. “The German government was very cooperative and sent us a great deal of material.” Despite that, chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner preferred to call up as many witnesses as possible rather than presenting his case via historical documents, because "it would be more shocking and have more impetus."
"Some of us thought that Eichmann may have experienced regret at the terrible things done to the Jews in Europe," says Bach. While in custody, Eichmann was shown part of a film that portrayed the horrible conditions of the camps and the crematoria. “We all waited to see how he would react to the emotional film,” says Bach. But when a German-speaking guard asked Eichmann for his reaction, he simply changed the subject and complained about not being allowed to appear at the trial in a Nazi uniform.
Instigator of the Crimes
Among the many documents that Bach found was an interview which Eichmann gave to a fascist Dutch journalist in 1956 while hiding in Argentina. Eichmann expressed satisfaction over the sight of continuous railroads cars arriving in Auschwitz. "It was a glorious sight," he said.
"Did you have any regrets at any time?" asked the journalist.
"Yes", answered Eichmann, "I'm sorry that I wasn't stricter in carrying out our goal. Look what happened," he declared angrily in 1956. "The State of Israel now exists and that cursed race continues."
A book written by the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoes, describes how up to a thousand Jewish children were gassed daily. "Occasionally a youngster would beg for his life on bended knees in front of me, and I have to admit, I sometimes felt weak myself. I have children of my own. But then I was embarrassed at my frailty. The Oberfuhrer (Eichmann) strengthened my resolve by explaining that we had to kill the accursed Jewish children above all; they represented the future, and the Jewish future had to be erased from the face of the world."
Prosecutors found several examples of Eichmann’s steadfast, even stubborn resistance to any show of lenience. One of the Nazi leaders in Poland sent a request to delay the deportation of a certain Dr. Weiss and his wife. Dr. Weiss was a world famous expert on radar, and the officer thought it would be useful for the Reich to obtain key information before annihilating him. Eichmann wouldn't hear of it "as a matter of principle," and the doctor and his family perished along with their entire community.
At one point during the war, Hitler himself, for political reasons, asked Eichmann not to touch 8,000 Jews left in Budapest. Yet despite his loyalty to the Fuhrer, Eichmann planned otherwise. (Only the war's progression prevented him from deporting this group.) These examples counter Eichmann's claim throughout the trial that he was merely a cog in the machine, carrying out orders.
"There were many dramatic incidents during the trial," says Bach, some which never came to the floor of the courtroom. "We received an important document from an anonymous source which detailed the number of arrivals at Auschwitz, the dates, and the numbers given to each Jew. We tried to verify the details and find the person who had sent us the valuable material, but couldn't make headway. We called in experts from the police department to examine the document and help us find its author. Then I had a brainstorm. Let's find survivors with the numbers mentioned in the document and ask them when they arrived at the camp. That will give us the proof we need to present the document at the trial.
"One of the policeman in the room, after some hesitation, rolled up his sleeve and showed us a number engraved on his arm. 'This number appears on the report; and indeed I arrived in Auschwitz on the date mentioned,' he said quietly. There was complete silence in the room. None of his police colleagues even knew that he'd been in the Holocaust. Like so many, he had hidden his past. We had our proof on the spot. But none of us could speak for several minutes."
Horror Stories
The Eichmann trial had the effect of creating huge public awareness about the Holocaust in Israel and worldwide.
"Nobody wanted to talk about their Holocaust experiences," says Yosef Kleinman, a survivor who arrived in Palestine in 1945 during the days when the tiny Jewish community was struggling to survive and prepare for statehood. There was neither energy, time nor patience to hear the newcomers out. “No one was interested in hearing our stories,” says Kleinman.
"They called us 'sabonim' (soapers),” he says. “They couldn't fathom why we hadn't stood up to the Nazis in the camps and fought back. In those days Israelis were taken up with the macho image of the ‘new Jew.’ They didn't understand what we were up against in Europe, and we ourselves didn't want to be reminded. We just wanted to get on with our lives and put that all behind us."
Indeed, the main drama of the Eichmann trial was the Holocaust survivors who appeared as witnesses. As first it was difficult to even locate witnesses, since they had gotten so used to not talking about that period in their lives. "I had a hard time convincing some people to come forth and tell their story," Bach recalls. “One man told me, ‘If I start talking, you won't be able to stop me for four or five days.’"
The prosecution team argued among themselves how much time to give each witness. "I was adamant that at least one witness should appear from every country that had been under Nazi rule," says Bach.
Kleinman, one of the youngest witnesses, described the selection process he endured as a 14-year-old. "First we were put into a ghetto, and several weeks later we were sent in cattle cars to the camp. For three days we had nothing to drink or eat.”
At Auschwitz, there was a selection table where the infamous Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele, sent the most able-bodied to the right for slave labor, and the weaker ones to the left for extermination. “My 13-year-old brother was held up for inspection,“ Kleinman recalls, “but in the end they told him to run along and join our parents to the left, which he did happily, not knowing what that meant. That was the last time I saw any of them.
”In the barracks, the old timers quickly filled us in and callously pointed to the smoking chimneys we could see through the window. 'That's where your parents are. They're all dead by now.' That's how we learned the terrible truth.”
At the Eichmann trial, Kleinman testified about an incident where Auschwitz guards called the prisoners out to see one young boy getting punished. Kleinman describes:
“Usually they'd give 25 lashes. This boy withstood the punishment and didn't let out a sound. That made the tormentor angry and he continued beating him – 30, 35, 40 lashes. And still the boy didn't cry out. We ourselves couldn't take it anymore. But the soldier continued hitting him all over – on his legs, face, stomach, wherever the whip landed.
“When he got to 50, and the boy was already on the ground, he threw away his whip and left in disgust. We ran over to the hero, picked him up and washed him off. 'What did you do to get this punishment?' we asked him. He could barely talk, but he said, “I brought siddurim (prayer books) to the barracks. It was worth it. I'm glad I did it.'"
This story had a deep influence in the courtroom. The court-appointed defense attorney wept openly, and the judges called for a break in the procedures.
Little Red Coat
At the trial, another witness who had been inside the gas chamber lived to tell about it. As a youngster, he arrived in Auschwitz together with 200 other children, after a horrendous three-day train trip. After the selection, he was pushed into a large dark room with shower piping, and the door was shut behind them. At first the children began to sing, to lift their spirits, but that soon gave way to wailing and screaming. Suddenly the heavy metal door swung open and a guard pulled out 20 of them into the bright sunlight. The Nazis needed workers to unload bags of potatoes and there weren't enough soldiers for the job. That's how this man was able to give a first-hand description of the insides of the crematorium.
At the trial, Dr. Martin Foldi, related how he and his family arrived at Auschwitz in the winter of 1944. As the bewildered Jews stumbled out of the cattle cars, they were hounded by dogs and Nazi soldiers with whips. He described being sent to the right with his 11-year-old son. His wife and two-year-old daughter were taken to the left. The little girl was wearing a little red coat. At the last minute, a guard sent Foldi's son with the crowd to the left. Dr. Foldi panicked thinking, how could this young boy find his mother and sister among the thousands there at the station. But then he knew... he could find his sister because she was wearing the red coat. It would be "like a beacon" for the boy. Then he states, "I never saw them again."
This testimony is likely to have formed the inspiration for the iconic red coat in Steve Spielberg’s classic film, Schindler’s List.
The horrible story shook the courtroom. But for prosecuting attorney Gavriel Bach, it was by far the most upsetting moment of the 16-week trial. Bach had just bought a red coat for his own daughter.
In the courtroom, Bach played with his papers and kept the whole court waiting for his next question while he conquered his emotions.
Historic Impact
The Eichmann trial made headlines all over the world, but in Israel the subject was the center of everyone's attention. The long-term effects of the trial were dramatic and many. The Israeli public understood at last what the survivors had undergone, and became much more empathetic. The enormity of the Holocaust was suddenly brought to the fore, through the witnesses who gave a personal voice and face to the 6 million victims.
Today, far from the days of Israelis “not wanting to acknowledge the tragedy,” there is a whole different attitude. Israeli universities have professors of Holocaust Studies; thousands of Hebrew books have been printed on the subject; government agencies grant special privileges to survivors; and every year on Yom HaShoah the media devotes an entire day to interviews with the nearly-extinct generation of survivors.
Half a century later, the Eichmann trial is not merely a historic event. It represents the turning point in Israel’s understanding of the Holocaust.
This article can also be read at: http://www.aish.com/ho/i/The_Eichmann_Trial_50_Years_Later.html
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http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/24/magazine/manager-square-in-the-muslim-city-of-bethlehem.html?pagewanted=9&src=pm
I inquire about the Christians. I try to avoid direct questions, but I ask Freij about the Christians' future prospects in a Muslim world. Are there any similarities between the endangered Copt minority in Egypt and Bethlehem's Christians? "None whatsoever," he replies. He insists that the Christian community is thriving and faces no threats. "Still, many Christians are leaving," he adds upon reflection, confirming my cabdriver's observation.
I know the story well. Christians are nervous. Whether or not Freij decides to run, it is quite possible a Muslim will become the next Mayor. This does not worry the Christians as much as the fact that Hamas and Islamic fundamentalist elements will inevitably make life difficult for them as a minority. Bethlehem University, which is partly supported by the Vatican, has been asked to build a place for prayer to accommodate Muslim students. Koranic words have been scribbled on church walls. A few years ago, a graffito in Beit Zahur, nearby, proclaimed, "First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people." To illustrate the extent of Christian fears, a conservative Israeli essayist told me that since the announcement of the redeployment of Israeli soldiers from Palestinian territories, more than 10,000 Palestinians, many of them Christian, have applied for Israeli citizenship.
The writing on the wall is clear. There are Christian mothers who breathe easily once their children are safely abroad. Young Christian couples claim they cannot find adequate housing in Bethlehem and therefore leave. There are numerous Orthodox Palestinian communities in South America. Many Christians apply to emigrate.
I want to ask Freij whether a latter-day Joseph and Mary would come to Bethlehem or whether they would flee to South America instead. I know what he would say.
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Must be some of that "Islam, with its unique religious ontology" I've been told about.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/04/28/60minutes/main20058368_page2.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody
CBS News) Logan: And I'm screaming, thinking if I scream, if they know, they're gonna stop, you know. Someone's gonna stop them. Or they're gonna stop themselves. Because this is wrong. And it was the opposite. Because the more I screamed, it turned them into a frenzy.
Someone in the crowd shouted that she was an Israeli, a Jew. Neither is true. But, to the mob, it was a match to gasoline. The savage assault turned into a murderous fury.
Logan: I have one arm on Ray. I've lost the fixer, I've lost the drivers. I've lost everybody except him. And I feel them tearing at my clothing. I think my shirt, my sweater was torn off completely. My shirt was around my neck. I felt the moment that my bra tore. They tore the metal clips of my bra. They tore those open. And I felt that because the air, I felt the air on my chest, on my skin. And I felt them tear out, they literally just tore my pants to shreds. And then I felt my underwear go. And I remember looking up, when my clothes gave way, I remember looking up and seeing them taking pictures with their cell phones, the flashes of their cell phone cameras.
Pelley: Ray reported that he found himself with the sleeve of your jacket in his hand. It had been completely ripped from the rest of the jacket.
Logan: I felt at that moment that Ray was my only hope of survival. You know, he was looking at me and I could see his face and we had a sea of people between us, obviously tearing at both of us, beating us. I didn't even know that they were beating me with flagpoles and sticks and things, because I couldn't even feel that. Because I think of the sexual assault, was all I could feel, was their hands raping me over and over and over again.
Pelley: Raping you with their hands?
Logan: Yeah.
Pelley: Nonstop. During this whole time?
Logan: From the front, from the back. And I didn't know if I could hold onto Ray. I'm holding on to him. I didn't wanna let go of him. I thought I was gonna die if I lost hold of him.
But in that moment Ray, a former special forces soldier, was torn away.
Logan: When I lost Ray, I thought that was the end. It was like all the adrenaline left my body. 'Cause I knew in his face when he lost me, he thought I was gonna die. They were tearing my body in every direction at this point, tearing my muscles. And they were trying to tear off chunks of my scalp, they had my head in different directions.
Pelley: Pulling at your hair?
Logan: Oh yeah, not trying to pull out my hair, holding big wads of it, literally trying to tear my scalp off my skull. And I thought, when I thought I am going to die here, my next thought was I can't believe I just let them kill me, that that was as much fight as I had. That I just gave in and I gave up on my children so easily, how could you do that?
Pelley: Your daughter and your son are one and two years old?
Logan: I had to fight for them. And that's when I said, "Okay, it's about staying alive now. I have to just surrender to the sexual assault. What more can they do now? They're inside you everywhere." So the only thing to fight for, left to fight for, was my life.
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https://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/the-arab-spring-israel-and-the-silence-of-the-academy/34772
The ‘Arab Spring,’ Israel and the Silence of the Academy
May 1, 2011, 11:46 am
By Jacques Berlinerblau
The Arab world is experiencing a series of convulsions resulting in the quotidian slaughter of citizens in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and elsewhere. Yet the reaction on American college campuses is comparatively muted.
Muted compared to what, you ask? Compared to the tragic shedding of one life in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Having directed Jewish Studies programs in universities for most of my career I can assure you of this: if Israel were to inflict the type of violence on Palestinians that Arab regimes (and Iranian ones) casually inflict on their own dissenting populations in the course of one day, many colleges across America would be virtually shut down.
Remember the “Jenin Massacre”? I do. The university where I taught at the time came to a near complete standstill because of the alleged Zionist atrocities committed in the West Bank.
During those days of rage I had the misfortune of wandering into a “teach in.” That gathering featured an overheated array of faculty members and “community activists” lecturing at an audience of students (and whether the students had been “urged” or forced to attend by their professors was subsequently a source of unresolved controversy).
Needless to say, the conversation on stage did not adhere to academic standards of disinterested inquiry, sober assessment, or rigorous adherence to the facts. I took up the microphone to point that out and was lustily booed and insulted by colleagues (many of whom had been nothing but friendly prior and, strangely enough, after as well). I was eventually escorted out of the auditorium by campus security for my own safety.
That was just the beginning. Appeals were made for faculty to integrate the theme of Israeli aggression into their class lectures. As such, everyone from the professor of evolutionary Biology to the specialist in Portuguese literature was asked to link his or her subject matter to the theme of Zionist aggression. Astonishingly, many of them were able to do so.
Efforts to psychologically, and even physically, immobilize the campus proceeded apace. “Zionist sympathizers,” were called out, lectures were disrupted, divestment initiatives were pursued, “die ins” were staged—these were the reflexive responses to highly complex problems in the Mideast in April of 2002.
Ditto for Israel’s wars with Hezballah and Hamas.
I am struck, however, by the relative calm on American campuses as each day brings forth fresh and repulsive evidence of civilian massacres in the Arab world. No demonstrations. No “teach-ins.” No “die-ins.” And there is less calling out of professors who support(ed) these regimes than I would ever have imagined possible.
This is not to say that faculty and students are unconcerned. It’s more as if they are speechless, unworded. They are not protesting, as much as they are trying to puzzle this catastrophe through (and let me be the first to say that this is precisely what people on college campuses should be doing).
Their speechlessness confirms a truism: the old dominant paradigm for explaining Mideast dysfunction is not working. It is hard to understand what the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has to do with Muammar el-Qaddafi strafing his own citizens or Bashar Assad unleashing his goons on protesters (though whether all of those protesters are offering more democratic alternatives is a conversation I will leave for another day).
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A Lesson for Israel Advocates from the OBL Reaction
from The Volokh Conspiracy by David Bernstein
(David Bernstein)
The nonsense spewing from the various usual suspects–the European left, left-wing NGOs, leftist international law experts [update: here’s an excellent example from an Israeli commentator]–regarding the takedown of Osama bin Laden by U.S. forces should provide an important lesson for advocates of Israel.
The hostility emanating to Israel emanating from these sources is not, primarily, a result of anti-Semitism or other Jewcentric mental maladies. Rather, it is a natural result of a cauldron of ideologies–pacifism, anti-liberalism, Third Worldism, hostility to the West, warmed-over Marxism, and so on, combined with a dash of naive human rights idealism–that dominates certain intellectual circles.
Israel receives more grief than almost anyone else from such circles for several reasons: (1) because of its precarious security situation, it uses military force more regularly than other potential targets; (2) because of its precarious political situation, it is far more vulnerable to such criticism than, say, the U.S. (which will studiously ignore criticism of the OBL operation); and (3) unlike in the U.S, Israel has a significant and influential domestic far left that encourages and magnifies such criticisms. Indeed, given universal military service among Jewish non-Haredi adults, Israel often faces criticism from its own leftist soldiers and reservists of the sort quite rare in the U.S.
That’s not to deny that some leftist critics of Israel are anti-Semites, and that an even greater number are content to play on anti-Semitic themes when they find it rhetorically useful. But let’s face it: if you can’t get the leftist Europeans, NGOs, etc. behind a surgical strike on Osama Bin Laden, they are hardly going to approve of much broader Israeli military action in Gaza or Lebanon.
Given that many Jewish supporters of Israel have left-wing tendencies themselves (though the hard leftist types have long abandoned Israel), it’s far more comfortable for them to identify anti-Semitism as the main source of anti-Israel hostility. But the first step in defeating an intellectual enemy is to identify that enemy’s underlying, motivating ideology, and, in this case, for the most part, anti-Semitism isn’t it.
http://volokh.com/2011/05/07/a-lesson-for-israel-advocates-from-the-obl-reaction/
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So what is it, then? A more bland sort of anti-western motivation?
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I'm not in total agreement, but thought the author raised interesting points, liked his description of the amalgam of failed ideologies that condense around anti-Israeli breast beating, and thought he had some insights as to how those yo-yos manage to be so blithely inconsistent without necessarily having to be anti-semetic.
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A fair point it seems to me.
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Not every critic of Israel is an anti-semite, but if you wanted to find anti-semitism, that's a good place to start looking. Failed ideologies like to project their failures on the successful, nothing new there. Always easier than painful introspection.
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http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/07/jews-as-depicted-in-the-quran.html
Dear Sheikh! As-Salam `Alaykum. What, according to the Qur’an, are the main characteristics and qualities of Jews?
Answer: [...]
As regards the question you posed, the following is the fatwa issued by Sheikh `Atiyyah Saqr, former Head of Al-Azhar Fatwa Committee, in which he states the following:
“The Qur’an has specified a considerable deal of its verses to talking about Jews, their personal qualities and characteristics. The Qur’anic description of Jews is quite impartial; praising them in some occasions where they deserve praise and condemning them in other occasions where they practice blameworthy acts. Yet, the latter occasions outnumbered the former, due to their bad qualities and the heinous acts they used to commit.
The Qur’an praises them on the verse that reads: “ And verily We gave the Children of Israel the Scripture and the Command and the Prophethood, and provided them with good things and favored them above (all) peoples.” (Al-Jathiyah:16) i.e. the peoples of their time.
Among the bad qualities they were characterized with are the following:
1. They used to fabricate things and falsely ascribe them to Allah. Allah Almighty says: “ That is because they say: We have no duty to the Gentiles. They speak a lie concerning Allah knowingly.” (Al-`Imran:75) Also: “The Jews say: Allah's hand is fettered. Their hands are fettered and they are accursed for saying so. Nay, but both His hands are spread out wide in bounty. He bestoweth as He will.” (Al-Ma`idah:64)
In another verse Almighty Allah says: “Verily Allah heard the saying of those who said, (when asked for contributions to the war): "Allah, forsooth, is poor, and we are rich! We shall record their saying with their slaying of the Prophets wrongfully and We shall say: Taste ye the punishment of burning!” (Al-`Imran:181)
2. They love to listen to lies. Concerning this Allah says: “and of the Jews: listeners for the sake of falsehood, listeners on behalf of other folk” (Al-Ma’idah: 41)
3. Disobeying Almighty Allah and never observing His commands. Allah says: “And because of their breaking their covenant, We have cursed them and made hard their hearts.” (Al-Ma’idah: 13)
4. Disputing and quarreling. This is clear in the verse that reads: “Their Prophet said unto them: Lo! Allah hath raised up Saul to be a king for you. They said: How can he have kingdom over us when we are more deserving of the kingdom than he is, since he hath not been given wealth enough?” (Al-Baqarah: 247)
5. Hiding the truth and standing for misleading. This can be understood from the verse that reads: “…distort the Scripture with their tongues, that ye may think that what they say is from the Scripture, when it is not from the Scripture.” (Al-`Imran: 78)
6. Staging rebellion against the Prophets and rejecting their guidance. This is clear in the verse: “And when ye said: O Moses! We will not believe in thee till we see Allah plainly.” (Al-Baqarah: 55)
7. Hypocrisy. In a verse, we read: “And when they fall in with those who believe, they say: We believe; but when they go apart to their devils they declare: Lo! we are with you; verily we did but mock.” (Al-Baqarah: 14) In another verse, we read: “Enjoin ye righteousness upon mankind while ye yourselves forget (to practice it)? And ye are readers of the Scripture! Have ye then no sense?” (Al-Baqarah: 44)
8. Giving preference to their own interests over the rulings of religion and the dictates of truth. Allah says: “…when there cometh unto you a messenger (from Allah) with that which ye yourselves desire not, ye grow arrogant, and some ye disbelieve and some ye slay?” (Al-Baqarah: 87)
9. Wishing evil for people and trying to mislead them. This is clear in the verse that reads: “Many of the People of the Scripture long to make you disbelievers after your belief, through envy on their own account, after the truth hath become manifest unto them.” (Al-Baqarah: 109)
10. They feel pain to see others in happiness and are gleeful when others are afflicted with a calamity. This is clear in the verse that reads: “If a lucky chance befall you, it is evil unto them, and if disaster strike you they rejoice thereat.” (Al-`Imran:120)
11. They are known of their arrogance and haughtiness. They claimed to be the sons and of Allah and His beloved ones. Allah tells us about this in the verse that reads: “The Jews and Christians say: We are sons of Allah and His loved ones.” (Al-Ma’idah: 18)
12. Utilitarianism and opportunism are among their innate traits. This is clear in the verse that reads: “And of their taking usury when they were forbidden it, and of their devouring people's wealth by false pretences.” (An-Nisa’: 161)
13. Their impoliteness and indecent way of speech is beyond description. Referring to this, the Qur’anic verse reads: “Some of those who are Jews change words from their context and say: "We hear and disobey; hear thou as one who heareth not" and "Listen to us!" distorting with their tongues and slandering religion. If they had said: "We hear and we obey; hear thou, and look at us" it had been better for them, and more upright. But Allah hath cursed them for their disbelief, so they believe not, save a few.” (An-Nisa’:46)
14. It is easy for them to slay people and kill innocents. Nothing in the world is dear to their hearts than shedding blood and murdering human beings. They never give up this trait even with the Messengers and the Prophets. Allah says: “…and slew the prophets wrongfully.” (Al-Baqarah: 61)
15. They are merciless and heartless. In this meaning, the Qur’anic verse explains: “Then, even after that, your hearts were hardened and became as rocks, or worse than rocks, for hardness.” (Al-Baqarah: 74)
16. They never keep their promises or fulfill their words. Almighty Allah says: “Is it ever so that when ye make a covenant a party of you set it aside? The truth is, most of them believe not.” (Al-Baqarah: 100)
17. They rush hurriedly to sins and compete in transgression. Allah says: “They restrained not one another from the wickedness they did. Verily evil was that they used to do!” (Al-MA’idah:79)
18. Cowardice and their love for this worldly life are their undisputable traits. To this, the Qur’an refers when saying: “Ye are more awful as a fear in their bosoms than Allah. That is because they are a folk who understand not. They will not fight against you in a body save in fortified villages or from behind walls. Their adversity among themselves is very great. Ye think of them as a whole whereas their hearts are divers.” (Al-Hashr:13-14) Allah Almighty also says: “And thou wilt find them greediest of mankind for life and (greedier) than the idolaters.” (Al-Baqarah:96)
19. Miserliness runs deep in their hearts. Describing this, the Qur’an states: “Or have they even a share in the Sovereignty? Then in that case, they would not give mankind even the speck on a date stone.” (An-Nisa’:53)
20. Distorting Divine Revelation and Allah’s Sacred Books. Allah says in this regard: “Therefore woe be unto those who write the Scripture with their hands anthem say, "This is from Allah," that they may purchase a small gain therewith. Woe unto them for that their hands have written, and woe unto them for that they earn thereby.” (Al-Baqara: 79)
After this clear explanation, we would like to note that these are but some of the most famous traits of the Jews as described in the Qur’an. They have revolted against the Divine ordinances, distorted what has been revealed to them and invented new teachings which, they claimed, were much more better than what has been recorded in the Torah. It was for these traits that they found no warm reception in all countries where they tried to reside. Rather, they would either be driven out or live in isolation. It was Almighty Allah who placed on them His Wrath and made them den of humiliation due to their transgression. Almighty Allah told us that He’d send to them people who’d pour on them rain of severe punishment that would last till the Day of Resurrection. All this gives us glad tidings of the coming victory of Muslims over them once Muslims stick to strong faith and belief in Allah and adopt the modern means of technology."
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Warning, mega post.
Cmon, GM why cant you write normal posts like everyone else ? It would be most appreciated if instead of an array of articles to prove your point, you would put together something of your own accord. It is only because of my infinite patience that I backtrace and dig up points you want to move across, from your post-al bombardment.
:-D
Andrew, do you understand the role of naskh in islamic theology and why the "verses of the sword" override the nicer verses like what you posted above? Can you tell me where in the muslim world there is the freedom of religion?
+ BOSTOM ARTICLE
Rampant simplifications.
Naskh, or abrogation is a term used mostly in exegesis for contradictory material between the Qur'ān and the Sunna. In its historiographical use, naskh usually incorporates the replacement of an earlier tradition with a chronologically newer one.
Last 200 years give or take there has been serious objection to the idea of naskh within Muslim interpretatons themselves whereas many modern scholars even reject it.
Weiss-Asad one of the most influential muslims of the 20. century, outright refutates the very notion of abrogation.
The harshest argument counter abrogation is the sole fact that there are NO secondary sources within the Hadith literature on the problem of abrogation.
You have a grave misunderstanding of not only how traditional religious texts are being read and interpreted on scholarly level but how history in general is being written today. I know for a fact Bostom is aware of the details because I remember reading some of hist stuff on tafsir a while ago, but obviously he has a similar urge to suddenly forget the things that may counterbalance his work.
The problem with bloggers like Bostom and amateur historians ala Menzies,Voronov, and others, while they do mostly work with generally good and credible data analysis and „facts“, they are (intentionaly or accidentally) clueless to the modern methods of historiography, theory and philosophy of history. In Bostoms case, the general tone of voice is strident and propostreously anti-Muslim. There isnt a problem with this per se, but it is coupled with selective works designed to pick out the worst examples of anti-Christian and anti Jewish behavior by Muslims, usually in time of war and threats to their own destruction, and this is what is greatly bothering me. To make things worse he demonizes the so-called Islamic threat to Western civilization all thedamn time and the final word is more times than not confusing and quite frankly, irritating.
Claiming, especially in humanistics, that ONE thing has all the answers dead stop, is silly and ignorant. Its not exact science, where gravitational pull is 9.82 no matter how many times you drop the stone. Like already said, there ARE scientific METHODS being used though, which most of the guys dont care to look at. These things are mega collages, and if you want an objective all around view, alot of the times you have to read what you think is propostreous and wrong. Then again, maybe at that point, its too late :)
You provide articles, I provide books. Heres one of the more important issues for the topic at hand, interpreting sources (primary, secondary, first hand, second hand...et al) in Islamic historiography :
The Sources of Islamic Law: Islamic Theories of Abrogation, John Burton
To also portray the other side of the coin, which often means diametrical opposites, read up on Montgomery Watt and Alfred Guillaume for example.
Do you understand the concept of just war, or is it bad because it has the word war in it?
War is bad, mmmmkay ? This alone could be a week long debate, again, there is no one, monographic answer to what Just war is. I wrote it as an example, just as there is no one monographic answer to what Jihad is. Like Guro crafty says, theres levels and then theres levels.
You have Ciceronian Bellum iustum concept, Augustinian, Aquinian, Skabimierz...itd. Since Grotius, Just war was replaced with international law, being codified and embraced in a set of rules. Before that though it was a very neat concept for waging war upon whoever you didnt like, or wanted something from, but didnt have a formal cassus belli. Something similar to the War on Terror.
all in all, my point was that throughout history Christians in this manner werent any different to Muslims, in fact they were far worse.
And the crusades grew out of what? Let's try hundreds of years of islamic aggression, enslavement and occupation of europe before the first crusade happened. I'd think as a european historian, you'd know this. Cause and effect and linerar history, do you think the islamic brutality experienced by the europeans might have shaped how they then fought in the crusades?
Simplifications, half truths.
While it is true the goals of the crusades were to take back lost lands, a great number of campaigns were waged against pagans, Balts, Slavs, Jews, Greek and Russian Orthodoxy, Mongols, Cathars, Hussites, Waldensians, Old Prussians, and political enemies of the various popes. There were also situationary allegiances between and within sides, like the Christian alliance with the Rum sultanate during the 5th crusade for example. Some of theexpeditions were diverted, which in the 4th crusade even resulted in the sack of Christian Constantinople and the partitioning of the Byzantine Empire between Crusaders. Thank god for plenary indulgence.
The hundreds of years of aggression, enslavement and ocupation of Europe rings so horridly plastic its almost ripe for Hollywood.
Most of what we know from ancient Greek thought, came through Muslim scholars and literates, reevaluation of Aristotles thought and Neoplatonism, spherical trigonometric functions got its basic modern form, great advancements in astronomy, navigation on sea was highly developed by the predecessor of the sextant, it was only through early Arabic translations that medieval Europe rediscovered Hellenic medicine, Galen and Hippocrates.
And a word about non Muslim subjects under Sharia Law....I beleive I wrote about this already, but what the hell, Im sure it cant hurt.
Dhimmi is one of those incredibly misinterpreted and misused words for the topic. Basically, dhimma were provided rights in return for taxes. Dhimmi were excused from Muslim duties but otherwise equal under the laws of property, contract and obligation. Dhimma had more rights and freedoms than any other social and religious minority in Europe during the whole Middle Ages under any type of rule.
Sometimes they even allowed cases of behavior that Muslims found repulsive. One example was the Zoroastrian practice of incestuous "self-marriage" where a man could marry anyone from his kin, even males. According to Qayyim, the famous Islam Sunni scholar, non-Muslims had the right to engage in such religious practices even if it offended Muslims, under the conditions that such cases not be presented to Islamic Sharia courts and that these religious minorities believed that the practice in question is permissible according to their religion. Dhimmis were even allowed to operate their own courts following their own legal systems in cases that did not involve other religious groups, capital offences, or threats to public order.
Not only is the enslavement comment ridiculous, its outright wrong.
Islamic law and custom prohibited the enslavement of free dhimmis within lands under Islamic rule in the time of the Caliphate. Pickup anything from Bernard Lewis, his insight on this particular topic is excellent. Then again, these things are not binary, nor simple.
So, an outline, as you can see, is far from the neatly sacked, half baked information you provided, to prove your point.
I offer you sources for the other side too, so you wont accuse me of only working from the other side of dogmatic belief, here are a couple of authors that not only refute the Islamic golden age, but write it off as a myth. Personally I hate the style with which the books are written, and the scientific apparatus is crumbling, but here you go anyway :
Srđa Trifković, Sword of the Prophet
Dr. Shoja-e-din Shafa, Rebirth
And then, heres two of the books from mandatory literature for my general medieval history exam.
Fernand Braudel, History of civilizations and Jacques le Goff, Medieval Civilization, 400-1500
Andrew, before you cite academics like Edward Said (Edward Sayid), you might want to examine their agendas and how the truth might not be one of them. Look up Ward Churchill as another academic who understood that as long as one is sufficiently post-modern and leftist, actually scholarship is not required.
Oh man, I kinda hoped you will have sprung that trap. Like all stories, this one too, has more sides.
Ok, lets begin. Weiner never interviewed Edward Said. Asked about this, he said that after conducting research that lasted three years, he saw no need to talk to Said about his memories or his childhood: „There was no point in calling him up and saying, 'You're a liar, you're a fraud.'" Wow, very investigating reporting like.
The journal „Nation“ and Christopher Hitchens wrote that schoolmates and teachers confirmed Said's stay at St. George's.. Then New Republic editor Charles Lane said Weiner had offered to sell him the essay on Edward Said but that discussions over publication broke off when Weiner refused to "look at the galley of Said's memoir and take it into account."
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair of Counterpunch interviewed Haig Boyadjian, who reported telling Weiner that he had been Said's classmate at St. George's, a fact Weiner omitted mentioning.
Amos Elon, biographer of the founders of Israel, wrote in The New York Review of Books that Weiner failed to disprove that Said and his family sought refuge from the war outside Palestine, as did hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians at the time. The fact remains that shortly afterward the family's property in Jerusalem was confiscated. Said and his family became political refugees as the result of the Israeli government's refusal to allow them to return to the country of their birth.
Now, Its a fact, the family left Jerusalem when he was a kid, but the war and violence were so booming, that it became impossible for them to function. Like Holocaust survivor and Israeli human rights activist Israel Shahak says on Sayids refugee status : "This is like saying the Jews who escaped from Germany before the war were not kicked out. The main argument is that they were prevented from returning to their land. This is what it is about.“
In reply, Weiner accused Elon of dishonesty, and Hitchens of making himself into „ a poster boy for Palestine." Again, brilliant counter argumenting. Go get'em tiger. Said observed that several publishers of a conservative magazine, had attacked him in three long articles and that Weiner's was the third in the series. Said commented that the article about his early life was "undercut by dozens of mistakes of fact."
Even if all that were true or at least parts of it, I couldnt care less, to be honest. I dont care. Sayid could be a transsexual gay church pastor on crack for all I know. If his work has ground and value, Ill check it out. How can you jump to conclusions that if parts of his Bio are untrue, his whole persona is a compulsive liar ? His concept of Orientalism is stil a very burning one, with alot of debatable pro and contra points. Apart from Maria Todorova, Bernard Lewis and a few others, he is for me one of the better writers concerning the whole Orient-Occident polemic.
What kind of rhetoric is this GM ? So what, lets say that because Chomsky was part of several political (and otherwise) controversies, he surely is not a man of worth and should be discouraged to read ? And somehow his intent is not Truth but something else ? But still the fact remains modern linguistics could not stand if not for him, first coherent critiques of Skinners Behaviorism that shook ground of modern psychology, far reaching implications on cognitive sciences, and one of the first noted critiques of post-modern and post-structuralist thoughts.
Man if you want to limit yourself and your horizons like this, go ahead.
Heres the sources :
Amritjit Singh, Interviews with Edward W. Said (Conversations With Public Intellectuals Series). Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2004: pp. 19 & 219.
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Commentary: 'Scholar' Deliberately Falsified Record in Attack on Said, Counterpunch September 1, 1999, accessed February 10, 2006
Christopher Hitchens, The "Commentary" School of Falsification, The Nation, 2 September 1999. Accessed 6 February 2010.
aand for the other side, Weiners article that GM posted, with Craig Offman, Said critic blasts back at Hitchens, Salon.com, 10 September 1999. Accessed 5 February 2010.
Make your own judgement to who is the scapegoat here.
And who were the first non-africans to take part in the african slave trade? Long before the europeans ever were involved.
I dont see how this partakes to the quoted number from me. Islam views on slavery are VERY concise, and alot is said on the topic. The Qur'an, Muhammad, and majority of Islamic theologians, all stated that humankind has a single origin and rejected the idea of certain ethnic groups being superior to others. The legendary, Arnold Toynbee, british historian, said it nicely : "The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue."
Not to go into too much detail here, fact is alot of the views got distorted ESPECIALLY after huge influence of the great Western pillar Aristotle (whom many muslim scholars such as Avicenna and Averroes are credited that we even know of his existence and works) and his view that certain ethnic groups are slaves by nature, and also the influence of the highly ethnically discoherent Jewish Geonim academies.
Know this though, that a religious imperative was never the driver of the slavery impetus. Arab slave trade even started way before Islam ever began spreading. The status of „slave“ was completely different to what we may imagine under the meaning of the word now. They had to be dealt with in accordance of the Islamic law, especially during the Umayyad and Abbasid eras, slaves were allowed to earn their living if they opted for that, otherwise it was the masters duty to provide for that. They also couldnt be forced to earn money for their masters unless with an agreement between them both. If the slave agreed and he would like the money he earned to be counted toward his emancipation then this was written in the form of a contract. This contract is know as a „mukataba“. The slaves usually bought themselves to freedom. Although the owner did not have to accept the request for freedom, it was considered praiseworthy to do so.
Now Im not saying they wore jewels or held their POW and others with silk gloves. Im just saying, these things are not black, not white, nor grey, satin or infrared. They are f***g chaotic and all over the place, without one true, unwavering answer. You need to GRAVELY widen your horizon of knowledge if you want to make deeper connections here. You can pin point circumstantial evidence everywhere you want in the historic timeline, but sadly, that doesnt count for much.
@Guro Crafty,
I find your response here quite remarkable. It is PRECISELY as simple as whether Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself or not!!! Annale slice and layer all you want to concerning the etymology of the terms Palistine/Palestinian, Iran/Aryan, Jihad/Kampf but the simple facts are :........
Well to a point of course it is as simple. But then again, the answers are simplifications too.
Most of the facts are bound to the Arabian hatred towards Jews. Ok, when you are spending all this time about the resoltuion, spend at least a day thinking about the problem. The Arabian Exodus was a grave and tragic event, no doubt here, but treating the symptom will usually not get you very far. It will only sharpen the sword and deepen the hate gap.
I stand by my initial post here, the underlying problem is that of identity. Identity, whether its natural, or historical law, always searches for its roots, because of the ideological apparatus. Roots lead to ethnogenesis and ethnogenesis leads to history. Thats why they say history is an apparatus of the state, because it „formally“ places a nation and its tradition on the map. It is its door to existence. Sad thing is, like I already said, that both sides have grown so accustomed so fighting, it has become symptomatic, almost to a point, where sides have forgotten what the origin of the conflict is.
And this is where I chime my 2 personal cents. At this point, off the record, I blame the politicial noise gets intentionally very loud, because certain subjects do not want to settle the conflict, as turbulent West Bank is a very nice opportunity maker excuse. A Just War-like one. Also there is the fear of cascading, if any side gives in or settles for something, there will be swarms of similar uprisings from similar surrounding cases the next day all around the Globe.
As GM has already clarified, his comments were directed to the entirety of Marxism, the over twenty million killed by Stalin et al, the 50-70 million killed by Mao, etc.
And I write again, that the „entirety of Marxism“ is a dangerous misconstruct. Contrary to what you guys may think, or have heard overseas, Marxism is not a holistic, homogenous, ideologically coherent whole, where the State takes your candy. Far from it. In approx. 100 years of its scholary existence it has grown so divergently that by now you can hardly follow it. It has branches, sub branches, connections, ifluences, contradictions, structuralist, post structuralist incursions, addendums of critical theory...you name it. To just shrug it off and throw it all away into one barrel is somehow shortsited, not to mention incredibly ignorant. You can blame Marx for all you want that has the prefix „comm-“, but in effect you simply cannot equate the horrific doings of afore mentioned men, with incredibly subtle and deep reaching marxist ontology and philosophy of history.
If this „entirety“ holds true, then may we not say that St. Augustine is guilty for all the horrors done in the name of the Christ since he is the theological father of the Christian religion, and most other theologians and paters and mystics that evolved the dogma were deriving from him anyway ? Of course we cant, even though his influence is far more direct and more straightforward than Marx' ever was to his successors.
Unless, the Christian notion of original sin is so embedded in your symbolic order. In that case I can accept this transferral of guilt to and from the „source“, but you must warn me of this earlier, because it inevitably enforces a very different kind of debate.
PS: I have looked in vain for your statement of your guiding philosophy "Annales Marxism" was it? I would like to read up on this a bit. This is what I have found so far-- is this it?
I wrote Annales Marxism as a type of intern joke I like to say. Because the Annales school was the school that has generally replaced the marxist interpretation of history in most of Europe, and they consider themselves a purificated, perfected and most progressive historiographic school to date. Which arguably, they are, but I like to contradict, especially the french :D :D
If you would like to read up on some of that I strongly suggest : Fernand Braudel, A history of civilizations and Lucien Febvre, The Rhine: Problems of History and Economics. They should be rather easy to find.
Must be some of that "Islam, with its unique religious ontology" I've been told about.
The way you are limiting yourself in thought, I too, could not have seen it any other way. A bit less Jihad Watch, a bit more library.
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Cmon, GM why cant you write normal posts like everyone else ? It would be most appreciated if instead of an array of articles to prove your point, you would put together something of your own accord. It is only because of my infinite patience that I backtrace and dig up points you want to move across, from your post-al bombardment.
I think it's important to see source documentation. We can then peel that apart, if need be.
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"Naskh, or abrogation is a term used mostly in exegesis for contradictory material between the Qur'ān and the Sunna. In its historiographical use, naskh usually incorporates the replacement of an earlier tradition with a chronologically newer one."
There are also conflicts within the quaran, so naskh was used to address those conflicts. A cynic such as myself would say that liars have a hard time keeping lies straight, and that sociopathic "prophets" get divine guidance that suits their needs from moment to moment.
http://www.meforum.org/1754/peace-or-jihad-abrogation-in-islam#_ftn51
Abrogation in the Qur'an
The Qur'an is unique among sacred scriptures in accepting a doctrine of abrogation in which later pronouncements of the Prophet declare null and void his earlier pronouncements.[9] Four verses in the Qu'ran acknowledge or justify abrogation:
•When we cancel a message, or throw it into oblivion, we replace it with one better or one similar. Do you not know that God has power over all things?[10]
•When we replace a message with another, and God knows best what he reveals, they say: You have made it up. Yet, most of them do not know.[11]
•God abrogates or confirms whatsoever he will, for he has with him the Book of the Books.[12]
•If we pleased, we could take away what we have revealed to you. Then you will not find anyone to plead for it with us.[13]
SNIP-------
Abrogation and Jihad
How does the theological debate over abrogation impact contemporary policy formulation? While not all terrorism is rooted in Islam, the religion is an enabler for many. It is wrong to assume that more extreme interpretations of religion are illegitimate. Statements that there is no compulsion in religion and that jihad is primarily about internal struggle and not about holy war may receive applause in university lecture halls and diplomatic board rooms, but they misunderstand the importance of abrogation in Islamic theology. It is important to acknowledge that what university scholars believe, and what most Muslims—or more extreme Muslims—believe are two different things. For many Islamists and radical Muslims, abrogation is real and what the West calls terror is, indeed, just.
During the lifetime of Muhammad, the Islamic community passed through three stages. In the beginning from 610 until 622, God commanded restraint. As the Muslims relocated to Medina (623-26), God permitted Muslims only to fight in a defensive war. However, in the last six years of Muhammad's life (626-32), God permitted Muslims to fight an aggressive war first against polytheists,[52] and later against monotheists like the Jews of Khaybar.[53] Once Muhammad was given permission to kill in the name of God, he instigated battle
Rather than go post-al, I'll let you address this before moving on. :wink:
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greetings.
Thank you for the kind pause. I take it as the calm before the deep plunge. :lol:
Since I will not be online again for a while, do continue to write as you see fit after reading this.
A cynic such as myself would say that liars have a hard time keeping lies straight, and that sociopathic "prophets" get divine guidance that suits their needs from moment to moment.
I can agree with this. But this indirect reading of sacred texts is really, way more modern, than it is traditional. What you wrote above is true for basically all sacred texts. And more. Keeping lies straight, was a big thing at the time when most of these were written, beacuse transcedence wasnt the only thing that they were used for. Crowd control back then was way more literal, way more direct, to what it is today.
One of the biggest things in modern religious studies, which I think will greatly change the way we look on ancient ontology, is, and I am paraphrasing of course, not whether what for example Muhammad said is true or not, but rather what did it mean at the time. Of course you cant degrade all of the context to this zero level historicism, but at least you acheive the shift in hermeneutics, through which it is alot easier to understand where and why alot of the texts get so extreme.
I like this post. Bukay is a cool dude. Although I do not beleive in the Huntington bullshit he is trying to pull off (which is maybe a topic for some other time), his stance on Islam fundamentalism is extreme, but systematical and critical, which I like a lot.
Of course the compulsion quote above is not a be all counter balance to your radical opinions. And of course it is not ONLY radical neither. Just like Jihad is not internal struggle alone it is NOT ONLY holy war. Bukay says this in your quote anyway, I just wanted to bring it up more clearly. I also totally agree with his stance about actual extremism today, and the academia pun is also funny and true to an extent. Extremism IS an actual threat of course. But going overboard again and saying everything Muslim/Islam ever was, is and will be only evil and deserves our rightful hammer of Good is again, completely off. The problem of ALL sacred texts, Islam is no specialty here, its just more actual because it is all around media today, is that radical interpretation tend to get the best of it.
But other part of the problem lies also in the fact, that the great leap that the West did, where it shook of the shackles that still burden the East, are the social revolutions. So a comparison of a Muslim state against a Western state is unfair, to an extent. Because you arent comparing the same stuff. The very worst things that happen there, arent happening in our places anymore, but not because of religion being benign, or different, but because of the social struggle that brought us out of that dogmatic dialetic, and forcing religion into a different strata of society. See, Marx again :D
Know that there are countless authors who are writing on the topic and there is no ONE author that knows the true answer. They all back their claims, their versions, their interpretations of facts. And one reads authors that have similarily aligned versions. Which is perfectly ok. But when such reading becomes automatic, you are becoming identically dogmatic like the very thing that you are trying to disprove. And here comes the point of most of my incursions on this forum, that to get a better perception on things, instead of reading authors that have similar claims like you, take a step back, read more than one author, especially from different sides of the polemic and then, create your own opinion.
Keep in mind again, that even though I may come across as a sympathiser of Islam, or Arabs or anything, in reality I am harshly against religion, as an organised institution. As a man of faith I fall somewhere in the famed Einsteinism „deeply religious non beleiver“. What I do have a problem with however is when things get taken out of context, and are being put across as overly simple and are used for means to some other end.
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Of course the compulsion quote above is not a be all counter balance to your radical opinions. And of course it is not ONLY radical neither. Just like Jihad is not internal struggle alone it is NOT ONLY holy war. Bukay says this in your quote anyway, I just wanted to bring it up more clearly. I also totally agree with his stance about actual extremism today, and the academia pun is also funny and true to an extent. Extremism IS an actual threat of course. But going overboard again and saying everything Muslim/Islam ever was, is and will be only evil and deserves our rightful hammer of Good is again, completely off. The problem of ALL sacred texts, Islam is no specialty here, its just more actual because it is all around media today, is that radical interpretation tend to get the best of it.
You and I might decide that "jihad" really means "rainbows and fuzzy kittens" rather than anything unpleasant. If Habib at my local Falaful Hut thinks "jihad" means he should be an extra-moral in a way that agrees with the modern, western view of moral, that's fine as well. The problem arises when the view of what is morally correct for observant muslims means "smite the infidels" and all the unpleasant verses that are referred to in the quaran and other islamic texts. You'll find that I have no beef with many different religions that I personally do not agree with on a theological level. As an example, I don't complain about hindus because I don't have any trying to kill me and wipe my civilization from the map, in fact, I see India as an important ally.
Those from within the muslim world who wish to reform it to a religion that can peacefully co-exist with the kufar have a bad habit of ending up dead, or in some cases, living like mob-informants under police protection. Who are they hiding from? When a muslim like Zuhdi Jasser advocates a modernist interpretation of islam, vocal muslims condemn him as not an islamic scholar and other less than pleasant terms. Where are the islamic scholars that teach a modernist islam? Where are the countries where sharia is practiced that do not punish apostates and cite "There is no complusion in religion" as justification for allowing religious freedom?
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all in all, my point was that throughout history Christians in this manner werent any different to Muslims, in fact they were far worse.
The idea that the pre-literate, brutal, pagan european cultures would suddenly become beacons of niceness because they started wearing crosses instead of pre-christian amulets is unrealistic. It took a lot of time, technological advancements (Like the Gutenberg bible) and the spread of literacy and thus the reformation to alter some unpleasant things in the west. Core values from christianity, like the concept of a secular government rather than theocracy took root in western thought. The movement to end slavery in the west grew out of activists motivated by their christian beliefs. The end of segrigation in the US was lead by christians as well. Still lots of slavery in the muslim world and I am unaware of any islamic William Wilberforces or Martin Luther King Jr.s
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Ok, lets begin. Weiner never interviewed Edward Said. Asked about this, he said that after conducting research that lasted three years, he saw no need to talk to Said about his memories or his childhood: „There was no point in calling him up and saying, 'You're a liar, you're a fraud.'" Wow, very investigating reporting like.
http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/glosses/weinerAttackOnSaid.html
(*) To be completely fair, hints of the truth have also appeared in fugitive places over the years, including in a 1987 article by Said in of all venues, House & Garden. My attempts to verify the record with Said himself were unsuccessful; a request for an interview, made through his assistant at Columbia, Zaineb Istrabadi, met with no response.
Even if all that were true or at least parts of it, I couldnt care less, to be honest. I dont care.
There can be no doubt that a great deal of the moral authority accruing to Edward Said derives as much from his personal as from his intellectual credentials.(*) As a living embodiment of the Palestinian cause, he has made much in print and on film of his birth, childhood, and schooling in Palestine, telling a story of idyllic beginnings and violent disruption--of a paradise lost--that resonates with personal pain while also serving as a powerfully compelling metaphor for the larger Palestinian condition. As Salman Rushdie put it in lauding Said's After the Last Sky, in writing about his "internal struggle: the anguish of living with displacement, with exile," Said "enables us to feel the pain of his people."
Both his personal pain and the pain he feels for his people are on especially vivid display in a 1998 BBC documentary that Said both wrote and narrated, In Search of Palestine. The film, aired around the world to mark the 50th anniversary of the Palestinian nakbah ("disaster") of 1948, and recently shown in New York on the local PBS affiliate, features extensive footage of Said standing outside his birthplace at what is now 10 Brenner Street in Jewish western Jerusalem.
But just the mention of that birthplace confronts us with a problem. Although Said has defined his own intellectual vocation as one of "tell[ing] the truth against extremely difficult odds"--he has sweepingly declared that the duty of the intellectual is "to speak the truth, as plainly, directly, and as honestly as possible"--it turns out that, in retailing the facts of his own personal biography over the years, he has spoken anything but the plain, direct, or honest truth. Instead, he has served up, and consciously encouraged others to serve up, a wildly distorted version of the truth, made up in equal parts of outright deception and of artful obfuscations carefully tailored to strengthen his wider ideological agenda--and in particular to promote the claims of Palestinian refugees against Israel.
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Farag Foda (Egyptian Arabic: فرج فوده, IPA: [ˈfɑɾˤɑɡ ˈfoːdæ]), also Faraj Fawda, (1946 - June 8 1992) was an important Egyptian thinker, human rights activist, writer, and columnist.
Based in Cairo, he was noted for his critical articles and sharp satires about Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt. In many newspaper articles, he demonstrated weak points in Islamic ideology. Among other things he exposed Egypt's most popular preacher, Abd al-Hamid Kishk, for "telling his audience that Muslims who entered paradise would enjoy eternal erections and the company of young boys draped in earrings and necklaces," and promising them "an eternity of blissful pederasty."[1]
He was shot to death in his office on 8 June 1992 by two Islamic fundamentalists from the Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya group. His son and other bystanders were seriously wounded in the attack.
Before his death, Farag Foda was declared an apostate and foe of Islam[2]. An Al-Azhar scholar, Mohammad Al-Ghazali, a witness before the court, declared it was not wrong to kill a foe of Islam. Al-Ghazali said: "The killing of Farag Foda was in fact the implementation of the punishment against an apostate which the imam (the state) has failed to implement (undertake)."
One of Foda's killers, Abd al-Shafi Ahmad Ramadhan, was sentenced to death on 30 December 1993 and executed on 26 February 1994]. The other was executed for another murder.
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http://www.indianexpress.com/news/cleric-who-termed-stonepelting-protests-unislamic-killed-in-srinagar-blast/773497/
Militants on Friday killed a prominent religious leader Moulvi Showkat Ahmad Shah,a liberal voice who had denounced stone-pelting and was engaged with Centre's interlocutors, by triggering an IED blast near a mosque here, drawing condemnation from separatists and political leaders.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12111831
Salman Taseer was repeatedly shot at close range with a sub-machine gun
The influential governor of Pakistan's Punjab province, Salman Taseer, has died after being shot by one of his bodyguards in the capital, Islamabad.
Mr Taseer, a senior member of the Pakistan People's Party, was shot when getting into his car at a market.
Interior Minister Rehman Malik said the guard had told police that he killed Mr Taseer because of the governor's opposition to Pakistan's blasphemy law.
Many were angered by his defence of a Christian woman sentenced to death.
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http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h0Xm56iYPH9m9T_8pfkDvKQevqpQ?docId=CNG.109ca1c1340ce42e33e6f0390a02cf2c.e1
Bomb wounds four at Indonesian Islam group HQ
(AFP) – Mar 15, 2011
JAKARTA — A bomb exploded at the headquarters of a moderate Islamic group in the Indonesian capital Jakarta on Tuesday, wounding four people including a police officer whose hand was blown off.
The device was in a package sent to the office of the Liberal Islam Network (JIL), a grouping of religious intellectuals, in East Jakarta, national police spokesman Boy Rafli Amar told reporters.
"We suspected that it was a bomb. Our officers were trying to tame it when it went off," he said, adding that the police are investigating the motive.
A witness told local television station MetroTV that the package was addressed to the group's former director and liberal Muslim scholar Ulil Abshar Abdalla.
"Our office received a suspicious package containing cables with a strong smell. We called the police," Fia Anwar said.
"As the police were checking the package, it exploded. Four people were injured, including a policeman and our security guards," she added.
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It was the Jews from the bagel shop no doubt , , ,
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/scientist-imam-threatened-over-darwinist-views-2232952.html
Scientist Imam threatened over Darwinist views
By Tom Peck and Jerome Taylor
Saturday, 5 March 2011
A prominent British imam has been forced to retract his claims that Islam is compatible with Darwin's theory of evolution after receiving death threats from fundamentalists.
Dr Usama Hasan, a physics lecturer at Middlesex University and a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, was intending yesterday to return to Masjid al-Tawhid, a mosque in Leyton, East London, for the first time since he delivered a lecture there entitled "Islam and the theory of evolution".
But according to his sister, police advised him not to attend after becoming concerned for his safety. Instead his father, Suhaib, head of the mosque's committee of trustees, posted a notice on his behalf expressing regret over his comments. "I seek Allah's forgiveness for my mistakes and apologise for any offence caused," the statement read.
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Andrew,
Do you still wish to maintain this position? "Even if all that were true or at least parts of it, I couldnt care less, to be honest. I dont care." As an academic, isn't your devotion supposed to be finding the truth and sorting out falsehoods in your scholarly analysis? Or is the concept of truth just another form of western imperialism?
I'll say this about Said, at least his individually constructed "palestinian" identity is as bogus as the overall "palestinian" identity, so there is a form of authenticity in that.
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Very good conversation going on this thread and I hope to contribute to it in the next few days. In the meantime here is this interesting article:
German grandchildren of Nazis delve into past
By KIRSTEN GRIESHABER, Associated Press
Saturday, May 14, 2011
(05-14) 12:23 PDT BERLIN, Germany (AP) --
Rainer Hoess was 12 years old when he found out his grandfather was one of the worst mass murderers in history.
The gardener at his boarding school, an Auschwitz survivor, beat him black and blue after hearing he was the grandson of Rudolf Hoess, commandant of the death camp synonymous with the Holocaust.
"He beat me, because he projected on me all the horror he went through," Rainer Hoess said, with a shrug and a helpless smile. "Once a Hoess, always a Hoess. Whether you're the grandfather or the grandson — guilty is guilty."
Germans have for decades confronted the Nazi era head-on, paying billions in compensation, meticulously teaching Third Reich history in school, and building memorials to victims. The conviction Thursday in Munich of retired Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk on charges he was a guard at the Sobibor Nazi death camp drives home how the Holocaust is still very much at the forefront of the German psyche.
But most Germans have skirted their own possible family involvement in Nazi atrocities. Now, more than 65 years after the end of Hitler's regime, an increasing number of Germans are trying to pierce the family secrets.
Some, like Hoess, have launched an obsessive solitary search. Others seek help from seminars and workshops that have sprung up across Germany to provide research guidance and psychological support.
"From the outside, the third generation has had it all — prosperity, access to education, peace and stability," said Sabine Bode, who has written books on how the Holocaust weighs on German families today. "Yet they grew up with a lot of unspoken secrets, felt the silent burdens in their families that were often paired with a lack of emotional warmth and vague anxieties."
Like others, Hoess had to overcome fierce resistance within his own family, who preferred that he "not poke around in the past." Undeterred, he spent lonely hours at archives and on the Internet researching his grandfather.
Rudolf Hoess was in charge of Auschwitz from May 1940 to November 1943. He came back to Auschwitz for a short stint in 1944, to oversee the murder of some 400,000 Hungarian Jews in the camp's gas chambers within less than two months.
The commandant lived in a luxurious mansion at Auschwitz with his wife and five children — among them Hans-Rudolf, the father of Rainer. Only 150 meters (yards) away the crematories' chimneys were blowing out the ashes of the dead day and night.
After the war, Hoess went into hiding on a farm in northern Germany; he was eventually captured and hanged in 1947, in front of his former home on the grounds of Auschwitz.
"When I investigate and read about my grandfather's crimes, it tears me apart every single time," Hoess said during a recent interview at his home in a little Black Forest village.
As a young man, he said, he tried twice to kill himself. He has suffered three heart attacks in recent years as well as asthma, which he says gets worse when he digs into his family's Nazi past.
Today, Hoess says, he no longer feels guilty, but the burden of the past weighs on him at all times.
"My grandfather was a mass murderer — something that I can only be ashamed and sad about," said the 45-year-old chef and father of two boys and two girls. "However, I do not want to close my eyes and pretend nothing ever happened, like the rest of my family still does ... I want to stop the curse that's been haunting my family ever since, for the sake of myself and that of my own children."
Hoess is no longer in contact with his father, brother, aunts and cousins, who all call him a traitor. Strangers often look at him with distrust when he tells them about his grandfather — "as if I could have inherited his evil."
Despite such reactions, descendants of Nazis — from high-ranking officials to lowly foot soldiers — are increasingly trying to find out what their families did between 1933 to 1945.
"The Nazis — the first generation — were too ashamed to talk about the crimes they committed and covered everything up. The second generation often had trouble personally confronting their Nazi parents. So now it is up to the grandchildren to lift the curses off their families," said Bode.
It was only during her university years — reading books about the Holocaust — that Ursula Boger found out her grandfather was the most dreaded torturer at Auschwitz.
"I felt numb for days after I read about what he did," recalled Boger, a shy, soft-spoken woman who lives near Freiburg in southwestern Germany. "For many years I was ashamed to tell anybody about him, but then I realized that my own silence was eating me up from inside."
Her grandfather, Wilhelm Boger, invented the so-called Boger swing at Auschwitz — an iron bar that hung on chains from the ceiling. Boger would force naked inmates to bend over the bar and beat their genitals until they fainted or died.
Boger, 41, said it took her several years of therapy and group seminars to begin to come to terms with the fact her grandfather was a monster.
"I felt guilty, even though I hadn't committed a crime myself, felt like I had to do only good things at all times to make up for his evil," she said.
Like Hoess, Boger never personally met her grandfather, who died in prison in 1977. After her father died five years ago, she found old letters from her grandfather begging to see his grandchildren in prison — something that never happened.
"It all just doesn't go together," Boger said. "He is the man who killed a little boy with an apple who came in on a transport to Auschwitz, by smashing his head against a wall until he was dead, and then picked up and ate that apple.
"At the same time, he put a picture of myself as a little girl over his bed in prison. How am I supposed to come to terms with this?"
Tanja Hetzer, a therapist in Berlin, helps clients dealing with issues related to their family's Nazi past. While there are no studies or statistics, she said, many cases indicate that descendants of families who have never dealt with their Nazi family history suffer more from depression, burnout and addiction, in particular alcoholism.
In one prominent case, Bettina Goering, the grandniece of Hermann Goering, one of the country's leading Nazis and the head of the Luftwaffe air force, said in an Israeli TV documentary that she decided to be sterilized at age 30 "because I was afraid to bear another such monster."
Some grandchildren of Nazis find a measure of catharsis in confronting the past.
Alexandra Senfft is the granddaughter of Hanns Elard Ludin, Hitler's Slovakia envoy who was involved in the deportation of almost 70,000 Jews. After Ludin was hanged in 1947, his widow raised the children in the belief their father was "a good Nazi."
In her book, "The Pain of Silence," Senfft describes how a web of lies burdened her family over decades, especially her mother, who was 14 years old when her beloved father was hanged.
"It was unbearable at times to work on this book, it brought up fears and pain, but at the same time I got a lot out of writing it all down," Senfft, a lively 49-year-old, explained during an interview at a Berlin coffee shop.
"If I had continued to remain oblivious and silent about my grandfather's crimes, I would have become complicit myself, perhaps without even being aware of it."
Senfft said she also wrote the book so her children could be free of guilt and shame, and that confronting family pasts is essential for the health of German society as a whole so that history does not repeat itself.
These days Rainer Hoess lectures schoolchildren about the Nazi era and anti-Semitism. A few months ago, he visited Auschwitz for the first time and met a group of Israeli students.
That day was "probably the most difficult and intense day in my life," Hoess said, but it was also liberating because he realized that the third generation of Jews after the Holocaust did not hold him responsible. One Israeli girl even gave him a little shell with a blue Star of David painted on it, which he now wears around his neck on a black leather necklace at all times.
Hoess was embroiled in controversy in 2009 when Israeli media reported he tried to sell some of his grandfather's possessions to Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial. But email correspondence seen by the AP backs up Hoess' assertion that he would have been just as willing to donate the items. Hoess eventually donated everything he owned from his grandfather — including a trunk, letters and a cigar cutter — to the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich.
Hoess acknowledges that his grandfather will probably never stop haunting him. After his visit to Auschwitz, he met Jozef Paczynski, a Polish camp survivor and the former barber of Commandant Hoess.
"Somehow, subconsciously, I was hoping that maybe he would tell me one positive story about my grandfather, something that shows that he wasn't all evil after all, that there was some goodness in him," Hoess confided.
Paczynski asked Hoess to get up and walk across the room — then told him: "You look exactly like your grandfather."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/05/14/international/i014751D83.DTL
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http://www.memri.org/clip_transcript/en/2934.htm
May 11, 2011 Clip No. 2934
Hamas MP and Cleric Yunis Al-Astal: The Jews Were Brought to Palestine for the "Great Massacre" through which Allah Will "Relieve Humanity of Their Evil"
Following are excerpts from an interview with Hamas MP and cleric Yunis Al-Astal, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on May 11, 2011:
Yunis Al-Astal: The [Jews] are brought in droves to Palestine so that the Palestinians – and the Islamic nation behind them – will have the honor of annihilating the evil of this gang.
[…]
All the predators, all the birds of prey, all the dangerous reptiles and insects, and all the lethal bacteria are far less dangerous than the Jews.
[…]
In just a few years, all the Zionists and the settlers will realize that their arrival in Palestine was for the purpose of the great massacre, by means of which Allah wants to relieve humanity of their evil.
[…]
When Palestine is liberated and its people return to it, and the entire region, with the grace of Allah, will have turned into the United States of Islam, the land of Palestine will become the capital of the Islamic Caliphate, and all these countries will turn into states within the Caliphate. When this happens, any Palestinian will be able to live anywhere, because the land of Islam is the property of all Muslims.
Until this happens, we must reject all the resettlement plans, naturalization, or even reparations prior to the return of the refugees.
[…]
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Good thing we Jews have them "surrounded", right AB? :evil: :lol: :roll:
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Hey, if Israel just returns to the 1967 borders, all this Jew-hatred will just evaporate.
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This is WND so read with care and search for confirmation:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=314309
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- Pajamas Media - http://pajamasmedia.com -
Europeans Are Major Force Behind Second Gaza Flotilla
Posted By Soeren Kern On July 2, 2011 @ 4:36 pm In England,Europe,France,Germany,Greece,Spain,World News | 22 Comments
The so-called Freedom Flotilla 2, a convoy of about ten ships hoping to break an Israeli naval blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, has been off to an inauspicious start. With two vessels disabled due to alleged “sabotage” and other boats held up in a port in Athens by the Greek government, the flotilla will not set sail for at least another few days and may be called off altogether.
Whatever its fate, the flotilla has considerable public support in Europe, where opposition to Israel often crosses the line into anti-Semitism [1]. Although a handful of Americans, Canadians, and Middle Easterners (as well as a few Aussies and Kiwis) are among the 500 pro-Palestinian activists hoping to sail with the flotilla, the majority of its organizers, supporters and actual participants are from Europe, which has become “ground zero” in the global campaign of boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel.
The Gaza flotilla is, in fact, an integral part of a growing European movement to delegitimize the state of Israel [2]. It is rooted in the program of political warfare to achieve the “complete international isolation of Israel [3]” that was launched at the UN conference against racism in Durban, South Africa in 2001.
European charities linked to left-wing and pro-Palestinian causes have raised an estimated €10 million ($14.5 million) to fund the flotilla. Many European politicians and members of the European Parliament as well as media outlets have expressed strong support for it in public. The flotilla has been organized from Britain and the main operational hub is in Greece.
Eight out of the ten vessels comprising the flotilla are European. They include the “Dignity” and the “Louise Michel” from France, the “Saoirse” (Gaelic for freedom) from Ireland, the “Stefano Chiarini” from Italy, the “Guernica” from Spain, the “Juliano” from Sweden, and two Greek cargo ships carrying 3,000 tons of supplies. The two other ships are the “Tahrir” from Canada and “The Audacity of Hope” from the United States.
The European Freedom Flotilla [4] website has pooled information on flotilla campaigns in the various European countries. Some of these include: Belgium to Gaza [5], Free Gaza Denmark [6], Ship to Gaza Greece [7], Freedom Flotilla Italia [8], Ship to Gaza Netherlands [9], Ship to Gaza Norway [10], Free Gaza Scotland [11], Ship to Gaza Sweden [12], and so on.
Other pan-European groups directly or indirectly involved in the flotilla include the Brussels-based European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine [13], the London-based Palestinian Return Center [14], and the Oslo-based European Network to Support Rights of Palestinian Prisoners [15].
Britain has hosted much of the organizing apparatus of the flotilla, which is being coordinated out of London by Mohammad Sawalha [16], a senior Muslim Brotherhood operative closely linked to Hamas and who was granted asylum by Britain in 1990.
Sawalha — together with Zaher Birawi, another Hamas activist living in Britain — is a director of Britain2Gaza [17], a coalition of left-wing and Islamist organizations participating in the flotilla that includes groups like: the British Muslim Initiative, the Friends of Al-Aqsa [18], the Palestinian Forum in Britain [19], the Palestine Solidarity Campaign [20], and the Stop the War Coalition [21]. Sawalha is also the vice chairman of the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza [22], a British-based group that coordinates the Miles of Smiles land convoys to Gaza.
Britain is also home to the Boycott Israeli Goods Campaign [23], the Palestine Solidarity Campaign [24] (which is working to “build a mass anti-Apartheid movement for Palestine”), Interpal [25], Freedom for Palestine [26], A Just Peace for Palestine [27], Stop Arming Israel [28], Oxford-Ramallah Friendship Association [29], Reading-Palestine Solidarity Campaign [30], Viva Palestina [31], Medical Aid for Palestinians [32], the Scottish-Palestine Solidarity Campaign [33], and many more.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague says the flotilla is unwise and has advised Britons not to participate in it. But he himself has contributed to the BDS campaign against Israel by his failure to honor a long-standing promise to amend British universal jurisdiction laws [34] in a way that would make it safe for Israeli leaders to visit Britain without the risk of detention on frivolous allegations of war crimes.
In France, a fundraising campaign called “A French Ship to Gaza [35]” collected more than €600,000 ($865,000) for the Gaza flotilla. The campaign was launched in October 2010 under the combined leadership of French NGOs for Palestine [36] and a “Red-Green Alliance” of leftists and Islamists called the “National Collective for a Just and Lasting Peace between Israelis and Palestinians.”
Nationwide, more than 70 French organizations [37] including political parties and trade unions have been involved in mobilizing activists and raising funds for the flotilla. Some 40 French nationals, including one French MEP, are on board the two French vessels that are participating in the convoy. More than 300 French politicians have signed a petition in support of the campaign.
Germany is sending more than 20 activists to participate in the flotilla, which is being coordinated by the German Initiative to Break the Gaza Blockade [38], a coalition of more than a dozen pro-Palestinian organizations, including: the Palestinian Community in Germany [39], the Palestinian-German Federation for the Right of Return, the German-Palestinian Union, the German Youth for Palestine [40], the Committee for a Democratic Palestine, and the Palestinian Society for Human Rights [41], which in May 2011 held the 9th Annual Conference of Palestinians in Europe [42] titled “The Return Generation Knows its Way.”
In Ireland, the flotilla is being coordinated by Irish Ship to Gaza [43] under the direction of Caoimhe Butterly, a pro-Palestinian activist who in April 2002 spent 16 days as a “human shield” in Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. Other pro-Palestinian activist groups in Ireland include: the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign [44], the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Alliance [45], and the Derry Friends of Palestine [46]. About 25 Irish nationals were planning on sailing with the “Saoirse,” including Irish MEP Paul Murphy of the Socialist Party and United Left Alliance. But the vessel dropped out of the flotilla after being “sabotaged” while docking in Turkey.
In Norway, which hosts the European Network to Support the Rights of Palestinian Prisoners [15], some $250,000 was raised to send 20 activists to Gaza. In neighboring Sweden, the campaign Ship to Gaza Sweden [12] has been selling “nautical miles to Gaza” for €100 ($145) each.
In Spain, the flotilla is being organized by “Rumbo a Gaza [47]” (Course to Gaza). Despite massive unemployment in Spain, the group managed to raise enough funds to send 45 Spanish activists to Gaza on a boat called the “Guernica,” which also happens to be the name of a small town in the Basque country that was bombed by Adolf Hitler during the Spanish Civil War.
In Switzerland, more than 200 NGOs are supporting the flotilla [48]. It is being coordinated by a Geneva-based group called Droit pour Tous [49] (Right for All), which in March 2011 sponsored ‘The First International Conference on the Rights of Palestinian Prisoners and Detainees.” Three members of the Swiss National Council, the lower house of the Swiss parliament, want to sail with the flotilla.
If Gaza has become an obsession for many ordinary Europeans, so too for Europe’s political class, which rarely misses an opportunity to rebuke Israel for a blockade the latter says is necessary to prevent weapons for reaching Iran-backed Hamas militants.
Austrian Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger [50] visited the Gaza Strip in April 2011 and demanded that Israel lift its blockade. British Prime Minister David Cameron [51] said Israel has turned the Gaza Strip into a “prison camp” and at least 14 British parliamentarians [52] have publicly backed the flotilla. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as well as several members of her government, has insisted that Israel end the blockade and the German Bundestag [53] in July 2010 passed a resolution condemning Israeli policies in Gaza.
In Ireland, which recently needed a $113 billion bailout [54] to save it from financial collapse, Prime Minister Enda Kenny [55] is closely following the events in Gaza. “I have every sympathy with the people of Gaza,” Kenny told the lower house of parliament. Even tiny Luxembourg has something to say about Gaza: In February 2011 Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn [56] visited the territory and demanded that Israel lift the blockade.
In Spain, the kaffiyeh-wearing [57] Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose often toxic anti-Israel rhetoric has contributed to a notable rise in anti-Semitism in Spain [58], has called for a “strong, joint EU position” on Gaza and Israel’s blockade. Hamas militants recently gave European Union “Foreign Minister” Catherine Ashton an opportunity to do just that when they welcomed her to the Gaza Strip by firing a rocket into southern Israel [59], killing a man working in the Netiv Ha’assera kibbutz. Rather than condemn Hamas for the killing, the European Union, which takes pride in being the largest contributor of aid to the Palestinians, berated Israel instead.
A notable exception has been Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, whose government has prohibited eight boats participating in the flotilla from leaving Greek waters. Previously, Papandreou had described an Israeli commando raid on a similar flotilla in May 2010 as “condemnable and unacceptable [60].”
The irony of all the Gaza activism in Europe is this: The European single currency is on the verge of collapse. Many European countries are on the brink of bankruptcy. The European social welfare state is crumbling. Millions of Europeans are out of work and many are losing their homes. Europeans are losing the war they started with Libya. Muslim immigration to Europe is out of control. Islamic Sharia law is becoming increasingly common (here [61], here [62], here [63], and here [64]) in many parts of the continent. Considering all the problems besetting Europe today, the issue many Europeans care about most is … the Gaza Strip.
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Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/europeans-are-major-force-behind-second-gaza-flotilla/
URLs in this post:
[1] opposition to Israel often crosses the line into anti-Semitism: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/anti-semitism-sweeps-europe-in-wake-of-gaza-operation/
[2] European movement to delegitimize the state of Israel: http://www.hudson-ny.org/2172/europeans-boycotts-against-israel
[3] complete international isolation of Israel: http://academic.udayton.edu/race/06hrights/WCAR2001/NGOFORUM/Palestinans.htm
[4] European Freedom Flotilla: http://www.freedomflotilla.eu/
[5] Belgium to Gaza: http://www.belgiumtogaza.com/
[6] Free Gaza Denmark: http://www.freegaza.dk/
[7] Ship to Gaza Greece: http://www.shiptogaza.gr/
[8] Freedom Flotilla Italia: http://www.freedomflotilla.it/
[9] Ship to Gaza Netherlands: http://www.nederland-gaza.nl/
[10] Ship to Gaza Norway: http://www.shiptogaza.no/
[11] Free Gaza Scotland: http://freegaza-scotland.org/
[12] Ship to Gaza Sweden: http://www.shiptogaza.se/
[13] European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine: http://www.eccpalestine.org/
[14] Palestinian Return Center: http://www.prc.org.uk/newsite/en
[15] European Network to Support Rights of Palestinian Prisoners: http://ufree-p.net/eng/
[16] Mohammad Sawalha: http://jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=0&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=378&PID=0&IID=7745&TTL=Who_Is_Behind_the_Second_Gaza_Flotilla
[17] Britain2Gaza: http://www.britain2gaza.com/
[18] Friends of Al-Aqsa: http://www.foa.org.uk/
[19] Palestinian Forum in Britain: http://www.palestinianforum.co.uk/en
[20] Palestine Solidarity Campaign: http://www.palestinecampaign.org/
[21] Stop the War Coalition: http://stopwar.org.uk/
[22] the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza: http://www.facebook.com/ECESG?sk=wall
[23] Boycott Israeli Goods Campaign: http://www.bigcampaign.org/
[24] Palestine Solidarity Campaign: http://palestinecampaign.org/
[25] Interpal: http://www.interpal.org.uk/
[26] Freedom for Palestine: http://www.waronwant.org/freedomoneworld/
[27] A Just Peace for Palestine: http://www.justpeaceforpalestine.org/
[28] Stop Arming Israel: http://www.stoparmingisrael.org/
[29] Oxford-Ramallah Friendship Association: http://www.oxford-ramallah.org/
[30] Reading-Palestine Solidarity Campaign: http://readingpsc.org.uk/
[31] Viva Palestina: http://www.vivapalestina.org/home.htm
[32] Medical Aid for Palestinians: http://www.map-uk.org/
[33] Scottish-Palestine Solidarity Campaign: http://www.scottishpsc.org.uk/
[34] amend British universal jurisdiction laws: http://www.hudson-ny.org/1671/uk-universal-jurisdiction-law
[35] A French Ship to Gaza: http://www.unbateaupourgaza.fr/
[36] French NGOs for Palestine: http://www.plateforme-palestine.org/
[37] more than 70 French organizations: http://flottille.blog.lemonde.fr/2011/06/25/flottille-pour-gaza-ii-embarquement-imminent/
[38] German Initiative to Break the Gaza Blockade: http://germany-gaza.de/
[39] Palestinian Community in Germany: http://www.falastin.de/home.html
[40] German Youth for Palestine: http://www.djp-info.de/
[41] Palestinian Society for Human Rights: http://www.pgd-online.de/
[42] 9th Annual Conference of Palestinians in Europe: http://www.palconference.eu/
[43] Irish Ship to Gaza: http://irishshiptogaza.org/
[44] Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign: http://www.ipsc.ie/
[45] Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Alliance: http://www.sadaka.ie/
[46] Derry Friends of Palestine: http://www.derryfriendsofpalestine.org/
[47] Rumbo a Gaza: http://www.rumboagaza.org/
[48] more than 200 NGOs are supporting the flotilla: http://www.thelocal.ch/national/20110525_229.html
[49] Droit pour Tous: http://www.droitpourtous.ch/index.php?language=en&page=15&homepage
[50] Austrian Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger: http://www.middleeastmonitor.org.uk/news/middle-east/2217-austrian-foreign-minister-enters-gaza-through-rafah-border-crossing
[51] British Prime Minister David Cameron: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jul/27/david-cameron-gaza-prison-camp
[52] 14 British parliamentarians: http://www.britain2gaza.com/2011/06/parliamentarians-add-their-support-to-the-flotilla/
[53] German Bundestag: http://www.faz.net/artikel/C31325/resolution-im-bundestag-israel-muss-gaza-blockade-beenden-30285638.html
[54] $113 billion bailout: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-28/ireland-wins-eu85-billion-aid-germany-drops-threat-on-bonds.html
[55] Prime Minister Enda Kenny: http://www.kildarestreet.com/debate/?id=2011-06-29.102.0
[56] Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn: http://www.mae.lu/fr/Site-MAE/Actualites/Jean-Asselborn-en-tournee-au-Proche-Orient-du-22-au-26-fevrier-2011-Quatrieme-etape-Visite-de-travail-dans-la-Bande-de-Gaza-25-fevrier-2011
[57] kaffiyeh-wearing: http://www.minutodigital.com/noticias2/3006.htm
[58] notable rise in anti-Semitism in Spain: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/spains-jewish-problem/
[59] firing a rocket into southern Israel: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8573715.stm
[60] condemnable and unacceptable: http://www.ana-mpa.gr/anaweb/user/showplain?maindoc=8775605&maindocimg=8679363&service=6
[61] here: http://www.hudson-ny.org/1656/creeping-sharia-britain
[62] here: http://www.hudson-ny.org/1799/europe-goes-halal
[63] here: http://www.hudson-ny.org/1857/europe-fatwa-factories
[64] here: http://www.hudson-ny.org/2130/islamic-shariah-compliant-banking-europe
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BBC
Sandor Kepiro, a former Hungarian policeman recently acquitted of Nazi-era war crimes, has died in hospital in Budapest at the age of 97.
His death was reported by his family and lawyer, who said he believed the trial this summer had contributed to his client's poor health.
A Budapest court dismissed charges he had ordered the execution of 30 people because of insufficient evidence.
Mr Kepiro once topped an international list of wanted war crimes suspects.
His acquittal in July caused outrage at the Simon Wiesenthal Center with its chairman, Efraim Zuroff, pledging to do "everything possible to see that it's overturned".
'Refused to shoot'
More than 1,200 Jewish, Serb and Roma civilians were murdered over three days by Hungarian forces in a notorious massacre in the Serbian city of Novi Sad in 1942.
Mr Kepiro was accused of rounding up 36 people during the raid. Thirty of them were put on a lorry, allegedly on the defendant's orders, and taken away to be shot.
The prosecution had demanded at least a prison sentence for Mr Kepiro, but he insisted he had not killed anyone.
He said he had been "the only person to refuse the order to use firearms", and that he had intervened to save five people about to be killed by a corporal.
Mr Kepiro was previously convicted of involvement in the killings in Hungary in 1944 but his conviction was quashed by the fascist government.
He returned to Hungary in 1996 after decades in Argentina, and was first accused in 2006 by the Nazi hunters at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
P.C.
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http://legalinsurrection.com/2011/09/sorry-we-thought-you-were-a-jew/
“Sorry, we thought you were a Jew”
Posted by William A. Jacobson Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 11:44am
Here’s your “Arab Spring” and “Arab Street” for you.
From a BBC correspondent (h/t Daily Dish):
While walking in the street someone pushed me from behind with such force that I nearly fell over.
Turning around, I found myself surrounded by five men, one of whom tried to punch me in the face. I stopped the attack by pointing out how shameful it was for a Muslim to assault a guest in his country, especially during Ramadan.
Relieved that a seemingly random assault was over, I was appalled by the apology offered by one of my assailants. “Sorry,” he said contritely, offering his hand, “we thought you were a Jew.”
Shaking his head in disbelief on hearing the news, an Egyptian friend sympathised: “That’s stupid, you are obviously not a Jew.”
The chilling implication I was left with was that, had I been Jewish, the assault would have apparently been justified.
Just like the attack on Lara Logan, in the new Egypt and elsewhere, looking Jewish is a dangerous thing.
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Posted here because of its focus on the Jewish vote:
By DAN SENOR
New York's special congressional election on Tuesday was the first electoral outcome directly affected by President Obama's Israel policy. Democrats were forced to expend enormous resources in a losing effort to defend this safe Democratic district, covering Queens and Brooklyn, that Anthony Weiner won last year by a comfortable margin.
A Public Policy Poll taken days before the election found a plurality of voters saying that Israel was "very important" in determining their votes. Among those voters, Republican candidate Robert Turner was winning by a 71-22 margin. Only 22% of Jewish voters approved of President Obama's handling of Israel. Ed Koch, the Democrat and former New York mayor, endorsed Mr. Turner because he said he wanted to send a message to the president about his anti-Israel policies.
This is a preview of what President Obama might face in his re-election campaign with a demographic group that voted overwhelmingly for him in 2008. And it could affect the electoral map, given the battleground states—such as Florida and Pennsylvania—with significant Jewish populations. In another ominous barometer for the Obama campaign, its Jewish fund-raising has deeply eroded: One poll by McLaughlin & Associates found that of Jewish donors who donated to Mr. Obama in 2008, only 64% have already donated or plan to donate to his re-election campaign.
The Obama campaign has launched a counteroffensive, including hiring a high-level Jewish outreach director and sending former White House aide David Axelrod and Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to reassure Jewish donors. The Obama team told the Washington Post that its Israel problem is a messaging problem, and that with enough explanation of its record the Jewish community will return to the fold in 2012. Here is an inventory of what Mr. Obama's aides will have to address:
• February 2008: When running for president, then-Sen. Obama told an audience in Cleveland: "There is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel." Likud had been out of power for two years when Mr. Obama made this statement. At the time the country was being led by the centrist Kadima government of Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and Shimon Peres, and Prime Minister Olmert had been pursuing an unprecedented territorial compromise. As for Likud governments, it was under Likud that Israel made its largest territorial compromises—withdrawals from Sinai and Gaza.
• July 2009: Mr. Obama hosted American Jewish leaders at the White House, reportedly telling them that he sought to put "daylight" between America and Israel. "For eight years"—during the Bush administration—"there was no light between the United States and Israel, and nothing got accomplished," he declared.
Nothing? Prime Minister Ariel Sharon uprooted thousands of settlers from their homes in Gaza and the northern West Bank and deployed the Israeli army to forcibly relocate their fellow citizens. Mr. Sharon then resigned from the Likud Party to build a majority party based on a two-state consensus.
In the same meeting with Jewish leaders, Mr. Obama told the group that Israel would need "to engage in serious self-reflection." This statement stunned the Americans in attendance: Israeli society is many things, but lacking in self-reflection isn't one of them. It's impossible to envision the president delivering a similar lecture to Muslim leaders.
Enlarge Image
CloseRoll Call/Getty Images
Stuart Balberg of Brooklyn, New York, calls voters on behalf of Bob Turner, Republican candidate for the congressional seat vacated by Democrat Anthony Weiner.
.• September 2009: In his first address to the U.N. General Assembly, President Obama devoted five paragraphs to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, during which he declared (to loud applause) that "America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements." He went on to draw a connection between rocket attacks on Israeli civilians with living conditions in Gaza. There was not a single unconditional criticism of Palestinian terrorism.
• March 2010: During Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Israel, a Jerusalem municipal office announced plans for new construction in a part of Jerusalem. The president launched an unprecedented weeks-long offensive against Israel. Mr. Biden very publicly departed Israel.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton berated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a now-infamous 45-minute phone call, telling him that Israel had "harmed the bilateral relationship." (The State Department triumphantly shared details of the call with the press.) The Israeli ambassador was dressed-down at the State Department, Mr. Obama's Middle East envoy canceled his trip to Israel, and the U.S. joined the European condemnation of Israel.
Moments after Mr. Biden concluded his visit to the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority held a ceremony to honor Dalal Mughrabi, who led one of the deadliest Palestinian terror attacks in history: the so-called Coastal Road Massacre that killed 38, including 13 children and an American. The Obama administration was silent. But that same day, on ABC, Mr. Axelrod called Israel's planned construction of apartments in its own capital an "insult" and an "affront" to the United States. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs went on Fox News to accuse Mr. Netanyahu of "weakening trust" between the two countries.
Ten days later, Mr. Netanyahu traveled to Washington to mend fences but was snubbed at a White House meeting with President Obama—no photo op, no joint statement, and he was sent out through a side door.
• April 2010: Mr. Netanyahu pulled out of the Obama-sponsored Washington summit on nuclear proliferation after it became clear that Turkey and Egypt intended to use the occasion to condemn the Israeli nuclear program, and Mr. Obama would not intervene.
• March 2011: Mr. Obama returned to his habit of urging Israelis to engage in self-reflection, inviting Jewish community leaders to the White House and instructing them to "search your souls" about Israel's dedication to peace.
• May 2011: The State Department issued a press release declaring that the department's No. 2 official, James Steinberg, would be visiting "Israel, Jerusalem, and the West Bank." In other words, Jerusalem is not part of Israel. Later in the month, only hours before Mr. Netanyahu departed from Israel to Washington, Mr. Obama delivered his Arab Spring speech, which focused on a demand that Israel return to its indefensible pre-1967 borders with land swaps.
Mr. Obama has made some meaningful exceptions, particularly having to do with security partnership, but overall he has built the most consistently one-sided diplomatic record against Israel of any American president in generations. His problem with Jewish voters is one of substance, not messaging.
Mr. Senor is co-author with Saul Singer of "Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle" (Twelve, 2011
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Optimists Were Wrong About the Arab Spring
There's a reason that hatred of Israel played well on the Arab street
By JOSEF JOFFE
I wasn't alone, but the mea culpa is all mine. Like many, I thought that dawn was finally breaking over the Arab world when those nice, middle-class crowds thronged Cairo's Tahrir Square chanting "freedom" and "democracy" without burning American and Israeli flags. What a miracle, I mused: The dogs of hate are not barking. And what a wondrous moment of transcendence! Free the people, and they will free themselves from the obsession of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism their overlords had implanted to distract them from misery and oppression.
It was a false dawn—and not only because of the sacking of the Israeli embassy in Cairo last week. On my desk sits a Reuters photo dated May 13; the caption reads: "People burn an Israeli flag during a demonstration on Tahrir Square." There were no such symbols of "Arab rage" when the protests erupted in late January.
The demons of yore are back and presumably they have never left. The Friday demonstration on Tahrir Square was at first standard fare—yet another protest against the military regime. But at the end, several thousands armed with Palestinian flags, crowbars and hammers marched off to the Israeli embassy for a bit of deconstructionist work.
But there is more. For six hours, desperate Israeli leaders tried to contact the junta; its leader Field Marshall Tantawi refused to speak with either the Israeli prime minister or his defense minister. It took another seven hours before Egyptian security forces rescued the last Israeli—perhaps only because Washington had interceded in the meantime.
The moral of this tale is simple. The revolution isn't going anywhere, and life is as miserable as always. So how about a little pogrom? It wasn't the junta that invented this stratagem, but our good friend Hosni Mubarak now fighting for his life in a Cairo courtroom.
.How do despots stay in power amid poverty, hopelessness and repression? By feeding the people the heady brew of hatred against the "Other." But why Israel, a neighbor officially recognized by Cairo and granted 30 years of peace? An iron law of Arab politics cracks the paradox: the better state-to-state relations, the worse the anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism within.
Jew hatred? Isn't it just righteous anti-Israelism fed by the plight of the Palestinians? Go to a bookstore in Cairo, Amman or Riyadh—all quasi-allies of Israel—and you will find piles of anti-Semitic tracts. They are in Arabic, but a 100% import from yesterday's Europe—blood libel, world conquest and all. Ditto the TV fare and newspaper cartoons, which depict the Jew as bloodsuckers or cannibals.
Mubarak et al. had struck a devil's bargain with their peoples: I'll treat with the infidels, and you gorge yourselves on the fantasies that keep you in line. The mistake of Arab Spring optimists like me was to ignore the stubborn reality behind the well-worn tactic. We should have asked: Why would the despots call on those particular demons? Because they are an integral part of Arab political culture, hence so easy to rouse. The import of European anti-Semitism began in the '30s, long before Israel's birth, let alone its conquest of the West Bank.
To invoke "essentialism"—deep and enduring traits—when looking at a culture, is a tricky thing. Cultures do change, even profoundly—look at Germany's breathtaking leap from Nazism into liberal democracy. But the sad trajectory of the Egyptian revolution, going toxic only after a few weeks, confirms the depth of the loathing. Acceptance of the "Other" who is the Jew (or even a Copt) is not a pillar of Islamic culture. But the opposite—abhorrence—is such superb cement for societies rent by myriad conflicts: between sects, classes, tribes and nationalities, between modernity and tradition, city and country, devout and secular. To serve as target and unifier has been the fate of Jews in Europe, and it remains their fate in Arabia.
Nor does it help to apologize, as the hapless effort of the Netanyahu government demonstrated when it tried to soothe tempers after five Egyptian soldiers were inadvertently killed when Israeli troops were pursuing militants along the Sinai border last month. The message of the mob in Cairo was: The embassy must go, the peace must go, Israel must go.
Is there no way out? Sure there is. Happy societies don't need the barbarians at the gate. But Arab society is not happy, which is why the clash within drives the conflict without, spilling over into Europe and, on 9/11, into the United States.
When will it ever end? Not soon. Take Sweden, a nice Protestant place. In the 17th century, it was the scourge of Europe, conquering about half of the Holy Roman Empire's states. It stopped fighting in 1814, taking the slow road to development and democracy instead. Only in the mid-20th century did it become such an admirable model of tranquility. Would that history moves a bit faster in this century.
Mr. Joffe is editor of Die Zeit, a senior fellow of the Freeman-Spogli Institute, and a fellow of the Hoover Institution.
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I'm pretty sure the "victory" in Libya will give us the same results.
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"Cultures do change, even profoundly—look at Germany's breathtaking leap from Nazism into liberal democracy."
Well yeah, only after millions of dead Germans and the obliteration of their citiesand 3rd reich leaders all dead or chased around the world.
Perhaps that is the lesson we will eventually learn about what will "change" Islamic culture. I hope not but it certainly seems that way from where I sit at this time in history.
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"Cultures do change, even profoundly—look at Germany's breathtaking leap from Nazism into liberal democracy."
Well yeah, only after millions of dead Germans and the obliteration of their citiesand 3rd reich leaders all dead or chased around the world.
Perhaps that is the lesson we will eventually learn about what will "change" Islamic culture. I hope not but it certainly seems that way from where I sit at this time in history.
Yup.
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"Cultures do change, even profoundly—look at Germany's breathtaking leap from Nazism into liberal democracy."
Well yeah, only after millions of dead Germans and the obliteration of their citiesand 3rd reich leaders all dead or chased around the world.
Perhaps that is the lesson we will eventually learn about what will "change" Islamic culture. I hope not but it certainly seems that way from where I sit at this time in history.
http://www.globalsn.net/
I saw this documentary the other night. I hope this becomes a real movement within the islamic world. I fear that Ashraf al-Khaled will end up like other would-be islamic reformers, but you've got to admire his courage. He doesn't shy away from confronting jihadists face to face and he isn't parroting the usual "It's America/Israel/The west's fault" either. He recognizes the pathology within the islamic world and wants to address it.
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1N60RTxg1Y[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1N60RTxg1Y
Channeling Rev. Wright.
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GM, Hard to say what the slip was there. He wasn't equating Jews with janitors, that doesn't make sense. I think when he said Billionaire he thought Soros and then Jew stuck in his mind. All (one) Jews he knows are billionaires and want higher taxes on themselves? When I think Soros I think flaming lib, not Jew. When I think billionaire I think jobs and how few new ones we have - billionaires and jobs.
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I dunno, I'd like to compare it to Obama's toast to Rashid Khalidi, but that's still as secret as Obama's health records and academic transcripts.
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Upon his return to Ramallah from New York, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was greeted by a crowd of several thousand well-wishers. They applauded him for his speech at the UN. There, Abbas erased Jewish history from the Land of Israel, denied Israel's right to exist and pledged his commitment to establish a racist Palestinian state ethnically cleansed of all Jews.
Many of Abbas's supporters in Ramallah held posters of US President Barack Obama. On them Obama was portrayed as a monkey. The caption read, "The First Jewish President of the United States."
The fact that the Palestinians from Fatah and Hamas alike are Jew-hating racists should surprise no one who has been paying a modicum of attention to the Palestinian media and general culture. Since the PA was established in 1994 in the framework of the peace process between Israel and the PLO, it has used the media organs, schools and mosques it controls to spew out a constant flow of anti-Semitic propaganda. Much of the Jew-hating bile is indistinguishable from anti-Jewish propaganda published by the Nazis.
As for their anti-black bigotry, it is enough to recall the frequency with which Condoleezza Rice was depicted as a monkey and a devil in the Palestinian and pan-Arab media during George W. Bush's presidency to realize that the racist depiction of Obama was not a fluke. Moreover, and more disturbingly, it is worth recalling that like its fellow Arab League members, the PA has strongly supported Sudan's genocide of black Africans in Darfur.
To a degree, the willingness of African-Americans to turn a blind eye to Arab anti-black prejudice is understandable. Since the mid-1960s, oil rich Arab kingdoms led by Saudi Arabia have spent hundreds of millions of petrodollars in outreach to African-Americans. This outreach includes but is not limited to massive proselytization efforts among inner city blacks. The combination of a strong and growing African-American Muslim population and a general sense of amity towards Muslims as a result of outreach efforts contribute to a willingness on the part of African- Americans to overlook Arab anti-black racism.
Unlike African-Americans, Jewish Americans have been targeted by no serious outreach campaigns by the likes of Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab world. To the contrary, as Mitchell Bard documented in his bookThe Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America's Interests in the Middle East, these Arab nations have spared no effort in anti-Israel lobbying in the US. Among the Arab lobby's goals is to undermine the legitimacy of American Jewish lobbying on behalf of Israel.
Furthermore, the anti-Jewish atmosphere in the Arab world is far more comprehensive and poisonous than its anti-black prejudice. A Pew global opinion poll from 2008 showed that hatred of Jews is effectively universal in the Arab world and overwhelming in non-Arab Muslim states. In Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon, between 95 and 97 percent of respondents expressed hatred of Jews. In Indonesia, Turkey and Pakistan between two-thirds and three-quarters of respondents expressed hatred of Jews.
Jew-hatred among Muslim minorities in the West is less overwhelming. But Muslim antagonism towards Jews vastly outstrips that of the general populations of their countries. According to a Pew survey from 2006, while 7% of British citizens express unfavorable views of Jews, 47% of British Muslims admit to such views. In France, 13% of the general population admits to harboring negative feelings towards Jews and 28% of French Muslims do. Likewise in Germany, 22% of the general population acknowledges anti-Semitic views and 44% of German Muslims do.
More dangerously, the quantity of anti-Semitic attacks carried out by Muslims in the West far outstrips their percentage in the general population. According to Pew data, in 2010 Muslims comprised just 4.6% of the population of the UK but carried out 39% of the anti-Semitic attacks. Moreover, according to the Times Online, in 2006, 37% of British Muslims claimed that British Jews are legitimate targets for attacks. Only 30% of British Muslims disagreed.
With the overwhelming data showing that throughout the Arab world there is strong support for organizations and regimes which advocate the genocide of world Jewry, the American Jewish community could have been expected to devote the majority of its attention and resources to exposing and combating this existential threat. Just as the American Jewish community dedicated itself in the past to causes such as the liberation of Soviet Jewry and fighting neo-Nazi groups in the US and throughout the world, it could have been expected that from the Anti-Defamation League to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, that major American Jewish groups would be using the financial and human resources at their disposal to defend against this violent, genocidal hatred.
But this has not occurred. Many leading American Jewish organizations continue to be far more involved in combating the currently relatively benign anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church and Evangelical Christians than confronting the escalating dangers of Muslim anti-Semitism.
According to a Gallup poll released last month, 80% of American Jews have favorable views of American Muslims. Seventy percent believe that they are not supportive of al-Qaida. These data indicate that American Jews are second only to American Muslims in their support for Muslim Americans. Indeed 6% more American Jews than American Muslims believe that American Muslims face prejudice due to their religion.
American Jewish championing of American Muslims is disconcerting when compared with American Jewish treatment of the philo-Semitic Evangelical Christians. Matthew Knee discussed this issue in depth in a recent article published at the Legal Insurrection website.
In a 2003 Pew survey, 42% of American Jews expressed antagonism towards Evangelical Christians. In a 2004 American National Election Study, Jews on average rated Evangelical Christians at 30 out of 100 on a "feeling thermometer," where 1 was cold and 100 was hot.
A 2005 American Jewish Committee survey found that Jews assessed that following Muslims, Evangelical Christians have the highest propensity for being anti-Semites. And yet, in the same 2004 American National Election Survey, Evangelical Christians rated Jews an average of 82 on the 1- 100 feelings scale. Evangelical Christians rated Catholics at 80.
Consistent survey data show that levels of anti- Semitism among Evangelical Christians is either the same as or slightly lower than the national average. According to a 2007 ADL survey, the US average is 15%.
There is a clear disparity between survey data on anti-Semitism among various American ethnic groups and American Jews' assessment of the prevalence of anti-Semitism among the same groups. The AJC survey found that American Jews believed that 29% of Evangelicals are largely anti- Semitic. They assessed that only 7% of Hispanics and 19% of African-Americans are anti-Semites.
As it works out, their perceptions are completely incorrect. According to the 2007 ADL survey, foreign born Hispanics, and African-Americans, harbor significantly stronger anti-Semitic views than the national average. Twenty-nine percent of foreign born Hispanics harbor very anti-Semitic views. Thirty-two percent of African-Americans harbor deeply anti-Semitic views.
Like Jews, Hispanics, African-Americans and Muslims vote disproportionately for the Democratic Party. Evangelical Christians on the other hand, are reliably Republican. A 2009 survey on US anti- Semitism conducted by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research in San Francisco found that Democrats are more likely to be anti-Semitic than Republicans.
The Gallup survey from last month showing American Jews' deep support for American Muslims is of particular interest because that support stands in stark contrast with survey data concerning American Jewish perception of Muslim American anti-Semitism.
The 2005 AJC survey showed that American Jews believe that 58% of American Muslims are anti- Semitic. That is, American Jews are Muslim Americans' strongest non-Muslim defenders at the same time they are convinced that most Muslim Americans are anti-Semites.
What can explain this counterintuitive behavior? And how can we account for the apparent pattern of incorrect Jewish perceptions of anti-Semitism among Evangelical Christians on the one hand and fellow Democrats on the other hand?
As Knee argues, the disparity may very well be due to partisan loyalties. The Democratic Party has openly engaged in fear mongering and demonization of Evangelical Christians in order to maintain Jewish loyalty to the party. Knee quotes then-Democratic national chairman Howard Dean's statement that "Jews should feel comfortable in being American Jews without being constrained from practicing their faith or be compelled to convert to another religion."
As for Muslims, Knee cites a press release from the National Jewish Democratic Council from March attacking Congressman Peter King's hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims. In the press release, the council claimed that such hearings "can and will" harm religious tolerance in America. That is, the council implied that by investigating the radicalization of American Muslims - and its concomitant transformation of American Muslims into supporters of the genocidal Jew-hatred endemic among radical Muslims worldwide - Rep. King is endangering Jews.
If American Jews are most concerned with being able to maintain their loyalty to the Democratic Party, then it makes sense for them to wildly exaggerate Evangelical anti-Semitism. It is reasonable for them to underestimate African-American and Hispanic anti-Semitism, and ignore the higher rates of anti-Semitism among Democrats than among Republicans. Moreover, it makes sense for them to follow their party's lead in failing to address the dangers of global Islamic anti- Semitism.
None of this makes sense, however, if American Jews are most concerned with defending Jews - in America and worldwide - from anti-Semitic sentiments and violence.
On Wednesday evening we begin our celebration of the New Year. Rosh Hashana marks a period of soul-searching among Jews. We are called upon at this time to account for our actions and our failures to act and to improve our faithfulness to our people, to our laws and to God.
It is possible that American Jews are simply unaware of the disparities between reality and their perceptions of reality. But it is the duty of all Jews to educate ourselves about the threats that reality poses to ourselves and our people.
At the UN last week, Abbas received accolades and applause from all quarters for his anti-Semitic assault on Jewish history and the Jewish state. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's remarks were applauded by Israel-supporters in the audience in the General Assembly.
As Israel is increasingly isolated and Jews worldwide are under attack, it is my prayer for the coming year that the American Jewish community will come to terms with a difficult reality and the choices it entails, and act with the majority of their fellow Americans to defend Israel and combat anti-Semitism in the US and throughout the world.
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMjm4LxFa1c&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Gee, I wonder who she voted for in 2008..... :roll:
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Fury over Sharpton speaking at Crown Heights riot-anniversary forum
By ANDY SOLTIS
Last Updated: 6:49 AM, August 18, 2011
Posted: 2:08 AM, August 18, 2011
An East End synagogue has reignited bitterness over the 1991 Crown Heights race riots by inviting the Rev. Al Sharpton to a symposium marking the 20th anniversary of the bloody confrontations.
"It's just an absolute disgrace," said Norman Rosenbaum, whose brother Yankel was killed at the height of the mayhem. "His vile rhetoric incited the rioting."
What revived the nightmare was Sharpton's invitation to appear on a panel on the "State of Black-Jewish Relations: Twenty Years after Crown Heights."
The riots were touched off when 7-year-old Gavin Cato was struck and killed by a car in the motorcade of a Hasidic leader.
BAD BLOOD: Al Sharpton led a march during the 1991 riots in which Yankel Rosenbaum (inset) was killed.
Yankel Rosenbaum, an Australian-born Hasidic scholar who had nothing to do with the motorcade, was stabbed to death in the violence that followed.
Sharpton was criticized at the time for saying, in a eulogy for Gavin, that he wasn't killed by a car accident but by "the social accident of apartheid." He led 400 protesters, chanting "No justice, no peace" despite pleas by then-Mayor David Dinkins for calm.
Norman Rosenbaum said the title of the forum falsely implies the four nights of rioting were due to "ongoing problems between the Jewish community and the African-American community."
"It was just wanton criminal attacks," he said. "This is Crown Heights revisionist history," he said of the forum, scheduled for Sunday night.
He said Sharpton "did absolutely nothing then to improve black-Jewish relations -- and nothing since."
Community leader Isaac Abraham, who was invited to the forum, accused The Hampton Synagogue's Rabbi Marc Schneier of trying to gain attention by including Sharpton.
"To get some publicity for your phony West Hampton ethnic bullcrap, you invite the biggest race hustler who played a large part in those four nights of the pogrom," he wrote Schneier.
Yosef Lifish, the driver of the car that killed Cato, was cleared of charges and left for Israel. Sharpton flew to Tel Aviv later in 1991 in an attempt to slap Lifish with a civil suit.
When a passer-by at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport recognized Sharpton, she shouted, "Go to hell!"
"I am in hell already," Sharpton replied. "I am in Israel."
andy.soltis@nypost.com
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/crown_hts_fury_38tR1JfphLH4X9An8W8VYL
**Wow, I hope he doesn't get a TV show on MSNBC or something.....
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(http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/101611.jpg)
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I wonder if there has ever been any study of Black antisemitism.
Surely some Blacks resent and dislike Jews. I don't know if it would be at a higher percentage overall than say other groups including whites who dislike Jews.
It seems Sharpton, Wright, Farrakan fit the mold. I recall Jackson's "hymietown" comment. I often wondered why liberal Jews seemed to need to make the point that Jews had much in common with Blacks because of a history of discrimination.
Such Jews misread the situation. It is not the discrimination issue that has many Blacks resenting Jews. It is the socioeconomic disparity. Blacks feel patronized by the lib Jews who coddle up to them, I suspect.
I remember one of my Jewish ancestors who was by no means bigoted or prejudiced. Yet he had no narcisstic need to prove what a good heart he had by "sticking up" for Blacks. He would say I am not worried about the Blacks. They are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. Just like we do.
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http://jammiewearingfool.blogspot.com/2011/10/its-just-like-pre-world-war-ii-nazi.html
'It's Just Like Pre-World War II Nazi Germany'
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NIlRQCPJcew[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NIlRQCPJcew
We're not the only ones who've noticed the ugly anti-Semitism coming from the Occupy Wall Street creeps. The folks in Israel see what's happening.
One of people reportedly responsible for organizing the "Occupy Wall St." protests, Adbusters editor Kalle Lasn, has a history of perpetuating conspiracy theories that say the Jews control America's foreign policies.
Back in New York, another protestor insisted that "a small ethnic group constitutes almost all of the hedge fund managers and bankers on Wall St. They are all Jewish. There is a conspiracy in this country where Jews control the media, finances… They have pooled their money together in order to take control of America."
He was kind enough to warn Russia to avoid similarly being destroyed by what in America has become a "conspiracy everyone is afraid to talk about."
The Emergency Committee for Israel, a Jewish-run Republican organization, released a video highlighting these and other anti-Semitic incidents at the "Occupy wall St." events, and urging President Barack Obama to take a firm stand against such hateful rhetoric.
Israel's Yediot Ahronot newspaper called the anti-Semitic outbursts "hard to watch," and an Israeli commenter said, "It's just like pre-World War II Nazi Germany. You think blood libels can't happen in America?"
It has been pointed out by many media commentators that the openly anti-Semitic remain but a small portion of those participating in the Occupy Wall St. movement. However, others have noted that Nazi anti-Semitism started out as a fringe phenomenon in Germany before eventually defining that nation's domestic agenda in the 1940s.
More than the few Occupy Wall St. anti-Semites themselves, it is the lack of a clear and firm repudiation of their hateful rhetoric by the mainstream American media and political leaders that has a growing number of Israelis and Jews on edge.
Update: Where is the ADL on this ugliness?
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch4VcOGv36U&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch4VcOGv36U&feature=player_embedded
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/11/is-democrats-demagoguery-fueling-anti-semitism.php
Is Democrats’ Demagoguery Fueling Anti-Semitism?
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I take it with a grain of salt the following survery. First of all it is only one survey so I don't know how accurate it is or if people taking it tell the truth to start with. In any case I notice that blacks have a higher rate of anti semitism. I wondered about this on the board here:
*****Survey Finds Anti-Semitic Attitudes Rising
Updated: Friday, 04 Nov 2011, 7:19 PM EDT
Published : Friday, 04 Nov 2011, 7:11 PM EDT
MYFOXNY.COM - Swastikas were found painted on the facades of the Jackson Heights and East Elmhurst branches of the Queens Library and on the door of Congregation Tifereth Israel on Thursday.
The Anti-Defamation League today condemned the anti-Semitic graffiti. The ADL says there were 133 anti-Jewish incidents reported across New York City in 2010.
A nationwide ADL survey released just yesterday found that anti-Semitic attitudes have risen in America.
The ADL survey found that 15 percent of Americans - nearly 35 million adults - hold deeply anti-Semitic views. That's up three percent from 2009.
"The fact that anti-Semitic attitudes have increased significantly over the past two years is troubling and raises questions about the impact of broader trends in America - financial insecurity, social uncertainty, the decline in civility and the growth of polarization - on attitudes toward Jews," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director.
19-percent answered "probably true" to the statement "Jews have too much control/influence on Wall Street," an increase from 14-percent in 2009.
Several cases of anti-Semitism have been documented at various Occupy Wall Street across the country.
The survey also found that anti-Semitic views among the African-American population have remained steady, but are consistently higher than the general population.
In 2011, 29-percent of African-Americans expressed strongly anti-Semitic views, according to the survey.*****
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CCP post: "In 2011, 29-percent of African-Americans expressed strongly anti-Semitic views, according to the survey"
To know the significance we will need a control group. Perhaps 29% are anti- all whites and perhaps 29% are also anti- their fellow African-Americans.
Seriously, isn't it strange that they find a happy home in the same political party. Around here that the Jewish community and one of America's most gay cities and a dysfunctional black community all find comfort in representation in Washington from the same Muslim Rep. Keith Ellison. The Obamites don't support Israel or even capitalism and don't they openly support a gay agenda, and they double the black unemployment, yet these unconnected constituent groups just keep hanging in there delivering the votes.
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmTMIjkMoLk[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmTMIjkMoLk
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ISRAEL DEVELOPS CANCER VACCINE (From Pam Geller's "Atlas Shrugs" web site)
In between ducking bombs from a culture that creates nothing, invents nothing, produces nothing, and aspires to nothing except genocide. That's their major industry -- annihilation of the Jewish people. But Israel is the problem.
Israel Develops Cancer Vaccine
Vaxil's groundbreaking therapeutic vaccine, developed in Israel, could keep about 90 percent of cancers from coming back.
As the world's population lives longer than ever, if we don't succumb to heart disease, strokes or accidents, it is more likely that cancer will get us one way or another. Cancer is tough to fight, as the body learns how to outsmart medical approaches that often kill normal cells while targeting the malignant ones. In a breakthrough development, an Israeli company has formulated a therapeutic cancer vaccine, now in clinical trials at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem.
There are a 12 Million Jews in the world, and yet they have received 192 Nobel Prizes. The Muslims number 1.4 Billion ... or 117 times the number of Jews! Based upon this 117:1 Muslim-to-Jewish ratio, one might expect the Muslims to have 22,464 Nobel Laureates. They have nine, including the prize awarded to the pedophile godfather of modern terror, Yaser Arafat.
Unless the Swedes and Norwegians start awarding Nobel Prizes for plane hijackings, pizza shop bombings, civilian bus attacks, Jihad suicides/homicides, drive-by shootings, throat-slittings, embassy attacks and other such acts of barbarisms, the embarrassing low level of contribution to the welfare of civilization and mankind by the [Arab] Muslim world will continue. The Jewish People, meanwhile, will continue being the Lights Unto All Nations.
And the world is licking their boots and doing their bidding, turning the homeland and its inhabitants over as ransom, as if that would slake their bloodlust.
In the words of the American Enterprise Institute’s political scientist Charles Murray, “In the first half of the 20th century, despite pervasive and continuing social discrimination against Jews throughout the Western world, despite the retraction of legal rights, and despite the Holocaust, Jews won 14 percent of Nobel Prizes in literature, chemistry, physics, and medicine/physiology. In the second half of the 20th century, when Nobel Prizes began to be awarded to people from all over the world, that figure rose to 29 percent. So far, in the 21st century, it has been 32 percent.”1 Jews constitute about 0.2 percent of the world’s population.
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Even the same level of anti-semitism as OWS here!
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4153207,00.html
Cairo rally: One day we'll kill all Jews
Muslim Brotherhood holds venomous anti-Israel rally in Cairo mosque Friday; Islamic activists chant: Tel Aviv, judgment day has come
Eldad Beck Published: 11.25.11, 20:29 / Israel News
Arab hate: A Muslim Brotherhood rally in Cairo's most prominent mosque Friday turned into a venomous anti-Israel protest, with attendants vowing to "one day kill all Jews."
Some 5,000 people joined the rally, called to promote the "battle against Jerusalem's Judaization." The event coincided with the anniversary of the United Nations' partition plan in 1947, which called for the establishment of a Jewish state.
However, most worshippers who prayed at the mosque Friday quickly left it before the Muslim Brotherhood's rally got underway. A group spokesman urged attendants to remain for the protest, asking them not to create a bad impression for the media by leaving.
'Treacherous Jews'
Speakers at the event delivered impassioned, hateful speeches against Israel, slamming the "Zionist occupiers" and the "treacherous Jews." Upon leaving the rally, worshippers were given small flags, with Egypt's flag on one side and the Palestinian flag on the other, as well as maps of Jerusalem's Old City detailing where "Zionists are aiming to change Jerusalem's Muslim character."
Propaganda material ahead of Egypt's parliamentary elections was also handed out at the site.
Hate in Cairo (Photo: AFP)
Spiritual leader Dr. Ahmed al-Tayeb charged in his speech that to this day Jews everywhere in the world are seeking to prevent Islamic and Egyptian unity.
"In order to build Egypt, we must be one. Politics is insufficient. Faith in Allah is the basis for everything," he said. "The al-Aqsa Mosque is currently under an offensive by the Jews…we shall not allow the Zionists to Judaize al-Quds (Jerusalem.) We are telling Israel and Europe that we shall not allow even one stone to be moved there."
'We have different mentality'
Muslim Brotherhood spokesmen, as well as Palestinian guest speakers, made explicit calls for Jihad and for liberating the whole of Palestine. Time and again, a Koran quote vowing that "one day we shall kill all the Jews" was uttered at the site. Meanwhile, businessmen in the crowd were urged to invest funds in Jerusalem in order to prevent the acquisition of land and homes by Jews.
Throughout the event, Muslim Brotherhood activists chanted: "Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, judgment day has come."
Speaking to Ynet outside the mosque following the prayer, elementary school teacher Ala al-Din said that "all Egyptian Muslims are willing to embark on Jihad for the sake of Palestine."
"Why is the US losing in Afghanistan? Because the other side is willing and wants to die. We have a different mentality than that of the Americans and Jews," he said.
Eldad Beck is reporting from Cairo on behalf of Ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth
Roee Nahmias contributed to the story
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Is the Occupy Wall Street Movement Occupied?
IPT News
November 29, 2011
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3312/is-the-occupy-wall-street-movement-occupied
Anti-Israel and Muslim-American advocacy groups in the United States are capitalizing on the Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS) to promote their own agendas.
The Occupy movement started in New York's Zuccotti Park Sept. 17, and spread to more than 100 cities, according to the movement's "unofficial" website. "The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and aims to expose how the richest 1 percent of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future."
There has been an ongoing debate about the depth of anti-Semitism within the OWS movement, with some finding it rampant and others casting it as a fringe element. Those concerns were heightened Nov. 5 when more than 20 people from the Occupy Boston camp marched into the lobby of that city's Israeli consulate for a sit-in. The group engaged in a series of anti-Israel chants including "Viva Palestina," and "Hey hey, ho ho, Israeli apartheid has got to go!"
What is clear is that groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) have insinuated themselves on the movement to tackle issues other than economic policies.
The latest example came Nov. 18, when CAIR's New York chapter held a rally, prayers and a march from Occupy Wall Street to make demands including:
· "An immediate end to all racial, ethnic and religious profiling;"
· "The dismantlement and disclosure of all surveillance operations;"
· An "independent commission to investigate all NYPD and CIA operations against the Muslim community." The event was sponsored and endorsed by dozens of organizations, including the New York chapters of the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Council of North America, Al-Awda and the Majlis Ash-Shura of Metropolitan New York.
The demonstration attracted hundreds of Muslims and approximately 50 OWS protesters, carrying signs reading, "NYPD Watches Us. Who Watches NYPD?"
"Many many other people at Occupy Wall Street stand in solidarity with Muslim communities, and all targets of NYPD, CIA, FBI and government repression," Jen Waller, a representative of the OWS movement and a member of the New York Committee to Stop FBI Repression, said during the rally. She added that we are watching "more and more innocent Muslim men and women [that] are targeted and attract into government orchestrated terrorism schemes."
Previously, Islamist groups joined OWS events. CAIR-NY and the Islamic Leadership Council held a prayer service in Zuccotti Park on Oct. 21 following outreach to the group by the Wall Street protesters.
The crowd of approximately 60 chanted in response to a speaker: "American Muslims have to stand with Occupy Wall Street. For a long time, American Muslims have been scared into silence. Those days are over. We are here in numbers. We are here to pray. We are here to protest. And most of all we are here to raise our voice."
Imam Ayub Abdul Baki of the Islamic Leadership Council of New York delivered a speech saying, "We are also suffering, suffering racism and discrimination. Islamic bashing is on the increase." Baki held up a plaque with the "last sermon of the Prophet Mohammed," calling it "the eternal message of Islam to the world." Baki then discussed the sermon saying "all Muslims as well as non-Muslims should be familiar with this."
Baki's Leadership Council (Majlis Ash-Shura of Metropolitan New York) is an umbrella organization of mosques and Islamic organizations that claims to serve 850,000 Muslim New Yorkers and is "dedicated to bring Muslims on one platform." Among its members are the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA)-NY and the Muslim American Society (MAS) Youth Center.
MAS was founded as the American chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, while ICNA has a track record of radicalism and teaching its members violence and the evils of Jews and America. ICNA issued a press release earlier this month expressing support and sympathy for the OWS protestors.
The youth branch of the Muslim American Society (MAS) held an OWS gathering in Zuccotti Park in late October. "We, the members of Muslim American Society New York and Muslim New Yorkers stand in solidarity with the protesters of Occupy Wall Street on grounds of free speech, right to assemble and justice for all," the advertisement for the event said.
Hatem Bazian, the chairman of the anti-Israel organization American Muslims for Palestine, led a prayer service and delivered a speech late last month as part of Occupy Oakland. Bazian spoke about the amount of money the United States spends on the military, calling the United States "a deaf economy," and stating "We are the number one producers of weapons of mass destruction."
"Allah and his messenger are at war with those who exploit people through usury," CAIR-Michigan Executive Director Dawud Walid said Oct. 21 during a "Sermon about Occupy Wall St Movement & the death of Qadhafi" at a Michigan mosque. "And the world is hungry for this message. The financial and the housing crisis would not be what it is in America I believe, and even some non-Muslim economist wrote if the American financial system was working according to the Islamic banking system. This is a fact," he added.
Walid drew help from the Occupy Detroit movement to hold "Crusades Against Hate" on Nov. 11, which was intended to counter a prayer event being held that same day by an organization that CAIR regards as anti-Muslim.
Other groups have capitalized on the OWS movement to promote anti-Israel messages.
In addition to the Boston sit-in, protesters in Chicago repeated anti-Israel statements made on a megaphone by an Occupy Chicago leader: "The city of Chicago is guilty of supporting the Israelis." The speaker also announced two upcoming demonstrations to protest the "Israeli occupation of the Palestinian land."
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an anti-Israel organization on college campuses across the country, joined an OWS protest last month during its 2011 conference, "Students Confronting Apartheid," at Columbia University.
Approximately 30 SJP students participating in the conference joined protesters at Wall Street, chanting "Occupy Wall Street, Palestine Must Be Free," while carrying Palestinian flags.
Since its inception, SJP chapters have campaigned for divestment from companies that work with Israel, which SJP categorizes as an apartheid state, and accuses of ethnic cleansing.
This month, activists from Adalah-NY, a radical group that organizes protests against Israeli artists and products, went to Zuccotti Park to read a statement advocating boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
"Our aspirations overlap; our struggles converge," the statement said. "Our oppressors, whether greedy corporations or military occupations, are united in profiting from wars, pillage, environmental destruction, repression and impoverishment … Palestinians, too, are part of the 99% around the world that suffer at the hands of the 1% whose greed and ruthless quest for hegemony have led to unspeakable suffering and endless war."
OWS protests also have served as a platform for individuals to make anti-Semitic statements.
"I think that the Zionist Jews, who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve, which is not run by the federal government... they need to be run out of this country," an OWS protester in Los Angeles said.
The Emergency Committee for Israel released a video featuring anti-Semitic speech and signs at OWS protests. Signs include statements such as "Hitler's Bankers – Wall St.," and "Google: 1) Wall St. Jews 2) Jewish Billionaires 3) Jews & Fed Rsrv Bank." The video also calls on viewers to contact elected officials to take action against the hate speech.
The anti-Israel agenda associated with the OWS movement led "many Jewish supporters of OWS who do not identify as anti-Zionist" to believe "that they could no longer be associated with the movement," Daniel Sieradski, a Jewish OWS supporter said in an interview earlier this month. "Worse yet, there have been attempts to push Zionists out of the movement by claiming their support for Israel's mere existence is fundamentally racist and as such, they should not be part of any serious social justice movement."
One OWS protest organized by Existence is Resistance worsened the movement's "external impression of being pro-terror," Sieradski said. Existence is Resistance (E.I.R.) is a grassroots organization that promotes "non-violent resistance through cultural arts." E.I.R. hosted a "Kuffeya Day" at New York's Liberty Plaza late last month "in support of Palestinian prisoners, most significantly Majd Ziada." The photo featured alongside the event announcement is a picture of Leila Khaled, a member of the U.S. designated terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. During the event a man claiming to be from Afghanistan gave an anti-Semitic tirade, saying that "Yehudi" means "hateful thing." (Yehudi means "Jew" in Arabic).
It's a "Jewish idea to kill Muslims," he added, and that America and Israel are trying to kill Muslims.
Demonstrations like the above have nothing to do with OWS's frustrations with U.S. economic policies. But they show how Islamist groups are using the economic-driven movement to engender hostility toward Israel, and in some cases, toward Jews in general.
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http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-fundraiser-and-ambassador-blames-israel-anti-semitism_610946.html
Obama Fundraiser and Ambassador Blames Israel for Anti-Semitism
1:22 PM, Dec 3, 2011 • By DANIEL HALPER
The U.S. ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, recently told a conference hosted by the European Jewish Union that Israel is to blame for growing anti-Semitism harbored by people of Muslim faith.
Ambassador Howard Gutman
“A distinction should be made between traditional anti-Semitism, which should be condemned and Muslim hatred for Jews, which stems from the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians,” Gutman reportedly said, according to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. “He also argued that an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty will significantly diminish Muslim anti-Semitism.”
According to the account in the Israeli paper, “The legal experts at the event were visibly stunned by Gutman’s words, and the next speaker offered a scathing rebuttal to the envoy’s remarks.”
Gutman was a major fundraiser for President Obama’s 2008 election campaign. He bundled $500,000 for Obama, according to OpenSecrets.org, personally giving at least $2,300 to the campaign.
In 2009, Obama nominated Gutman, a Washington, D.C. attorney, to be ambassador to Belgium.
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Media Mum? Jesse Jackson Tells of 'Non-Christian' Merchants Singing 'What a Friend We Have in Jesus'
By Mike Bates | December 04, 2011 | 18:52
On yesterday's Rainbow PUSH Saturday Morning Forum, broadcast nationally on the Word Network, Jesse Jackson spoke of Christmas. The activist, 1984 and 1988 Democratic presidential candidate, and former Clinton spiritual adviser told (video here) of "non-Christian" merchants who "use Jesus to lure you in to Santa Claus's birthday party." Here's what he said:
This (Christmas) is a holy day for the poor, not a holiday for the merchants. I once heard some people that I know say that when Christmas Eve is over, they have midnight services in the back of their shops. These were non-Christian people I was, they say we, say every December 24th around midnight we have, we close our shops and we're not Christian but we start singing "What a Friend We Have in Jesus." We use Jesus to lure you into Santa Claus's birthday party and unless you have the holiday spirit, which is his songs, his wine, and his stuff you're not welcome at the party of the man whose party it is. This is, Christmas should be a poor people's holy day.
He then went on to say that Jesus was "born under the cloud of who is his Daddy?"
If Pat Robertson or any other former GOP presidential candidate had said something along these lines, you can bet it would have received considerable press coverage. But this is Jesse Jackson, self-styled spokesman for the downtrodden and Leftist hero. So he gets a pass from the mainstream media.
Christmas had been of particular interest to Jackson for many years. In 1969, he announced his second "Black Christmas" boycott of white merchants. According to the Chicago Tribune at the time, Jackson claimed his initiative would include "a parade and the appearance in Negro areas, hospitals, and jails of 'Soul Saint,' a black Santa Claus."
In their 1985 book "Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Race," authors Thomas Landess and Richard Quinn write of the Soul Saint "who, according to Jackson, came from the South Pole rather than the North Pole and lingered along the equator sufficiently to take up wearing a dashiki of black, with yellow, red and green trimmings — the colors of the flag of Ghana. Henceforth, the Soul Saint would preside over the season of Christmas, a black figure whose gifts were not toys or sugar plums but 'love, justice, peace, and power.'"
Who wants an iPhone as a gift when you can have love, justice, peace, and power instead? Plus, you don't have to give your money to those non-Christian merchants who close their shops at midnight on Christmas Eve after a rough season of using Jesus to lure you into Santa Claus's birthday party. Sounds like a win-win for the Rev. But don't expect to see a story about it on network or cable news anytime soon.
Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mike-bates/2011/12/04/jesse-jackson-tells-non-christian-merchants-singing-what-friend-we-have-
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The argument made by Baraq's ambassador to Belgium can be pithily undone simply by pointing to what is happening to Christians in Egypt, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Muslim world.
In conversation with people who have inhaled the pravda meme about Israel being equally at fault etc. I have found this to be an effective point for persuasion.
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""non-Christian" merchants who "use Jesus to lure you in to Santa Claus's birthday party."
GM, JJ was of course referring to Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist "merchants".
I mean - not Jews -
I offer the challenge again. If anyone has heard any prominent Black say anything really protective or good in general about the Jews please let me know. Of course all Balcks are not anti semites. I am talking about the ones we see in the media for years. The Jacksons, Sharptons, Waters, and the other well publicized "civil rights" leaders.
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http://www.chequerboard.org/2011/12/national-public-radio-falls-down-on-the-job/
National Public Radio Falls Down On the Job
by Pejman Yousefzadeh on December 6, 2011
I sent the following e-mail to NPR today; the only changes that I have made to it for the purposes of this post is to embed links in the text:
As a monthly donor to my local NPR station (WBEZ), as a Jew, and as a human being, I was outraged when during the course of his interview with Robert Siegel, Kalle Lasn, one of the organizers behind the Occupy movement, cheerfully admitted to having conducted something of a one-man census to see how many members of the neoconservative movement are Jewish. I was even more outraged when Robert Siegel refused to challenge Lasn by asking how and why any attempt to quantify the number of Jews in the neoconservative movement is a legitimate exercise.
For the record, Lasn’s attempt to quantify “the Jewishness of the necons” (his words) occurred way back in 2004, and his tract was titled “Why won’t anyone say they are Jewish?” A better question is “Who cares whether or not they are?” Neoconservative arguments, taken individually or as a whole, are either right or wrong. The “Jewishness”–or lack thereof–of the people making those arguments should make no difference whatsoever in any discussion concerning neoconservative thought, and to most people, it indeed makes no difference whatsoever. It only matters to anti-Semites like Lasn, who think that by counting the number of Jews allegedly in influential positions, he will uncover the secrets to the workings of the universe. In his tract, Lasn also sought to slime and smear his targets by saying that they “do not distinguish enough between American and Israeli interests.” This dual-loyalty canard is a common anti-Semitic accusation, and it should have been called out for the vile and revolting piece of rhetorical garbage that it was, and is.
Alas, Robert Siegel made only passing reference to Lasn’s disgusting and despicable bigoted views, and did nothing whatsoever to take Lasn to task for them. I accept that in order to keep our First Amendment vibrant, we must at times tolerate the airing of speech that should and does sicken those with more enlightened sensibilities. But the same First Amendment that gives anti-Semites like Lasn the right to broadcast his nonsensical and offensive statements gives Siegel the right to challenge those statements with better, smarter speech. Too bad that Siegel proved himself entirely incapable of taking Lasn on by providing the better speech that listeners like me hoped he would respond with, and striking a blow against one of the oldest forms of bigotry around.
I will only add that since it seemed to be perfectly fair to detractors of the Tea Party to judge the movement by the actions of a few dimwits at rallies, and the presence of a few offensive signs, it should also be perfectly fair to judge the Occupy movement by one of its chief gurus; and the noxious ideas he embraces. Sauce for the goose, and all that.
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I can't say I am offended in the same vein. I have noted how many Jews are involved in the political and social and economic and cultural liberalism over the years. As well as the journolist.
I would say the ratio of Jews who are liberal vs "neo" cons (whatever exactly that means) is probably on the order of ten to one.
Pointing out the obvious is not bigoted. It is truth.
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Yes, tis true, but I sense here that the purpose of pointing it out is to make the divided loyalities aspersion, one which is not often made with regard to Chinese-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Puerto Rican-Americans, Mexican-Americans, etc.
A consistent standard in these things would be a good thing. An inconsistent standard poses ugly questions.
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I agree fully with Crafty's last statement. Btw - I'm speaking as a Christian. I'm interested in forum members' opinions regarding my next post here.
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Important information regarding Ron Paul, written by a former staffer. I'm curious to know what others here think about whether there is in fact a meaningful distinction between "Anti-Zionist" or "Anti-Israel" and "Anti-Jew." I'm not certain that such a distinction exists in any meaningful form:
Statement from fmr. Ron Paul staffer on Newsletters, Anti-Semitism
Written By : Eric Dondero
Fmr. Senior Aide, US Cong. Ron Paul, 1997 – 2003
Campaign Coordinator, Ron Paul for Congress, 1995/96
National Organizer, Draft Ron Paul for President, 1991/92
Travel Aide/Personal Asst. Ron Paul, Libertarian for President
1987/88
I have been asked by various media the last few days for my comments, view of the current situation regarding my former boss Ron Paul, as he runs for the presidency on the Republican ticket.
I’ve noticed in some media that my words have been twisted and used for an agenda from both sides. And I wish to set the record straight with media that I trust and know will get the story right: conservative/libertarian-conservative bloggers.
Is Ron Paul a “racist.” In short, No. I worked for the man for 12 years, pretty consistently. I never heard a racist word expressed towards Blacks or Jews come out of his mouth. Not once. And understand, I was his close personal assistant. It’s safe to say that I was with him on the campaign trail more than any other individual, whether it be traveling to Fairbanks, Alaska or Boston, Massachusetts in the presidential race, or across the congressional district to San Antonio or Corpus Christi, Texas.
He has frequently hired blacks for his office staff, starting as early as 1988 for the Libertarian campaign. He has also hired many Hispanics, including his current District staffer Dianna Gilbert-Kile.
One caveat: He is what I would describe as “out of touch,” with both Hispanic and Black culture. Ron is far from being the hippest guy around. He is completely clueless when it comes to Hispanic and Black culture, particularly Mexican-American culture. And he is most certainly intolerant of Spanish and those who speak strictly Spanish in his presence, (as are a number of Americans, nothing out of the ordinary here.)
Is Ron Paul an Anti-Semite? Absolutely No. As a Jew, (half on my mother’s side), I can categorically say that I never heard anything out of his mouth, in hundreds of speeches I listened too over the years, or in my personal presence that could be called, “Anti-Semite.” No slurs. No derogatory remarks.
He is however, most certainly Anti-Israel, and Anti-Israeli in general. He wishes the Israeli state did not exist at all. He expressed this to me numerous times in our private conversations. His view is that Israel is more trouble than it is worth, specifically to the America taxpayer. He sides with the Palestinians, and supports their calls for the abolishment of the Jewish state, and the return of Israel, all of it, to the Arabs.
Again, American Jews, Ron Paul has no problem with. In fact, there were a few Jews in our congressional district, and Ron befriended them with the specific intent of winning their support for our campaign. (One synagogue in Victoria, and tiny one in Wharton headed by a well-known Jewish lawyer).
On the incident that’s being talked about in some blog media about the campaign manager directing me to a press conference of our opponent Lefty Morris in Victoria to push back on Anti-Jewish charges from the Morris campaign, yes, that did happen. The Victoria Advocate described the press conference very accurately. Yes, I was asked (not forced), to attend the conference dressed in a Jewish yarlmuke, and other Jewish adornments.
There was another incident when Ron finally agreed to a meeting with Houston Jewish Young Republicans at the Freeport office. He berated them, and even shouted at one point, over their un-flinching support for Israel. So, much so, that the 6 of them walked out of the office. I was left chasing them down the hallway apologizing for my boss.
Is Ron Paul a homo-phobe? Well, yes and no. He is not all bigoted towards homosexuals. He supports their rights to do whatever they please in their private lives. He is however, personally uncomfortable around homosexuals, no different from a lot of older folks of his era.
There were two incidents that I will cite, for the record. One that involved me directly, and another that involved another congressional staffer or two.
(I am revealing this for the very first time, and I’m sure Jim Peron will be quite surprised to learn this.)
In 1988, Ron had a hardcore Libertarian supporter, Jim Peron, Owner of Laissez Faire Books in San Francisco. Jim set up a magnificent 3-day campaign swing for us in the SF Bay Area. Jim was what you would call very openly Gay. But Ron thought the world of him. For 3 days we had a great time trouncing from one campaign event to another with Jim’s Gay lover. The atmosphere was simply jovial between the four of us. (As an aside we also met former Cong. Pete McCloskey during this campaign trip.) We used Jim’s home/office as a “base.” Ron pulled me aside the first time we went there, and specifically instructed me to find an excuse to excuse him to a local fast food restaurant so that he could use the bathroom. He told me very clearly, that although he liked Jim, he did not wish to use his bathroom facilities. I chided him a bit, but he sternly reacted, as he often did to me, Eric, just do what I say. Perhaps “sternly” is an understatement. Ron looked at me directly, and with a very angry look in his eye, and shouted under his breath: “Just do what I say NOW.”
The second incident involved one or two other staffers many years later at the BBQ in Surfside Beach. I was not in direct presence of the incident. But another top staffer, and I believe one of our secretaries, was witnessed to it. This top staffer adores Ron, but was extremely insulted by his behavior, I would even say flabbergasted to the point of considering resigning from his staff over it.
“Bobby,” a well-known and rather flamboyant and well-liked gay man in Freeport came to the BBQ. Let me stress Ron likes Bobby personally, and Bobby was a hardcore campaign supporter. But after his speech, at the Surfside pavilion Bobby came up to Ron with his hand extended, and according to my fellow staffer, Ron literally swatted his hand away.
Again, let me stress. I would not categorize that as “homo-phobic,” but rather just unsettled by being around gays personally. Ron, like many folks his age, very much supports toleration, but chooses not to be around gays on a personal level. It’s a personal choice. And though, it may seem offensive to some, he has every right in my mind to feel and act that way.
Finally, let me make a couple observations. The liberal media is ferociously attacking Ron this morning, on everything from the Newsletters to his various PACs. I’m amused at how off-base they all are. If they are looking for something that went un-explained after many years, it’s the Nadia Hayes incident from the end of the presidential campaign in 1988. I personally am still a little ticked off by this, and surprised that nobody has ever followed up on it. In brief, Nadia was Ron’s longtime business/campaign manager in the 1980s. On the very last day of the presidential campaign, attorneys, accountants, and even Nassau Bay police dept. investigation officials stormed into our campaign office, sealed everything off, rushed us campaign staffers into the storeroom (literally), and for hours on end ruffled through the entire campaign records, file cabinets, and other papers.
Lew Rockwell and Burton Blumert were there too. We were greatly surprised by this. Nadia was eventually convicted of embezzlement and went to jail for 6 months, plus had to pay $140,000 in restitution to Ron.
There were rumors at the time, and long thereafter, that Lew and Burt had pinned it all on Nadia, and that they had their own reasons for the “coup.” For years afterwards, Rockwell, and Blumert had complete control of Ron’s enterprises through Jean McIver and (former JBS/Jesse Helms fundraiser) David “James” Mertz of northern Virginia.
It was easy to pin it all on Nadia. She lived extravagantly, and her husband who owned a boat repair business in Clear Lake, had recently had some serious financial problems.
Nadia never resurfaced, and was never heard from again.
I will attest, that when campaign consultant Tony Payton died of heart failure, in 2002 I believe, I specifically asked Ron if I could look Nadia up, and contact her to let her know that her longtime friend had died, and he reacted sternly to me, expressing that he did not want me to do that, and if I did, there would be serious consequences. I was shocked. And this was one of the reasons I eventually left his staff.
On one other matter, I’d like to express in the strongest terms possible, that the liberal media are focusing in on entirely the wrong aspects regarding controversies on Ron Paul.
It’s his foreign policy that’s the problem; not so much some stupid and whacky things on race and gays he may have said or written in the past.
Ron Paul is most assuredly an isolationist. He denies this charge vociferously. But I can tell you straight out, I had countless arguments/discussions with him over his personal views. For example, he strenuously does not believe the United States had any business getting involved in fighting Hitler in WWII. He expressed to me countless times, that “saving the Jews,” was absolutely none of our business. When pressed, he often times brings up conspiracy theories like FDR knew about the attacks of Pearl Harbor weeks before hand, or that WWII was just “blowback,” for Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy errors, and such.
I would challenge him, like for example, what about the instances of German U-boats attacking U.S. ships, or even landing on the coast of North Carolina or Long Island, NY. He’d finally concede that that and only that was reason enough to counter-attack against the Nazis, not any humanitarian causes like preventing the Holocaust.
There is much more information I could give you on the sheer lunacy of his foreign policy views. Let me just concentrate on one in specific. And I will state this with absolute certainty:
Ron Paul was opposed to the War in Afghanistan, and to any military reaction to the attacks of 9/11.
He did not want to vote for the resolution. He immediately stated to us staffers, me in particular, that Bush/Cheney were going to use the attacks as a precursor for “invading” Iraq. He engaged in conspiracy theories including perhaps the attacks were coordinated with the CIA, and that the Bush administration might have known about the attacks ahead of time. He expressed no sympathies whatsoever for those who died on 9/11, and pretty much forbade us staffers from engaging in any sort of memorial expressions, or openly asserting pro-military statements in support of the Bush administration.
On the eve of the vote, Ron Paul was still telling us staffers that he was planning to vote “No,” on the resolution, and to be prepared for a seriously negative reaction in the District. Jackie Gloor and I, along with quiet nods of agreement from the other staffers in the District, declared our intentions to Tom Lizardo, our Chief of Staff, and to each other, that if Ron voted No, we would immediately resign.
Ron was “under the spell” of left-anarchist and Lew Rockwell associate Joe Becker at the time, who was our legislative director. Norm Singleton, another Lew Rockwell fanatic agreed with Joe. All other staffers were against Ron, Joe and Norm on this, including Lizardo. At the very last minute Ron switched his stance and voted “Yay,” much to the great relief of Jackie and I. He never explained why, but I strongly suspected that he realized it would have been political suicide; that staunchly conservative Victoria would revolt, and the Republicans there would ensure that he would not receive the nomination for the seat in 2002. Also, as much as I like to think that it was my yelling and screaming at Ron, that I would publicly resign if he voted “No,” I suspect it had a lot more to do with Jackie’s threat, for she WAS Victoria. And if Jackie bolted, all of the Victoria conservatives would immediately turn on Ron, and it wouldn’t be pretty.
If you take anything from this lengthy statement, I would hope that it is this final story about the Afghanistan vote, that the liberal media chooses to completely ignore, because it doesn’t fit their template, is what you will report.
If Ron Paul should be slammed for anything, it’s not some silly remarks he’s made in the past in his Newsletters. It’s over his simply outrageously horrendous views on foreign policy, Israel, and national security for the United States. His near No vote on Afghanistan. That is the big scandal. And that is what should be given 100 times more attention from the liberal media, than this Newsletter deal.
Eric Dondero, Publisher
LibertarianRepublican.net
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"[Jews] have in them deep-rooted instincts that are antagonistic and therefore repulsive to the European, and their presence among us is a living example of the insurmountable difficulties that exist in merging race characteristics, in making cats love dogs …"
"It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and brains."
http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/pi/article/viewFile/1591/1117
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This comes to me without citation:
==============================
A great many Jews know the story of how the Danes rescued 8,000 Jews from the Nazi's by smuggling them to Sweden in fishing boats.
Very few Jews, know the story of how all 50,000 Bulgarian Jews were saved. Not a single Bulgarian Jew was deported to the death camps, due to the heroism of many Bulgarians of every walk of life, up to and including the King and the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.
In 1999, Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the Anti Defamation League flew with a delegation to Sophia to meet the Bulgarian Prime Minister. He gave the Prime Minister the first Bulgarian language copy of a remarkable book, "Beyond Hitler's Grasp," written in 1998, by Michael Bar Oar, a professor at Emory University . (A Bulgarian Jew who had migrated to Israel and then to the USA ).
This book documents the rescue effort in detail. The ADL paid for and shipped 30,000 copies to Bulgaria , so that the population could partake in the joy of learning about this heroic facet of their history.
This story is clearly the last great secret of the Holocaust era. The story was buried by the Bulgarian Communists, until their downfall in 1991. All records were sealed, since they didn't wish to glorify the King, or the Church, or the non Communist parliamentarians, who at great personal risk, stood up to the Germans. And the Bulgarian Jewish Community, 45,000 of whom went to Israel after the War, were busy building new lives, and somehow the story remained untold.
Bulgaria is a small country and at the outset of the War they had 8 million people. They aligned themselves with the Nazi's in hopes of recapturing Macedonia from Yugoslavia and Thrace from Greece . Both provinces were stripped from them, after W.W.I. In late 1942 the Jews of Selonica were shipped north through Bulgaria , on the way to the death camps, in sealed box cars. The news of this inhumanity was a hot topic of conversation. Then, at the beginning of 1943, the pro Nazi Bulgarian government was informed that all 50,000 Bulgarian Jews would be deported in March. The Jews had been made to wear yellow stars and were highly visible.
As the date for the deportation got closer, the agitation got greater. Forty-three ruling party members of Parliament walked out in protest. Newspapers denounced what was about to happen. In addition, the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Archbishop Krill, threatened to lie down on the railroad tracks. Finally, King Boris III forbade the deportation. Since Bulgaria was an ally of Germany , and the Germans were stretched militarily, they had to wrestle with the problem of how much pressure they could afford to apply. They decided to pass.
Several points are noteworthy. The Bulgarian Jews were relatively unreligious and did not stand apart from the local populace by virtue of garb, or rites. They were relatively poor by comparison to Jews in other countries, and they lived in integrated neighbor-hoods. Additionally, the Bulgarians had many minorities, Armenians, Turks, Greeks, and Gypsies, in addition to Jews.
There was no concept of racism in that culture. The bottom line here is that Bulgarians saw Bulgarian-Jews as Bulgarians, and not as Jews. And, being a small country, like Denmark , where there was a closeness of community that is often missing in larger countries. So, here was a bright spot that we can point to as example of what should have been.
The most famous of those saved was a young graduate of the Bulgarian Military Academy . When he arrived in Israel , he changed his name to Moshe Dayan.....
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great story - thanks.
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I'd just like to point out the lack of global outrage at the horrors in Syria.
Ah, if only the joooooOOOOooooooos could be blamed, then there would be endless protests.
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Bill Gates (about as Goyish as anybody can be) advertised for a new chairman
of Microsoft Europe. 5,000 candidates show up at the job screening. They are
assembled in a large room. Among them is Maurice Cohen, a French Jew, a
small, bearded, speckled man.
Bill Gates thanks the candidates for coming but asks all those who are not
familiar with the JAVA programming language to leave; 2,000 people rise and
leave the room.
Maurice Cohen says to himself, "I do not know this language but what have I
got to lose if I stay? I'll give it a try".
Bill Gates then asks all those who have no experience of managing teams of
more than 100 people to leave. Another 2,000 people go.
Maurice Cohen says to himself, "I have never managed anybody but myself but
what have I got to lose if I stay? What can happen to me?"
Then Bill Gates asks all candidates who do not have outstanding academic
qualifications to rise and leave; 500 people remove themselves.
Maurice Cohen says to himself, "I left school at 15 but what have I got to
lose if I stay? So he stays in the room.
Lastly, Bill Gates asks all of the candidates who do not speak the
Serbo-Croat language to rise and leave; 498 people rise and leave the room.
Maurice Cohen says himself, "I do not speak Serbo-Croat but what the hell!
Have I got anything to lose?" He finds himself alone with one other
candidate.
Everyone else has gone. Bill Gates joins them and says: "Apparently you are
the only two candidates who know JAVA, have managed large teams of
employees, have advanced PhD degrees, and who can speak Serbo-Croatian. I'd
like to hear you converse with one another in Serbo-Croatian."
Calmly Maurice turns to the other candidate and says to him: "Baruch ata
Adonai."
The other candidate answers: "Elohénu melech ha'olam
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My father and my wife’s mother both turn 90. Not that unusual in the twenty first century when miracle drugs and modern hygiene contribute remarkably to longevity. But remarkable, nevertheless, in this instance. Both are holocaust survivors.
My father was a teenager when the Nazis murdered his parents in front of his eyes. He lost his two brothers and three sisters in the horrors of the death camps. Miraculously escaping the camp by smuggling guns in, he spent the rest of his teenage years fighting Nazis as a partisan in the forests of Poland. There he befriended a young man in the Polish resistance who was destined to become Pope John Paul II.
Continue Reading-- http://www.spiritgrowjosefkrysscenter.org/blog/laibls/never-again
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For future reference, pasting GM's post on European Matters thread here as well.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/03/23/a-jew-free-europe/
A Jew-Free Europe
The specter of A Jew-Free Europe has been raised again in this chilling post-Toulouse oped by Giulio Meotti:
A new exodus from the Diaspora could now take place. In the past few years, the number of French Jews immigrating to Israel has doubled. Hundreds of French Jews have bought apartments in Israel. It’s their “pied-a-terre” in case the situation gets darker in Europe.
According to the statistics available, due to aliyah and assimilation, French Jewry is projected to experience a dramatic decline from 520,000 in 2000, to 480,000 in 2020, to 380,000 in 2050, and to 300,000 by 2080. The Jewish population in the United Kingdom will also decline to 240,000 in 2020, 180,000 in 2050, and 140,000 in 2080.
Why the rise European anti-Semitism after the Holocaust? Meotti continues:
To quote psychiatrist Zvi Rex: “Europe will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” Europe doesn’t want to live under the psychological burden of Auschwitz forever. The Jews are living reminders of the moral failure of Europe. This leads to the projection of guilt on Israel and the remaining European Jews.
No question.
[I wonder how Peter Beinart feels about that?-ed. He doesn't.]
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http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2012/04/04/the-l-a-times-should-release-the-khalidi-tape-for-passover/?singlepage=true
The L.A. Times Should Release the Khalidi Tape for Passover
April 4, 2012 - 11:07 pm - by Roger L Simon
Passover 2012, which starts at sunset Friday, will not be a particularly auspicious one for the Jewish people.
Despite being superficially strong in many ways, Israel — the sole Jewish state — and Jews in general face more determined opposition than they have at any time since World War II. From terrorists in the South of France to professors at Boston’s Northeastern University, anti-Semitism is rife. Meanwhile, Iran, which repeatedly calls for the extermination of Israel, draws ever closer to nuclear weapons capability. And the once vaunted “Arab Spring” has turned into the darkest of winters with Egypt morphing into its own Sunni version of a Khomeinist Islamist autocracy with women in veils, Christians attacked, homosexuals jailed, and the peace treaty forged at Camp David fragile as a potato chip.
But have no fear. Our president “has Israel’s back.” Or so he says.
Others, of course, feel differently. Mindful of his odd behavior beginning when he was a candidate and promised to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem but took it back the next day, to his disrespect (both public and private) for Israel’s prime minister, preferring, as he does, Turkey’s quasi-Islamist leader, to the curious fact that virtually the only country in the Middle East (other than war-torn Syria) that this peripatetic president has yet to visit is Israel, one could easily be skeptical of Obama’s sympathy for the Jewish state.
At this moment, he and his minions seem to be doing their level best to rein in Israel vis-à-vis Iran, making sure Netanyahu & Co. dare not act for their own self-preservation without the approval of their powerful U.S. ally, an approval that is unlikely to be forthcoming – the most recent example being the leak of a possible Israeli military alliance with Azerbaijan.
So it’s hard not to see Obama as, to be polite, ambivalent toward the Jewish state; to be impolite, one could call his attitude passive-aggressive, with all the semi-conscious hostile intent that diagnosis implies.
And, to continue in that vein, plenty of clinical evidence exists, several old friendships, that would lead one to think Obama might be, again consciously or unconsciously, deeply antagonistic to Israel, because these old friends had attitudes toward Zionism as adverse as the appalling Holocaust–denying professoriate at Northeastern.
Which leads me to the Los Angeles Times and the Khalidi tapes.
I wrote in April 2010:
Rashid Khalidi — a Palestinian-American historian known for his strong pro-Palestinian opinions — is currently the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia and director of that university’s Middle East Institute. After Khalidi received this Columbia appointment in 2003, a farewell dinner party was held in his honor in Chicago. A videotape was made of that party where many good things were said about the Palestinian cause and many bad things about Israel. Then Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama was in attendance, as were, some say, William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.
That tape was given at some point by an unknown person to Peter Wallsten of the Los Angeles Times. Wallsten then reported on some of its contents in a brief LAT article of April 10, 2008 titled “Allies of Palestinians see a friend in Obama.”
Perhaps because it was so attenuated, that article engendered a cry for the release of the full tape. What really happened at the party? What was said? How did Obama react? People wanted to know more details of the Middle East views of the presidential candidate. But the LAT was effectively mum and sequestered the tape in its safe.
In response to a charge of suppression of information by the McCain campaign, the paper’s editor Russ Stanton said:
“The Los Angeles Times did not publish the videotape because it was provided to us by a confidential source who did so on the condition that we not release it. The Times keeps its promises to sources.”
Was this an oral promise made by the paper or by the reporter? Or was there a written agreement, as would be more proper and normal in such circumstances? The Times has not told us, nor have they produced a written agreement of any sort, even without the source’s name. We don’t know either whether a transcription is proscribed.
They have told us almost nothing. We have to take this all on faith, just as we do this risible comment by the paper’s “readers’ representative”Jamie Gold, quoted in the same article with Stanton:
“More than six months ago the Los Angeles Times published a detailed account of the events shown on the videotape. The Times is not suppressing anything. Just the opposite — the L.A. Times brought the matter to light.”
Detailed? Brought the matter to light? I am tempted to use the tired Internet acronym ROFLOL. But let’s examine Wellsten’s original article instead. It begins:
It was a celebration of Palestinian culture — a night of music, dancing and a dash of politics. Local Arab Americans were bidding farewell to Rashid Khalidi, an internationally known scholar, critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights, who was leaving town for a job in New York.
A special tribute came from Khalidi’s friend and frequent dinner companion, the young state Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking to the crowd, Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi’s wife, Mona, and conversations that had challenged his thinking.
His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation — a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,” but around “this entire world.”
And? Well, that’s about it. Wellsten doesn’t tell us much more from the videotape or the party other than:
a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, “then you will never see a day of peace.”
One speaker likened “Zionist settlers on the West Bank” to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been “blinded by ideology.”
That’s it. No word of the details of how Obama reacted or what he really said, other than the short quote above.
Interestingly, that sole Obama remark, as reported by Wallsten, contains an ellipsis in the middle. After the then-state senator says the Khalidis had given him “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases” comes a strategically placed dot-dot-dot. We don’t know what those blind spots and biases were and what he might have thought of them. Or how he might have changed. That, in Wallsten’s or some Times editors’ judgment, was best left on the tape.
So what are we to think? We have an administration that not only ascribes most of the Middle East blame to Israel, but also has banned “Islamism” and all related words, even “Islam” and “jihad,” from our national security documents. They’re completely gone. Indeed, even the Fort Hood massacre, so clearly inspired by Islamic extremism, has now been shifted into the comfortable category of the lone, angry killer.
That was what I wrote roughly two years ago. I also wrote a polite request for the Los Angeles Times to release the tape in the public interest. Not surprisingly, there was no reply, public or private, although I have written for the paper on several occasions (full disclosure: not recently).
Meanwhile, Passovers have come and gone and Barack Obama is running for a second term, making the usual play for the usually reliable Jewish vote, courting AIPAC and so forth, telling people what they want to hear.
But is that what he really thinks and how he will act in the moments of crisis almost certainly ahead?
Because of Iran, the relationship between the U.S. and Israel is more than ever a life or death matter – and a lynch pin in the global struggle for Western civilization.
Is too much to ask the Los Angeles Times – the hometown paper of the city with the fourth largest Jewish population in the word – bigger even than Jerusalem – finally release the Khalidi tapes for Passover 2012?
I am skeptical that they would have the courage but I will force myself to remain hopeful.
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http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/senate-races/220295-connecticut-dem-lobs-insults-in-senate-debate
Murphy called 'whore' in Dem debate
By Josh Lederman - 04/06/12 10:07 AM ET
Rep. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) was called a "whore" by a primary opponent during Thursday night's debate for Connecticut's open Senate seat.
Lee Whitnum, who is mounting her second bid for the Senate in Connecticut, blasted Murphy over his support for Israel, the New Haven Register reported.
“I’m dealing with a whore here who sells his soul to AIPAC, who will say anything for the job,” Whitnum said, referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Whitnum said anti-American sentiment worldwide could be cured if the federal government were to prosecute U.S. settlers who “go to Israel and maim or kill in the Promised Land.” She also called for the elimination of U.S. aid to Israel.
“The Jewish community has always taken care of its own,” she said.
In another exchange, Whitnum said another candidate, state Rep. William Tong (D), was “ignorant.”
This isn’t the first time Whitnum has raised eyebrows over her stance on Israel. She made her critique of AIPAC a centerpiece of her 2010 bid for former Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) seat, but lost in the primary to now-Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).
Whitnum has also written a book entitled “Anti-AIPAC Not Anti-Semitic: The Israel Lobby's Dangerous Control of Congress.”
Whitnum was not invited to the first Senate debate in March and sued unsuccessfully to be a part of it.
“I’d advocated for all the candidates to be a part of these debates, and I might think twice about that with that kind of awful language being used on the airwaves,” Murphy said after the second debate.
Murphy and former Connecticut Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz are the leading contenders in the Democratic primary for retiring Sen. Joe Lieberman’s (I-Conn.) seat. On the Republican side, wrestling mogul Linda McMahon and former Rep. Chris Shays (R-Conn.) are fighting for the GOP nomination.
The Hill rates this race as likely Democratic.
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http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/04/15/european-anti-semitism-its-not-just-france/
April 15, 2012
European Anti-Semitism: It’s Not Just France
It’s easy and comforting to dismiss the recent wave of anti-semitic hate crimes sweeping France as a continental outlier–an exception to the rule of European tolerance.
It’s also wrong.
Take Malmö, Sweden, for example, a city whose mayor has taken to blaming Jews for their own persecution:
The store window had been smashed many times before. The shoe-repair shop is located in one of the rougher parts of Malmö, Sweden, and the Jewish owner, a native of the city, had gotten used to this sort of vandalism. But in the spring of 2004, a group of immigrants just under the age of 15—too young to be prosecuted by Swedish law—walked into the store yelling about “damn Jews.” The owner was hit in the face by one of the boys. Yasha, an 85-year-old customer…was struck in the back of his head…“I left Poland to get away from anti-Semitism,” he later told the police. “But at least there I never experienced any violence. That only happened to me here, in Sweden.”
…But Malmö’s mayor of 17 years, Ilmar Reepalu, has “Tourettes syndrome with respect to Jews,” according to Kvällsposten, a Swedish newspaper… When a journalist from the Malmö daily Skånska Dagbladet asked him in January 2010 about growing anti-Semitism in his city, he replied, “We accept neither anti-Semitism nor Zionism in Malmö.” His reaction to the fact that Jews are leaving his city because of anti-Semitism was to maintain that “there have been no attacks against Jews, and if Jews want to leave for Israel that is not a concern for Malmö.” In an interview with Danish television in March 2010, he described criticism about his statements regarding Jews and Zionism as an attack orchestrated by “the Israeli lobby.”
Read the entire harrowing account in Tablet Magazine. The author skillfully illustrates the toxic mix that has infected Sweden–a combination of extremist Muslim anti-semitism, failed integration of young immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, and feckless elites who prefer to wring their hands over stoking potential Islamophobia rather than condemn and combat actual anti-Semitism.
In his Passover greeting, President Obama reminded the American people that “The story of the Exodus is thousands of years old, but it remains as relevant as ever. Throughout our history, there are those who have targeted the Jewish people for harm – a fact we were so painfully reminded of just a few weeks ago in Toulouse.” Obama is right to connect the persecution of the Jewish past to the persecution of its present. We must remain ever vigilant about the world’s oldest prejudice, lest history repeat itself.
If a gang of white American thugs attacked African-Americans, and defended their action on the ground that they were protesting Robert Mugabe’s seizure of white-owned farms in Zimbabwe, the world would laugh at their foolishness even as it condemned their bigotry. This isn’t quite how it works when goons around the world attack Jews and Jewish buildings and defend themselves by saying that they are angered by things the Israeli government has done. Efforts are made to ‘understand’ the perpetrators even as their actions are condemned. Somehow these events are seen as justifying, even requiring tough diplomatic measures against Israel — rather than demanding aggressive programs of civic education aimed at confronting the psychology of hate.
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I will be visiting Dachau this week :cry: :cry: :cry:
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I spent about four hours there today.
A very powerful experience, , , :cry: :cry: :cry:
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/04/more-anti-semitism-at-occupy-wall-street.php
Posted on April 20, 2012 by John Hinderaker in The sick left
More Anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street
Anti-Semitism is just one of many unsavory aspects of the Occupy Wall Street movement, but it helps to explain why mainstream Democrats have quietly dropped the “Occupy” crowd like a hot potato. We have documented several anti-Jewish incidents since the Occupy movement began; there was another one on the organization’s Facebook page yesterday, on Holocaust Remembrance Day. I am not sure how long this cartoon stayed up; long enough, anyway, to garner 54 “likes” at the time the screen shot was taken:
(http://1-ps.googleusercontent.com/h/www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2012/04/408x397xUntitled-1_wa.jpg.pagespeed.ic.xY72z8TBzb.jpg)
The cartoon makes no sense, of course–two organizations that Jews (here, Israelis, apparently) definitely don’t control are the U.N. and the Obama administration–but when did bigotry ever demand logic?
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"but it helps to explain why mainstream Democrats have quietly dropped the “Occupy” crowd like a hot potato"
I haven't heard this before. Why in the world Jewish Dems at least would not drop Obama the same way is beyond me.
But then again as noted multiple times their support of the Dem party is also based on warped logic.
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For centuries Poland was indeed tolerant of Jews. As in the rest of post WW1 Europe antisemitism grew but it still appears to have been less than in other countries druing WW2. So it appears disparaging memories of Poles from people who knew holocaust survivors that I heard growing up were anecdotal and not a fair representation of the population:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland
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"some did hold thumbs up watching Jews pass by on trains to death camps" - comment below
"For centuries Poland was indeed tolerant of Jews." - agree.
It was just movie but one thing I took from Schindler's List was that even people in the line were not fully aware of what was happening. The crime was so horrendous the victims couldn't comprehend it. Who knows what an outward sign of approval meant.
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Sorry, not buying it.
Who knew?
Mybe not the details of what the camps were, but pretty much everyone knew what the gist of things was. The Warsaw ghetto was known to all. Jews having to wear armbands was known to all. Mein Kampf was known to all. The vile propaganda was known to all-- and believed by most.
All this and much, much more was known to all.
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Okay, point taken.
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Thank you.
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Circumcision ban in Germany faces criticism
by Jared Yee | Jun 30, 2012 |
tags: circumcision, Germany
A state court decision in Cologne criminalising circumcision has sparked protest among Muslims and Jews for whom it is a religious duty. However, the state court in Cologne described circumcision as bodily injury, and therefore a violation of German law. At the heart of the debate is the child’s capacity to give informed consent to the procedure.
Holm Putzke, of Passau University, addressed circumcision in an academic journal in 2008. Putzke is not convinced by arguments that circumcision is "for the good of the child" because it symbolically gives the child access to a religious community. He suggests delaying circumcision until the man is old enough to decide for himself. Putzke describes the recent verdict as a "groundbreaking and courageous judgment".
Bijan Fateh-Moghadam, of Münster University, argues that childhood circumcision is a "relatively simple procedure with few risks and recognized medical advantages." He says, therefore, that parental permission does not, in this case, constitute an abuse of custody rights. Fateh-Moghadam says the Cologne verdict will not prevent Jewish and Muslim parents in Germany from circumcising their sons, though he thinks many will travel abroad or have the operation done in private. "I think the verdict could have a paradoxical effect - the level of protection for children will fall rather than rise," he warns. ~ Deutsche Welle, Jun 28
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Yasir Arafat Is Still Dead and We Know Who Really Did Him In
Posted By Barry Rubin On July 6, 2012
Yasir Arafat is still dead. True, he was once alive. I sat across from him in his Gaza office, for example. And he even had a copy of my history of the PLO on his bookshelf so he must have been of sound mind at the time. It’s not my fault. I told him to start jogging and cut down on sweets. But he didn’t listen. On November 4, 2004, he died, a fate he previously delivered to thousands of far more innocent people.
The effort now by various Palestinian factions to imply Israel killed him is the funniest thing in the Middle East since the U.S. director of national intelligence’s congressional briefing when he said the Muslim Brotherhood was a secular democratic organization. What’s dismaying is how much play Western media are giving this charge as if it should be taken seriously. When the West behaves in this way it signals at the least a dangerously naive credulousness and at worst a profound anti-Jewish and anti-Israel complex. The New York Times and Washington Post take this nonsense seriously.
But there’s something else in this story, something very chilling indeed. Revolutionary Islamists especially, but many Muslims otherwise, believe that Jews tried to murder Muhammad, the founder of Islam, and even if they failed that the poison shortened his life. The accusation that Jews are the murderer of prophets — with Muslims throwing in the founder of Christianity also — is a phrase that derives from this story. It is frequently heard from Hamas and others. This is a blood libel, an alleged crime that then leads to the view that Jews are absolutely evil and should be wiped out. In short, it is a rationale for genocide. When Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, and the Muslim Brotherhood say that Israel should be wiped off the map and Jews generally should be murdered that incitement is the inevitable consequence of this line of thinking.
That Western observers are unaware of all of this history — repeated daily in inciteful sermons found in Middle East mosques — is quite evident. Such a lack of knowledge leads them to believe that the conflicts they say are easily resolvable, quickly settled by more Israeli concessions or still continuing because of Israeli actions when the causes are much deeper and the solutions far more remote. Western societies today are obsessed with searching everywhere for racism and hate speech. Well, the idea that the Jews murdered Arafat (rather than that Arafat spent most of his career murdering Jews) falls into that category.
As for the specific claims in the Arafat case, they are easily disposed of:
First of all, anyone who saw Arafat during the last year of his life knew he was seriously ill and steadily worsening. His lips trembled, he looked disoriented, and he wasn’t as articulate as usual. Even on television you couldn’t possibly miss his distress. Parkinson’s disease was a likely diagnosis though Crohn’s disease was said to be another probable medical problem for the dictator.
His doctors obviously knew that he was in bad shape. But, and this is what’s most important, they didn’t do anything about it. The prospect of Arafat’s death was so traumatic for the movement — which had known no other leader during 43 years for Fatah, 36 years for the PLO, and its entire ten year life for the Palestinian Authority. By not taking serious action and giving him better treatment, the key to the mystery is this: His own doctors and movement killed Arafat. So if Israel killed Arafat then his own doctors and the entire PLO, Fatah, and PA leadership were in on the conspiracy. Indeed, Arafat himself, by not more actively seeking medical help or speaking about his problems was also in on the conspiracy. This is unlikely.
Second, the doctors were shut up and the report of his death was kept secret by Arafat’s widow Suha Arafat. Since his colleagues had access to a lot of this information they also kept quiet. In other words, we are supposed to believe that those in the world who most hated Israel had evidence that Israel had something to do with his death but they kept it secret?
Third, suddenly, almost eight years later Suha and other Arafat loyalists are making claims. But there is no new evidence whatsoever. Obviously, this is a publicity stunt. Let them release the huge medical report on his death. Let them permit the French doctors to have a press conference. Let them dig up Arafat. Until one of those things happens why should the Western media fall for this trick? So again, if there was the slightest suspicion that Arafat was being murdered, Arafat’s wife, doctors, and all of the Palestinian leadership were helping the conspiracy. This is also unlikely.
Fourth, the claims that Arafat was poisoned by Israel using some exotic radioactive means has been made from the day Arafat was planted but have always faded away, at least internationally, because no evidence was offered. Old fables are being treated like new revelations. Such claims of Zionist conspiracies are always promoted in order to slander and discredit Israel when just about anyone significant dies in the Arab world.
Fifth, if Arafat had been poisoned by radioactive substances his symptoms would have been extreme and evident. They include nausea, hair loss, throat swelling and paleness. Moreover, Arafat would have died really fast, but he lingered for a long time.
The history of this myth shows that it is the Palestinian leadership, not Israel, that has something to hide, that has kept everything secret. I suspect the secret is the incompetence of his own doctors.
So did Arafat die of AIDs? After my own serious research on this matter I could find no evidence for this assertion. And I know that both Israeli and U.S. intelligence had no evidence that Arafat was homosexual either on the basis of in-depth discussions over many years. Sources like Ahmad Jibril — a life-long enemy of Arafat — and other unreliable sources cited are not impressive. If there is evidence to the contrary I will certainly revise my view. But you should know that the Israeli government and intelligence position–privately as well as publicly–is that they have no evidence of Arafat being a homosexual or suffering from AIDs.
The rumor began with an article by Oriana Fallaci whose only evidence was that his bodyguards at the time were extremely handsome young men. (By the time I was seeing him in the 1990s that was certainly not true at all.)
Of course, Arafat was a weird person and in our biography, Arafat: A Political Biography, Judith Colp Rubin and myself explain his psychology and personality. One of my favorite Palestinian jokes about Arafat recounts that he is patting the head of a little girl and asks her, “Whose daughter are you?”
She answers, “Yours.” Arafat was considered by his countrymen to be so cold that he didn’t recognize his own begotten daughter. The story is almost plausible.
But I repeat: there is no reason to think Arafat was a homosexual or died of AIDs or poisoning. He was overweight, ate an unhealthy diet, worked long hours, didn’t take care of himself (he believed eating honey would keep him healthy), and had very bad doctors despite their local reputations.
So we know who killed Arafat: his doctors, entourage, movement, and of course his own body. Yet when I go to Yahoo what do I see but Arafat’s “mysterious” death as the lead story in the entire world, as if any accusation made against Israel must be true.
Note: Here’s a history of the Israel-killed-Arafat tale in Palestinian Media Watch. For more analysis of why the claims are absurd see here and here. Note: Here’s a history of the Israel-killed-Arafat tale in Palestinian Media Watch. For more analysis of why the claims are absurd see here and here. Here’s some more information about the Israeli decision to let Arafat go to Paris. One interesting point is that it implies the French doctors took some action which might have been correct but could also imply that they are at fault for Arafat’s turn for the worse, giving them a motive for not revealing details of his treatment.
Article printed from Rubin Reports: http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2012/07/06/yasir-arafat-is-still-dead-and-we-know-who-really-did-him-in/
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/world/europe/in-germany-ruling-over-circumcision-sows-anxiety-and-confusion.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120714
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Berlin to Protect Right to Ritual Circumcision
By VANESSA FUHRMANS
BERLIN—Germany's government pledged Friday to pass a law to protect the ritual circumcision of young boys, seeking to calm a fractious debate over the religious rights of the country's Jews and Muslims that has erupted since a German court ruled the practice amounted to illegal bodily harm.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief spokesman called such legislation "a matter of urgency" after a district court in Cologne ruled in late June that a child's "fundamental right to physical integrity" superseded his parents' rights to carry out a religious practice. Because a child could decide later whether to have the circumcision on his own, that religious freedom wouldn't be unreasonably impaired, the court ruled.
The ruling has since unleashed an outpouring of criticism from Jewish and Muslim groups at home and abroad. The backlash has landed with particular resonance in a country still sensitive to accusations of religious intolerance as a result of the atrocities Nazis committed against Jews during the Third Reich. At an emergency meeting of the Conference of European Rabbis in Berlin earlier this week, its president called the court decision the "worst attack on Jewish life since the Holocaust."
Were the ruling to set a precedent, "there would be no future for most of the Jewish community in Germany," said Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the body's president.
On Friday, the government sought to quell the uproar and move to clarify the legal uncertainty that the court decision has triggered. "For everyone in the government, it's completely clear: We want Jewish and Muslim religious life in Germany," said Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said. "Circumcisions carried out in a responsible manner must be possible in this country without punishment."
Germany is home to some four million Muslims, many of them originally from Turkey, as well as approximately 120,000 Jews, part of a community that has steadfastly rebuilt itself here since its near-obliteration during World War II. While Germany has sought to help re-establish its budding Jewish community and address its concerns, it has struggled, like many European countries, to integrate its swelling Muslim population.
The June 26 ruling stems from the case of a four-year-old Muslim boy who had been circumcised by a doctor at the behest of his parents. After complications developed and the boy was taken to the hospital, local prosecutors became aware of the case and took legal action against the doctor.
The lower court's ruling isn't binding on other jurisdictions, nor do legal experts anticipate it to set much of a precedence given court's position in Germany's judicial hierarchy. Still, the ruling has created a lot of legal uncertainty, and already had a stifling effect.
The German Medical Association earlier this week said the decision poses a legal quagmire for doctors and advised them not to perform such operations because of the risks of being prosecuted. The court ruling "isn't about banning religious rights," he said. "It's about delaying a religious act to ensure that children's rights are also protected."
Its president, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, warned the court's decision also could threaten children's health. Its president, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, warned the court's decision also could threaten children's health. One hospital that already has stopped performing religious circumcisions is the 250-year-old Jewish Hospital of Berlin. Last year, it performed roughly 300 circumcisions, on Muslim and Jewish boys. Since the Cologne court's ruling, though, the hospital said it has had to cancel five planned procedures.
"There is now the danger that laypeople will carry out the procedure instead, and that that will lead to considerable complications from the often unhygienic conditions alone," Dr. Montgomery said.
Holm Putzke, a German law professor from the University of Passau whose writings have played an influential role in Germany's legal debate over ritual circumcision, however, called the government's plans for legislation a "hasty reaction" that risked running afoul of Germany's constitution. Protecting the bodily harm of a child as a religious act opened the door to sanctioning other, more controversial practices under the guise of religious freedom he said.
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http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/olympics-fourth-place-medal/bob-costas-intends-honor-munich-victims-call-ioc-194507640--oly.html
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Debate over circumcision in Germany continues
by MIchael Cook | Jul 28, 2012 |
tags: circumcision
A group of Orthodox rabbis has warned that a German court ruling banning infant male circumcision could spread throughout Europe. Some hospitals in Austria and Switzerland have already suspended circumcision because of alleged legal uncertainty.
In May a court in Cologne said that circumcision of infant males was illegal, arguing that "the right of parents to raise their children in a religion does not override the right of a child to bodily integrity."
Subsequently, in Switzerland the children's hospitals of Zurich and St Gallen announced a moratorium on circumcisions. In Austria the governor of Vorarlberg province told state-run hospitals to stop circumcisions until the legal situation is clarified, although this puzzled Austrian legal experts who said that a decision by a German court was irrelevant.
"Our fears that the court ruling in Cologne could have a knock-on effect across Europe are now being realized," said Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the Conference of European Rabbis.
Jews and Muslims, for whom circumcision is an important religious ritual, are outraged. Britain's Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, wrote in the Jerusalem Post earlier this month: "It is hard to think of a more appalling decision. Did the court know that circumcision is Judaism's most ancient historical ritual, dating back almost four thousand years to the days of Abraham?"
It could take a long time to resolve the matter. Germany's justice minister has appointed a task force of senior legal experts to draft a law which reverses the court's decision. "The matter is more complicated than just inserting a simple little sentence somewhere, as some people envision," says the minister. "After this emotional debate, I wouldn't rule out the possibility that the law will come before the Federal Constitutional Court. The judges there will have to determine whether they share the balancing of fundamental rights that we intend to make."
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Suicide as a Jewish Value
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On August 8, 2012
A month ago, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz sat down with the host of a Jewish television channel and could not name any reason for Jews to vote for Obama except for his support for abortion. Which is to say that the favorite muppet of the Democratic Party could not think of any reason to support B.O. except a mutual commitment that fewer Jews be born.
It is a little-known fact that Margaret Sanger, that pioneer of eugenic solutions to “racial, political, and social problems,” began by targeting Jews, opening her first center in Brownsville, Brooklyn, complete with Yiddish and Italian flyers, aiming for the two immigrant groups whose high reproduction rates were considered a social problem.
Abortion as a liberal Jewish value has been a stunning success. In New York City, where Sanger first set up shop, 74 percent of all Jewish children are members of the traditionalist Orthodox religious group. Liberal Jews are already panicking over the prospect of a future Jewish population in New York City that is staunchly conservative and religious.
A recent survey of New York City Jews also shows a nearly even split between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. 46 percent of New York Jews are planning to vote against Obama, and a majority of New York City Jews think that Romney would be better at fixing the economy than B.O. But it is only to be expected that the group for whom abortion isn’t a Jewish value would come to outnumber the group for whom abortion is a Jewish value.
The problem with values is that you have to live with their consequences. When your values dictate that terrorists deserve all the protections of the civilian justice system, then you have to be ready to live with the explosions. If your values dictate minimal population growth, then you have to accept the consequences of extinction. Values that are contrary to survival carry their own natural cost. And when your values are at odds with your interests, then your values might as well be an open window, a loaded revolver or a dose of strychnine.
Liberal Jews like to talk about Jewish values rather than Jewish interests, because their values are incompatible with Jewish interests — even as a matter of simple survival. The usual liberal grab bag of values that are represented by the Jewish hand puppets of liberalism, like Wasserman-Schultz, aren’t just alien, they threaten the basic survival of the Jewish People.
When asked to justify what interests the Democratic Party and American Jews have in common, the Jewish liberal dives into a copy of the New York Times and comes up with illegal immigration, abortion, gay rights and support for peace in the Middle East.
That list of liberal Jewish values not only fails to align with a single Jewish interest, but each of them threatens Jewish interests… that is if survival is to be considered a Jewish interest.
Peace in the Middle East means aborting Israel, dissecting it into small pieces and repeating the process until there is no country left. It’s another case of liberal Jews trying to do to Israel what they have already done to themselves. To believe that pressuring Israel into making a non-stop roll of concessions to Muslim terrorists is a Jewish value is to believe that suicide is a Jewish value.
Illegal immigration, a cause that virtually every major Jewish organization has signed on to, means the mass migration of Mexicans to the United States. The ADL’s own survey shows that nearly half of foreign-born Latinos rate as strongly anti-Semitic, over three times the rate of white Americans. (Bad news for the glorious civil rights alliance; the ADL’s strongly anti-Semitic ratings are 12 percent for white Americans, 35 percent for African-Americans and 44 percent for foreign-born Latinos.) The only way to make sense of this is that liberal Jewish groups believe that increasing anti-Semitism in America is actually a Jewish value.
But liberals of all creeds need more Mexican illegal aliens and immigrants from all across the Third World to compensate for the good work of Sanger. Liberal Christians fear the reproduction rates of Conservative Christians as liberal Jews fear the reproduction rates of Orthodox Jews. The only way out of the demographic race is to import “ringers” who will have the children that they won’t. The new eugenics is political eugenics. Birth control is no longer for the people that Sanger considered the “unfit”; they’re valued now for their reproductive rates which help the “fit” stay in power.
Growing anti-Semitism is a small price to pay for the liberal values of having people like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz sitting in Congress instead of selling tie-dyed t-shirts and hand-painted seashell bongs in a flea market. And like all the wages of liberalism, the price for it isn’t paid by the people on top, but by those at the bottom: Those Jews living next to the 44 percent in New York City or on farms in the West Bank within firing range of their Palestinian Muslim peace partners. The Jews whom Sanger and Schultz consider “unfit.”
There is a fundamental gap between the interests of those Jews and those of a liberal elite who claim that their liberal values are our Jewish values. The values of the elite are linked to power while those of the population are linked to survival. The power of liberal Jewish elites is inextricably linked to the decimation of Jewish populations, whether in the United States, Europe or Israel.
Jews who have grown up within the bubble of liberal Jewish values are repeatedly asked to choose between their own interests, their physical, social and economic welfare, and the values that have been presented to them as Jewish values. They are encouraged to believe that betraying their own interests is a noble act of self-sacrifice for the greater good.
This is the same false choice between interests and values, between the low ground of survival and the high ground of moral superiority, that the left subjects all Americans and Europeans to on a regular basis. What all the lecturers on the theme of the moral high ground and the new value system have forgotten to mention is that a value system that is incapable of perpetuating itself is of very little use to anyone. It isn’t even any good as an act of martyrdom because martyrs are remembered by the people who share their beliefs.
Martyrs that live on die for a faith, not for the extinction of a faith. And that is what liberal Jewish values are. The extinction of a faith and a people in the name of a better faith in liberalism and a better people in the form of a multicultural rainbow of other people who have children, but still vote Democratic, because their religious values have not yet been submerged within a liberal identity.
The paradox of the multicultural alliance is that the political survival of the narrow wedge of liberals at the top depends on a larger wedge of non-liberals who vote for them but don’t share their values. If the minority communities adopted the full panoply of liberal values, they would be on the same path to extinction as the people for whom they have been taught to pull the lever on Election Day.
That is what makes the multicultural alliance into a frighteningly unstable beast which is always at risk of either breaking left or breaking right and must be constantly replenished through fresh supplies of immigrants who are still economically liberal and socially conservative enough to keep the system going.
Jewish liberals are stuck in a particularly hellish version of this paradox preaching an extinction-based value system that is doomed to lose the race to traditionalists. And the only way out is to try and suborn and break down the values of Jewish traditionalists more aggressively in order to gain fresh recruits for their zombie army of the living dead.
Margaret Sanger at least understood that “the unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit’ … can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes.” Birth control teaching without eugenics would never be enough, but the age when the government can mandate a One Child Policy is not yet here. And even if it did arrive, it would still lead to a higher birth rate for couples in traditional marriages.
The race between traditional Jewish values and liberal Jewish values must always end in the same way over and over again. Suicide can never become a Jewish value unless it is universalized and it can never be universalized until every traditional group is broken down. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has already lost and she probably knows it. If she doesn’t, the Jewish Federations who are busy typing up the survey results certainly do. And while that will lead them to redirect more money to groups such as Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and Uri L’Tzedek which act as leftist outposts of the war on traditional Judaism — that too is another race they cannot win.
In Israel and America, the proponents of Jewish suicide are successfully wiping themselves out, while the proponents of Jewish survival are filling up cradles. The race between the Jewish values of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and their values is already being won.
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Anti-Defamation League Continues To Embarrass The Jewish Community
Scott Pollack - The Critical Post - August, 2012
There are not enough Jewish voices on the right side of history. Too many aligned with Bolsheviks during early 20th century Russia. Too many took reformed Judaism as a serious discipline. Too many turned their backs during World War 2. Too many align today with The Democratic Party.
President Obama has weakened America’s involvement with Israel in the public relations arena. He’s been seen on many occasions as disrespectful to the investment of American dollars made for making sure that Israel remains free.
Here comes the Anti-Defamation League. They claim to have been battling bigotry towards American Jews since 1913. Certainly, they were a pivotal organization on this front. What have they achieved? Are Jews more widely respected? No. The same animosity is leveled at the Jewish community and one could postulate, in ever greater proportions, than has been experienced in times past.
In America, the term Zionism has been lionized as the cry to excite Jewish hatred. It’s everywhere. There are scores of folks all over the country who attribute America’s reserve currency status as being tainted by the Zionist cause. There are conspiracy theorists that link the House of Rothschild arm in arm with the Rockefeller’s, and Israel is a creature of the Rothschild’s bearing down on the British crown in early 20th century international politics via The Balfour Declaration.
In the last 60 years the force of governmental legislation against bigots has not lessened bigotry. Discrimination is a matter of personal choice. It will always be that way. It may be against the law but there are always ways to skirt the law by the well chosen use of words which describe any particular discrimination as something other than what it is.
It was the Anti-Defamation League that was out in front against “hate speech.” It has not stopped any hatred. If anything it has had the opposite effect. People will always make choices they feel comfortable with whether or not it’s popular. Hate speech is “thought police” politics and it has been legislated as against the law. When you suppress speech by claiming that “emotional damage” occurs in the feelings of those the speech was directed at, it is reasonable to posit that emotional pressure builds all the more for those who wish to express their hate. Thus, it becomes an emotional powder keg which builds to explode at some point in the future. We see examples of this all over the political landscape today, whether it’s the LGBT’s, Blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Asians or many other minorities embedded into America’s population.
The “anti hate speech” agenda today is being shown as a failure and for what it is, a statist policy gone sour. One can’t go for a day without someone crying foul about someone’s expression of animosity and then seen somewhere in the day’s headlines.
Leaders in the Jewish community continue to embarrass Jews as a whole. To the lay population, it matters not how tied to their faith these Jewish leaders are, it only matters that they’re Jewish, and they must be stopped.
The Anti-Defamation League has largely failed in its mission to secure favorable “political thoughts” about the Jewish peoples in the population at large. Now they’re attacking one of the Jewish community’s staunch defenders, Pamela Geller.
Ads are running across the country sponsored by Geller’s AFDI not-for-profit corporation. AFDI stands for American Freedom Defense Initiative. Pamela Geller is the American lightning rod who bravely warns the American population about the stealth jihad and its invasion into American culture and her politics.
The Anti-Defamation League and many others in America do not fathom the real idea behind Islam or Muslims in general. Those in the know understand that it is a geopolitical agenda disguised as a religion. Its very essence is a lie compounding other lies. Do not underestimate the wiles of the Muslim population at large or what is being said from the pulpits of mosques around the country. Do not underestimate the wink and nod gestures amongst the leaders of Islam and their adherents.
The term Islamophobia is a code used by leftists to make unpopular a healthy gut level reaction for Jewish, as well as American preservation. In other words, there is nothing wrong with not wanting too much fraternity with the Muslim world and its geopolitical goals. Therefore, to be an Islamophobe is a good thing.
Better yet, should we all just embrace Iran’s latest menacing rant? Exactly what is the Muslim Brotherhood in America doing to curb the speech and invective of the Iranian leadership?
If we take the tack of ADL’s latest agenda, which on the surface would seem to be, dial down the rhetoric for or against anything, and let things be without drawing too much attention to it, what will be the result from Islam’s leaders other than perceived weakness?
If the phrase “never again” doesn’t mean anything to the ADL or those aligned with them, then they are obvious apologists of the grossest kind. They inspire weakness, not strength. Moreover, to make this statement: “Being pro-Israel doesn’t mean being anti-Muslim and anti-Arab. Suspecting a “jihadist” motivation by everyone who follows Islam contributes to an atmosphere where hatred and discrimination are easily justified. Geller has a First Amendment right to spread her views, but she does Israel no service by her bigoted attacks on all Islam. The ADL hopes that our Muslim neighbors recognize that Geller’s campaign reflects the thinking of a very small minority in the Jewish community and trust that they also understand, as do we, the dangers posed by extremists in all of our faiths.” is admitting that discrimination of any kind doesn’t serve the idea of preservation in the face of another discrimination, like those espoused by the seat of Islamic power, Iran. Let’s not forget America’s interests in the matter.
“Israel’s interests” as depicted in the previous paragraph by the Scarsdale Chair of the ADL, John Harris, must not be to preserve itself. Israel is derided everywhere in the public relations machine of the Arab and Muslim press. So Israel and her proponents should just shut their mouths accordingly. If Mr. Harris could point to a time in history when Jews, by remaining silent or amiable, were allowed to live in peace, we’d welcome the reply and example. Of course, he will not be able to illuminate such a point.
So, philosophically what does Pamela Geller achieve with AFDI’s latest initiative? Pamela Geller shows strength where a weakness is perceived. Pamela Geller shows backbone where a supple spine fails and has always failed. She stands proud as an American Jew who is a political conservative instead of shrinking from the critics, her largest being the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood arm of American political discourse, The Council of American Islamic Relations.
If the ADL wants to do something about Jewish public relations in America that would be positive, perhaps they should have a talk with George Soros or Jaimie Dimon, or for that matter, the entire Hollywood-Broadway machine of America’s entertainment industry, who’ve all abandoned what earlier notable founding Jewish moguls adhered to, something called, The Hayes Code.
Perhaps if proud Jews were to do something positive like policing their own by having frank discussions with leftist apologists from within our community, away from the light of day, and say to these folks, start showing a better example in your person, there would be a trend to take root that would portend well for coming generations of Jews everywhere.
Pamela Geller in the meantime, will take the heat other Jews would feign to bear up against in the face of geopolitical religious tyranny, and continue her mission, rest assured on that point. Men in the ADL and the leftist Jewish community should take note. Will it take sides with a courageous advocate for American values, and Jewish preservation, or will it submit to the dhimmitude, which is the expected result of Islam and its adherents, for waging the war of this stealth jihad, disguised as moderate Islam?
The ADL submits their “opinion” about Ms. Geller here and wants you to accept this as fact. Instead what it does, in our opinion, is promote acceptance of weakness and moderation which is unreasonable to assume. The ADL wants you to believe they’re for securing an “equal outcome” against all discrimination for all peoples who’ve been discriminated against. What they fail to recognise is twofold: 1. Talk is cheap and 2. You cannot legislate good grooming, decorum or behavior.
Behavior is precisely the point.
Perhaps the ADL can explain where moderate Islam has sprouted from the Jewish example? Israel has allowed the Dome on The Temple Mount to stand in Jerusalem, and has shown tolerance by doing so. What has this tolerance wrought? To be precise, only more hatred, or to put it another way, nothing.
The article below is Ms. Geller’s post we are in strong support for. We wish her to continue to be a political conservative and stand as an example for other Jews in America to follow. If you’re a Jew reading this opinion, consider any other alternative to preservation and you will come up empty handed, except to wield a weapon in your defense when faced with annihilation. Discrimination in this case is your ally for survival and not the converse, as apologists like the ADL would have you assume.
If the ADL wants to shake hands with moderate Muslims in this country, perhaps they should ask “that community” to take CAIR to task and tell all of them to stand down and cease those activities on American soil.
We are telling the ADL to rethink their values, and so should every Jew in this country. Jewish orthodox leaders are swinging for the GOP in this next election. Perhaps the rest of the community, and those from the New York, Chicago, Miami and LA communities as well, should learn a new tactic and that is to stand on the right side of history, rather than the left.
Not all Jews are cowards.
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The Crime Committed in France, by France
François Hollande
AP Photo/Jacques Brinon Pool
French President François Hollande, center, arrives at the Jewish memorial prior to ceremonies to mark the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Vel d'Hiv roundup, Paris, July 22, 2012
The following is the speech given by President François Hollande to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv Roundup on July 16 and 17, 1942, when the French police arrested 13,152 Jewish men, women, and children from Paris and its suburbs, and confined them to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a bicycle stadium in Paris. They were later deported to German concentration camps. Eight hundred and eleven survived the war. President Hollande delivered his speech at the original site of the demolished velodrome on July 22, 2012.
Prime Minister, President of the National Assembly, ambassadors, Mayor of Paris, President of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, Chief
NYRblog : Roving thoughts and provocations from our
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Rabbi, representatives of the religions, ladies and gentlemen:
We’ve gathered this morning to remember the horror of a crime, express the sorrow of those who experienced the tragedy, and speak of the dark hours of collaboration, our history, and therefore France’s responsibility.
We’re also here to pass on the memory of the Holocaust—of which the roundups were the first stage—in order to fight the battle against oblivion and testify to new generations what barbarity is capable of doing and what resources humanity may possess to defeat it.
Seventy years ago, on July 16, 1942, early in the morning, 13,152 men, women, and children were arrested in their homes. Childless couples and single people were interned in Drancy, where the museum created by the Mémorial de la Shoah will stand in the autumn.
The others were taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver. Thrown together for five days in inhuman conditions, they were taken from there to the camps of Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande.
A clear directive had been given by the Vichy administration. “The children must not leave in the same convoys as the parents.” So, after heartrending separations, they departed—the parents on one side, the children on the other—for Auschwitz- Birkenau, where the deportees of Drancy had preceded them by a few days.
There, they were murdered. Solely for being Jews.
This crime took place here, in our capital, in our streets, the courtyards of our buildings, our stairways, our school playgrounds.
It was to prepare the way for other roundups, in Marseille and throughout France—in other words, on both sides of the demarcation line. There were also other deportations, notably of gypsies.
The infamy of the Vel d’Hiv was part of an undertaking that had no precedent and has no comparison: the Holocaust, the attempt to annihilate all the Jews on the European continent.
Seventy-six thousand French Jews were deported to the death camps. Only 2,500 returned.
Those women, men, and children could not have known the fate that awaited them.
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They could not even have imagined it. They trusted in France.
They believed that the country of the great Revolution and the City of Light would be a safe haven for them. They loved the Republic with a passion born of gratitude. Indeed, it was in Paris in 1791, under the National Constituent Assembly, that Jews had become fully fledged citizens for the first time in Europe. Later, others had found in France a land of welcome, a chance at life, a promise of protection.
Seventy years ago, this promise and this trust were trampled underfoot.
I would like to recall the words that the [future] chief rabbi of France, Jacob Kaplan, wrote to Marshal Pétain in October 1940, after the introduction of the despicable Statute of the Jews. “As the victims of measures that undermine our human dignity and our honor as Frenchmen, we express our profound faith in the spirit of justice of the Eternal France. We know that the ties uniting us with the great French family are too strong to be broken.”
Therein lies the betrayal.
Across time, beyond grief, my presence this morning bears witness to France’s determination to protect the memory of her lost children and honor these souls who died but have no graves, whose only tomb is our memory.
That is the purpose of the requirement set by the Republic: that the names of those martyred victims should not fall into oblivion.
We owe the Jewish martyrs of the Vélodrome d’Hiver the truth about what happened seventy years ago.
The truth is that French police—on the basis of the lists they had themselves drawn up—undertook to arrest the thousands of innocent people trapped on July 16, 1942. And that the French gendarmerie escorted them to the internment camps.
The truth is that no German soldiers—not a single one—were mobilized at any stage of the operation.
The truth is that this crime was committed in France, by France.
To his great credit, President Jacques Chirac recognized this truth, in this very spot on July 16, 1995.
“France,” he said, “France, country of the Enlightenment and human rights, land of
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welcome and asylum, France, that day, was committing the irreparable.”
But the truth is also that the crime of the Vel d’Hiv was committed against France, against her values, against her principles, against her ideal.
Honor was saved by the Righteous, by all those who were able to rise up against barbarism, by those anonymous heroes who hid a neighbor here, helped another there, and risked their lives to save those of innocent people. By all those French people who enabled three quarters of France’s Jews to survive.
France’s honor was embodied by General de Gaulle, who stood up on June 18, 1940, to continue the struggle.
France’s honor was defended by the Resistance, the shadow army that would not resign itself to shame and defeat.
France was represented on the battlefields, with our flag, by the soldiers of the Free French Forces.
She was also served by the Jewish institutions, like the Oeuvre de secours aux enfants [Children’s Welfare Organization], which secretly organized the rescue of more than five thousand children and took in orphans after the Liberation.
The truth does not divide people. It brings them together. In that spirit, this day of commemoration was established by François Mitterrand, and the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah was created under Lionel Jospin’s government. Set up under that same government, with Jacques Chirac, was the Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation Resulting from Anti-Semitic Legislation in Force During the Occupation, whose aim was to put right what still could be put right.
In the chain of our collective history, it now falls to me to continue this common duty of remembrance, truth, and hope.
It begins with passing on the memory. Ignorance is the source of many abuses. We cannot tolerate the fact that two out of three young French people do not know what the Vel d’Hiv roundup was.
The Republic’s schools—in which I hereby voice my confidence—have a mission: to instruct, educate, teach about the past, make it known and understood in all its dimensions. The Holocaust is on the curriculum of the final primary and junior
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school years and the second lycée year.
There must not be a single primary school, junior school, or lycée in France where it is not taught. There must not be a single institution where this history is not fully understood, respected, and pondered over. For the Republic, there cannot and will not be any lost memories.
I personally shall see to this.
The challenge is to fight tirelessly against all forms of falsification of history: not only the insult of Holocaust denial, but also the temptation of relativism. Indeed, to pass on the history of the Shoah is to teach how uniquely appalling it was. By its nature, its scale, its methods, and the terrifying precision of its execution, that crime remains an abyss unique in human history. We must constantly remind ourselves of that singularity.
Finally, passing on this memory means preserving all its lessons. It means understanding how the ignominy was possible then, in order that it may never recur in the future.
The Shoah was not created from a vacuum and did not emerge from nowhere. True, it was set in motion by the unprecedented and terrifying combination of single- mindedness in its racist frenzy and industrial rationality in its execution. But it was also made possible by centuries of blindness, stupidity, lies, and hatred. It was preceded by many warning signs, which failed to alert people’s consciences.
We must never let our guard down. No nation, no society, nobody is immune from evil. Let us not forget this verdict by Primo Levi on his persecutors. “Save the exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces.” Let us remain alert, so that we may detect the return of monstrosity under its most harmless guises.
I am aware of the fears expressed by some of you. I want to respond to them.
Conscious of this history, the Republic will pursue all anti-Semitic acts with the utmost determination, but also all remarks that may lead France’s Jews even to feel uneasy in their own country.
In this area, nothing is immaterial. Everything will be fought with the last ounce of energy. Being silent about anti-Semitism, dissimulating it, explaining it already means accepting it.
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The safety of France’s Jews is not just a matter for Jews, it is a matter for all French people, and I intend it to be guaranteed under all circumstances and in all places.
Four months ago, in Toulouse, children died for the same reason as those of the Vel d’Hiv: because they were Jews.
Anti-Semitism is not an opinion, it is an abhorrence. For that reason, it must first of all be faced directly. It must be named and recognized for what it is. Wherever it manifests itself, it will be unmasked and punished.
All ideologies of exclusion, all forms of intolerance, all fanaticism, all xenophobia that seek to develop the mentality of hatred will find their way blocked by the Republic.
Every Saturday morning, in every French synagogue, at the end of the service, the prayer of France’s Jews rings out, the prayer they utter for the homeland they love and want to serve. “May France live in happiness and prosperity. May unity and harmony make her strong and great. May she enjoy lasting peace and preserve her spirit of nobility among the nations.”
All of France must be worthy of this spirit of nobility.
To tirelessly teach historical truth, to scrupulously ensure respect for the values of the Republic, to constantly recall the demand for religious tolerance, within the frame of our laïque [secular] laws never to give way on the principles of freedom and human dignity, always to further the promise of equality and emancipation. Those are the measures we must collectively assign ourselves.
In thinking of the lives never allowed to blossom, of those children deprived of a future, those destinies cut short, we must raise still further the demands we make of our own lives. By refusing indifference, neglect, and complacency, we shall make ourselves stronger together.
It is by being clear-sighted about our own history that France, thanks to the spirit of harmony and unity, will best promote her values, here and throughout the world.
Long live the Republic! Long live France!
August 18, 2012, 9:35 a.m.
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Well, Hollande sure just went up in my opinion.
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GERMANY MOVES TOWARDS A COMPROMISE ON CIRCUMCISION
A row over circumcision in Germany has escalated after a formal
complaint was lodged against a rabbi in the city of Hof. According
to a doctor from the city of Giessen, "Religious freedom cannot be
used as an excuse for carrying out violence against an under-age
child". The dispute was ignited by a June 26 ruling by a Cologne
court that circumcision of a child constituted "illegal bodily
harm," even with parental consent.
Ever since the German government has been searching for a
compromise which will satisfy the Jewish community and
international critics, while honouring the court decision. The
President of the Conference of European Rabbis, Pinchas
Goldschmidt, has described the decision as "one of the gravest
attacks on Jewish life in the post-Holocaust world".
Germany's national Ethics Council (Ethikrat) has recommended
authorising circumcision if safeguards are in place. "There must be
a green light for circumcision but under the conditions of a full
explanation to the parents, the agreement of both parents, the
treatment of pain and the professional execution of the
circumcision," chairwoman Christiane Woopen said.
But the recommendation was made after a robust debate. A legal
scholar, Reinhard Merkel, said that it was "bizarre" that religious
communities could be allowed to define when and how a human body
could be injured. If a child's right to bodily integrity had to be
weighed against religious requirements, this was a "legal policy
crisis". However, he squared the circle by invoking an
"indebtedness" to Jews which called for a "special law".
Constitutional law expert Wolfram Hofling, on the other hand,
argued that parental rights were paramount. If they believed that
the ritual was in the best interests of the child then this should
be respected, especially since millions of circumcisions have
occurred without complications.
The row has spread to Scandinavia as well. In neighbouring Denmark
an article in the Politiken newspaper described circumcision as a
ritual involving the torture of a baby. The Danish Parliament is
gearing up for a debate on the issue. Since report by the
Children's Ombudsman in 2003 described circumcision as a violation
of children's rights, a ban has a lot of support. Finn Schwarz,
president of the Jewish Congregation of Copenhagen, says that if
circumcision is banned, Jews will have no choice but to pack their
bags and leave.
For many Jews, this is a transcendental issue, despite the small
but real possibility of harming a child. The deputy prime minister
of Israel, Eli Yishai, wrote a letter to German Premier Angela
Merkel in which he said: "Circumcision is one of the most important
commandments for the Jewish people, and the first given to one of
the fathers of our nation, Abraham, as a sign of his eternal treaty
[with God]. Even in times of slavery and exile, Jews made sure to
fulfil this commandment, and did so happily." German Jews should
not have to choose between Judaism and their citizenship.
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Germany's Circumcision Police
Here's an idea: Send an international delegation of rabbis and imams to seek arrest in protest..Article Comments (32) more in Opinion | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ ».smaller Larger facebooktwittergoogle pluslinked ininShare.0EmailPrintSave ↓ More .
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By SHMULEY BOTEACH There was a head-spinning moment in Germany last week: News emerged that a rabbi had been criminally charged for performing his religious duties. Rabbi David Goldberg of northern Bavaria, who shepherds a 400-member community, is the first person to run afoul of a ruling by a Cologne judge earlier this year that criminalized circumcision, a basic religious rite.
There is some precedent outside of Germany for such a ruling. In 2001, a Swedish law sparked a protest from Jews and Muslims by requiring that a medical doctor or anesthesia nurse accompany registered circumcisers, and that anesthesia be applied before the procedure. The law is still in effect.
In 2006, a Finnish court charged a Muslim mother with assault for circumcising her baby, and this was followed by a Jewish couple being fined for causing bodily harm to their son. The Muslim mother wasn't ultimately punished, and in 2006 the Finnish Supreme Court said her actions weren't criminal and religious circumcision not a crime. In the United States, a San Francisco ballot initiative tried last year to make circumcision an offense punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison; it failed to get enough votes. (In Germany, the Cologne judge seems not to have not yet specified punishment for violations.)
The ban by the court in Cologne, however, is the most troubling. For decades Germany has been an example of how a nation can take responsibility for its previous crimes. It is very moving to see Germany's Holocaust memorial in Berlin, just two blocks from the country's parliament. But the circumcision ban deserves universal scorn.
The American and European rabbinate should lead a delegation of mohelim (ritual circumcisers) to Germany to seek arrest for civil disobedience in protest against government persecution. I would join them and call upon Islamic imams to stand with us.
Does the German government really want to get into a public battle over whether they are better guardians of the health and welfare of Jewish (and Muslim) children than their parents?
The Los Angeles Times recently cited a study predicting that as the number of circumcisions goes down in the U.S., the cost of health care will steadily climb. Eryn Brown reported that "If circumcision rates were to fall to 10% . . . lifetime health costs for all the babies born in a year would go up by $505 million. That works out to $313 in added costs for every circumcision that doesn't happen."
Why? Because circumcision has been proven to be the second most effective means—after a condom—for stopping the transmission of HIV-AIDS, with the British Medical Journal reporting that circumcised men are eight times less likely to contract the infection.
The New York Times echoed these findings in an Aug. 27 report that projected "declining U.S. circumcision rates could add more than $4 billion in health care costs in coming years because of increased illness and infections." The story focused on the American Academy of Pediatrics updating its 13-year-old policy on circumcision and declaring that the health benefits of circumcision—in reducing chances of HIV infection and other STDs, urinary tract infection, and cancer—outweigh the risks.
While the Germans decry the barbarity of circumcision for men, they also overlook the benefit to women who are the men's partners. Male circumcision reduces the risk of cervical cancer—caused by the human papillomavirus, which thrives under and on the foreskin—by at least 20%, according to an April 2002 article in the British Medical Journal.
While some attempt to equate male circumcision with female clitoridectomy, the comparison is absurd. Female circumcision involves removing a woman's ability to have pleasure during sexual relations. It is a barbarous act of mutilation that has no corollary to its male counterpart. Judaism has always celebrated the sexual bond between husband and wife. Attempts to malign circumcision as a method of denying a man's sexual pleasure are ignorant. Judaism insists that sex be accompanied by exhilaration and enjoyment as a bonding experience that leads to sustained emotional connection.
We Jews must be doing something right in the bedroom given the fact that, alone among the ancient peoples of the world, we are still here, despite countless attempts to make us a historical footnote.
A German judge may think he is a better guarantor of Jewish well-being than Jews themselves. No thanks.
Rabbi Boteach's books include "Kosher Jesus" (Gefen, 2012) and "Kosher Sex" (Doubleday, 1999). He is a Republican candidate for the U.S. Congress from New Jersey's ninth district.
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The double-standard here is really staggering - and indicative IMHO of the growing acceptance of anti-Semitism in the U.S. and around the world:
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2012/08/genocidal-campaign-bring-these-ads-to-your-city.html
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Ahhh it's Pam Geller again.... :evil:
You said, "The double-standard here is really staggering - and indicative IMHO of the growing acceptance of anti-Semitism in the U.S. and around the world."
The article talks about public ads.
Yet, I couldn't find any "anti-Semitism" public ads referenced. Objectivist1 could you provide a few "anti-Semitism" public ad's in America examples?
By the way, please make sure you distinguish between "anti-Semitism" and "anti-Israel" policies. The two are not blindly congruous as many American Jewish groups will confirm.
Supporting the plight of the Palestinians, or hoping for peace in the Middle East, or opposing the bombing of Iran, the annexation of Jerusalem, etc. are NOT "anti-Semitic".
My Grandfather is Norwegian. Norway is a great place; I like Norwegians, however at all times what is good for America comes before my warm thoughts for Norway. And if I/you support
what's good for what we believe is best for America, and Norway suffers in our opinion, that doesn't mean we hate Norwegian's, it merely means you disagree with Norway's State policy.
The same applies to Israel; I and others can criticize Israel if we believe their policies do not coincide with what we think is best for America. That does not mean I or millions of others,
including many Jews in America are anti-Semitic.
And Objectivist1, if you could find someone, anyone, other than from Pam Geller's page a few people might start listening to you. :-(
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Once again, JDN refuses to cite any of the assertions made in Geller's piece, and instead chooses to portray her as non-credible. After repeated attempts by me, Crafty and others to persuade him to actually take issue with specific assertions in the articles posted here, he falls back on the tired, leftist tactic of smearing the messenger. It's really quite tiresome, childish and frankly pathetic. I submit that it is JDN who is generally not taken seriously here, because this character assassination and reference to others who condemn the messenger he happens to despise is apparently all he is capable of.
Henceforth (and I've broken this rule too many times already with regard to him) I will not waste any time responding to "arguments" - from JDN or others - which amount to nothing but ad hominem attacks and/or compurgation. I have MUCH better things to do with my time than respond to dullards who are by definition incapable of independent thought and argumentation. I consider it rather self-evident that the majority of the readers of this forum are able to distinguish between an honest attempt at a discussion and the tactics of what is commonly known as an "Internet troll."
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Objectivist1; I think nearly everyone, even on this site, think Pam Geller is a bit Wacko. Only you......
However, giving the benefit of the doubt, I did read the piece. No where could I find reference to
a public advertisement that was "anti-Semitic". So I asked you for examples; evidence, facts.....
I forgot that's a problem for you; you prefer sleaze and rumors.
Actually Ojbectivist1 YOU are the troll; you have a one track mind; all Muslims are bad and evil. Your most frequent (only) sited source;
Pam Geller. Truly you should post of the humor page. Along with the Martians are coming.
You don't have to respond to my arguments; actually you never have before; you just post more Pam Geller. :-o
But I hope you don't mind if I post in response to your sleaze and sensationalism. It's kinda fun and easy to refute. Like arguing with that
5 year old neighbor who keeps yelling, "The Martians are coming; they are behind every tree, run for your life!".
It's pointless, but kinda fun and entertaining. :evil:
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For the record, I do read Geller and regard her as a citable, though not infallible, source.
Also, I would contest your assertion that Obj. cites only PG, he regularly cites other sources, as do I.
For the record, I reiterate my assertion that Obj has posted many (but not all) pieces containing specfics worthy of reasoned response.
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With all due respect, I don't think Pam Geller is honestly citable; she is usually fallible and inflammatory; she is a racist; that said, if alternative sources are cited as well from learned souces, that would strengthen the arguments. But quoting her cite alone leaves one open to ridicule.
I never said that Objectivist1 "only" cites Pam Geller or her website, however he does so too way too frequently, probably 90%+ on this site and the Islam in America site, resulting in no credibility. Is the only source he reads Pam Geller and her website? Surely there are more learned individuals who could be quoted to make his point? Or if not, maybe he has no point? :-o
I do agree YOU cite numerous sources, many are valid, not all with whom I agree, but that is why we have a forum; to discuss diverse opinions. I have found the diverse arguments on circumcision rather interesting for example.
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Shame on Germany for Circumcision Ban
Posted By Alan M. Dershowitz On September 7, 2012
Why do countries with long histories of anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry seem to care more about the so-called rights of young children not to be circumcised than do other countries in the world with far better histories of concern for human rights? The same rhetorical question can be asked of countries, such as Norway, that care so much about the rights of animals not to be slaughtered according to Jewish ritual. These questions are entirely rhetorical because every thinking person knows the answer. It’s not because Germans or Norwegians are better people and care more about children and animals than do Americans. It is because they care less about Jews. Or more precisely they care a lot about Jews. They just don’t like them very much and don’t care if they are forced to leave the country because they cannot practice their religions there.
So let no one praise a nation that murdered a million Jewish babies and children for shedding crocodile tears over the plight of the poor little baby boy who, following a many thousand year old tradition, is circumcised a week after birth. Every good person should condemn Germany for what really lies at the heart of efforts to ban circumcision—old-fashioned anti-Semitism, a term coined by Germans for Germans and against Jews.
History is not irrelevant in assessing current policies. The history of Germany (and Norway) in prohibiting Jews from practicing their traditional rituals goes back to a time when overt anti-Semitism was not only acceptable, it was de rigueur. Today, new words replace discredited old ones. Anti-Zionism instead of anti-Semitism. The welfare of children instead of the banning of religious rituals. But it’s all the same. Anyone who falls for the new pseudo scientific nonsense about the evils of circumcision or ritual slaughter is as naïve or bigoted as those who fell for the old pseudo scientific racial claims of Nazism.
Indeed, there is an ugly whiff of “racial superiority” in the implicit assumption underlying these bigoted laws: Namely, that Germans and Norwegians are somehow morally (if not racially) superior to other countries that permit such “barbaric” practices.
So let’s call a spade a spade and let’s call anti-Semitism by its true name.
How then should reasonable people respond to these unreasonable efforts to make it difficult to practice traditional Judaism? Some have called for a legal response. Perhaps. But fighting these bigoted practices in court plays into the hands of those who are proposing it. In Nazi Germany, respected jurists were able to use the law to justify the most primitive forms of racism. Indeed Nazism operated through the Nuremburg laws and other such anti-Semitic legal enactments, which were declared entirely lawful by the German courts. Efforts to use the law against these manifestations of racism backfired, by legitimating the Nazi’s legalistic undertakings. So let those who seek to challenge these laws do so but not without understanding the downside of such action.
Some may suggest that the alleged science purporting to support these bans be challenged on the basis of scientific truth. Perhaps. But that too may play into the hands of those who would argue that even acknowledging a possible scientific basis for these bigoted proposals lends some legitimacy to them. “Science” too was used to support Nazi racial studies. Should German scientists now conduct “twin studies” on circumcised and uncircumcised siblings? Why is Germany not willing to accept the conclusion reached by the American Academy of Pediatrics following a five year review of the best research, that “the health benefits” of circumcision – including reduction of HIV and papillomavirus transmission – “out weight the risks?”
The best response is to shame the Germans into rejecting this new form of left wing anti-Semitism, by showing them how similar it was to the Nazism they now claim to abhor. This approach will not work in Norway, because Norwegians have forgotten their history and still believe they were victims of Nazism rather than collaborators. Norway’s anti-Semitic laws preventing Kosher slaughter of animals date back to the pre Nazi period and have remained in force since that time. Norway seems to have no shame nor is it capable of being shamed. Many Germans, on the other hand, seem willing to remember the past—at least up to a point. They must confront that past and look into the historical mirror before they once again go down the road of treating their Jewish citizens as second class or worse.
Shame on those Germans who would ban circumcision. Shame on those Germans who do not care enough to rise up in anger against the pseudo scientific bigots who falsely claim to be interested in the sensitivities of children. Praise for those Germans who do stand against the bigotry of their countrymen.
Let other countries with cleaner hands take the lead in conducting real scientific research and in seeking to protect the rights of children and animals. The dirty hands and filthy past of Germany forever disqualifies that country from leading the effort to ban Jewish rituals. For shame!
This article was published in German by the Juedische-allgemeine.
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http://act.watchdog.net/petitions/1399?share_ref=25757.nbfUie
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http://act.watchdog.net/petitions/1399?share_ref=25757.nbfUie
Hardly a hate crime. It was simple assault; he was punched in the face. That's it. No staples, etc.
"Our understanding is that the investigation is now nearly complete," the statement reads. "Based on interviews with more than 50 witnesses who were at the party that night, the East Lansing Police have apparently concluded that while the student was the victim of a serious physical assault, the evidence does not support his claim that the assault involved anti-Semitic hate speech or gestures, nor does it indicate that the incident was motivated by his religion.
That said, assault is a crime. But let's not make something out of nothing.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/zach-tennen-michigan-attacked-jewish_n_1840923.html
http://www.mlive.com/lansing-news/index.ssf/2012/09/anti-defamation_league_alleged.html
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Thank you for the update.
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German Ritual-Circumcision Ruling Ignites Feud .
By VANESSA FUHRMANS
BERLIN—A German debate over the legality of ritual circumcision has many in the country's tiny Jewish community re-examining a more existential question: Can Jews feel at home in Germany?
Ambivalence over the answer follows a German district-court ruling in June that ritual circumcision amounted to illegal bodily harm. It was captured in a fury-filled essay this month by Charlotte Knobloch, the 79-year-old former chairwoman of Germany's Central Council of Jews, an umbrella group that represents Jewish community interests to the government.
Ms. Knobloch—a Munich-born Jew who survived the Nazis with the help of Bavarian Catholic farmers who pretended she was their daughter—has spent much of her adult life defending to Jews abroad her decision to stay in a post-Holocaust Germany. But in the wake of the decision, she said she was questioning her convictions.
"For the first time in my life, I feel resignation," she wrote in the essay in Germany's Süddeutsche Zeitung. Observing the public "bloviating about 'child torture' and 'trauma' " by circumcision opponents, she added: "I seriously have to ask myself whether this country still wants us [Jews]."
The essay contributed to a firestorm that Germany's political establishment has scrambled to quell—with little effect. Opponents to ritual circumcision say the practice violates infant or young boys' bodily integrity and shouldn't be performed until they are old enough to choose it themselves. Although the Cologne court's June 26 ruling carried no legal weight outside that district, and although Germany's government quickly began drafting legislation to affirm the rights of parents nationwide to have their sons circumcised, the decision and the public discourse since have sparked fear and unease among Germany's Jews and Muslims, who also commonly practice circumcision.
Within the small Jewish population, it has re-opened especially deep and complex wounds, and raised new concerns over their standing and religious freedoms in a country that—despite its efforts to re-cultivate a budding Jewish community after decimating it during the Third Reich—remains vastly remote from everyday Jewish life.
So few Germans have any personal connection to Jewish life, that "many feel alienated from Jews," said the 32-year-old Melody Sucharewicz, a Munich-born political communications strategist who splits her time between Germany and Israel. She said she has recently begun wearing her Star-of-David necklace from her childhood as a sign of resolve. "How else could something that is such a normality of Jewish life be picked out and rendered into this huge issue?"
As the debate continues, "my attitude has changed from being fairly casual and lighthearted to increasing concern," said Rabbi Walter Rothschild, an English rabbi who has lived in Berlin the past 14 years. Though he says he feels at home in Germany, the steady stream of hostile mail he has received since the ruling has unsettled him, he says.
"It's not even anonymous anymore," he said. "To me, it seems there is clearly a latent desire among parts of the German population to attack the practices of minority religions."
The ruling has unleashed a torrent of condemnation from Jewish and Muslim groups in Germany and abroad, and prompted a letter from Israel's president Shimon Peres to his German counterpart, Joachim Gauck, imploring Germany to end the legal uncertainty around circumcision. Reflecting her country's unique sensitivities to accusations of religious intolerance, Chancellor Angela Merkel also has urged quick action, saying Germany would be the world's "laughing stock" if it were to stifle Jews in practicing their religion. In July, more than 600 professionals and academics signed an open letter, published in Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, arguing the point, saying "religious freedom can't be a blank check for [sexual] violence against underage boys."
A leading member of Germany's Humanist Society called the practice a "relic of the ancient past," while the German Association of Pediatricians said it would join in any suit challenging a potential law protecting the practice.
More legal battles appear inevitable. A doctor last month filed the first legal complaint against a German rabbi for performing ritual circumcisions, accusing Rabbi David Goldberg in the German town of Hof of doing bodily harm. Local prosecutors said they are still weighing whether the complaint merits a formal investigation into the matter. Rabbi Goldberg, one of just a few rabbis in Germany who perform circumcisions, has said he will continue the practice, given there is no law forbidding the practice.
Many German Jews say the mainstream platform such criticism of ritual circumcision has received makes them particularly uneasy. A recent survey of 1,000 respondents by German polling group TNS Emnid in July showed 56% of Germans agreed with the Cologne ruling. "It's not the normal anti-Semitism that one can easily brush off," said Jonas Fegert, a 21-year-old Jewish political-science student at Berlin's Free University. "It's framed as these enlightened legal scholars explaining to Jews that their old traditions are wrong and unmodern."
The debate comes amid what has been widely described as a budding Jewish renaissance in Germany, home to some 104,000 Jews. That figure compares with the more than 530,000 Jews who lived in Germany before Hitler came to power, but is many times the few thousand left after the war. Many of Germany's Jews today are Conservative or Orthodox Jews who came from the former Soviet Union after the German government made it easier for them to obtain citizenship during the 1990s. In recent years new synagogues, seminaries and other signs of Jewish life have sprung up across the country.
But behind the recent vibrancy, tensions persist that have been pulled back into the spotlight by the circumcision debate. Reported anti-Semitic violence declined last year to 29 cases nationwide, according to police. But the August street attack of a Berlin rabbi by four teens of Arab descent in front of his six-year-old daughter sent shock waves through Berlin's Jewish community, and verbal threats and other forms of abuse often go unreported. A German Parliament-commissioned study presented early this year reported that "despite Germany's constant confrontation with its Nazi past" some 20% of Germans held latent anti-Semitic beliefs.
Write to Vanessa Fuhrmans at vanessa.fuhrmans@wsj.com
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I would add that there is sound medical research showing medical benfits to circumcision such as less transmission of sexual diseases.
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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NG03Dj02.html
Banning circumcision is dangerous to your health
By Spengler
On June 26, the District Court of the Federal State of Cologne ruled that circumcision of children for religious reasons at the instruction of parents constituted the infliction of bodily harm and therefore was a punishable offense. As the judges concerned included their email addresses and telephone numbers in a press release, concerned individuals might wish to express their views directly.
To: State Court Judge Dr Jan F Orth, Cologne (Jan.Orth@lg-koeln.nrw.de; tel +49-221-477-3304) and District Court Judge Jorg Baack (Joerg.back@ag-koeln.nrw.de, tel +49-221-477-2008.)
Your Honors: Your decision last week to criminalize the religious rite of circumcision presents a threat to the survival of the German people. Germans are failing of the desire to live. At your present fertility rate of 1.3 children per female, there will be virtually no
German speakers left to celebrate Goethe's quadricentennial, although a few Jewish scholars still might learn German as a supplement to Yiddish. In more ways than you imagine, this decision poisons the hearts of your countrymen and reduces their long-term prospects for survival.
Whether the Constitutional Court will uphold your decision remains to be seen; in the meantime, you have put the life of Germany's small Jewish community into suspension. Physicians at the Jewish Hospital in Berlin have stopped performing circumcisions for fear of legal action. Even worse: you have provided a pretext for every Jew-hater in Germany to denounce a fundamental practice of our religion on the spurious pretext of child welfare.
Not even the Nazis thought of banning circumcision as a way of uprooting Jewish life in Germany. If your decree withstands a constitutional challenge, Germany once again will be Judenrein. The difference today is that you need us more than we need you.
Never mind that your decision involved the case of Muslim parents circumcising a child for religious reasons. The matter of circumcision comes to the West through the Jews, regardless of the Muslim imitation Jewish practices. This is our issue, and you will answer to us in the court of world opinion.
In danger of extinction: Germans aged 15 to 24 vs over 60, at constant fertility
Source: United Nations World Population Prospects
To suggest that circumcision impairs health is silly on the face of it, considering that the Jewish people, alone among all the peoples of the world, have endured through these past 4,000 years - not in spite of circumcision, but rather because of it, as I shall explain.
The State of Israel, the only country in which almost every male is circumcised, has the world's highest life expectancy at 82 years (in a tie with Japan and Switzerland). The average Israeli man can expect to live four years longer than the average German man. Israel also has the highest fertility of any industrial country, at three children per female. If the respective fertility rates of Germany and Israel continue, there will be more Israelis under the age of 25 than Germans by the end of the present century.
I will not address the scientific grounds for circumcision (which among other things drastically reduces the transmission of infections including AIDS), because your decree has nothing to do with science. Rather, as Heinrich Heine wrote in 1844 of your city of Cologne,
Dummheit und Bosheit buhlten hier
Gleich Hunden auf freier Gasse;
Die Enkelbrut erkennt man noch heut
An ihrem Judenhasse.
(Stupidity and evil mated here / Like dogs in the open gutter / You still can recognize their descendants today / By their Jew-hatred).
What we call the b'rit, or covenant, brings the sacred and eternal into the carnal and temporal sphere of human life. That is the content of Jewish practice: the sanctification of eating through kashrut, of the family through the laws of marital purity, and of time itself through the observance of the Sabbath. But circumcision precedes all of these. It denotes what all the peoples of the world desire: to be holy (that is, eternal) in their own flesh. It is the token of God's love for Israel set in the body of Israel itself, the sign of our immortality. God's love for Abraham extends to his descendants, and circumcision denotes the transformation of Jewish flesh to a holy vessel for God's presence in the world.
The great Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod wrote:
God could have played a godly role, interested in certain features of human existence, the spiritual, but not in others, the material. He could even have assigned the man the task of wrenching himself out of the material so as to assume his spiritual identity, which is just what so many religious believe he did. Instead, the God of Israel confirms man as he created him to live in the material cosmos ... There is a requirement for the sanctification of human existence in all of its aspects. Israel's symbol of the covenant is circumcision, a searing of the covenant into the flesh of Israel and not only, or perhaps not even primarily, into its spirit. And that is why God's election is of a carnal people. By electing the seed of Abraham, God creates a people that is in his service in the totality of its human being and not just in its moral and spiritual existence [1]
. Israel is the exemplar and model for the sanctification of the human body, for the dedication of the individual to God through a physical change, through the sanctity of family life, and the sanctity of all life embodied in our dietary laws. But if you excise the sacred from human life, life itself becomes intolerable. I submit that the Germans are in danger of extinction because they have ceased to tolerate life.
On this matter I refer you to the decisive passage in the iconic literary work of your culture, the wager between Faust and Mephistopheles in the second Studierzimmer scene of Goethe's Faust I. Goethe is the most biblical of modern writers, [2] perhaps the only one to restate the existential question of Ecclesiastes so clearly. [3]
The devil offers Faust the usual inducements: money, fame and sex. But what Faust wants rather is life - a real life, such as all of humanity lives:
What is apportioned to all humankind,
Would I enjoy in my inmost self,
Grasp the highest and lowest with my spirit,
And bring their weal and woe into my own breast.
Mephistopheles answers with contempt. Mere mortals, he tells Faust, cannot abide life, which was made for a God:
Believe me, who for millennia past
Has chewed on this hard crust:
From cradle to the grave
No man ever has been able to digest this sourdough!
Believe our kind: this whole
Was made only for a God!
He basks in light eternal.
Us he brought down into darkness,
While all you get is day and night.
Your Honors: Believe us Jews, who have eaten our bread with joy for so many thousands of years, and who say each morning, "Happy are we, how good is our portion, how lovely our fate, how beautiful our heritage." Mephistopheles is not entirely wrong: life was indeed made for a god. But what God has made also can be imparted to human beings. We cannot be gods, but we can be godly.
What makes it possible to digest the sourdough of life is to impart the sacred to everyday life. That is why - as the demographers have shown - only the religious have birth rates above replacement in the industrial world.
Germany drove out the divine with fire and sword. Now it chews the old sourdough with disgust. Germany's sin was to envy us, rather than to emulate us. The great German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig wrote of this envy before his death in 1929. The Gentile nations of the ancient past accepted their eventual extinction, he explained, until they learned of the hope of eternal life from the Jews.
The God of Israel first offered eternal life to humankind, and Christianity extended Israel's promise to the nations. But the nations longed for eternal life in their own Gentile skin rather than in the Kingdom of God promised by Jesus Christ. After Christianity taught them the election of Israel, the Gentiles coveted the election of the Jews and desired their own people to be the chosen people.
Rosenzweig hoped that the Jewish example - of a people whose immortality vouchsafed the Christian promise - would inspire Christians to value the enduring presence of the people of Israel. Mercifully he died before National Socialism took envy of the Jewish people to a new and hideous extreme by positing the German "master race" as a neo-pagan lampoon of Jewish election. The Germans have failed as pagans, and they are failing as Christians. Eventually they might fail of their own lack of interest in life.
The neo-pagan illusions of National Socialism have been crushed, although they lurk at the fringes of German politics. Despite their defeat, the National Socialists may have succeeded in extirpating the presence of the divine in German life. No action by responsible public officials since the end of the war has advanced their cause as forcefully as the evil degree you have promulgated.
You no longer have the power to destroy us, but you yet may destroy yourselves. We, the Eternal People, who have seen so many good things disappear from under the sun, will view this with sadness.
Hochachtungsvoll,
Spengler
Notes: 1. In The Body of Faith: God and the People Israel, (1983), p67
2. See the author's essay "Hast Thou Considered My Servant Faust?"
3. See "Koheleth and Goethe's Faust," by Rabbi Isaac Rosenberg
Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman. His book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) was published by Regnery Press in September 2011. A volume of his essays on culture, religion and economics, It's Not the End of the World - It's Just the End of You, also appeared this fall, from Van Praag Press.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
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http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2012/09/fox-news-anti-jihad-ads-free-speech-or-offensive.html
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Watch/read and make your own judgement as to who has the more persuasive argument:
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2012/09/video-pamela-geller-on-cnns-erinburnett-abruptly-cuts-segment-at-hamas-cair-description-full-audio-secretly-recorded.html
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Objectivist1. I had thought you got the message; everyone agrees Pam Geller is a wackier than a .... (I can't think of anyone wackier and more absurd than her).
Yet again, you post Geller twice in a row. Or, if not Geller, before often you post jihad something or another's website; it's all the same from you here and on the Islam site. That's seemingly it. Geller and Jihad.... is your sole source. You have NO respected sources, no academic sources, no independent sources, no intelligent sources, you have no one except a wacko and her band of merry cohorts. It would be funny except you try to act serious. As I suggested, go outside, talk to your neighborhood kid about the Martians landing; you will find far more truth. Time for you to grow up and learn. YOU have become a joke, although maybe I don't get the humor; is it all a joke Objectivist1? Why do you continue to post garbage; or is that all you know? Or are you just lazy and won't search anywhere else? Or is the answer is that there is no one else? :evil:
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JDN:
I would think that you would have already gotten my message: I consider Geller quotable for our forum.
Marc
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Ahhh and I thought you had agreed, Geller was ....., but you defended Spencer (we discussed) and McCarthy (I agreed; credible).
I guess that's my misunderstanding; still I'm a bit surprised that you find Geller "quotable" in a search for the truth.
In the interest of fairness, I hope you don't mind if I start quoting pieces frequently (that will be easy) and equally biased (again....) albeit opposite of Ms. Geller?
I'll find someone equally outspoken/outlandish/racist; but don't worry, I'm sure their reputation will be equal to hers and in the interest in truth you will want
to hear both (biased) sides. :-)
It is your sandbox, but I notice if you don't like a particular article and find it "specious" and/or the source of the article questionable, you are the first
to point it out.....
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A couple of things.
First a link to a video by a young Jewish woman.
Absolutely Uncertain is the title.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgvMGLdc908
The second a piece from American Thinker by a Rabbi.
L
September 28, 2012
Wake Up, Jews!
By Rabbi Aryeh Spero
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/09/wake-up_jews.html#ixzz27x08dEm0
No doubt, it's hard for people to give up their lifelong attachments and identity. But there are moments in history when a turning point arrives, and those with eyes to see and ears to hear recognize it. Many Jews have made political liberalism their religion and personal identity and the Democrat Party their unexamined home and comfort zone. But everything changed early September.
Rarely do modern-day political conventions startle. The Democratic National Convention, however, was earthshaking and a warning to Jews to wake up. Democrat delegates decided to stick it to Israel. We no longer care, they roared, if Israel remains a Jewish state; flood her heartland with millions of so-called Palestinians whose goal is to make the state Islamic. We will not condemn Hamas for targeting Jewish population centers with rockets. Jerusalem is not Israel's indivisible capital but should be divided, like Berlin was. Such was the undeniable sentiment of the delegates at the Convention.
After objections from outside the Convention, the chairman reinstated support for Jerusalem. But he was resoundingly booed. The world saw how those boos far outweighed the yeas. My fellow Jews, the boos were for you; those boos were for Israel, a successful Israel that sticks in the craw of a leftist, socialist mindset that sees Israel not as the beacon of freedom and accomplishment she is, but as something outside the leftist ideological orbit. Sure, they will take your contributions and your votes, but they don't want your Israel, and they expect you to forgo distinctly Jewish needs on the altar of leftism. We saw not liberalism, but hardcore leftism, and we saw a home where the welcome mat is quite conditional and worn out.
The prophet Daniel saw the writing on the wall. All too often throughout our history, we Jews, and especially heads of major Jewish organizations, have failed to see the writing on the wall. We are afraid to see that which is a game-changer, and so we deny events we wish were not happening. After all, who wants to change the comfort zone?
It was a convention, like the last four years of the Obama administration, reveling in class warfare. Class warfare, like Occupy Wall Street and other scapegoating calls, has never been good for the Jews. We are often the scapegoat of those envious. Knowing this, Ahmadinejad scheduled a meeting with Occupy, a movement endorsed last year by many bigwigs in the Democratic Party and even President Obama himself. Jihadists and much of Islam want to delegitimize the concept of a Jewish state by tarnishing Jews as "those rich capitalists" unworthy of a state among the community of nations.
Too often, we Jews have been beguiled into believing that Jews in positions of power have our interests at heart. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is but the latest who would have us think she is "doing what is good for the Jews" when, in fact, she is doing and will continue to do what is good for Debbie and her power base. Similarly, the heads of the major Jewish organizations have been conspicuously silent -- a silence that would not prevail if a Republican were doing the things to Israel Obama is doing.
Job openings are way down; 50% of college graduates, our children, can't find jobs; and Mr. Obama will continue to weaken national security and thus the safety of our families...and continue to make it more difficult for Israel to survive. For many, all this is secondary and expendable for their more important agenda of abortion on demand and gay marriage. How frivolous; how irresponsible!
We can determine what truly is important to a person when he is forced to choose between two values. Since when is it a Jewish value to condemn Israel to misery just so one can be assured of abortion at any time, under any circumstance? Most of your grandparents would have chosen Israel over abortion and gay marriage. As our sages tell us: "The wages of immorality are further immorality."
President Obama has time to meet with Muslim Brotherhood Morsi of Egypt, who has declared his intention to get rid Israel, but Mr. Obama has no time to meet with Israel's Netanyahu, whose country is under imminent nuclear threat from Iran. Israel's concern about a possible nuclear Holocaust is, for Mr. Obama, dismissed as mere noise, while his delegates at the U.N. on Sept. 24 are ordered to sit and listen to the vile noise of the Holocaust-denier and Iranian Jew-hater-in-chief. It is clear that Mr. Obama's underlying sympathy is with the Muslim Brotherhood and its spread and influence around the world. He is coaxing us to accept Islamic attitudes and norms. This speaks volumes -- to those willing to see the facts as they truly are.
My friends, get off the train, now. The track is pointing in a very dangerous direction. You will not prevail over the trend; on the contrary, you will become part of the trend. As an elder clergyman, I'm horrified as I watch many Jews -- young and old -- slowly evolve into proponents of positions unwholesome, dangerous, and destined toward spiritual and physical suicide.
True, you will be forced to stop your demonizing of Republicans. You may have to vote for Romney, a candidate singular in his passion and love for Israel as a living concept, an indivisible Jerusalem, and for Israelis and Jews as Jews. You will have to wipe away the gruesome fantasies you have concocted about Republicans and conservative Americans. That's OK. In fact, it is a nice thing to do and is good for the soul.
Rabbi Aryeh Spero is author of Push Back: Reclaiming our American Judeo-Christian Spirit. (212) 252-6861; www.caucusforamerica.com
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Simon Wiesenthal Center: Obama should sever ties with Muslim Brotherhood for its call for jihad against Israel
Posted by Robert Spencer at www.jihadwatch.org on October 14, 2012
"We are not dealing with a Youtube video or a lone extremist Imam, but a call to anti-Semitic violence by a man who has tens of millions of followers and leads the organization that controls Egypt's future. It cannot be business as usual in Washington when such an assault is launched against the Jewish people." Indeed. Badie said: "The jihad for the recovery of Jerusalem is a duty for all Muslims." But Obama will pay no heed to this call from the Wiesenthal Center, and the mainstream media will not call him on it.
An update on this story. "Wiesenthal Center: Obama should sever ties with Brotherhood," from the Jerusalem Post, October 13 (thanks to Pamela Geller):
The Simon Wiesenthal Center on Friday called on US President Barack Obama to publicly condemn the latest call for jihad against Israel by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie and to sever all contacts with the organization until the threat is withdrawn.
The Center's call comes after Badie reportedly said in his weekly message to supporters that "The Jews have...spread corruption on earth [and] spilled the blood of believers," and therefore Arabs Should confront the Jewish state "Through holy jihad, high sacrifices and all forms of resistance."
In a joint statement, Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, respectively founder and dean and associate dean of the Center, denounced Badie, saying his "rant confirms our long held view that Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is the most dangerous anti-Semitic organization in the world today."
According to the statement, "We are not dealing with a Youtube video or a lone extremist Imam, but a call to anti-Semitic violence by a man who has tens of millions of followers and leads the organization that controls Egypt's future. It cannot be business as usual in Washington when such an assault is launched against the Jewish people."
They concluded by urging "President Obama to condemn the rhetoric and cut off all official and unofficial US contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood until they desist from their hate and war mongering."
Posted by Robert on October 14, 2012
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By RUTH R. WISSE
No citizens would seem to need a strong America more than the Jews, who are once again targeted by aggressors seeking to destroy what they cannot attain. Iran develops the bomb and threatens to annihilate the Jewish state. Fundamentalist-controlled Egypt threatens to abrogate the treaty that cost Israel the Sinai Peninsula. Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza vie over which is Israel's more effective enemy, with the latter firing more than 400 rockets into southern Israel so far this year.
Israel rejects having any foreign soldier defend its soil, but no country the size of New Jersey can permanently withstand such disproportionate force without countervailing support from a greater power.
The positive basis for such support was spelled out by Mitt Romney this summer on his visit to Israel: common belief in democracy and the rule of law, common practice of free enterprise, and common freedom of expression that includes the freedom to criticize. The defensive rationale for supporting Israel is that, as Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has put it, "those who single out the Jewish people as a target of racial and religious bigotry will inevitably be a threat to all of us."
These affinities explain why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was cheered when he told the U.S. Congress last year that "Israel has no greater friend than America and America has no greater friend than Israel." Through military intelligence and experience, it is sometimes Israel that protects America.
Given the unique danger to the Jewish state and Israel's exceptional role in the defense of democracy, one might expect American Jews to vote for whichever party and politician is likelier to secure both countries. But Unlike Christians, Muslims and many others, Jews are a self-defined minority with a strategy of political accommodation to surrounding majorities. Whether out of fear or hopes for peace, many Jews have ingested the accusations against them, hoping to avoid conflict by holding Israel responsible for the aggression against it. Consequently, Jews can be found among those Americans who believe that their weakness—and that of Israel—would advance world peace.
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Associated Press
.Jews don't necessarily vote with Israel in mind, but for those who do, the choice has never seemed clearer. President Obama's call last year for Israel to return to its 1967 borders—the roughly nine-mile diameter that invited combined attacks from Egypt, Syria, Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization—horrified Susan Crown of Chicago, who had been an Obama bundler in 2008: "Telling all the people who have lost loved ones in the 1967 war, that we were going to have a 'do-over,' really made me mad," she told an Illinois "Women in Leadership" forum this month.
Earlier, in a speech in Cairo entitled "A New Beginning," Mr. Obama courted Arab favor as mediator between Islam and Christianity. His speech extolled the "religious tolerance and racial equality" practiced by the two societies, and he ascribed equal responsibility to Israelis and Arabs for regional hostility.
The clearest argument for choosing Republican over Democratic leadership in the coming election was made inadvertently by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who wrote recently that the GOP was returning to "the moral, muscular foreign policy" that Mr. Obama scuttled. When Ms. Dowd called Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan the "puppets" of Dan Senor (a former Bush administration official who has co-authored a book on Israeli entrepreneurship), she meant they, unlike the president, are enthusiastic and unapologetic supporters of Israel. When she said that neoconservatives are "slithering back," Ms. Dowd merely confirmed, albeit in slimy language, the obvious choice for voters who want America to take leadership of a free and safer world. You just have to know how to read.
Yet most Jews and leaders of Jewish organizations urge their coreligionists to keep voting for the president whose party has adopted the most tepid position on Israel in recent times. Edgar Bronfman, the former president of the World Jewish Congress, wrote recently that, "Not long ago, while sitting in the Oval Office, Obama looked me in the eye and said, 'My commitment to Israel's security is bone deep.' " Or, as my Harvard colleague Alan Dershowitz wrote: "Several months ago, President Obama invited me to the Oval Office to discuss his Iran strategy. He looked me in the eye and said, 'I don't bluff.' "
A president prepared to hypnotize so many Jews into promoting his campaign might have done better to invite back to the Oval Office the prime minister of the country they claim to be looking out for.
Every day brings fresh anxieties. The fate of America's ambassador to Libya and the subsequent White House handling of the attack might give pause to those who trust that President Obama "has Israel's back." And Jews aren't the only Americans looking for resolute policies of deterrence in the Middle East.
Ms. Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of "Jews and Power" (Schocken, 2007).
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Crafty - one thing this professor says regarding her colleague Alan Dershowitz is very true and has always baffled me: He is on the one hand a staunch defender of Israel and has gone to the mat many times against people who demonize that state and promote Palestinian lies, which are endless. HOWEVER - he does appear to by "hypnotized" by Obama, and unable to criticize his foreign policy, particularly in regard to Israel.
Something truly bizarre is at work here that so many otherwise intelligent American Jews are fooled into supporting this President. It is mind-boggling, and recalls nothing so much as the large percentage of European Jews in the late 1930s who failed to see the writing on the wall right in front of their faces. One would think they would have learned this horrific lesson from their brethren who survived. That they have failed to do so is chilling.
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http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/29/poll-18-of-americans-think-obama-is-jewish/
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http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/29/poll-18-of-americans-think-obama-is-jewish/
28 percent correctly identified Obama as a protestant Christian
(http://www.motifake.com/image/demotivational-poster/0912/that-word-inigo-montoya-word-think-means-princess-bride-mand-demotivational-poster-1260739585.jpg)
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various entries here http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Two+gun%22+Cohen
In November 1947, the United Nations was considering the creation of a Jewish state in parts of Western Palestine and a new Arab state in the other parts.
The hopes of the Jews rested in large part on China. The five-member Security Council had to approve putting the resolution before the General Assembly, but China, one of the five, was threatening to veto it.
The head of the Chinese delegation was approached by a hero of the Chinese campaign against the Japanese during World War II, a man who had been a general and senior adviser to President Sun Yat-sen. The general persuaded the delegation to abstain. The Security Council voted approval and the Partition Resolution was sent to the General Assembly, where it passed. Modern Israel came into existence.
The general who persuaded the Chinese not to oppose the resolution was not Chinese himself – but, in fact, a Jew born in Poland in 1887.
Morris Abraham Cohen was brought to London from Poland when he was still a toddler and grew up in the impoverished East End of London. By the time he was 12 he had become a skilled boxer and a pickpocket.
He quickly amassed a police arrest record and his family sent him to reform school until he was 16. Once released, he went to Canada to work on a farm in rural Saskatchewan, near some Indian reservations. The farming bored him; he preferred work as a carnival barker and con man. This got him arrested yet again and he did some jail time.
While wandering the Canadian West he became friendly with the local Chinese. Cohen liked Chinese cuisine (what Jew doesn’t?) and the Chinese outlook on life.
One day Cohen wandered into a Chinese eatery and realized the owner was being robbed. Cohen beat the robber to a pulp. The Chinese were so impressed, they embraced Cohen as one of their own. He joined the local chapter of nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen’s political movement and started to pick up some basic Chinese. Cohen raised funds for Sun’s movement and helped procure arms.
After serving in World War I as a Canadian soldier, Cohen headed off in 1922 to China with plans to work as a railroad developer. But once in Shanghai he found work as a writer on the English-language newspaper associated with Sun Yat-sen’s movement.
The Chinese called him Ma Kun (“clenched fist”), which was as close as they could get to Morris Cohen. He procured arms for a warlord of Canton in the 1920s and was adviser to Wu Tiecheng, the Canton police chief who later became mayor of Shanghai. Cohen began to serve as part of Sun’s guard force, and eventually commanded the entire 250-man presidential bodyguard unit.
Always armed, Cohen managed to defend Sun from more than one assassination attempt. After Cohen was wounded in his hand while driving off one group of assassins, he started carrying a second pistol and local Westerners immediately dubbed him “Two-Gun” Cohen, the nickname he carried with pride for the rest of his life.
Eventually he was appointed head of the Chinese secret service. His sidekick was another Jew, an anti-Soviet Russian named Moses Schwartzberg who had been part of a plot to assassinate Lenin in 1918.
Because of the importance of the Schwartzberg-Cohen pair, Yiddish became one of the three languages of the Chinese secret service, after Mandarin and English. Schwartzberg would later organize a regiment of 1,200 Jewish volunteers to fight for Israel in its War of Independence.
After Sun Yat-sen died, Two-Gun Cohen was named commander of the Chinese 19th field army. He worked for a while for Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek. He led Nationalist troops in fighting against both the Japanese and the Chinese communists. He was the only European ever to serve as a Chinese general.
When the Japanese invaded China in the 1930s, Cohen worked for British intelligence. Just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong was invaded by the Japanese. Two-Gun got Sun Yat-sen’s widow out safely on one of the last planes to escape. Cohen himself was captured by the Japanese and thrown into the Stanley Prison Camp, where he was beaten and mistreated.
After the war he lived in Canada, where he helped the Zionists obtain arms for Israel’s War of Independence. He eventually returned to England, where he died in 1970. On his tombstone in Manchester his name appears in English, Hebrew, and Chinese characters. His funeral was attended by representatives from both Chinas, which were still at war with each another. It was the only thing in the world on which they could agree.
There is a special entry about Two-Gun in the Spy Museum in Washington. Two books have been published about Two-Gun’s life.
Rob Reiner is working on a movie about Two-Gun.
Two-Gun’s cousin, the journalist Marion Dreyfus in New York City, tells me her family still has many scrolls and silks that Two-Gun sent them from China. She found a plaque on the wall of the Shanghai synagogue commemorating Two-Gun as one of the ten most important Jews in Chinese history.
When Cohen returned to Manchester after the war, he and his cousins went into the raincoat business, the weather in England being ideal for such a venture. Two pistols and a Chinese generalship notwithstanding, Two-Gun was a proud Jew – and he could even get you a raincoat…………………………….wholesale!
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Not all Jews. Just the liberal ones. I sproudly separate myself from them.
Objectivist,
The best explanation I can think of as to why Jews did not learn the lesson from the 30's is they still want to believe that government can be "good".
What does George Soros mean when he speaks that government is not a problem when it is "good government"?
In the late 30s Stalin murdered many Jews. though I haven't finished the book and would otherwise be by no means a scholar on the subjece it appears Stalin was very paranoid of Jews because of their ties to America. America represented this gigantic ideological competitor that Stalin feared. And he feared European and Russian Jews many of whom had relatives friends colleagues in the West and particularly in America. So he murdered many.
While it seems many Jews who came to America embraced the Constitution and the freedoms our founding fathers set up for us.
On the other hand many brought their socialist political philosphies with them from Europe. Many appear convinced that some less stringent form of Marxism is still viable and preferrable. It is interesting how so many big monied Hollywood types have type cast McCarthy for his communist censorship attempts of th 40's(?) and 50s yet are very active participants in cencorship of conservative thought in the MSM. Nothing but their version of political correctness is acceptable.
All I can think of is these Jews still are deluded of the utopia that "good government" can foster. Stlalin/Lenin were mer abberations. Commnuism just didn't get a fair chance. Isn't that what the enlightenede Oliver Stone thinks?
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http://www.politics.hu/20121127/outrage-over-jobbik-demand-for-list-of-jewish-mps-officials/
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http://www.investigativeproject.org/3825/saudi-jihadist-targets-jews-favors-wmd
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IPT News
December 19, 2012
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3859/press-tv-obscene-anti-semitism
Iran's Press TV scored an international scoop Tuesday. It turns out, it reports, the massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six of their teachers and administrators was not the work of a troubled loner. Rather, it was Israeli death squads exacting vengeance over a recent United Nations General Assembly vote granting Palestine nonmember observer status.
In a time of national grieving unmatched since the 9/11 attacks, the Iranian government's English-language news outlet used the opportunity to promote vile anti-Semitic conspiracies so extreme that not even the most strident Islamists have offered anything close to them.
The claim came from Michael Harris, who was one of three panelists in a discussion about the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. While the other panelists focused on a culture of violence in America, or the issue of gun laws, Harris unleashed a torrent of Jew hatred.
"Hollywood is Jewish owned and Jewish controlled and they spew filth and they spew violence out," he said. Jews are the ones pushing for gun control. Jews control Congress.
"And now here we go, here's a revenge killing in the U.S., sponsored by Israel, that killed all these innocent children," Harris said. "And that is something that Israelis do very, very well. They target the innocent, they target children, they target women and they avoid the issue. Because they're angry they didn't get their way and now Palestine has standing in the U.N. and Israel is going to be subject to the International Criminal Court and their leadership is going to be taken to task. So let's connect the dots here about what's going on globally, geo-politically with Israel involved."
While the other two guests dismissed Harris' theories, saying Israel had nothing to do with Newtown and tried to steer the conversation back to the brutal killing, the Press TV hostess never pushed back. A video of the segment shows Harris spoke longer than the others during the 25-minute segment and was given the last word.
The United States considers Iran the world's leading state-sponsor of international terrorism. But that fact hasn't stopped American Islamists, led by officials from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) from repeatedly appearing on Press TV programs to bash American policy or culture. It might be different if they tried to speak truth to power, criticizing Iran for its terror support or repression of its own people.
But instead, they have blamed America for Muslim riots over the Internet video mocking Mohammed last fall. They have cast America as being at war with Islam, a message considered to be one of the most potent tools in recruiting Muslims to violent jihad, and likened America's treatment of Muslims to the way Jews were treated in Nazi Germany. Examples go on and on.
They grant legitimacy to a broadcast outlet pushing conspiracy theories like a modern Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Press TV followed up the Newtown panel discussion by publishing a story on Harris' theory on its website. "Israeli death squads involved in Sandy Hook bloodbath: Intelligence analyst," the headline blares. It describes Harris as "a former Republican candidate for governor of Arizona and GOP campaign finance chairman."
The Press TV article asserts Israel staged the attack "to teach America a lesson, knowing that America would take the punishment, keep 'quiet,' and let a 'fall guy' take the blame."
If the publishing of cartoons and Internet videos depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad can spark riots and killings throughout the world, what does a blood libel like the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory do to Muslim attitudes toward Jews?
Blaming Zionists and blaming Jews for problems large and small is a reflex action in parts of the Middle East, including claims Jews were behind the 9/11 attacks. Hamas instills it in young children. Islamists in Egypt blamed Jews for a New Year's Eve 2011 bombing at a Coptic church that killed 21 people, a message echoed by Press TV.
The article on the Newtown shooting was written by Gordon Duff, identified as "a Marine Vietnam veteran, a combat infantryman, and Senior Editor at Veterans Today." Harris also writes for Veterans Today, including articles defending David Duke as "a shining example of western freedom and democracy."
Another article details his suspicions that Jews, what he calls "organized jewery" was behind Jared Loughner's shooting attack in Tucson that wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six people, including U.S. District Judge John Roll.
"My point here is: will organized jewery, the Neo-Pharisees that comprise the unelected criminal shadow government sacrifice an asset like Congresswoman Giffords to advance their bigger agenda?? You bet they will. The criminals who took down the WTC and the Murrah Building in Oklahoma, will eagerly sacrifice a pawn to pass stricter gun control measures and dis-arm the US population. The armed US population is the biggest obstacle that still exists for the shadow government of the Neo-Pharisees to fully implement a totalitarian state here in the USA, just like they destroyed Czarist Russia and created the Soviet Union, they work day and night to impose that same hell on the citizens of the USA."
Press TV officials should have been aware of Harris' views before they invited him on the air and let him unleash his empty conspiracy theories and hate rhetoric.
Duff's Press TV article says Harris points to "the flood of inconsistencies in the 'cover story.'" But those amount to a series of unanswered questions about alleged accomplices and unsourced claims that police gunned down the shooter, Adam Lanza, after he tried to surrender.
"After Harris' broadcast, key members of the military and law enforcement community contacted Veterans Today in full support of Harris' analysis," Duff writes.
"One three star general is quoted as saying, 'Harris hit the nail right on the head and it is about time someone spoke up.'"
What other proof is needed? In the broadcast interview, Harris predicted a grand cover-up by Congress, which he said is owned by Zionists. The absence of proof, therefore, is his proof.
"So any truth of this, if there's going to be, is going to be hidden because Israel wants it hidden because they are once again the guilty party," Harris said. "You have to realize, Israel has been operating death squads in the United States now since Gabby Giffords and Judge Roll were shot in Tucson. There's been other incidences. The Aurora, Colorado shooting that was, again, Israeli death squads operating in the U.S."
Fellow panelist Raynard Jackson, a Washington-based political consultant, called Harris' comments "irresponsible." A third panelist, Don Debar, said that the United States is the "pre-eminent imperial power in the history of the planet." As such, it controls Israel "although there is some backwash in the Congress and other places."
Given the last word, Harris went off on another rant, condemning American drone strikes abroad, which, "again," he said, "it goes back to Israeli influence in U.S. foreign policy." If he had not done so in the previous 20 minutes, he made it clear that he and Iran are on the same page.
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On this day in 1945 Auschwitz was liberated.
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Thanks for sharing that, Marc.
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http://www.capitalismisfreedom.com/life/japanese-diplomat-wwii-saved-6000-jews-hitler-writing-them-all-visas-japan-even-after
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Important historical NYT piece from March 1 2013 that I did not see posted:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking Published: March 1, 2013 Sunday New York Times
THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.
What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.
The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.
The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.
“The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.
“We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was,” he said, “but the numbers are unbelievable.”
The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.
Auschwitz and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi killing machine in the public consciousness. Likewise, the Nazi system for imprisoning Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a single site — the Warsaw Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites, infamous though they are, represent only a minuscule fraction of the entire German network, the new research makes painfully clear.
The maps the researchers have created to identify the camps and ghettos turn wide sections of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture and slavery — centered in Germany and Poland, but reaching in all directions.
The lead editors on the project, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as part of a multivolume encyclopedia. (The Holocaust museum has published the first two, with five more planned by 2025.)
The existence of many individual camps and ghettos was previously known only on a fragmented, region-by-region basis. But the researchers, using data from some 400 contributors, have been documenting the entire scale for the first time, studying where they were located, how they were run, and what their purpose was.
The brutal experience of Henry Greenbaum, an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor who lives outside Washington, typifies the wide range of Nazi sites.
When Mr. Greenbaum, a volunteer at the Holocaust museum, tells visitors today about his wartime odyssey, listeners inevitably focus on his confinement of months at Auschwitz, the most notorious of all the camps.
But the images of the other camps where the Nazis imprisoned him are ingrained in his memory as deeply as the concentration camp number — A188991 — tattooed on his left forearm.
In an interview, he ticked off the locations in rapid fire, the details still vivid.
First came the Starachowice ghetto in his hometown in Poland, where the Germans herded his family and other local Jews in 1940, when he was just 12.
Next came a slave labor camp with six-foot-high fences outside the town, where he and a sister were moved while the rest of the family was sent to die at Treblinka. After his regular work shift at a factory, the Germans would force him and other prisoners to dig trenches that were used for dumping the bodies of victims. He was sent to Auschwitz, then removed to work at a chemical manufacturing plant in Poland known as Buna Monowitz, where he and some 50 other prisoners who had been held at the main camp at Auschwitz were taken to manufacture rubber and synthetic oil. And last was another slave labor camp at Flossenbürg, near the Czech border, where food was so scarce that the weight on his 5-foot-8-inch frame fell away to less than 100 pounds.
By the age of 17, Mr. Greenbaum had been enslaved in five camps in five years, and was on his way to a sixth, when American soldiers freed him in 1945. “Nobody even knows about these places,” Mr. Greenbaum said. “Everything should be documented. That’s very important. We try to tell the youngsters so that they know, and they’ll remember.”
The research could have legal implications as well by helping a small number of survivors document their continuing claims over unpaid insurance policies, looted property, seized land and other financial matters.
“HOW many claims have been rejected because the victims were in a camp that we didn’t even know about?” asked Sam Dubbin, a Florida lawyer who represents a group of survivors who are seeking to bring claims against European insurance companies.
Dr. Megargee, the lead researcher, said the project was changing the understanding among Holocaust scholars of how the camps and ghettos evolved.
As early as 1933, at the start of Hitler’s reign, the Third Reich established about 110 camps specifically designed to imprison some 10,000 political opponents and others, the researchers found. As Germany invaded and began occupying European neighbors, the use of camps and ghettos was expanded to confine and sometimes kill not only Jews but also homosexuals, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and many other ethnic groups in Eastern Europe. The camps and ghettos varied enormously in their mission, organization and size, depending on the Nazis’ needs, the researchers have found.
The biggest site identified is the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, which held about 500,000 people at its height. But as few as a dozen prisoners worked at one of the smallest camps, the München-Schwabing site in Germany. Small groups of prisoners were sent there from the Dachau concentration camp under armed guard. They were reportedly whipped and ordered to do manual labor at the home of a fervent Nazi patron known as “Sister Pia,” cleaning her house, tending her garden and even building children’s toys for her.
When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.
The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, “Germanizing” prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.
In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites. (more at link above)
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I actually did post this earlier - not sure if it was in this thread or not. Regardless - very interesting that the NYT will even publish this story, considering the fact that they tried to whitewash the Holocaust during WWII until the very end, when it could not be denied any longer.
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Thanks Objectivist. Sorry that I missed that.
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http://unitedwithisrael.org/jews-commemorate-the-warsaw-ghetto-uprising/
Happy Passover!
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http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0018_0_18447.html
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-apuzzo/voices-raised-in-resistan_b_3029488.html
From the article:
It was at Terezín in 1944 that imprisoned Czech conductor Rafael Schächter led a chorus of his fellow Jewish prisoners -- most of them doomed to the gas chambers at Auschwitz -- in brazenly performing Verdi's Requiem before the very Nazis who had condemned them to death. One of the most complex and demanding of chorale works, Verdi's 1874 Requiem was originally intended as a musical rendition of the Catholic funeral mass. Rafael Schächter took Verdi's music and transformed it into a universal statement, one proclaiming the prisoners' unbroken spirit and warning of God's coming wrath against their Nazi captors.
Includes trailer of PBS special.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/05/the-remarkable-107-year-life-of-a-nazi-concentration-camp-survivor/
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http://news.yahoo.com/stephen-hawking-backs-boycott-israeli-academics-152822565.html
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Why are the Jews So Powerful?
Posted on May 6, 2013 by alaiwah
By Farrukh Saleem
The writer is the Pakistani Executive Director of the Center for Research and Security Studies, a think tank established in 2007, and son in law of Khalilur Rehman of the Jang Group.
There are only 14 million Jews in the world:
seven million in the Americas
five million in Asia
two million in Europe
100,000 in Africa .
For every single Jew in the world there are 100 Muslims.
Yet, Jews are more than a hundred times more powerful than all the Muslims put together.
Ever wondered why?
Jesus of Nazareth was Jewish.
Albert Einstein, the most influential scientist of all time and TIME magazine’s ’Person of the Century’, was a Jew.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis was a Jew.
So were Karl Marx, Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman.
Here are a few other Jews whose intellectual output has enriched the whole humanity:
Benjamin Rubin gave humanity the vaccinating needle.
Jonas Salk developed the first polio vaccine.
Albert Sabin developed the improved live polio vaccine.
Gertrude Elion gave us a leukemia fighting drug.
Baruch Blumberg developed the vaccination for Hepatitis B.
Paul Ehrlich discovered a treatment for syphilis.
Elie Metchnikoff won a Nobel Prize in infectious diseases.
Bernard Katz won a Nobel Prize in neuromuscular transmission.
Andrew Schally won a Nobel in endocrinology.
Aaron Beck founded Cognitive Therapy.
Gregory Pincus developed the first oral contraceptive pill.
George Wald won a Nobel for our understanding of the human eye.
Stanley Cohen won a Nobel in embryology.
Willem Kolff came up with the kidney dialysis machine.
Over the past 105 years, 14 million Jews have won 15-dozen Nobel Prizes while only three Nobel Prizes have been won by 1.4 billion
Muslims (other than Peace Prizes).
Stanley Mezor invented the first micro-processing chip.
Leo Szilard developed the first nuclear chain reactor;
Peter Schultz, optical fibre cable;
Charles Adler, traffic lights;
Benno Strauss, Stainless steel;
Isador Kisee, sound movies;
Emile Berliner, telephone microphone;
Charles Ginsburg, videotape recorder.
Famous financiers in the business world who belong to Jewish faith include:
Ralph Lauren (Polo),
Levis Strauss (Levi’s Jeans),
Howard Schultz (Starbuck’s) ,
Sergey Brin (Google),
Michael Dell (Dell Computers),
Larry Ellison (Oracle),
Donna Karan (DKNY),
Irv Robbins (Baskins & Robbins) and
Bill Rosenberg (Dunkin Donuts).
Richard Levin, President of Yale University, is a Jew. So are Henry Kissinger (American secretary of state), Alan Greenspan (Fed chairman under Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush), Joseph Lieberman (US Senator), Madeleine Albright (American secretary of state), Casper Weinberger (American secretary of defense), Maxim Litvinov ( USSR foreign Minister), David Marshal ( Singapore ‘s first chief minister), Issac Isaacs (governor-general of Australia ), Benjamin
Disraeli (British statesman and author), Yevgeny Primakov (Russian PM), Barry Goldwater (US Senator), Jorge Sampaio (president of Portugal ), John Deutsch (CIA director), Herb Gray (Canadian deputy PM), Pierre Mendes (French PM), Michael Howard (British home
secretary), Bruno Kreisky (chancellor of Austria ) and Robert Rubin (American secretary of treasury).
In the media, famous Jews include:
Wolf Blitzer (CNN), Barbara Walters (ABC News), Eugene Meyer (Washington Post), Henry Grunwald (editor-in-chief Time), Katherine Graham (publisher of The Washington Post), Joseph Lelyveld (Executive editor, The New York Times), and Max Frankel (New York Times).
The most beneficent philanthropist in the history of the world is George Soros, a Jew, who has so far donated a colossal $4 billion most of which has gone as aid to scientists and universities around the world.
Second to George Soros is Walter Annenberg, another Jew, who has built a hundred libraries by donating an estimated $2 billion.
At the Olympics, Mark Spitz set a record of sorts by winning seven gold medals; Lenny Krayzelburg is a three-time Olympic gold medalist.
Spitz, Krayzelburg and Boris Becker (Tennis) are all Jewish.
Did you know that Harrison Ford, George Burns, Tony Curtis, Charles Bronson, Sandra Bullock, Billy Crystal, Woody Allen, Paul Newman,
Peter Sellers, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Douglas, Ben Kingsley, Kirk Douglas, Goldie Hawn, Cary Grant, William Shatner, Jerry Lewis and
Peter Falk are all Jews.
As a matter of fact, Hollywood itself was founded by a Jew.
Among directors and producers, Steven Spielberg, Mel Brooks, Oliver Stone, Aaron Spelling ( Beverly Hills 90210), Neil Simon (The Odd Couple), Andrew Vaina (Rambo 1/2/3), Michael Man (Starsky andHutch), Milos Forman (One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Douglas Fairbanks (The Thief of Baghdad ) and Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters) are all Jewish.
So, why are Jews so powerful?
Answer : EDUCATION
Why are Muslims so powerless?
There are an estimated 1,476,233,470 Muslims on the face of the planet: one billion in Asia, 400 million in Africa, 44 million in Europe and six million in the Americas . Every fifth human being is a Muslim; for every single Hindu there are two Muslims, for every Buddhist there are two Muslims and for every Jew there are 100 Muslims.
Ever wondered why Muslims are so powerless?
Here is why: There are 57 member-countries of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), and all of them put together have around
500 universities; one university for every three million Muslims.
The United States has 5,758 universities and India has 8,407.
In 2004, Shanghai Jiao Tong University compiled an ‘Academic Ranking of World Universities’ , and intriguingly, not one university from Muslim-majority states was in the top-500.
As per data collected by the UNDP, literacy in the Christian world stands at nearly 90 per cent and 15 Christian-majority states have a literacy rate of 100 per cent.
A Muslim-majority state, as a sharp contrast, has an average literacy rate of around 40 per cent and there is no Muslim-majority state with a literacy rate of 100 per cent.
Some 98 per cent of the ‘literates’ in the Christian world had completed primary school, while less than 50 per cent of the ‘literates’ in the Muslim world did the same.
Around 40 per cent of the ‘literates’ in the Christian world attended university while no more than two per cent of the ‘literates’ in the Muslim world did the same.
Muslim-majority countries have 230 scientists per one million Muslims. The US has 4,000 scientists per million and Japan has 5,000 per million.
In the entire Arab world, the total number of full-time researchers is 35,000 and there are only 50 technicians per one million Arabs. (in the Christian world there are up to 1,000 technicians per one million).
The Muslim world spends 0.2 per cent of its GDP on research and development, while the Christian world spends around five per cent of its GDP.
Conclusion: The Muslim world lacks the capacity to produce knowledge!
Daily newspapers per 1,000 people and number of book titles per million are two indicators of whether knowledge is being diffused in a society.
In Pakistan , there are 23 daily newspapers per 1,000 Pakistanis while the same ratio in Singapore is 360. In the UK , the number of book titles per million stands at 2,000 while the same in Egypt is 20.
Conclusion: The Muslim world is failing to diffuse knowledge.
Exports of high technology products as a percentage of total exports are an important indicator of knowledge application. Pakistan ‘s export of high technology products as a percentage of total exports stands at one per cent. The same for Saudi Arabia is 0.3 per cent; Kuwait , Morocco , and Algeria are all at 0.3 per cent, while Singapore is at 58 per cent.
Conclusion: The Muslim world is failing to apply knowledge.
Why are Muslims powerless?
…..Because we aren’t producing knowledge,
…..Because we aren’t diffusing knowledge.,
…..Because we aren’t applying knowledge.
And, the future belongs to knowledge-based societies.
Interestingly, the combined annual GDP of 57 OIC-countries is under $2 trillion.
America , just by herself, produces goods and services worth $12 trillion; China $8 trillion, Japan $3.8 trillion and Germany $2.4 trillion (purchasing power parity basis).
Oil rich Saudi Arabia , UAE, Kuwait and Qatar collectively produce goods and services (mostly oil) worth $500 billion; Spain alone produces goods and services worth over $1 trillion, Catholic Poland $489 billion and Buddhist Thailand $545 billion.
….. (Muslim GDP as a percentage of world GDP is fast declining).
All we do is shout to Allah the whole day and blame everyone else for our multiple failures!
Muslims are not happy
They’re not happy in Gaza
They’re not happy in Egypt
They’re not happy in Libya
They’re not happy in Morocco
They’re not happy in Iran
They’re not happy in Iraq
They’re not happy in Yemen
They’re not happy in Afghanistan
They’re not happy in Pakistan
They’re not happy in Syria
They’re not happy in Lebanon
So, where are they happy?
They’re happy in Australia
They’re happy in England
They’re happy in France
They’re happy in Italy
They’re happy in Germany
They’re happy in Sweden
They’re happy in the USA & Canada
They’re happy in Norway
They’re happy in almost every country that is not Islamic!
And who do they blame?
Not Islam…
Not their leadership…
Not themselves…
THEY BLAME THE COUNTRIES THEY ARE HAPPY IN
And they want to change the countries they’re happy in, to be like the countries they came from, where they were unhappy.
Try to find logic in that!
Jeff Foxworthy on Muslims:
1. If You refine heroin for a living, but you have a moral objection to liquor. You are a Muslim
2. If You own a $3,000 machine gun and $5,000 rocket launcher, but you can’t afford shoes. You are a Muslim
3. If You have more wives than teeth. You are a Muslim
4. If You wipe your butt with your bare hand, but consider bacon unclean. You are a Muslim.
5. If You think vests come in two styles: bullet-proof and suicide. You are a Muslim
6. If You can’t think of anyone you haven’t declared Jihad against.
You are a Muslim
7. If You consider television dangerous, but routinely carry explosives in your clothing. You are a Muslim
8. If You were amazed to discover that cell phones have uses other than setting off roadside bombs. You are a Muslim
9. If You have nothing against women and think every man should own at least four. You are a Muslim
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Bwahahahahahaha!!
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The author forgets Barack Hussain Obama. He alone makes up for all the Jews on the lists.
He is the gift to the world.
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The Church of Scotland's Scandal
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Earlier this month, the Church of Scotland issued a report titled "The Inheritance of Abraham? A Report on the 'Promised Land.'"
The essence of the report is that according to the Bible, Jews have no more attachment to the land of Israel than anyone else. Hence "promised land" is in quotation marks in the report's title -- because there is no promised land.
In the report's words: "The New Testament contains a radical re-interpretation of the concepts of 'Israel,' 'temple,' 'Jerusalem' and 'land.' When the Bible mentions 'Israel,' it does not mean Israel; when it says 'temple,' the Bible does not mean the Jewish temple; 'Jerusalem' does not mean the city of Jerusalem; and 'land' does not mean land.
"Promises about the land of Israel," the report continues, "were never intended to be taken literally, or as applying to a defined geographical territory."
Even during the worst excesses of Christian anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages, it is doubtful that any normative Christian body declared that "Israel," "the temple," "Jerusalem" and "the land" no longer meant or were ever intended to mean what those words represent.
This claim is not only profoundly anti-Semitic. It is an act of theological forgery; it makes a mockery of the Bible as a coherent document and it renders Christianity inherently anti-Semitic.
It would be as if a major post-Christian religious body had announced that "Jesus," "Christ," "crucifixion" and "resurrection" had never meant what Christians and the New Testament had always understood them to mean. Imagine if a major Muslim body declared that Jesus means Muhammad; Christ means Quran; crucifixion means Islamophobia; and resurrection means the Hajj.
I have never equated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. But the Church of Scotland report is not about criticism of Israel; it is about invalidating the Jewish people and invalidating the Jews' historically incontestable claims to the land upon which the only independent states that ever existed were Jewish.
--The Church of Scotland report asserts that the Bible does not support the existence of a Jewish state: "There has been a widespread assumption by many Christians as well as many Jewish people that the Bible supports an essentially Jewish state of Israel. This raises an increasing number of difficulties. ... "
--It asserts that justice and the existence of a Jewish state are mutually exclusive: "There is a direct conflict of interest between wanting human rights and justice for all and retaining the right to the land."
--It asserts that the Jews' return to Israel has no biblical basis.
--It asserts that the notion that the Jews have or ever had a special relationship with God -- one of the most oft repeated ideas in the Hebrew Bible -- is negated in that very same Bible: "That exclusivist tradition implied Jews had a special, privileged position in relation to God. But the prophetic tradition stood against this." The Chosen People is not chosen, in other words.
--It asserts that God's promise of the land to Abraham has nothing to do with the Jews; it is only about Jesus: "The promise to Abraham about land is fulfilled through the impact of Jesus, not by restoration of land to the Jewish people."
--It asserts that even Jesus -- that proud, religious Jew -- did not believe in any special relationship between God and the Jews: "Jesus offered a radical critique of Jewish specialness ... "
At the same time, this truly immoral document does not devote a word to why there were Palestinian refugees: While the Jews accepted the 1947-48 partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, all the neighboring Arab states rejected the partition and invaded the Jews in order to annihilate Israel at birth.
Nor does the report devote a single sentence to how Israel's occupation of the West Bank came about: In 1967, Israel's neighbors sought to exterminate Israel just as Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and most Palestinians and other Muslims in the Middle East today wish to now. And that only because of that war, won by Israel, did Israel come to occupy the West Bank of Jordan.
Nor is a word devoted to Palestinian national honoring of their numerous terrorists, or to the exterminationist and anti-Semitic propaganda that saturates Middle East media or to the widespread Palestinian support for terrorism (according to the just-released Pew Forum poll of Muslims, 40 percent of Palestinians support suicide terror).
And the Church of Scotland did not think it important to even hint at what happened in Gaza after the Israelis gave the whole of Gaza to the Palestinians: The Palestinians converted it into a terror-state that regularly launches rockets into Israel to kill as many Israelis as possible.
And, most vile of all, the Church of Scotland never once notes, let alone condemns, the Muslim countries and organizations that seek to annihilate Israel, an existential threat that no other country or people in the world face.
The Church of Scotland has given voice to the ugliest depiction of Jews since medieval times. The official reaction of the Scottish Jewish community is that Christian-Jewish post-Holocaust dialogue seems to have been a moral and intellectual waste of time. I do not agree. But if other Christian churches do not condemn the Church of Scotland -- despite its promise to revise its report to include a statement that Israel has a right to exist (!) -- even pro-Christian Jews will wonder whether the Scottish Jewish community's reaction is valid.
And how did this happen? The report is a combination of medieval Christian anti-Judaism and contemporary leftist anti-Zionism. For Jews and Israel, that's a lethal combination.
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http://unitedwithisrael.org/the-jewish-exodus-from-arab-lands/
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Few days after Rush Limbaugh's rant about there being no formal connection to Hitler and the final solution this pops up out of no where. Was never available to historians but for the One - no problem. OK so we'll see if a single witness came forward:
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Exclusive: U.S. finds long-lost diary of top Nazi leader, Hitler aide
ReutersBy John Shiffman | Reuters – 1 hr 15 mins ago..
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.Alfred Rosenberg, the Chief Nazi Party Ideologist, is seen in a portrait taken between 1933 and 1945 and released to Reuters by the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington June 7, 2013. REUTERS/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of William Gallagher/HANDOUTView Photo.
Alfred Rosenberg, the Chief Nazi …
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By John Shiffman
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The government has recovered 400 pages from the long-lost diary of Alfred Rosenberg, a confidant of Adolf Hitler who played a central role in the extermination of millions of Jews and others during World War Two.
A preliminary U.S. government assessment reviewed by Reuters asserts the diary could offer new insight into meetings Rosenberg had with Hitler and other top Nazi leaders, including Heinrich Himmler and Herman Goering. It also includes details about the German occupation of the Soviet Union, including plans for mass killings of Jews and other Eastern Europeans.
"The documentation is of considerable importance for the study of the Nazi era, including the history of the Holocaust," according to the assessment, prepared by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. "A cursory content analysis indicates that the material sheds new light on a number of important issues relating to the Third Reich's policy. The diary will be an important source of information to historians that compliments, and in part contradicts, already known documentation."
How the writings of Rosenberg, a Nazi Reich minister who was convicted at Nuremberg and hanged in 1946, might contradict what historians believe to be true is unclear. Further details about the diary's contents could not be learned, and a U.S. government official stressed that the museum's analysis remains preliminary.
But the diary does include details about tensions within the German high-command - in particular, the crisis caused by the flight of Rudolf Hess to Britain in 1941, and the looting of art throughout Europe, according to the preliminary analysis.
The recovery is expected to be announced this week at a news conference in Delaware held jointly by officials from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Department of Justice and Holocaust museum.
The diary offers a loose collection of Rosenberg's recollections from spring 1936 to winter 1944, according to the museum's analysis. Most entries are written in Rosenberg's looping cursive, some on paper torn from a ledger book and others on the back of official Nazi stationary, the analysis said.
Rosenberg was an early and powerful Nazi ideologue, particularly on racial issues. He directed the Nazi party's foreign affairs department and edited the Nazi newspaper. Several of his memos to Hitler were cited as evidence during the post-war Nuremberg trials.
Rosenberg also directed the systematic Nazi looting of Jewish art, cultural and religious property throughout Europe. The Nazi unit created to seize such artifacts was called Task Force Reichsleiter Rosenberg.
He was convicted of crimes against humanity and was one of a dozen senior Nazi officials executed in October 1946. His diary, once held by Nuremberg prosecutors as evidence, vanished after the trial.
A Nuremberg prosecutor, Robert Kempner, was long suspected by U.S. officials of smuggling the diary back to the United States.
Born in Germany, Kempner had fled to America in the 1930s to escape the Nazis, only to return for post-war trials. He is credited with helping reveal the existence of the Wannsee Protocol, the 1942 conference during which Nazi officials met to coordinate the genocide against the Jews, which they termed "The Final Solution."
Kempner cited a few Rosenberg diary excerpts in his memoir, and in 1956 a German historian published entries from 1939 and 1940. But the bulk of the diary never surfaced.
When Kempner died in 1993 at age 93, legal disputes about his papers raged for nearly a decade between his children, his former secretary, a local debris removal contractor and the Holocaust museum. The children agreed to give their father's papers to the Holocaust museum, but when officials arrived to retrieve them from his home in 1999, they discovered that many thousands of pages were missing.
After the 1999 incident, the FBI opened a criminal investigation into the missing documents. No charges were filed in the case.
But the Holocaust museum has gone on to recover more than 150,000 documents, including a trove held by Kempner's former secretary, who by then had moved into the New York state home of an academic named Herbert Richardson.
The Rosenberg diary, however, remained missing.
Early this year, the Holocaust museum and an agent from Homeland Security Investigation tried to locate the missing diary pages. They tracked the diary to Richardson, who was living near Buffalo.
Richardson declined to comment. A government official said more details will be announced at the news conference.
(Reporting by John Shiffmann in Washington and Kristina R. Cooke in San Francisco; Editing by Blake Morrison and Leslie Gevirtz)
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http://www.elephantjournal.com/2011/08/what-j-r-r-tolkien-said-to-the-nazis-when-they-asked-if-he-was-jewish/
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Iran Condemns Filmmaker as "Traitor" for Israel Visit
by IPT News • Jul 19, 2013 at 9:48 am
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4091/iran-condemns-filmmaker-as-traitor-for-israel
The Islamic Republic of Iran's vehemently anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiment has never been limited to international politics. Such bigoted attitudes continue to spill over into the arts, which are supposed to transcend political differences. Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf continues to experience a severe backlash for his recent decision to attend the Jerusalem International Film Festival, causing immense criticism from many within Iran and the Diaspora.
The head of the Cinema Organization at the Ministry of Islamic Guidance ordered the Film Museum's director to remove all of Makhmalbaf's exhibits, including dozens of international awards.
Makhmalbaf left Iran in 2005. While visiting Israel for his film screening, Makhmalbaf, advocated for strengthened ties between the Iranian and Israeli people. Elements within Iran's conservative media accused the film director of treason and collaboration with the "Zionists" against the Islamic Republic. Makhmalbaf's film, "The Gardener," relates to the Baha'i community; a religious minority which suffers systematic and institutionalized discrimination in Iran. Much of the film was made in Israel, and the trailer emphasized violence committed in the name of religion
The backlash further emphasizes the Islamic Republic's fear of the "soft war" allegedly waged by Israel and the West in an attempt to discredit the regime in the eyes of the Iranian population. International efforts to alleviate persecution of minorities and dissidents are perceived as a major threat to the stability of the regime.
Even the so called "pragmatic conservative" camp and reformist affiliated outlets criticized Makhmalbaf's visit to Israel. By simply visiting the Jewish state, Makhmalbaf's image has been transformed from revolutionary cultural icon to a traitorous enemy of the Iranian people.
Roughly 150 intellectuals, academics, authors, artists, journalists, and human rights advocates released a public letter condemning Makhmalbaf, claiming a violation of the cultural and academic boycott of anything Israeli. On the other hand, 80 activists and academics of Iranian descent signed a letter to the Times of Israel praising Makhmalbaf's visit. The signatories commended Makhmalbaf's call for Israel to support democratic elements in Iran over conducting a military strike on its nuclear sites.
In an interview with the UK's Guardian, Makhmalbaf described his time in Israel as "amazing" noting packed houses who attended three different screenings. As an artist, he said he tries to build friendship among people of different faiths and ethnicities.
That's not something the Iranian regime wants people to see.
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Read this first, then watch the video below.
It is interesting to note the following in the family tree of Kate Middleton
wife of Prince William:
Kate's mother is Carol Middleton, daughter of Ronald Goldsmith and Dorothy Harrison (both Jews)
The parents of Dorothy Harrison are Robert Harrison and Elizabeth Temple
(both Jews), the latter a descendant of the Myers family, English Jews in
the 19th century.
Bottom line: Princess Kate is a Jew on her matriarchal side, and as a
consequence, the future king of England will be a Jew according to Jewish
Law and tradition.
Fancy that!
Now click here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG3HDw8W3Jg&feature=player
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The article has parts that are more rude than funny.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/middleton-shmiddleton-britains-new-royal-heir-is-not-a-jew/
“It’s nonsense,” said Doreen Berger, the chairman of the Jewish Genealogy Society (JGS). “I have been researching Kate Middleton’s ancestry since it looked like she was getting engaged to Prince William.
“I’ve looked back as far as it’s possible to look back and she doesn’t have a Jewish link at all — it’s just not true. I’m 100 per cent sure.”
She added that Mr Cole was “confused. The names — Myers and Goldsmiths — are shared by non-Jews as well as Jews. Carole Middleton’s ancestors were a coal miner and a carpenter and they were not from Jewish areas.”
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The “Jewish” surnames were also used by non-Jews, and “there is no evidence of synagogue marriages or Jewish burials,” Harris noted. On the contrary, there are solid records of church weddings among Carole’s ancestors going back at least five generations.
....
The office of the British Chief Rabbi, which keeps records of marriages in the Orthodox United Synagogue, says that previous publications debunking the Middletons’ Jewish heritage “make the issue completely clear.”
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Thanks for the catch Rachel. I should have known better.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Autonomous_Oblast
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Outrage: U.S. Returning Artifacts Looted from Iraqi Jews to Iraq, Instead of Lawful
Owners
http://pjmedia.com/blog/outrage-u-s-returning-artifacts-looted-from-iraqi-jews-to-iraq-instead-of-lawful-owners/
By Harold Rhode
The National Archives is readying an exhibit of Iraqi Jewish artifacts due to open
on October 11. Appallingly, the U.S. government has agreed to then return the Iraqi
Jewish archives — including holy books — to Iraq, which systematically expelled its
Jewish community, by June of 2014. This is like returning artifacts to Germany, had
they never renounced Nazism.
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Outrage: U.S. Returning Artifacts Looted from Iraqi Jews to Iraq, Instead of Lawful
Owners
http://pjmedia.com/blog/outrage-u-s-returning-artifacts-looted-from-iraqi-jews-to-iraq-instead-of-lawful-owners/
By Harold Rhode
The National Archives is readying an exhibit of Iraqi Jewish artifacts due to open
on October 11. Appallingly, the U.S. government has agreed to then return the Iraqi
Jewish archives — including holy books — to Iraq, which systematically expelled its
Jewish community, by June of 2014. This is like returning artifacts to Germany, had
they never renounced Nazism.
Strange that a government run by Rev. Wright's most famous church attendee would do this.
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Op-Ed Contributor
In Hungary, Anti-Semitism Rises Again
By MARIANNE SZEGEDY-MASZAK
Published: October 29, 2013
ARLINGTON, Virginia — My father, Aladar Szegedy-Maszak, a Hungarian diplomat, dined with Adolf Hitler three times, And then he went to the concentration camp at Dachau.
As secretary to the Hungarian ambassador to Germany from 1932 to 1937, my father watched the rise of the Führer. He encountered him socially at a reception and two dinners — the first time on Feb. 10, 1933, at Hitler’s first speech as chancellor. He remembered how sweat poured from Hitler’s face, soaking his uniform. The speech left my father cold, but also deeply unsettled by the rhapsodic reactions of the audience. “This was my first personal experience that we were dealing with a quasi-religious mass movement,” he wrote, “or perhaps more accurately, a mass psychosis.”
My father knew how devastating Nazi rule would be for the Jews. Hungarian Jews came to his office in droves, imploring him for advice as to how they could help themselves as property was seized and small businesses destroyed.
He met movie directors and actresses; small-business owners; a landlord who owned a block of houses in a workingmen’s neighborhood of Berlin who was told that if he didn’t leave, he would be charged with molesting women. There was nothing he could do.
The hardy perennial of anti-Semitism has made a dramatic comeback in Central Europe. Germany has recently reiterated its friendship with Israel, in response to recent anti-Jewish activity. Far-right political parties in France and Austria have gained force. In Hungary, a virulently anti-Semitic party, Jobbik, is now the third-largest in Parliament. One party official has called for a list of all Jewish legislators, to assess their loyalty — a move that even the right-wing government condemned. (Earlier this month, the government pledged, in the face of global criticism, to crack down on anti-Semitism.)
This all would have been troubling yet familiar to my father and other relatives of his generation. They came of age in a country that was a stew of anti-Semitism. After World War I, Communists ruled for more than four months, and since most of those in power were Jews, the link between Communism and Judaism was forged in many minds. For many Hungarians, to be anti-Communist meant being anti-Semitic.
My father was not a convinced anti-Semite, but as a Hungarian Christian from a strong family tradition of support for the monarchy, he flirted with anti-Semitism as a young man — a fact he was ashamed of his entire life. The experiences in Berlin, he wrote, “extinguished the last, minimal remnants of anti-Semitism that I had had as a teenager during the counterrevolution.” His years in Berlin, and his two other encounters with Hitler, were antidotes to any vestiges of anti-Semitism he had once harbored.
At a diplomatic reception in September 1934 before the Nuremberg rally that Leni Riefenstahl famously memorialized in “Triumph of the Will,” my father could not reconcile the old-fashioned, modest, almost shy Hitler with the raving lunatic he had seen at rallies.
The final time he met Hitler was June 7, 1942. The prime minister of Hungary was invited on an official visit to the Führer’s wartime headquarters in East Prussia and asked my father — now deputy head of the political division in the Foreign Ministry — to go with him. They ate in Hitler’s dining car and my father saw what he later referred to as “the Satanic nature of his character.”
Hungary was an ally of Germany, but an extremely unreliable one. Its officials refused to deport Jews to concentration camps. My father, known for his opposition to Nazism, had attempted to organize an effort to negotiate a separate peace with the Allies, an effort that failed and led to his arrest after the Germans invaded Hungary, on March 19, 1944.
After a regime of Hungarian Nazis took over in October 1944, voices of moderation were jailed or killed. Some 440,000 Jews were deported. Members of the gendarmerie were enthusiastic participants in the process. Ultimately some 600,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered.
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If anti-Communism represented one side of hatred for Jews, anticapitalism represented another. My mother’s family, the highly assimilated children and grandchildren of the Hungarian Jewish industrialist Manfred Weiss, fell into the latter category.
My maternal grandfather was transported to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria after the invasion of Hungary, but he was lucky. He and his family were granted safe passage to Portugal after making, in effect, a deal with Heinrich Himmler for freedom in exchange for their property.
Before this deal was made, my maternal grandmother had disguised herself as a Hungarian peasant during the Nazi occupation. She met the wife of the anti-Semitic former prime minister (and Nazi collaborator) Bela Imredy, with whom my mother’s family had once socialized (albeit not with great closeness). My grandmother asked if there was anything Mrs. Imredy could do to save my grandfather. Mrs. Imredy replied that she couldn’t. And as they parted she turned and said, ominously and elliptically, “Now it’s our turn.”
My parents married at the end of 1945, after my father was liberated at the war’s end. He later became the Hungarian ambassador to the United States. He resigned in 1947, after the Communist takeover. He and my mother managed to remain in America. My father died in 1988, my mother in 2002.
I wonder what they would make of Hungary today. The same stereotypes of the past — the association of Jews with Communism and capitalism — fuel the support for Jobbik today.
Into this caldron has stepped the great conductor Ivan Fischer, himself a Hungarian Jew. He recently composed and performed an opera entitled “Red Heifer” that chronicles the story of a small group of Jews in the 19th century who were wrongly accused of the murder of a Hungarian girl from the countryside. It is a true story, one that uses the distant past to illuminate a dark time in the present.
Of course it is unlikely to change any minds. But the simple fact of it is an affirmation of the power of art to accomplish what decent politicians cannot. It is also an example the terrible persistence of a state of mind, a kind of psychopathy that did not begin with Hitler and, tragically, did not end with him.
Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, a journalist, is the author of “I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Hearts, Souls, and Wars in Hungary.”
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http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/11/26/giving-thanks-for-the-miracle-of-survival/?hpt=hp_t1
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http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/11/26/giving-thanks-for-the-miracle-of-survival/?hpt=hp_t1
I have seen a lot of bad things and it comes with a price, things like this are good to read.
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Amen.
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http://news.yahoo.com/outrage-romania-over-39-jew-burning-39-christmas-185834247.html
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http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/a-sick-development-coming-out-of-europe-disgusting-nazi-like-salute?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Israel+Breaking+News+Video%3A+New+anti-Semitic+Salute+gaining+popularity+across+Europe+&utm_campaign=20131229_m118494918_12%2F30%3A+Israel+Breaking+News+Video%3A+France+deplores+soccer+player%E2%80%99s+%E2%80%98disgusting%E2%80%99+Nazi-like+salute&utm_term=WATCH+HERE
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http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/wow-see-what-happens-when-an-anti-semitic-politician-learns-he-is-a-jew?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=12Tribe+Films+2013+Count+Down-+The+%231+Video+of+The+Year!&utm_campaign=20131222_m118432385_1%2F2%3A+12Tribe+Films+2013+Count+Down-+The+%231+Video+of+The+Year+and+MORE!&utm_term=See+What+Happens+When+an+Anti-Semitic+Politician+learns+he+is+a+Jew_21_21_21
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Heh.
http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/wow-see-what-happens-when-an-anti-semitic-politician-learns-he-is-a-jew?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=12Tribe+Films+2013+Count+Down-+The+%231+Video+of+The+Year!&utm_campaign=20131222_m118432385_1%2F2%3A+12Tribe+Films+2013+Count+Down-+The+%231+Video+of+The+Year+and+MORE!&utm_term=See+What+Happens+When+an+Anti-Semitic+Politician+learns+he+is+a+Jew_21_21_21
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Book Review: 'The Crooked Mirror,' by Louise Steinman
The Polish-Jewish past remains clouded by Soviet lies and by shame, guilt and a residual refusal by some to admit any responsibility.
By Diane Cole
Jan. 2, 2014 7:05 p.m. ET
When Louise Steinman was invited in 1999 to participate in a retreat at Auschwitz aimed at fostering Polish-Jewish reconciliation, she responded viscerally. She had grown up with the knowledge that many of her relatives on her mother's side had perished in the Holocaust, and she had no interest in what she viewed as "a communal identity based on a legacy of victimhood" or in "meditating on the train tracks" outside the death-camp complex. What could she possibly say to the current inhabitants of Poland, or they to her, that would yield anything beyond outrage on her part and defensiveness or denial on theirs?
Yet the author's nagging curiosity about her family's history prodded her to take that initial trip to Poland from Los Angeles, and there she discovered the lively curiosity among many younger Poles about their country's Jewish past and the fate of the more than three million Jews who had lived there before World War II—a subject deemed taboo under Communist repression. Much to her astonishment, she also witnessed the beginnings of a small Jewish revival, with growing numbers of Poles identifying themselves as Jews.
Ms. Steinman is no stranger to the struggle to reach back into history's abyss. Her 2001 memoir, "The Souvenir," recounted her discovery of a frayed Japanese flag that her father had claimed from a Pacific battlefield on which he had fought—and her subsequent journey ostensibly to return it to Japan, really to understand her father and the impact of war trauma.
The Crooked Mirror
By Louise Steinman
(Beacon, 224 pages, $26.95)
"The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation" is Ms. Steinman's provocative account of her first encounter with the traumatic Polish-Jewish past and of her later trips to Poland, Germany and Ukraine. More than just a tour of death sites, the book is a chronicle of her discovery of, and engagement with, the growing effort to bring Jews and Poles together to find what one Israeli she meets describes as "a new language to talk to each other."
To Ms. Steinman, it appears as if Jews and Poles today view each other through a crooked mirror, with both struggling to make sense of what they see. She travels to Wannsee—the Berlin suburb made infamous by the 1942 conference whose agenda was the "final solution to the Jewish question"—to attend the biannual conference of One by One. The organization facilitates "dialogue groups," bringing together "survivors, perpetrators, bystanders and resisters" and their descendants. Among the attendees in her group are a white-haired former member of the Wehrmacht, a woman whose father died at Auschwitz and Cheryl, another American Jew of Polish heritage, who pointedly asks: "Do the Poles want us back?"
Cheryl joins Ms. Steinman on trips that take them to the small towns where their ancestors had lived before the Holocaust. In Sejny, Poland, they watch volunteers renovate the ruined Jewish cemetery. The two also visit Krakow's Center for Jewish Culture. Since it opened in 1993, it has become a place where Jews who had previously hidden or not known about their Jewish background meet one another, as well as non-Jews. In Radomsko—the town in central Poland where Ms. Steinman's family had lived before the Holocaust—the citizens raise funds to install a commemorative marker, in Hebrew and Polish, on the site where the synagogue once stood before the war.
Ms. Steinman also tours Kazimierz, the old Krakow Jewish quarter now revived as a cultural district; there she attends a klezmer concert in the restored synagogue's packed sanctuary. Among the performers that night are "Polish actors dressed like Hasids in black silk jackets." The audience is enthusiastic. Ms. Steinman's affable guide and translator, Tomek, who isn't Jewish but is a serious student of Jewish history, is enchanted. But sensibilities diverge as Ms. Steinman inwardly fumes: "Was this some kind of minstrel show?"
The trips ultimately leave Cheryl cold, plaguing her with images of "my grandfather burned alive in the synagogue, my female relatives marched out of town, shot and buried in a mass grave." The extent to which reconciliation is a work in progress is driven home for Ms. Steinman when she learns that the last known home of some murdered relatives is occupied by a "xenophobic pensioner who listened to anti-Semitic broadcasts." On the same street, however, she also meets an "urbane law professor who spoke proudly of his grandfather rescuing a Jewish child."
How to explain such contradictory encounters? Ms. Steinman frames her experiences by tracing how the Polish past was systematically obfuscated by Soviet lies and further clouded by shame, guilt and a residual refusal by some to admit any responsibility. She refers throughout to works that document the participation of Poles in anti-Semitic violence during and after World War II, such as historian Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin " and Jan T. Gross's "Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland"—a book that remains controversial in Poland.
The mirror, then, remains askew. But readers can be grateful to Ms. Steinman for bearing witness to those seeds of understanding being planted in lands where so much blood flowed.
Ms. Cole, author of the memoir "After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges," is a faculty member of the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning at Temple Emanu-El in New York and a contributing editor of the Psychotherapy Networker
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How to fight academic bigotry
For decades, the American Studies Association labored in well-deserved obscurity. No longer. It has now made a name for itself by voting to boycott Israeli universities, accusing them of denying academic and human rights to Palestinians.
Given that Israel has a profoundly democratic political system, the freest press in the Middle East, a fiercely independent judiciary and astonishing religious and racial diversity within its universities, including affirmative action for Arab students, the charge is rather strange. Made more so when you consider the state of human rights in Israel’s neighborhood. As we speak, Syria’s government is dropping “barrel bombs” filled with nails, shrapnel and other instruments of terror on its own cities. Where is the ASA boycott of Syria?
And of Iran, which hangs political, religious and even sexual dissidents and has no academic freedom at all? Or Egypt, where Christians are being openly persecuted? Or Turkey, Saudi Arabia or, for that matter, massively repressive China and Russia?
Which makes obvious that the ASA boycott has nothing to do with human rights. It’s an exercise in radical chic, giving marginalized academics a frisson of pretend anti-colonialism, seasoned with a dose of edgy anti-Semitism.
And don’t tell me this is merely about Zionism. The ruse is transparent. Israel is the world’s only Jewish state. To apply to the state of the Jews a double standard that you apply to none other, to judge one people in a way you judge no other, to single out that one people for condemnation and isolation — is to engage in a gross act of discrimination.
And discrimination against Jews has a name. It’s called anti-Semitism.
Former Harvard president Larry Summers called the ASA actions “anti-Semitic in their effect if not necessarily in their intent.” I choose to be less polite. The intent is clear: to incite hatred for the largest — and only sovereign — Jewish community on Earth.
What to do? Facing a similar (British) academic boycott of Israelis seven years ago, Alan Dershowitz and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg wrote an open letter declaring that, for the purposes of any anti-Israel boycott, they are to be considered Israelis.
Meaning: You discriminate against Israelis? Fine. Include us out. We will have nothing to do with you.
Thousands of other academics added their signatures to the Dershowitz/Weinberg letter. It was the perfect in-kind response. Boycott the boycotters, with contempt.
But academia isn’t the only home for such prejudice. Throughout the cultural world, the Israel boycott movement is growing. It’s become fashionable for musicians, actors, writers and performers of all kinds to ostentatiously cleanse themselves of Israel and Israelis.
The example of the tuxedoed set has spread to the more coarse and unkempt anti-Semites, such as the thugs who a few years ago disrupted London performances of the Jerusalem Quartet and the Israeli Philharmonic.
Five years ago in Sweden, Israel’s Davis Cup team had to play its matches in an empty tennis stadium because the authorities could not guarantee the Israelis’ safety from the mob. The most brazen display of rising anti-Semitism today is the spread of the “quenelle,” a reverse Nazi salute, popularized by the openly anti-Semitic French entertainer, Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala.
In this sea of easy and open bigotry, an unusual man has made an unusual statement. Russian by birth, European by residence, Evgeny Kissin is arguably the world’s greatest piano virtuoso. He is also a Jew of conviction. Deeply distressed by Israel’s treatment in the cultural world around him, Kissin went beyond the
Dershowitz/Weinberg stance of asking to be considered an Israeli. On Dec. 7, he became one, defiantly.
Upon taking the oath of citizenship in Jerusalem, he declared: “I am a Jew, Israel is a Jewish state. . . . Israel’s case is my case, Israel’s enemies are my enemies, and I do not want to be spared the troubles which Israeli musicians encounter when they represent the Jewish state beyond its borders.”
Full disclosure: I have a personal connection with Kissin. For the past two years I’ve worked to bring him to Washington to perform for Pro Musica Hebraica, a nonprofit organization (founded by my wife and me) dedicated to reviving lost and forgotten Jewish classical music. We succeeded. On Feb. 24, Kissin will perform at the Kennedy Center Concert Hallmasterpieces of Eastern European Jewish music, his first U.S. appearance as an Israeli.
The persistence of anti-Semitism, that most ancient of poisons, is one of history’s great mysteries. Even the shame of the Holocaust proved no antidote. It provided but a temporary respite. Anti-Semitism is back. Alas, a new generation must learn to confront it.
How? How to answer the thugs, physical and intellectual, who single out Jews for attack? The best way, the most dignified way, is to do like Dershowitz, Weinberg or Kissin.
Express your solidarity. Sign the open letter or write your own. Don the yellow star and wear it proudly.
Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
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The evolution of anti-Semitism at elite universities
Posted on February 27, 2012 by Rivka Teitz Blau/JNS.org and filed under Features, Opinion, U.S..
Click photo to download. Caption: Princeton University. Credit: PD.
“Rabbi, did you ever think you would see this day?”
It was 1971, and the university official who asked this question was inviting the rabbi to the dedication of the kosher dining room in Stevenson Hall on the campus of Princeton University.
In light of the anti-Semitism that had prevailed at elite schools until the 1950s, the official was right. But the rabbi he invited was Rav Mordechai Pinchas Teitz, zt”l, who would indeed have imagined this moment could come.
Rabbi Teitz called America “golus [exile], but the best golus the Jewish nation has experienced.” He thought President Harry Truman, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean represented the best qualities of America: a commitment to fairness with a generosity of spirit.
True, these qualities had not always been evident in the Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges.
Barnard College, for example, had been founded and supported by Annie Nathan Meyer, and later received large donations from Jacob Schiff, both of whom were Jewish. But when Virginia Gildersleeve became the head of Barnard in 1911, her spirit of anti-Semitism prevailed.
In 1916 Schiff gave half a million dollars for the construction of the main building, which was called Students’ Hall. In 1926, after Schiff’s death, the building was named Barnard Hall rather than for the donor. Annie Nathan Meyer protested the blatant anti-Semitism and the pain caused to the Schiff family, but Gildersleeve—who had the support of Columbia’s Nicholas Murray Butler in her approach—did not retreat.
The sole memorial of Schiff’s generosity is a marble plaque set in the floor of the Barnard Hall lobby; when I was a student there we referred to meeting in the lobby as meeting “on Jake,” but we did not know the story behind this.
Gildersleeve and Butler were also perturbed by the number of Jews enrolling in their schools, particularly those whose families had come from Eastern Europe and had excelled in high school here.
Before World War I, forty percent of Columbia’s students were Jewish, and Barnard in the 1920s was heading toward the same percentage. They agreed to stop basing admission on academic achievement and to instead consider interviews, letters of recommendation, and “geographic distribution” as criteria. The last phrase is a code name for non-Jews since Montana, Idaho, and similar locales could be counted on for fewer Jews than the East Coast. Hewitt Hall, a dormitory at Barnard, was built to enable students from distant parts of the country to live on campus.
The irony is that a number of the professors who made these schools renowned were Jewish, at least one of them born in Lithuania—the supposedly “uncultured” Eastern Europe—Meyer Schapiro, who made the department of art history a force in American culture.
Other Jewish notables in the ensuing decades included Isidor Rabi, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1944, Lionel Trilling in English literature, and Franz Boas at Barnard, who developed the fields of anthropology and linguistics.
Gildersleeve was so intent on favoring admission of women from rich Protestant families that she organized the Seven Sisters with Bryn Mawr, Mt. Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley to promote her policy of excluding Jews. When she left the deanship in 1947, she lobbied against the establishment of a Jewish state in the British mandate of Palestine.
But change was coming. After World War II there was an increased sensitivity to the horrific consequences of anti-Semitism. Although other groups had not suddenly become philo-Semites, outright discrimination was becoming unacceptable. And the pioneers in Israel upended all the old stereotypes of Jews.
Day schools opened across the United States and Canada. In the middle of the nineteenth century Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch had initiated the model of a school with both Jewish and secular studies. Before World War II there were day schools in New York, Baltimore, Boston, Elizabeth, and a handful of other cities. In the postwar years tens of new schools were established. The law of unintended consequences operated; many of the teachers in these schools were European refugees who had managed to arrive in America after the war.
At the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the ‘60s a few graduates of yeshiva high schools were admitted into the top colleges. College administrators were nonplussed by the requirements of observant Jewish undergraduates. No exams on the Sabbath? Who ever heard of a holiday in May called “Shavuot”? Kosher food?
I recall that when I asked to defer a final that was scheduled for Shavuot, the registrar at Barnard said, “Miss Teitz, I’ve heard of your New Year; I’ve heard of your Day of Atonement; I think you’re making this holiday up.”
My sisters and I came to Barnard in the first place because of anti-Semitism. In a public high school in New Jersey, a teacher had said to a student, “I graduated from Barnard, but you will never be accepted there. You’re a rabbi’s daughter; your letter of rejection is guaranteed.” It was 1931, in an era when a Jewish student could not protest such a remark and such a policy. The rabbi’s daughter was my mother, who determined that if she had daughters they would attend Barnard.
This story first appeared in The Jewish Press and is re-distributed with the permission of that newspaper.
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http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1802794/sc/fb/jewish/Stories-of-the-Holocaust.htm
https://www.kazernedossin.eu/.../exhibitions/7_holocaust
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Al Sharpton vs. Reality...
An ‘Onslaught’ of White-on-Black Murder?
Posted By Colin Flaherty On March 14, 2014 @ frontpagemag.com
Activists from around the country marched on Tallahassee Monday to protest what one writer for Salon is calling “open season on black teenagers: The onslaught of white murder.”
Speakers such as Al Sharpton reminded the crowd of the most famous example of this onslaught from two years ago, when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin. A jury ruled it was self defense. The next example was last year, when Michael Dunn shot Jordan Davis after feeling threatened by Davis and his friends.
Earlier this month, a jury found Dunn guilty of three charges of second degree murder for firing several bullets into a car, but could not reach a verdict for the killing of Jordan Davis. This prompted howls of protest from black writers and activists who say these two killings form a trend.
Several national media outlets including Time and USA Today glommed on to the narrative: Black people are victims of white violence. Not the other way around, despite crime statistics that show white-on-black crime is a rarity compared to black-on-white crime and black mob violence.
Much of this violence is documented in White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore it.
If everything that speakers and reporters at the rally knew came from the daily newspapers, they could be forgiven for not being aware of the disproportionate nature of racial violence. So let’s fill in a few blanks with recent examples:
In Annapolis, Maryland, two black men, Devery Kelley and Cornell Robinson were arrested earlier this month for robbing a pregnant woman while she was in labor on her way to the hospital delivery room.
In Madison, Wisconsin, about the same time as the protest, police arrested six black people for the home invasion and beating of a young couple. They were also charged with sexual assault on the woman, who was six months pregnant.
In Seattle last week, police found 100 black people fighting in the street. Some were shooting guns. Some wore black ski masks. No one was arrested.
Ski masks seem to be a popular accessory this year: In Washington, D.C. over the weekend, black people wearing ski masks fired guns and threatened a homeowner who confronted a crowd of 100 black people fighting and stomping on the hood of her car. The Washington Post reported that “someone wearing a ski mask used a racial slur, told her to shut up and threatened to kill her.”
When she pointed the offenders out to police, they refused to question or even approach the suspects.
When the woman’s husband went to the police station the next day to complain about the lack of police action toward violence in her recently gentrified neighborhood, “he was told that officers are instructed not to engage large crowds if it might put them in danger.”
In Dayton, Ohio over the weekend, a large group of black people were fighting downtown. When police arrived to break it up, James White attacked the officers. They arrested him.
Over the weekend near Rochester, a large group of black people were fighting in a bowling alley when one man was hit in the head with a bowling ball. Four were arrested.
In Stamford, Conn. on Saturday, a store owner tried to stop a group of black people from stealing several bottles of liquor. The alleged thieves attacked the store owners and their family, breaking a bottle over the woman’s head. Police said one of the suspects “kicked and spit on officers.”
In Dallas less than a month ago, career criminal Deyfon Pipkins was shot and killed while breaking into the home of a senior citizen. This was just the latest of several burglaries at this house. The local Fox affiliate reports Pipkins had a criminal record that was “18 pages long.”
Soon after the killing, several relatives complained about the homeowner, said the Fox affiliate. “He could have used a warning,” said Lakesha Thompson, Pipkins’ sister-in-law. “He could have let him know that he did have a gun on his property and he would use it in self-defense.”
In Mobile, Alabama, the relatives of Adric White did not like it any better when he was shot in November at a discount store he was robbing. “If no one had a gun up to him, if no one pointed a gun at him – what gives him the right to think that it’s okay to just shoot someone?” a relative, who wished to remain anonymous, told FOX10. “You should have just left the store and went wherever you had to go in your car or whatever.”
In Milwaukee Friday afternoon, a large group of black people at a McDonald’s restaurant were fighting and destroying property. Nine black people were arrested.
On Friday in Chicago Heights, 20 black students from Bloom Trail High School were fighting and attacking security guards in what local news is calling a “massive brawl.” Some of it was caught on video. Nine were arrested.
Near Minneapolis a week ago, a group of 15 black people were fighting at an LA Fitness. They were throwing free weights and barbells at gym patrons and staff. When police arrived, they fought them too. Some on video.
Last Thursday in Omaha, a black man shot Brandon Samuels dead. They were at a party following a Miley Cyrus’s “Bangerz Tour” concert when Samuels tried to stop the man who was attacking a woman. The man left and returned with two friends and a gun. They shot Samuels in the neck and seriously wounded another.
In St. Louis on Sunday, dozens of black people rioted in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of a street, in the middle of a popular business district called the Delmar Loop, in the middle of a crowd of people with cell phone cameras, in the middle of an area known for frequent and regular black mob violence often caught on video. Then they looted a nearby Family Dollar store. Police took 20 into custody and released them to their parents without arresting anyone.
In Austin, Texas on Friday, the headline tells the story: “Another brutal beating in Downtown Austin has been caught on camera — this time the victims are two women.” This time the crowd was about a dozen black people. The women were beaten unconscious.
On Friday in Flint, again the headline tells the story: Brawl involving several teens in Flint sends two girls to hospital, police say. More than a dozen black people were involved. And yes, it happens quite often there.
On Monday in the San Francisco Bay area, a black passenger on a BART train harassed and assaulted white passengers. On video.
On Monday in Atlanta, Kenneth Temple and Rendauldos Chisolm were charged with first degree murder for beating, robbing and killing the manager of a Taco Bell.
In Denver, police are looking for 5 black people responsible for a crime spree including 18 robberies over the last seven weeks — that they know about. So far.
Over the weekend in Manhattan, Kyle Rogers was found unconscious and bloody on the street after being attacked Sunday morning. On video. The attack left Rogers with several broken bones in his face and jaw. Rogers is one of hundreds of victims of the spontaneous racial violence that some call the Knockout Game.
Police are looking for a black man in connection with the assault — one of dozens of such assaults in New York over the last several months. Many are directed at Orthodox Jews. After one recent attack, city council member Laurie Cumbo explained it all: Black people don’t like Jewish people that much. “The accomplishments of the Jewish community triggers feelings of resentment, and a sense that Jewish success is not also their success.”
Are we clear?
In Southern Maryland early Sunday morning, 50 to 100 black people were in a convenience store parking lot, fighting and cussing out police and refusing orders to stop. Four were arrested.
Last week in Pittsburgh, Penn., police charged a black man, Allen Darell Wade, in the shooting death of two white sisters who lived next door. Wade said he is being set up.
This is a long list: All part of a pattern if you just know how to look, said Mychal Denzel Smith in The Nation magazine. “There’s nothing new under America’s racist sun,” said Smith. “The cynic in me starts to believe this is exactly what white people want. It’s as though our cries of ‘Murder! Lynching!’ only make it easier for white America to accept black death.”
The local papers in Madison, Wisconsin are calling the sexual assault of a pregnant woman the worst crime in that town in years. Perhaps they can discuss it at the 15th Annual White Privilege Conference later this month. More than 2000 people are expected to attend.
In Madison.
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France: “Dirty Jew, Go home to Israel” — Muslim mother and daughter assault Jewish girl
Robert Spencer Mar 13, 2014 at 9:21am
Analysts routinely think that attacks like this one happen because of the conflict between Israel and the “Palestinians,” but in reality the enmity goes much deeper than that. Hatred of Jews is deeply ingrained in the Qur’an, which calls Jews “the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers” (5:82), and says that they “have been put under humiliation wherever they are overtaken, except for a covenant from Allah and a rope from the Muslims. And they have drawn upon themselves anger from Allah and have been put under destitution. That is because they disbelieved in the verses of Allah and killed the prophets without right. That is because they disobeyed and transgressed.” (3:110) It says that Allah transformed the disobedient Jews into apes and pigs (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166). It says that they say Ezra is Allah’s son, and are consequently accursed (9:30). And there are many other passages heaping contempt and scorn upon them.
“‘Dirty Jew, Go Home to Israel:’ Jewish Girl in France Attacked by Arab Mother and Daughter,” by Gidon Ben-zvi for Algemeiner, March 12:
A young Jewish woman was recently assaulted at a laundromat in a suburb of Lyon, France by a mother and daughter of Arab descent, according to Israeli daily Ma’ariv on Tuesday.
The victim, named only as Candace, told the Europe-Israel news site that the mother grabbed and held her down while the daughter hit her several times in the face.
“Dirty Jew, go home to your country, Israel,” the daughter shrieked at Candace while striking her, Ma’ariv reported.
According to Candace, the assailant had noticed that she was wearing a Star of David around her neck.
One of Candace’s eyes was badly injured in the unprovoked assault. She also said she lost some hearing in her left ear as a result of the beating.
The victim, an American expat who has been living in France for 12 years, added that none of the bystanders who witnessed the incident raised a finger to help. Following the attack Candace said she was disappointed once again by her adopted country when French police did little more than record her complaint.
Candace said she remains proud of her Jewish identity, despite the horrific thrashing. However, following the traumatic experience, the young woman said that she now finds it difficult to leave the safety of her home.
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http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Alan-Dershowitz-Nazis-Europe-Israel/2014/03/11/id/558976/
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One can add a prominent individual to the list of anti-Semites:
Barack Hussain Obama
If it isn't obvious by now.....
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Amen.
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http://allenbwest.com/2014/03/anti-israel-groups-threaten-violence-shout-kike-dirty-jew-university-michigan/
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http://allenbwest.com/2014/03/anti-israel-groups-threaten-violence-shout-kike-dirty-jew-university-michigan/
I'm sure their official stance disavows antisemitism. It's a convenient fig leaf for the left.
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Click here to watch: Russian state TV says Jews brought Holocaust on themselves
A presenter on Russia's state TV, Evelyn Zakamskaya, said on air that the Jews helped bring the Holocaust on themselves, according to a blog post published on Sunday. Zakamskaya was responding to a guest on the show, who said it was "strange" that Jewish organizations support Maidan (the Ukrainian protest movement). "They do not realize that they are, with their own hands, closer to the Holocaust?" To that, Zakamskaya responded: "They also advanced the first [Holocaust.]" Blogger John Aravosis from AMERICAblog confirmed the transcript of the show with Buzzfeed's Miriam Elder, who said it was "accurate, if incomplete."
WATCH HERE
President Vladimir Putin had actually decried rising anti-Semitism in Ukraine, saying in a press conference earlier this month that Moscow's "biggest concern" was "the rampage of reactionary forces, nationalist and anti-Semitic forces going on in certain parts of Ukraine, including Kiev.” However, Ira Forman, the Obama administration’s special envoy on anti-Semitism, disputed those claims, saying Putin’s assertions were not credible. “We have no indication that what President Putin has been saying about anti-Semitism has been a true reflection of what’s happening on the ground,” he said.
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/04/17/jews-ordered-to-register-in-east-ukraine/7816951/?csp=fbfanpage
From the article:
Jews in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk where pro-Russian militants have taken over government buildings were told they have to "register" with the Ukrainians who are trying to make the city become part of Russia, according to Ukrainian and Israeli media.
Jews emerging from a synagogue say they were handed leaflets that ordered the city's Jews to provide a list of property they own and pay a registration fee "or else have their citizenship revoked, face deportation and see their assets confiscated," reported Ynet News, Israel's largest news website.
Or, perhaps not:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117415/relax-ukraine-not-ordering-its-jews-register
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http://observer.com/2013/12/the-anti-semitic-stench-of-pink-floyd/
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OTOH http://jpfo.org/
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http://observer.com/2013/12/the-anti-semitic-stench-of-pink-floyd/
Too bad, I love their music. Water would argue he is not ant-Jew or anti-semitic, he is anti-the policies of Israel, and he is exercising his free expression and personal activism on his beliefs. He deserves the free expression back challenging the merits of his vacuous, reckless arguments.
It was a gaffe for Rand Paul to have recently quoted Roger Waters by name - even though he was right on the specific point, we did '"trade our heroes for ghosts".
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http://www.pink-floyd-lyrics.com/html/brain-damage-dark-lyrics.html
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Funny how Israel is always the target. Of course it has nothing to do with hating Jews.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2007-02/07/content_802906.htm
Shanghai awaits Roger Waters' Pink Floyd classics
By Mu Qian (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-02-07 06:51
British rock legend and former Pink Floyd member Roger Waters will hold his concert at the Shanghai Grand Stage on February 12. This is the third concert by a famous Western rock band or musician in Shanghai in one year, after the Rolling Stones' last April and Eric Clapton's on January 20.
"Pink Floyd has many fans in China," said Shanghai-based music critic Sun Mengjin. "Let Chinese rock fans name the 10 most influential rock groups, and Pink Floyd will definitely be one of them."
Roger Waters will hold his concert at the Shanghai Grand Stage on February 12.
File photo
At his concert in Shanghai, Waters will mainly perform classic Pink Floyd songs that he wrote or co-wrote, many from the albums Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall.
The Shanghai concert is the first one of Waters' Asia tour, to be followed by concerts in Hong Kong on February 15, in Mumbai, India on February 18, and in Dubai of the United Arab Emirates on February 21. The Asia tour is part of Waters' 2007 world tour, which started in Australia on January 25 and will end in Ireland on May 14.
The price of tickets to Waters' Shanghai concert ranges from 280 yuan ($36) to 1,680 yuan ($215), lower than the Rolling Stones' concert at the same venue in Shanghai, which ranged from 300 yuan ($38) to 3,000 yuan ($385).
Since Beijing's major stadiums are all under refurbishment for the 2008 Olympics, it is hard to find venues for large-scale concerts in Beijing now. This is the reason Shanghai has become the only stop in China for the Rolling Stones, Clapton and Waters.
According to the Beijing-based Star Daily, many rock musicians from Beijing, including Cui Jian and Second-hand Roses' lead singer Liang Long, have booked their tickets and will attend Waters' concert in Shanghai.
Waters was a primary creative force in Pink Floyd from 1965 to 1983, playing bass and singing. He wrote all the lyrics and some of the music of The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), a commercial breakthrough that became one of the most successful albums in rock history. He also wrote most songs in The Wall (1979).
Following the release of The Final Cut in 1983, Pink Floyd broke up and its members launched solo careers. In July 2005, Waters reunited with David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright for a one-off Pink Floyd performance at the Live 8 benefit concert in London's Hyde Park.
In October 2005, Waters released the CD of Ca Ira, an opera set during the French Revolution, on which he spent more than 10 years.
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Reza Aslan: Idea of resurrection “absolutely has no basis in 5,000 years of Jewish history, scripture or thought”
Robert Spencer Apr 23, 2014
In today’s politically correct culture, marching in the establishment lockstep, not ability, is what gets you ahead. The mainstream media lionizes people not because of their particular acumen, talents or intelligence, but because they parrot the establishment line that the media wants the public to adopt: contempt for America, hatred for Israel, disdain for Christianity and the Judeo-Christian tradition, and endless justification for Islamic supremacists and jihadists.
A prime example of this is our old friend Reza Aslan, the arrogant, foul-mouthed media darling who keeps revealing his abysmal ignorance in interview after interview, making howling errors of fact and then, when caught out, dismissing them as “typos.” The latest “typo” from Aslan is his statement, in yet another of an endless series of fawning interviews by besotted Leftists (this time in Salon), that the idea of resurrection “simply doesn’t exist in Judaism. The idea of an individual dying and rising from the dead absolutely has no basis in five thousand years of Jewish history, scripture or thought. So, that’s the thing: No matter what you think about the resurrection, the thing that’s kind of fascinating from an historical perspective is that there is simply no Jewish context for it.”
Well, let’s see. The first thing that sprang to mind when I read this was the famous Dry Bones passage in Ezekiel, which begins: “The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me round among them; and behold, there were very many upon the valley; and lo, they were very dry. And he said to me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ And I answered, ‘O Lord GOD, thou knowest.’ Again he said to me, ‘Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the LORD.’” (Ezekiel 37:1-6) For individual resurrection, there is the passage that has always loomed large in Christian exegesis: “For thou dost not give me up to Sheol, or let thy godly one see the Pit.” (Psalm 16:10)
There are many other passages (here are two, courtesy of Jihad Watch reader “Rod Serling”): “Thy dead shall live, their bodies shall rise. O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For thy dew is a dew of light, and on the land of the shades thou wilt let it fall.” (Isaiah 26:19) “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” (Daniel 12:2)
This is by no means Aslan’s first “typo.” In another interview, he referred to “the reincarnation, which Christianity talks about” — and later claimed that one was a “typo.” In yet another howler he later insisted was a “typo,” he claimed that the Biblical story of Noah was barely four verses long — which he then corrected to forty, but that was wrong again, as it is 89 verses long. Interviewed at the BBC about Obama’s meeting with Pope Francis, Aslan claimed that the “founding philosophy of the Jesuits” was “the preferential option for the poor.” In reality, the Jesuits were founded in 1534. According to the California Catholic Conference, “the popular term ‘preferential option for the poor’ is relatively new. Its first use in a Church document is in 1968 from a meeting of the Conference of Latin American Bishops held in Medellin, Columbia.” So Aslan was only 434 years off — recalling when he called Turkey the second most populous Muslim country, which was only about 100 million people off.
Reza Aslan is such an intellectually formidable scholar that he writes “than” for “then”; apparently thinks the Latin word “et” is an abbreviation; and writes “clown’s” for “clowns.” Aslan is less a “religious scholar” than he is a marginally literate, unevenly educated charlatan with a talent for telling the mainstream media what it wants to hear. His big secret is that he is really not all that bright, and is in way over his head, asked to comment all the time on matters that are way beyond his competence — and he knows it, which is why he lashes out so ferociously against anyone who dares to challenge him.
This matters because this clown is given such adoring treatment in the mainstream media as he propagates these falsehoods, and because his agenda his insidious: he is a Board member of a lobbying group for the bloodthirsty and genocidally antisemitic Iranian regime. Aslan tried to pass off Iran’s genocidally-minded former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a liberal reformer and has called on the U.S. Government to negotiate with Ahmadinejad himself, as well as with the jihad terror group Hamas. Aslan has even praised the jihad terror group Hizballah as “the most dynamic political and social organization in Lebanon,” and has also praised the anti-Semitic, misogynist, Islamic supremacist Muslim Brotherhood, which is dedicated in its own words, according to a captured internal document, to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.” Aslan wrote: “The Muslim Brotherhood will have a significant role to play in post-Mubarak Egypt. And that is good thing.” Millions of Egyptians obviously disagree. He has also applauded and called for the forcible shutdown of the free speech of those who hates — a quintessentially fascist impulse.
“‘You want people like that to hate you’: Reza Aslan on Glenn Beck, that Fox News interview, and who gets to speak for Jesus,” by Michael Schulson, Salon, April 20:
…As you note in the book, much about this portrait is pretty typical: There were a lot of messianic preachers wandering around first-century Palestine, Jesus among them. You argue that it’s the story of resurrection that really set Jesus apart. What made resurrection such a novel idea?
Well, it simply doesn’t exist in Judaism. The idea of an individual dying and rising from the dead absolutely has no basis in five thousand years of Jewish history, scripture or thought.
So, that’s the thing: No matter what you think about the resurrection, the thing that’s kind of fascinating from an historical perspective is that there is simply no Jewish context for it. The resurrection was one the earliest credo statements in this new movement. They wholeheartedly believed that Jesus rose from the dead very, very early on, and to be perfectly honest, historians who will admit as much don’t know what to do with that statement.
We can’t just ignore it. In other words, we can’t just simply say, “Oh, it was just some mass delusion,” or “It was all just some big scam.” I don’t think those answers are sufficient in explaining the experience [of believing in the resurrection] and how that experience transformed this, as I say, small ethno-nationalistic movement into the largest religion in the world….
I feel like you’ve given us a Jesus for the era of income inequality and Occupy Wall Street.
I think that’s a good way of putting it.
So should Congress raise the minimum wage to celebrate Easter?
I think that would a perfect way of celebrating what Jesus actually stood for. This is a man who was not about income equality; this is a man who was about the reversal of the social order….
On your Twitter feed, the background picture is of Glenn Beck looking distressed. I have to ask: Do you enjoy being the bane of these right-wing media personalities?
Am I allowed to say yes? I mean, look, when someone like Glenn Beck puts you on his chalkboard of crazy, I think it’s a moment to be proud of. When designated hate-group leaders like Robert Spencer or Pamela Geller spend all of their days Googling you and writing articles about things you’ve said or written, I think you should be proud of that, because these guys are clowns. They are racist, bigoted individuals, and you want people like that to hate you.
So, listen, I’m guilty of baiting these guys sometimes; it’s not a professional thing to do, I’m not proud of it, to be honest with you. At the same time, there is something to be proud of when Glenn Beck and Pamela Gellar [sic] and Robert Spencer and magazines like First Things hate you.
Thanks for the shout-out, Reza. Good to know we are on your mind, and that despite your shilling for Islamic supremacism and the Iranian mullahs you have enough of a conscience left to know that accusing us of murder and sending me vile adolescent emails full of gay slurs is “not a professional thing to do.” But I am afraid you flatter yourself: I have never Googled your name even once. People send me your nonsense on a more or less regular basis; it’s low-hanging fruit.
Anyway, he says Pamela Geller and I are “designated hate-group leaders,” without mentioning that the designator is the far-Left cash machine known as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which smears numerous conservative groups with this label, and has never seen an Islamic supremacist group it didn’t like. He adds that we are “racist, bigoted individuals”; what race is the jihad mass murder of innocent civilians again? I keep forgetting.
Meanwhile, so fawning is this interview that I am surprised that Michael Schulson didn’t start kissing Aslan’s feet, or perhaps anointing them with oil and drying them with his hair, before it was over. He even likens Aslan to the four Gospel writers: “Aslan may be the world’s most famous living biographer of Jesus (the most famous dead biographers, of course, go by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John).” “The world’s most famous living biographer of Jesus” is Reza Aslan? Yet another illustration of the utter intellectual poverty of our age.
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Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day :cry: :cry: :cry:
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http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/john-kerrys-jewish-best-friends/
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Are we here once again? I believe we are. Sadly, my many Jewish friends don't get it - most of them voted for Obama and are just now waking up...
http://pamelageller.com/2014/05/100000-new-yorkers-demonstrate-downtown-nazi-jew-hatred-newsmedia-doesnt-runs.html/
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Sad and disgusting at the same time. Is there no end to liberal Jews' propensity for denial???
STEVEN SPIELBERG 'JUST DOESN'T GET IT'
Critics blast 'Schindler's List' filmmaker for Obama award
Published: 11 hours ago
author-imageby BOB UNRUH Email | Archive
Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after nearly three decades with the Associated Press, as well as several Upper Midwest newspapers, where he covered everything from legislative battles and sports to tornadoes and homicidal survivalists. He is also a photographer whose scenic work has been used commercially.
The news that Barack Obama will accept an award Tuesday from filmmaker Steven Spielberg for his humanitarian work on behalf of the Jewish people is evoking a strong reaction from Israel supporters and critics of the president.
Spielberg’s decision to honor Obama shows he is out of touch with the problems the Jewish people face, according to commentator and author Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs.
“With all the work Steven Spielberg has done in increasing awareness of the Holocaust, and not just ‘Schindler’s List’ but his Shoah project as well, he just doesn’t get it. It’s astonishing,” she told WND.
She contends Obama has allowed Iran, which has vowed to wipe out Israel, to continue to pursue its nuclear-weapon ambitions, “paving the way for the next holocaust.”
Her comments, and others joining her perspective, came after it was announced that Spielberg, through the USC Shoah Foundation, will honor Obama with its Ambassador to Humanity Award.
Read Pamela Geller’s brilliant books, all highlighted in WND’s Superstore!
The Hill reported the foundation was created by Spielberg after he finished “Schindler’s List.” The organization collects and preserves the video testimonies of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust.
Nearly 52,000 such testimonies already have been recorded.
Spielberg was one of the top donors to Obama’s political advancement, with $1 million given in 2012.
“President Obama’s commitment to democracy and human rights has long been felt,” he said. “As a constitutional scholar and as president, his interest in expanding justice and opportunity and all is remarkably evidence.”
Geller said the attitude “is illustrative of the willful blindness of liberal Jews.”
“They have traded their religion for their politics. They have traded G-d (and their morality) for whomever is carrying the torch for human secularism. And now it is Obama,” she said.
She warned that Obama, through his action, or inaction, regarding Iran, is “single-handedly paving the way for the next holocaust.”
“Iran has vowed to wipe Israel off the map. When Iran goes nuclear, it’s not a question of whether there will be a war against Israel and the West, it’s only a question of when,” she said.
And yet, she said, Obama has made it possible for Iran to openly pursue its nuclear objectives.
“Obama got nothing from Iran at the Geneva summit, but Iran got everything. Netanyahu said of the agreement with Iran that it ‘is a bad deal. It’s a very bad deal. Iran is not required to take apart even one centrifuge. But the international community is relieving sanctions on Iran for the first time after many years. Iran gets everything that it wanted at this stage and it pays nothing,’” she said.
“One Iranian nuke can take out 6 million Jews. And Speilberg thinks that Obama deserves an award for this?” she said.
Geller cited libertarian thinker Ayn Rand said, who said “evil is made possible by the sanction you give it. Withdraw your sanction.”
“This is good advice for Mr. Speilberg,’ she said. “Withdraw your sanction.”
Geller said for the Jewish people, it’s “the late ’30s all over again.”
“Then too, the record of the establishment American Jews was shameful,” she said. “Then, too, Jewish leadership in America went along with the delusion that keeping the Jews out of Israel was the best course – because FDR said so. The American Jews went along then and they are going along with Obama now. Shame on Steve Speilberg for rendering ‘never again’ an empty slogan, devoid of meaning.”
Several Jewish organizations declined to respond to WND’s request for comment.
Joseph Farah, a former Middle East correspondent and now CEO of WND, WND Books and WND Films, wrote in a commentary, “Not since Yasser Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize have I been so outraged about an award.”
Farah said that in making the announcement, Spielberg “seemed consciously to avoid making a connection between Obama and his work in fostering Holocaust remembrance or even a commitment to the Jewish people.”
“It’s no wonder. Obama has no track record of accomplishment in those areas. In fact, I would argue he has not been a friend to Jews or the state of Israel,” Farah wrote.
“It’s difficult to image a more inappropriate person than Barack Obama to receive an award associated Holocaust remembrance. The other names that come to mind for me would be John Kerry, Obama’s secretary of state, who recently characterized Israel as an ‘apartheid state,’ perhaps the mullahs in Iran who constantly call for Israel’s destruction, perhaps Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority or the leaders of terrorist organizations like Hezbollah or Hamas.
Farah said no U.S. president since Israel was reborn in 1948 has been less of a friend to Israel or the Jewish people than Barack Obama.
“He seeks to redraw the nation’s borders in a way that would leave Israel unable to defend itself. He has sought to freeze building by Jews in and around Israel’s capital. He seeks a so-called peace agreement that would involve ethnic cleansing of Jews in a future Palestinian state. Obama is not operating in the spirit of Oscar Schindler. On the contrary, he is operating in the spirit of those who appeased Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. He is operating in the spirit of those who looked the other way as six million Jews were exterminated.”
He pointed out that Obama has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria, demanded Israel continue to divide the miniscule amount of land in holds among the vast stretches of the hostile Middle East, pushes Israel to make peace at any cost with neighbors who are sworn to the Jewish state’s destruction and “he sat in the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s pews for 20 years and never noticed that he was a raving anti-Semite bigot.”
Laurie Cardoza Moore of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations called the honor “absolutely outrageous.”
“One need only look at Obama secretary of State John Kerry’s pathetic leadership and comments since his appointment,” she said.
Moore said Kerry “has a record of inciting ‘terrorist attacks’ against innocent Israeli’s and, just last week, suggested that in the absence of a two-state peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority, Israel would become an ‘apartheid state.’”
“The very notion that Israel should be forced by the Obama administration to negotiate with the PA after they signed a ‘reconciliation agreement’ with Hamas, a terrorist organization, is ludicrous,” she said. “Obama never publicly condemned Kerry’s comments.”
History’s darkest hour comes to life in “The Forgotten People: Christianity and the Holocaust” on DVD
Moore said that only are Spielberg’s comments “an insult to Jews around the world, but they are also an affront to the thousands of Christians and Muslims in the Middle East who are being slaughtered as a result of Obama’s failed foreign policy.”
“In giving this award to Obama, Spielberg and the Shoah Foundation have been shown to be both contemptible and irrelevant,” she said.
Evangelist Ray Comfort, whose projects include “180 The Movie,” said it’s “a tragedy beyond words that a man who produced ‘Schindler’s List,’ a producer who said ‘I ‘was put on this earth to tell the story of the Holocaust,’ would now honor a president that has done more than any other president to further the American holocaust of the killing of babies in the womb.”
“Such misdirected esteem reminds me of the words of Scripture: ‘For what is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God,’” he said. “The butchery of millions of children in the womb is the result of man’s greatest and yet the most obscure of sins: idolatry. It opened the door to the Nazi holocaust.
Comfort said Hitler “created his own image of God and then killed in his god’s name, and idolatry has opened the door to the taking of 60 million lives.”
Related column:
Obama’s list is not like Schindler’s by Joseph Farah
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https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/jewnation.html
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http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304655304579551974194329920?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304655304579551974194329920.html
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"You would think—I would think—that 70 years after the Holocaust, with all the marvels of communication, of greater openness…that it would be low," said Mr. Foxman, who has worked for the New York-based League since 1965 and headed the group since 1987. "So it's maybe not shocking, but it's sobering." - Abe Foxman.
Just how far up your butt IS your head, Mr. Foxman? You've been defending Muslims and the Ground Zero Mosque for years, btw.
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http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/neo-nazi-parties-are-once-again-taking-over-europe-will-you-stop-it?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Israel+Breaking+News+Video%3A+Neo-Nazi+Parties+spread+throughout+europe%2C+Grandson+of+Top+Nazi+Fights+Back&utm_campaign=20140516_m120462155_5%2F16+Israel+Breaking+News+Video%3A+Neo-Nazi+Parties+spread+throughout+europe%2C+Grandson+of+Top+Nazi+Fights+Back&utm_term=Auschwitz+commandant+grandson+combats+Europe_E2_80_99s+neo-Nazis
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http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelmedved/2006/08/09/why_the_world_hates_the_jews/page/full
http://judaism.about.com/od/judaismbasics/a/jewsaschosenpeople.htm
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Do Jews Have a Future in Europe?
They are subject to daily attacks, verbal and physical, by the extreme right and left, and radicalized immigrants.
By
Simone Rodan-Benzaquen and
Daniel Schwammenthal
connect
June 10, 2014 2:37 p.m. ET
Just ahead of last month's European Parliament elections, which saw the rise of far-right and anti-Semitic parties, four people were murdered in the Jewish Museum of Brussels. The shootings underscored that, in addition to political extremism, Europe's Jews also face the violent threat of jihadists.
Mehdi Nemmouche, a French Muslim, was arrested on suspicion of carrying out the attack. He appears to have been radicalized in prison, and is believed to have fought for Islamist rebels in Syria. Like Mohamed Merah, who murdered three soldiers, three Jewish children and a Rabbi two years ago in France, Mr. Nemmouche appears to have mixed gangsterism with radical Islam, anti-Semitism and hatred of the West.
With roughly 1,000 European fighters like Mr. Nemmouche estimated to be in Syria, European Union officials are working to devise better strategies for combating radicalization and detecting the movements of people to and from Syria.
Enlarge Image
A woman stands at the entrance of the closed Jewish Museum in Brussels May 27, 2014. Reuters
But Europe's Jews also face almost daily attacks—both verbal and physical. In France, home to Europe's largest Jewish community of about 650,000, the situation is particularly severe, with 170 anti-Semitic acts reported by the Paris-based Jewish Community Protection Service (SPCJ) and the French Ministry of the Interior in the first trimester of 2014 alone. According to the French League of Human Rights, nearly 50% of all racist acts in France are anti-Semitic, even though Jews represent only 1% of the population.
Such attacks take place in the context of an extremely charged public debate. French comedian Dieudonné has managed not only to popularize an openly anti-Semitic discourse, but to forge the most unlikely of alliances. Though his father is from Cameroon, Dieudonné has united behind him individuals from the extreme right such as Alain Soral, a self-described "national-socialiste intellectual," National Front founder Jean-Marie le Pen and Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. Meanwhile, Dieudonné's fan base has deep roots in France's immigrant communities. Whatever else may divide the likes of Mr. le Pen and Dieudonné's legions of admirers, they are united by their animosity toward Jews and the Jewish state.
In nearby Belgium, Laurent Louis—until last month a member of parliament—is trying to reproduce Dieudonné's mass appeal. In early May, Mr. Louis organized a conference to unite French and Belgian anti-Semites, which the Belgian authorities canceled at the last minute.
Government attempts to silence Dieudonné and his followers by prohibiting his shows have failed, largely thanks to the Internet. Dieudonné's anti-Jewish YouTube diatribes receive millions of viewers within hours of uploading. The authorities can ban events but not sentiments. Take one demonstration in January this year, of some 17,000 people in the streets of Paris. Officially meant as a general anti-government protest, hundreds of participants wound up chanting "Jews out of France" and "the gas chambers were fake."
This environment leaves many in the Jewish community, perhaps for the first time since they rebuilt their homes in Europe after the Holocaust, fearing once again for their security and future. Fortunately, some European leaders have begun to grasp the depth of the problem. As French philosopher Albert Camus said: "To give things their correct name is to put the world right a bit." In that sense, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has started to put France right.
"Today exists a new form of anti-Semitism that is born in our suburbs," he said in a radio interview in July 2012. He was referring to young Muslims, as apartment blocks outside French city centers typically house large immigrant communities. At the same time he warned "not to stigmatize fellow citizens notably of Muslim faith." Mr. Valls went further two years later, in March this year, at a rally against anti-Semitism in Paris. The old anti-Semitism of the French extreme right "is renewed," he said. "It feeds off hate for Israel. It feeds off anti-Zionism. Because anti-Zionism is an invitation to anti-Semitism."
Indeed, anti-Semitism in Europe has taken new forms and comes from different segments of society. There is the extreme right with their traditional focus on race and Holocaust denial; the radical left, who seek to demonize Israel; and, as Mr. Valls hinted, there is a problem among some Muslim immigrants. Their motivation is little studied and thus little understood.
The simplistic notion, though, that their anti-Jewish acts are triggered by the Arab-Israeli conflict is just that—simplistic. It also risks rationalizing criminal behavior. The reality is that the problem of anti-Semitism has long become structural. After Merah's murders in 2012, for example, anti-Jewish attacks in France skyrocketed 58%, according to the SPCJ, independent of the relatively quiet situation between Israelis and Palestinians.
So what can governments and civil society in Europe do to combat anti-Semitism?
First, we need more leaders such as Mr. Valls speaking the truth and showing zero tolerance. When demonstrators at so-called "pro-Palestinian" rallies scream slogans like "Hamas, Hamas, Jews into the gas," as has frequently happened around Europe, political leaders and the media can not stay silent. Public hate speech must not be tolerated and anti-Semitic acts need to be systematically prosecuted and punished.
Second, not all expressions of anti-Semitism should be fought with the same weapons. Regarding the Muslim community, for example, improving social cohesion is key. Better integrating Muslim Europeans is not only a virtue and a necessity in itself, it can also help lower the susceptibility of these communities to anti-Semitism and radicalization.
It is equally important to empower moderate Muslims. People such as Latifa Ibn Ziaten, whose son Imad was one of the French soldiers murdered by Merah, and who now visits France's most difficult neighborhoods, speaking to youth groups and trying to steer them away from the influences of anti-Semites and extremists. There are many other such voices—Muslim entrepreneurs, writers, media personalities, students with the moral courage to confront the extremists within their communities. Let's support their work and help build their networks.
Third, more needs to be done early on in the process, before people develop anti-Semitic views. New educational programs ought to focus on this problem, assisting students to recognize prejudices. Youngsters need to learn about the culture, history and religion of other communities, by focusing on similarities and shared values.
Fourth, fighting anti-Semitism at home may also have a foreign-policy dimension. To this day, Saudi and Qatari money is pouring into European mosques, helping to spread an extremist form of Islam. In addition, we know that through satellite television and the Internet, Islamist and anti-Semitic content can easily be accessed in Europe. Much of it is unfortunately produced in the Arab world. The EU recently introduced the "more-for-more principle," offering stronger partnerships to neighboring countries that make more progress toward democratic reforms. Ending anti-Jewish, anti-Christian and anti-Western hate speech should become part of this bargain.
Much is at stake. Anti-Semitism is always symptomatic of a more profound problem in society, something that might start with Jews but will not stop there. So it is not just the well-being and future of the Jewish community in Europe that is at risk, but the very values Europe stands for.
Mrs. Rodan-Benzaquen is the director of the AJC Paris office and Mr. Schwammenthal is the director of the AJC Transatlantic Institute in Brussels.
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The Jew-Hating Obama Administration
Posted By Ben Shapiro On July 2, 2014 @ frontpagemag.com
On Monday, three Jewish boys were found dead, murdered by the terrorist group Hamas: Eyal Yifrach, 19; Gilad Shaar, 16; and Naftali Frenkel, 16. Frenkel was an American citizen. The three were kidnapped while hitchhiking some three weeks ago. In the interim, President Barack Obama said nothing about them publicly. His wife issued no hashtags. His State Department maintained that $400 million in American taxpayer cash would continue to the Palestinian unity government, which includes Hamas.
Presumably Frenkel did not look enough like Barack Obama’s imaginary son for him to give a damn. Or perhaps Frenkel hadn’t deserted his duty in the American military, and therefore his parents didn’t deserve a White House press conference. Maybe Michelle Obama was too busy worrying about children’s fat thighs to spend a moment tweeting out a selfie to raise awareness.
Or maybe, just maybe, the Obama administration didn’t care about Frenkel because he was a Jew.
Jewish blood is cheap to this administration. That seems to be true in every administration, given the American government’s stated predilection for forcing Israel into concessions to an implacable and Jew-hating enemy. But it’s particularly true for an administration that has now cut a deal with Iran that legitimizes its government, weakens sanctions, and forestalls Israeli action against its nuclear program. It’s especially true for an administration that forced the Israeli government to apologize to the Turkish government for stopping a terrorist flotilla aimed at supplying Hamas. And it’s undoubtedly true for an administration that has undercut Israeli security at every turn, deposing Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, fostering chaos in Syria and by extension destabilizing Jordan and Lebanon, and leaking Israeli national security information no less than four times.
Now the corpse of a 16-year-old Jewish American is found in Hebron.
The Obama administration’s first response: to call on the Israeli government for restraint. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on June 2, “Based on what we know now, we intend to work with this government.” Now, just a month later, that government has murdered an American kid. And now she says that the Obama administration hopes “that the Israelis and the Palestinians continue to work with one another on that, and we certainly would continue to urge that … in spite of, obviously, the tragedy and the enormous pain on the ground.”
To which the proper Israeli response should be: go perform anatomically impossible acts upon yourself.
The Obama administration had the opportunity to stand clearly against Jew-hating evil. Not only did it fail to do so but it funded that evil, encouraged that evil, militated against fighting that evil. But that’s nothing new. Jew hatred is as old as the Jewish people. It’s just found a new home in the White House.
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http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/on_july_23_1944_soviet_troops_found_800000_pairs_of_shoes
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Some pithy zingers in this one:
http://jonathanmessing.com/2014/07/22/massacre-in-yarmouk/
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http://poorrichardsnews.com/post/93425353068/us-state-department-cancels-all-tourist-visa
But he wore a kippah at AIPAC!
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http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/181021/why-europe-has-trouble-fighting-anti-semitism?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=4ed518a8d3-Friday_August_1_20148_1_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-4ed518a8d3-207194629
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The liberal Jews may not be thrilled with the Democratic leaderships view on Israel but I still doubt they will vote for Republicans. They just can't do it. Just the same Israel's interests are only a small part of the reason they need to ditch the Democrat party. First and foremost, how about supporting a country that puts America first? I also don't know why they feel the need to cozy up to radical blacks. The radical blacks certainly do NOT return the favor as one can see:
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/214135-gop-sees-signs-of-jewish-voters-drifting-away-from-democrats
That all said is we need people to be Americans first whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Black, White, Asian etc.
The Democratic party hijacked by socialists is not putting America first.
OTOH not all Republicans are doing this either.
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http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/study-finds-no-evidence-of-khazar-origin-for-ashkenazi-jews/2014/02/23/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkZdVeb9iSY
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Why I post this here can be understood after reading the blatant anti-Semitism in the comments posted after the article's announcement:
http://news.yahoo.com/israeli-billionaire-finds-3-bln-barrels-oil-reserves-110122178.html
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http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/181075/frances-toxic-hate-4-le-pen?all=1
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Click here to watch: Hungarian Mayor Holds Mock Public Execution of Israeli Leaders’
A mayor of a rural town in eastern Hungary held a mock medieval-style public execution of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former president Shimon Peres in order to protest Israel’s military operation against Hamas in Gaza. According to a video posted online, Erpatak Mayor Mihaly Zoltan Orosz, who hails from the neo-Nazi Hungarian Jobbik Party, is seen standing in a traditional Hungarian costume with effigies of Netanyahu and Peres hanging behind him. After reading an anti-Israel speech, a man wearing the black hood of an executioner kicks out chairs holding the effigies, marking the Israeli leaders’ executions.
Watch Here
The Hungarian Foreign Ministry condemned the mock execution, saying, “The mayor has used the conflict in Gaza and its innocent victims as an excuse to spread hate-inducing propaganda.” As is the case in the rest of Europe, anti-Semitism has been on the rise in Hungary. The Jobbik Party came in third in Hungary’s parliamentary elections in April.
Source: Algemeiner
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http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/spanish-imam-allah-destroy-every-single-jew?omhide=true&utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Israel+Breaking+News+Video%3A+Spanish+Imam+-+Allah%2C+Destroy+Every+Single+Jew&utm_campaign=20140828_m121903061_8%2F28+Israel+Breaking+News+Video%3A+Spanish+Imam+-+Allah%2C+Destroy+Every+Single+Jew&utm_term=Spanish+Imam_3A+Allah_2C+Destroy+Every+Single+Jew
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That this sort of sermon is routinely delivered in mosques around the world, including many if not most in this country, without vigorous and unceasing protest from Christians and Jews everywhere, is a crime. I count the majority of Christian pastors and priests in this category here in the U.S. They are part of the problem because they refuse to recognize this evil and call it out for what it is. We are heading for another Holocaust - indeed the most respected Muslim cleric in the world (in Iran) is openly calling on jihadists to "finish the work that Hitler started."
When I was young and first learned about the Holocaust, I found it almost impossible to imagine how this could happen without fierce resistance from the Jews at the outset. Now I understand - because tragically, I see this same denial of reality all around me among American Jews today.
Islam is not a legitimate religion in my opinion. It is a totalitarian political and social system which subjugates all "infidels" who don't adhere to its tenets. Having a deity attached to it as a mask for its true nature doesn't make it a religion. It ought not be recognized as such here in the U.S., nor given any favorable treatment.
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No, I'm not rejoining the fray as interminable, circular, didactic internet arguments have lost their charm. And this piece could be posted in more that one place here, and perhaps ought to be. It is a rare examination of Israel reporting in context by someone who was there and neatly fits many pieces of a generally unseen puzzle together:
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/183033/israel-insider-guide/1
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BBG
Good post. Sorry you no longer find the board interesting enough. I for one would like your opinions or posts again.
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A different topic about Jews AND their party affiliation:
Jews will not become Republicans as noted here many times as per this author, but he needs to write the part 2 to this - which are the reasons why so many Jews are Democrat liberals which I have posted on the board my multiple theories:
******Will Jews turn on Obama, Dems in 2014 and turn out for GOP?
By Zev Chafets
·Published August 29, 2014·
FoxNews.com
This year, as in every election year since Barack Obama has been in the White House, we are hearing the cry of the hopeful Republican: This is the year that Jewish voters and donors and activists are going to turn on the president and his party and turn out for the GOP.
The hope stems from a few observable truths. President Obama is not a great friend of Israel and he visibly doesn’t get along with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The American Jewish community – white, assimilated and prosperous – is out-of-place in a Democratic Party determined to build a coalition around an appeal to racial gender minorities, unmarried women, the LGBT community, immigrants and the dependent poor. And while the Jewish community is shrinking because of low birthrates and intermarriage, its Orthodox wing – strongly pro-Israel and socially conservative – is gaining in numbers and self-confidence.
The great majority of American Jewish Democrats see their party and its agenda as their secular religion.
All this, according to some conservative pundits, has created a tipping point. In November, they say, Jews could turn out in key congressional elections, especially in Senate contests, and vote for Republicans who have made support for Israel a signature issue. And in 2016, fed up with Obama’s chilly attitude toward the Jewish state and his weakness in the face of Islamic aggression, Jews could abandon their traditional affiliation with the Democrats and give their energy, their contributions and their votes to the Republicans.
I hate to rain on anybody’s inaugural parade, but this is sheer fantasy.
Jews are not simply supporters of the Democratic Party; they are at the heart of everything from union leadership to campaign funding, think-tank policymaking to grass roots organizing.
Three of the four liberal justices on the Supreme Court are Jews. There are 10 Jewish U.S. senators and more than 20 Jewish members of the House.
In contrast, after the departure of Majority Leader Eric Cantor, there isn't a single Jewish Republican in Congress (or in any statehouse). And 2014 isn't going to reverse that.
There are only three congressional races – two in New York, one in Connecticut – where Jewish candidates are considered competitive, and all three are long shots. The GOP has no Jewish senatorial candidates at all.
The Republican side of the aisle in both houses of Congress has, and will have, about as many Jewish members as the Icelandic parliament.
There aren't even any great Hebrew hopes out there, just a few obscure local politicians who might, someday, run for higher office. The best known (and most influential) Republican Jew in America is Sheldon Adelson, the octogenarian casino mogul and mega-donor. Whatever Adelson’s virtues, he isn't anybody’s idea of an electoral poster boy.
Of course you don’t have to be Jewish to get Jewish votes. Al Smith, a New York Catholic, won almost 75 percent in his loss to Herbert Hoover in 1928. Franklin Roosevelt got between 85-90 percent in four straight elections. John F. Kennedy, the son of a notorious anti-Semite, topped 80 percent in 1960. Four years later, Lyndon Johnson got 90 percent running against Barry Goldwater, the grandson of frontier Jews. Obama got 69 percent of Jewish voters in 2012.
In the last 20 presidential elections, only Jimmy Carter, a transparently unfriendly figure, got less than two-thirds of the Jewish presidential vote – and even he out-polled the strongly pro-Israel Ronald Reagan.
The fact is, the great majority of American Jewish Democrats see their party and its agenda as their secular religion. Reform Judaism, America’s largest Jewish denomination, is sometimes jokingly called “the Democratic Party with holidays.” A lot of Jews would sooner convert to Shia Islam than leave the party of their forefathers.
Republicans sometimes wonder at this loyalty. After all, polls show that they and their voters are more pro-Israel than Democrats. Republicans are attracted to the Jewish state because of its pioneer ethos, its “peace through strength” posture in the face of anti-Western jihad, its reflexive pro-Americanism and, for Christian evangelicals, its biblical roots.
None of this means much to most American Jews, however (except to the Orthodox, still a relatively small minority). There isn't much data, but conventional political thinking is that secular Jews, to the extent they are voting as Jews, are more concerned about a woman’s right to choose, gay rights or comprehensive immigration reform than they are about specific Israel-related policy.
Jews of all sorts tend to be pro-Israel. For many it is personal. But that doesn't mean supporting specific policies. The Democrats will retain their loyalty as long as the party maintains an acceptable level of support for Israel – to be, as Barack Obama once said about Hillary Clinton in a different context, “likable enough.”
President Obama clears that bar. Clinton, if she runs in 2016, will do even better. Bibi Netanyahu would prefer a Republican president, but he won’t be on the ballot, and any candidate he supports will lose big time to Hillary Clinton. Or Chelsea, for that matter.
Zev Chafets is a Fox News contributor.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNjRR9Sfl2c
http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/61113/sobibor-survivor-recalls-his-escape-and-a-decades-old-vow/
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http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-ashkenazi-jews-dna-diseases-20140909-story.html
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Interesting read on Sgt Schulz of Hogan's Heroes fame. I was not a big fan of the show really but I certainly remember it and him well.
He left Austria when Hitler annexed it and came to America and quickly learned English (just like today:(( )
Many of his relatives left behind like most of the others all died. He for some reason (accent?) was type cast into playing Nazi roles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Banner
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Germany Sees Rising Anti-Semitism Among Muslims
Merkel to Address Weekend Rally, German Jews Worry About Lack of Plan
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Bertrand Benoit
Sept. 11, 2014 10:01 p.m. ET
Windows at a newspaper office in Spremberg, Germany, were sprayed with anti-Semitic grafitti this month, reading 'Jews' and 'We'll catch you all.' Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
BERLIN—On a recent Monday morning, two police officers stood guard outside the Lauder Nitzan Kindergarten, a white, three-story house marked by a discreet nameplate. Shortly after 9 a.m., a dozen children walked out and headed for the playground, minded by a nervous-looking civilian with a pistol protruding from a belt holster.
Most Jewish institutions in Germany have long had 24-hour police protection. Many, like the kindergarten, also employ private security. But such vigilance, usually intended to stave off neo-Nazis, has taken on fresh urgency amid an upsurge in anti-Semitic acts this year that some authorities and Jewish community leaders blame on Muslims.
Chancellor Angela Merkel will address a rally against anti-Semitismin Berlin on Sunday, underlining the government's concern. But many Jews in Germany are worried their country doesn't have a clear plan.
This summer, protesters against Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip unleashed a barrage of abuse, calling Jews "cowardly pigs," "child murderers" and fodder for the gas chambers, according to witnesses and Jewish organizations. On the sidelines, a mob hounded a Jewish couple in Berlin and Jews were beaten in Hamburg and Frankfurt.
Similar incidents were taking place elsewhere in Europe, but in the country that masterminded the Holocaust, they evoked particularly painful memories.
"We haven't heard these things on German streets for 50, 60 years," said Dieter Graumann, president of the Central Council of Jews, sitting in his office on a Frankfurt side street. "The fact that people on German streets are saying Jews should burn, Jews should be slaughtered, Jews should be gassed. It hits a particular nerve for us."
Through education and prevention, but also repression, successive German governments largely succeeded in banning anti-Semitic speech from the public domain. Yet these efforts focused on the far-right; anti-Semitism in Muslim communities was left unchecked, according to community activists and government officials.
"The protests got a lot of attention, but 'Jew' has been used as an insult by young Muslims in schoolyards, on sports grounds, for years," said Ahmad Mansour, an Israeli Arab who has led initiatives against prejudice and radicalization among Muslims in Germany since 2007. "There is a group of people that Germany's fight against anti-Semitism passed by."
Aiman Mazyek, president of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, said that Islam forbids anti-Semitism, but that some Muslims blur the border between criticism of Israel and hate speech.
"It must be addressed, but community leaders can't do this on their own," he said. "The state must step in, too, as it has done against right-wing anti-Semitism."
In a radio interview two weeks ago, Hans-Georg Maassen, president of Germany's domestic intelligence agency, said "we've always associated anti-Semitism with national socialism [Nazis], the extreme right. We are now realizing that many immigrants who came to Germany harbor anti-Semitic prejudice."
Long-term studies by Bielefeld and Leipzig universities show anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany is less widespread today than it was 10 years ago. Police records of anti-Semitic acts show the same trend.
But starting in 2002, the year of the second intifada,, bouts of violence in the Middle East have coincided with spikes of anti-Semitism here, according to police, fanning fear among Jews.
"If you look back over 30 years, the statistics haven't changed that much," said Daniel Alter, a Berlin rabbi who survived a vicious attack in 2012 and now works with imams on outreach programs. "But anti-Semitism has become more visible, more accepted."
Mr. Alter now wears a cap over his yarmulke. "There are too many places in Berlin where it would be irresponsible to advertise yourself as a Jew," he said.
Esther Mizrahi, director of the Lauder Nitzan Kindergarten in central Berlin, said she doesn't feel comfortable taking her children to the kosher store. A 31-year-old woman from an Orthodox household said Lebanese boys threw a stone through her window last month after arguing with her children over the Gaza conflict.
One obstacle to combating anti-Semitism among Muslims has been reluctance among politicians and the police to stigmatize a community that faces racism itself. Last week, a study by the government's antidiscrimination watchdog showed far more antipathy in Germany against Gypsies and Muslims than against Jews. A mosque was burned in Berlin last month in a suspected arson attack.
Immigration from the former Soviet Union after the Berlin Wall fell saw Germany's Jewish community grow to about 130,000 from 30,000 in the late 1980s. That doesn't count an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Israelis living here.
The spread of anti-Semitic speech, from online forums to schoolyards, risks sending the community retreating in its shell, said Deidre Berger, director of the American Jewish Committee Berlin Office.
"Frictions with Muslims mean more and more Jewish families are deciding to send their children to Jewish schools," she said. "There's a tendency to seclude. If you can't send your child to the local school, it's a daunting challenge for society."
A year ago, Ms. Merkel said she was ashamed that Jewish institutions still required police protection. Mr. Graumann thinks it will be a long time before the guards become superfluous.
"I wish we no longer needed them," he said. "But that may have to wait until the Messiah comes."
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hotair.com/archives/2014/09/17/audio-joe-biden-being-joe-biden-jewish-outreach-edition/
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So Biden hates Jews as much as Obama.
He needn't worry. Zuckerberg and Soros won't sweat this. The money will keep flowing in from the wealthy Jewish liberals.
Most American Liberal Jews are not Jews first. They are liberals first. So they will just ignore this because it doesn't fit their liberal agenda.
But GM's point is valid. Imagine if a Republican made this remark. Then they would be going after the politician with wild fury. But just understand that it would not be because they made an anti-semitic remark. It would just be an good excuse to demoniize a Republican.
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Click here to watch: 71 years later, Sobibor gas chambers unearthed
The gas chambers at the Sobibor death camp, where some 250,000 Jews perished between April 1942 and October 1943, have been uncovered in an archaeological dig, bringing to a close an eight-year search, Yad Vashem announced on Wednesday. “Finally, we have reached our goal – the discovery of the gas chambers. We were amazed at the size of the building and the well-preserved condition of the chamber walls,” Israeli archaeologist Yoram Haimi, whose two uncles were killed in the camp, was quoted as saying in a press release. In addition to the thousands of personal effects belonging to the Jewish inmates that have been unearthed in past years, last week the archaeological team found a water well used by the Jewish prisoners, which the Nazis filled with waste while dismantling the camp. A wedding band bearing the Hebrew inscription “Behold, you are consecrated unto me” was also recently located near the gas chambers in what Haimi described as the “most poignant moment.” The find buttresses the accounts of the survivors of the extermination camp, and constitutes “a very important finding in Holocaust research,” said Yad Vashem scholar Dr. David Silberklang. “It is important to understand that there were no survivors from among the Jews who worked in the area of the gas chambers. Therefore, these findings are all that is left of those murdered there, and they open a window onto the day-to-day suffering of these people,” he said. “We will now be able to know more precisely what the process of murder was in the camp, and what the Jews went through until they were murdered. Additionally, finding the gas chambers and their capacity will enable us to estimate more precisely the number of people murdered in Sobibór.”
Watch Here
The discovery follows nearly eight years of excavations at the site — conducted by Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research, the German-Polish Foundation and the Majdanek State Museum — during which various personal items belonging to its victims such as jewelry, medicine, and food utensils were retrieved. Haimi has worked on the excavation since 2007, along with a Polish archaeologist Wojciech Mazure. In 2013 Dr. Ivar Schute, a Dutch archaeologist, joined the team. In 2012, Haimi discovered the areas where poles were planted in the soil, which mapped out the Himmelfahrsstrasse, or the “Road to Heaven, where the Jews were marched naked to the gas chambers,” according to the Associated Press. That find ultimately led him to the location of the gas chambers. The excavations were complicated by the extensive Nazi efforts to destroy all evidence of the Sobibor death camp. In October 1943, following an uprising of the camp’s 600 remaining inmates, of whom approximately half successfully escaped, the Nazis leveled the camp. They later planted crops over the site to hide the evidence. Thousands of Jews from Lublin, German-occupied Soviet territory, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Bohemia and Moravia, the Netherlands, and France were deported to Sobibor during the year-and-a-half that it was operational, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Like Belzec and Treblinka, which were established at around the same time, Sobibor was designed as a death camp, and Jews were gassed almost immediately upon their arrival.
Source: Times of Israel
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In Europe
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/world/europe/europes-anti-semitism-comes-out-of-shadows.html?emc=edit_th_20140924&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
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Meanwhile, here in America:
Click here to watch: UCLA Using Gov’t Funds to Fuel Anti-Semitism
A consortium of American Jewish and civil rights groups are concerned that federal funds are underwriting “one-sided, antisemitic programming that masquerades as scholarship,” at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), according to statements released Wednesday. In a just-released three-year study (2010-2013) covering “Antisemitic Activity and Anti-Israel Bias At the Center for Near East Studies (CNES)” at UCLA, AMCHA Initiative researchers said they have found “CNES events disproportionately focused on Israel and the Israeli-Arab conflict, with 93% of events on Israel being anti-Israel, and 75% displaying antisemitic discourse.” AMCHA investigates, documents and fights antisemitism at universities and other institutions of higher education in the US. CNES, according to AMCHA, is a major federally-designated National Resource Center, and as such, gets most of its funding funding from the Department of Education under Title VI of the Higher Education Act (HEA). The group said the school received $1,383,680 during the period being investigated. The groups issued a joint statement calling on the U.S. Congress to deny funds to Middle East Studies programs accused of having anti-American and anti-Israel bias, as well as to enact reforms on the funding process. Congress is currently reconsidering the reauthorization of the HEA, which provides federal funds to 129 international studies and foreign language programs. According to the 10 organizations that signed the statement- Accuracy in Academia, AMCHA Initiative, American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, Endowment for Middle East Truth, The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, Middle East Forum, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, Zionist Organization of America – the programs “have devolved into hotbeds of anti-American and anti-Israel activity, disseminating falsehoods both in universities and to K-12 teachers and to the general public.”
Watch Here
The organizations call on lawmakers to implement two accountability measures, including requiring Title VI recipients to establish grievance procedures and for the department of education to launch a complaint-resolution process. “Title VI of the Higher Education Act directs federal dollars to support the intellectually corrupt field of Middle East studies, among the most politicized academic disciplines, filled with professors hostile to America, Israel, and the West. American taxpayers should not fund programs that aim to weaken resolve and thwart policy,” said Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes. “CNES is promoting a one-sided, anti-Israel and antisemitic bias to impressionable students. This completely distorts UCLA’s scholarly and educational mission and is a violation of the Higher Education Act,” according to Leila Beckwith, AMCHA co-founder and a UCLA emeritus professor. In May, UCLA leaders and the University of California (UC) statewide system issued dual statements condemning a pledge organized by several anti-Israel student groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, that had called on UCLA student council candidates to promise not to visit Israel on trips sponsored by Jewish organizations.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH1DZYMowZQ
Kosher Store Sacked by Dozens of Hooligans in Crown Heights
A mob of teenagers in Crown Heights, New York City, vandalized a Jewish-owned business Saturday night, then damaged several nearby cars and buses before shouting “Heil Hitler” and leaving the area, witnesses said. The incident was captured on security camera. The store, Gourmet Butchers, was likely targeted because it was owned by Jews, the owner, Yanki Klein, told the local ABC News affiliate. The group, which various media sources described as consisting of 30 to 70 youths, primarily African-American, started “to scream and make noise” and then “everything happened in seconds,” Klein said. Another witness told the station that “a whole bunch of guys, they just rush the place. It was like out of nowhere, and everyone was just in like shock-mode, and everyone was shocked to see what was going on, there was no reason for it.” The same witness said that members of the group shouted “a Nazi phrase” before running away.
Watch Here
The video footage, posted to YouTube, shows a group of youths gathering outside the store, then cuts to several of them bursting through the main entrance, knocking over a shelf and throwing products around before leaving. Police were called to the scene and an investigation was launched into the incident. According to an account posted on the neighborhood news site Crownheights.info, the store has been targeted in the past by similar acts of vandalism carried out by smaller groups or individuals, and the owner has requested more police presence in the area, but to no avail. “[Very often] these kinds of kids come by my store and yell ‘Heil Hitler,’ or steal things that are on shelves near the door… I’ve asked the police to put an officer on my corner many times, but I feel like I am being ignored and these ‘minor’ problems keep happening.” Klein said. The Crown Heights area of Brooklyn, home to a large population of both Hasidic Jews and African Americans, has in the past been a flash point of tension between the two communities.
Source: Times of Israel
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http://www.truthrevolt.org/commentary/goldstein-barbarism-doesnt-deserve-be-humanized-met
Meanwhile, this thread hits 100,000 reads , , ,
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Saudis are a bunch of bigots and they are NOT our friends. I don't care that W walked around arm in arm with one of the "Princes" or did he call himself a king.
Their flowing oil at below cost is a game of chicken with us. We should do everything we can to increase fracking and export oil and break them.
IMO.
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Kerry Links ISIS Recruiting Success to Israel
by IPT News • Oct 17, 2014 at 12:29 pm
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4614/kerry-links-isis-recruiting-success-to-israel
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Israeli government officials are fuming over remarks made by Secretary of State John Kerry Thursday which connected the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict to waves of international recruits flocking to the terrorist group ISIS.
"As I went around and met with people in the course of our discussions about the ISIL coalition," Kerry said, "the truth is we – there wasn't a leader I met with in the region who didn't raise with me spontaneously the need to try to get peace between Israel and the Palestinians, because it was a cause of recruitment and of street anger and agitation that they felt – and I see a lot of heads nodding – they had to respond to."
In a Facebook post written in Hebrew, Israeli Communications Minister Gilad Erdan wrote, "I actually respect Kerry and his efforts, but every time he breaks new records of showing a lack of understanding of our region and the essence of the conflict in the Middle East I have trouble respecting what he says."
Naftali Bennett, the Israeli economy minister, blasted Kerry for linking ISIS, which seeks an Islamic caliphate in Syria, Iraq and beyond, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying it "gives a boost to global terrorism."
"It turns out that even when a British Muslim beheads a British Christian, there will always be those who blame the Jews," Bennett said, alluding to the beheading earlier this month of British aid worker Alan Henning. The killer, believed to be the same man who beheaded American journalists James Foley and Steven Satloff, speaks with a British accent.
Kerry's statement, made at a State Department reception celebrating the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday, is a bit of a contradiction to President Obama's statement during a speech to the United Nations last month. While also calling for peace talks to resume, Obama acknowledged that "the situation in Iraq and Syria and Libya should cure anybody of the illusion that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the main source of problems in the region."
And there's another obvious point Kerry doesn't seem to understand. The radical Islamists in ISIS, like radical Islamists in Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hizballah and others, absolutely reject any peaceful settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. It is codified in their founding charters and repeated statements. Their only acceptable outcome is Israel's destruction. Given that, it's difficult to understand how a peaceful resolution guaranteeing and Jewish homeland in Israel and a Palestinian state, would do anything but ignite new fury and spike the number of recruits seeking to join the jihad.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAyFlByb64M
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http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/23507/kerrys-wife-funds-anti-israel-pop-restaurant/#Z85Ed0lJgjvqX5lI.97
Kerry’s Wife Funds Anti-Israel Pop Up Restaurant
The Conflict Kitchen in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo: Conflict Kitchen Facebook Page)
Would you like fries with your anti-Israel propaganda? A pop-up restaurant called Conflict Kitchen has been serving what it calls Palestinian food, wrapped in anti-Israel leaflets.
The leaflets contain quotes from interviews with Palestinians in support of terrorism and the destruction of Israel. And all of this is made possible in part by funds from the Heinz Endowment, under the direction of US Secretary of State John Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry.
Conflict Kitchen is located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, near Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. According to its website, the restaurant “only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict” in an effort to “expand the engagement the public has with the culture, politics, and issues at stake within the focus country.” Other countries it has presented include Afghanistan, North Korea, Cuba Venezuela and Iran.
Each iteration of the restaurant is accompanied by events, performances and discussion panels. The restaurant’s current focus is on Palestine, and its menu and food wrappers reflect that focus. The wrappers claim the text “is taken directly from interviews we conducted with Palestinians living in both Palestine and the United States.” No quotation marks or direct attributions are supplied.
The text on each wrapper touches on a variety of subjects, from food to marriage to religion to settlements. One panel calls the creation of the State of Israel “an intentional and ongoing offensive.” Another justifies terror by claiming “You’re pushing them to the absolute extreme. So what do you expect? Palestinians are not going to just let you in and drop their arms. No, they’re going to kill and they are going to die.”
Other accusations leveled against Israel in the text include deliberately cutting off Palestinians’ water supply, preventing non-Jews from becoming Israeli citizens, hand-picking the members of the Palestinian Authority by eliminating all the non-corrupt candidates, undermining the Palestinian economy by importing products instead of buying locally, and capriciously harassing law-abiding Palestinians trying to access Israeli services.
Sponsored events accompanying the Conflict Kitchen’s Palestinian iteration have included talks by Laila El-Haddad, a Palestinian Arab activist who supports a one-state solution and the boycott campaign against Israel, and University of Pittsburgh professor Ken Boas, a board member of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions-USA. The latter reportedly compared Israel to South Africa under apartheid and called on the audience to support a boycott of Israel.
Requests by the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh to include a pro-Israel, or mainstream, perspective were rejected by Conflict Kitchen’s Jewish co-director, Jon Rubin, an associate professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
Rubin told the Pittsburgh News that “the goal of our project is to represent the voices of the people that we are working with, so it does not make sense to have someone from Israel on every one of the panels. We may have an Israeli perspective at some point, and I understand their desire to have their narrative told, but they have plenty of other formats to do that.”
Conflict Kitchen’s food wrappers indicate it “is funded through food sales, as well as support from The Sprout Fund, the Heinz Endowment, The Benter Foundation and the Studio for Creative Inquiry.” The Heinz Endowment and Benter Foundation were not listed as supporters of the Iranian iteration.
A spokesman for the Heinz Endowment told the Washington Free Beacon that it gave Conflict Kitchen a $50,000 grant last April to support its relocation to another site in Pittsburgh. He went on to stress “the opinions of Conflict Kitchen do not represent those of the Heinz Endowment.” He would not say whether the Endowment would continue to support the restaurant. Teresa Heinz Kerry is chairwoman for the fund.
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"Requests by the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh to include a pro-Israel, or mainstream, perspective were rejected by Conflict Kitchen’s Jewish co-director, Jon Rubin, an associate professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University"
An Israel hating Jew? Sounds like liberal Americans who hate America.
I wonder how much he gets paid from the Conflict Kitchen.
Lets play the liberal game. Everyone should be advised to boycott this place. There will be few Arabs who show up and no one else.
No Christians, no Jews, no Hindus etc.
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Just finished "Killing Patton" and thought it was a great read. One review I found online by Richard Cohen lambasted O'Reilly for not mentioning that Patton could have been anti semitic. I found this article discussing a somewhat complicated tangle about this:
http://www.rense.com/general85/pats.htm
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Just finished "Killing Patton" and thought it was a great read. One review I found online by Richard Cohen lambasted O'Reilly for not mentioning that Patton could have been anti semitic. I found this article discussing a somewhat complicated tangle about this:
http://www.rense.com/general85/pats.htm
I would examine anything from rense.com with a massive amount of scepticism.
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The article suggests the evidence is based from writings in Patton's own diary though I don't know if true. I would have to research more.
Car accidents were apparently not an uncommon way for Stalin to kill of an enemy while making it look like an accident. In my readings it has come up more than a couple of times that someone just suddenly dies of an auto accident. Another driver coming out of seemingly no where to slam into or cut off the victim on foot or in another vehicle.
I am convinced Patton was murdered. I don't think he was poisoned later while in a full body cast but the accident to start with was no "accident".
I guess the question remains was it Stalin or the American guy who wanted Patton out of the way because of his anti-Soviet rhetoric which was against everyone else in the Roosevelt-Truman government that wanted to appease Stalin.
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GM,
Thanks for the heads up on Rense. I am not familiar with him. As for Patton I became quite an admirer after I read O'Reilly's book. He certainly saw what was coming in regard to Stalin unlike many others at the time who were to busy appeasing Stalin. Yet the thought of proceeding directly to war with the Soviet Union as Patton probably would have been glad to do must have seemed to horrendous a thought at the time after just beating the Germans and still fighting the Japanese.
Then I read the review by Richard Cohen whose source for the anti-Semitism claims seems to be a collection of Patton's won writings and words edited by Martin Blumenthal. I cannot link from the computer I am on at this time.
I can forgive Patton for some of the things he may have thought about seeing concentration camp survivors as he probably thought that while that was terrible, so was terrible the suffering of so many other peoples at the time. I admit to finding it hard to forgive some of the things he apparently said or wrote.
He seemed to have a low opinion of Jews in general, blamed those in the media for the bad press he received at times during his military career. He also seemed to have a low opinion of Russians in general. Oddly he seems to have had a greater respect for Germans although I am not sure if this included Nazis.
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http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/186725/german-anti-semitism-biller?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=01e84f57c5-Sunday_November_16_201411_14_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-01e84f57c5-207194629
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Cop shoots knife wielding man after stabbing at a NYC Synagogue. GRAPHIC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4ntAF9c_uI
P.C.
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http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/187652/my-jewish-feminist-problem?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=ffe435a071-Sunday_December_21_201412_19_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-ffe435a071-207194629
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http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/187652/my-jewish-feminist-problem?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=ffe435a071-Sunday_December_21_201412_19_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-ffe435a071-207194629
Seems to be a common problem.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2903600/Every-single-French-Jew-know-left-Paris-Editor-Britain-s-Jewish-Chronicle-claims-people-fleeing-terror-hit-French-capital.html
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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
http://pamelageller.com/2015/01/france-opposed-netanyahus-attendance-at-paris-rally-so-they-invited-gaza-terror-leader-abbas-still-netanyahu-makes-impassioned-speech.html/
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Nothing like traditional European antisemitism.
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Fear of an Anti-Muslim Backlash
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On January 13, 2015 @ frontpagemag.com
It used to be that the media would at least wait a day before sweeping the latest victims of Muslim terrorism into the trash to refocus on the looming “anti-Muslim backlash” that never actually comes.
The increase in Muslim terrorism however has made it risky for the media to wait that long. 24 hours after a brutal Muslim terrorist attack, there might be another brutal Muslim terrorist attack which will completely crowd out the stories of Muslims worrying about the backlash to the latest Muslim atrocity.
The massacre at Charlie Hebdo was quickly followed by a massacre at a kosher supermarket and somewhere in between them the Islamic State in Nigeria had wiped out the populations of sixteen villages.
With so many Muslim attacks crowded together, the media had no choice but to take a deep breath and dive in with its “Muslim backlash” stories.
The Voice of America ran its “Muslims fear backlash” piece while the bodies were still warm. The Los Angeles Times rushed out its “Muslims fear backlash” story before the Kosher supermarket massacre. It quoted the Muslim spokesman for the National Observatory Against Islamophobia asserting that it is Muslims who suffer after such attacks. Muslims however weren’t the ones who suffered. The four dead Jews at a Kosher supermarket did the suffering at the hands of a Muslim gunman.
While Muslim murderers were still prowling France for victims, the media was making the story about the perpetrators, not the victims.
And Muslims around the world lined up to join the “Fear of a Backlash” party like it was an exclusive nightclub. Both Belgian and Swedish Muslims claimed to be afraid of a backlash after the Paris attacks. At least those Swedish Muslims who weren’t calling for Allah to “multiply such attacks.”
Even Detroit Muslims got in on the act. Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR in Michigan, claimed, “We are concerned about backlash against Muslims in the west.”
Walid had endorsed the historical Islamic mass murder of Jews on Twitter and stated in a sermon, “Who are those who incurred the wrath of Allah? They are the Jews, they are the Jews.”
Even while Jews were set to be murdered by a fellow exponent of Walid’s anti-Semitic ideology, the media was pandering to his phony claims of victimization thousands of miles away.
The Muslim backlash narrative insisted that the real victims weren’t Yohan Cohen, Yoav Hattab, Philippe Braham and Francois-Michel Saada dying in a Kosher supermarket in France, but Dawud Walid, the anti-Semitic spokesman for a hate group closely linked to terrorism over in Michigan.
Is it really a backlash that Muslims fear or a moral reckoning?
In the rush to make bigots like Walid the victims, instead of the actual men and women being murdered in the name of his violent ideology, the hard questions about the connection between the historical Islamic anti-Semitism bandied about by Dawud Walid and the modern massacres of Jews go unasked.
The murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists had its roots in an Islamic political and legal tradition of punishing blasphemy that has continued uninterrupted for over a thousand years. The murder of four Jews in a Kosher supermarket was part of a great Islamic tradition that began with Mohammed. The defenders of the “Prophet” began by killing blasphemers and then continued his work by killing Jews.
Muslims are not the victims of the Hebdo massacre. They are not the victims of mass murder in a Kosher supermarket. They are not the victims of the Sydney Siege.
They are the perpetrators.
When the media rushes to print interviews with Muslims claiming to suddenly be terrified of an imaginary backlash, it is marginalizing and silencing the real victims of Muslim violence who have been the subjects of a Muslim assault for over a thousand years complete with literal lashings.
Not every Muslim supports what happened, but the history and theology of Islam support the ends of silencing blasphemers and killing Jews, if not necessarily the provocative individual means.
The root cause of Islamic violence is Islam. Everything else, from poverty to YouTube videos, is subsidiary at best.
The cries of “Islamophobia” and the claims of a backlash silence the victims of Muslim terror and encourage social blindness to the next Muslim attack against Jews, Christians, Atheists, Hindus, Buddhists and countless others.
The Muslim backlash story is a great media tradition that dates back to at least September 11. While the streets of downtown Manhattan were still streaked with the ashes of the dead, the media began running stories about Muslims who were changing their clothes and putting up American flags out of fear that the maddened patriotic rabble would shortly begin massacring Muslims.
The mass anti-Muslim riots after September 11 never materialized; just as they never materialized after the Sydney Siege in Australia or the latest Muslim massacres in France.
The worst thing the media came up with in Australia, after touting its phony #Illridewithyou hashtag warning that Muslims were being persecuted, was three men and one woman holding up a sign reading, “Death to ISIS; Get Out You Rag-Headed F___s.”
They were immediately interviewed by police on possible charges of Isisphobia.
If the police had been as assertive in going after every Muslim in Australia waving a “Behead all those who insult the Prophet” sign, Australia would have been a lot safer.
And if the Australian media had been as aggressive in going after Sheikh Monis, as it did after a few young men waving Australian flags on a shopping center roof, the murder of two Australians in a café might not have happened.
But instead of fighting Jihadists, the media and politicians are determined to fight the threat of a backlash to Muslim terrorism. The obsession with the backlash however implicitly admits the existence of Islamic terror and sidelines it to instead focus on the reaction to it as the greater threat.
On one side are bodies heaped across Europe and America. On the other is the occasional slice of pork on a mosque door, a little graffiti scrawled on a wall or a dirty look on public transportation.
One is genocide and the other is petty vandalism.
We don’t need any more earnest interviews in which Muslims claim that they are the real victims of Muslim terrorism because they now feel “unwelcome” when the bodies of non-Muslims still lie in the morgue.
Try comparing an “unwelcome” feeling to being dead.
It is that sense of self-pitying Muslim victimization that leads easily to Muslim violence. Violence is often sanctioned by victimhood. That Muslims believe themselves to be the victims is nothing new. The Nazis also believed that they were the victims. So did the Muslim killer in a Kosher supermarket who claimed that ISIS, with its mass rapes and genocidal campaign, was the victim of French intervention.
If European Muslims really want to end atrocities like the ones that took place in Paris, instead of making themselves into the victims, they should examine the complicity of their religion, their politics and their sense of victimization in perpetrating them.
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Muslims worry about the backlash from tomorrow's terror attack...
:roll:
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http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2015/01/muslims-in-suburban-paris-charlie-hebdo.html
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http://freebeacon.com/national-security/europes-leading-rabbi-jews-must-begin-carrying-guns/
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Anti-Semitism Is Never Solely About the Jews
Radical Islamists attack Jews as the handiest target in a campaign to destroy the free societies that jihadists abhor.
By
Ruth R. Wisse
Jan. 15, 2015 7:08 p.m. ET
0 COMMENTS
The security of free and open societies depends increasingly on intelligence services. To find the sources of terror attacks originating in the Middle East, investigators track recruits back to their leaders in mountain or desert lairs. The intelligence agencies have become good at their work—though never good enough—but so far they seem not to have focused on the trail leading to the ideology that set terror in motion.
The Times of Israel offers a promising line of inquiry in its report on events in Paris last week under the headline, “First They Came for the Jews, Then They Came for the Cartoonists.” This echoes the famous words of Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller, a victim of the Nazis during World War II who connected the dots between the successive targets of his attackers.
Like those who came for the cartoonists, those who came for the pastors in the 1940s had been after the Jews. The unspecified “they” of back then and now locate in the Jews the handiest target on the way to subjugating the free and open society that is their ultimate foe.
These links through time also exist across contemporary time zones. The terrorist attack on the Har Nof synagogue in Jerusalem in November killed four Jews, just as the attack at the kosher supermarket in Paris killed four more. Since the start of this millennium there have been attacks on Jewish houses of prayer in Düsseldorf, Brussels, Minsk, Mumbai, Istanbul, London and Caracas. There are fewer than 4,000 Jews in Mumbai, about 9,000 in Caracas, more than 170,000 in London, and a half-million in Jerusalem. Disparate local factors cannot account for the single-minded choice of targets.
If we mistakenly imagine that this is “about” the Jews, however, we fall into the trap that anti-Semitism sets for us by deflecting attention from perpetrators to victims. The trail of terror leads not to the Jews but from those who organize against them. Fingering the Jews—in their homeland or elsewhere—is a pretext. In every case, Jews are convenient targets standing in for the liberalizing aspects of individual freedom, democratic governance and modernity complete with its anxieties. Anti-Jewish politics aims at the tolerant societies in which Jews flourish.
One of those societies is Israel. Adjusting our sights, if we follow the trail of Middle East terror back, past its current practitioners—Islamic State, al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and various offshoots and affiliates—we arrive at the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The PLO was founded in 1964—three years before the war launched by the Arab states from which Israel emerged in possession of some disputed territory on the west bank of the Jordan River. Until 1967, the PLO and its offshoots had existed in Jordan but been suppressed; after the war, as the PLO focused its terror exclusively against the Jews, money began to flow to the organization from the Arab states. A pure product of ideological anti-Semitism, the PLO and its terrorism formed but one weapon in the Arab war that was failing to destroy Israel by other means.
Here we reach the heart of the matter. Opposition to Israel was the unifying feature of an otherwise splintered Arab League that found in anti-Zionism the same ideological energy that Europeans had found in anti-Semitism. Other ideologies pit left against right; religious against secular; reactionaries against progressives. Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism unite otherwise contentious parties against a common target.
After World War II, Arab leaders in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere welcomed fleeing Nazi officers for their military, technological and political expertise. The radical differences between the two cultures did not preclude collaboration in a unified strategy focused on the same Jewish target.
Those Arab leaders made a poor choice. With their countries almost unscathed by the war, they might have concentrated on regional improvement, following the lead of Jordan’s King Abdullah I, who was prepared to settle for the lion’s share of Mandate Palestine. Instead they found in Israel a scapegoat and, in the Palestinians, a pawn whom they condemned to perpetual refugee status as a pretext for their own perpetual belligerence. No doubt they believed they could control potential domestic unrest by channeling popular anger at a foreign “invader.”
But deflecting dissatisfaction does not arrest it. Ignoring crises does not eliminate them. Appeasing terror does not defeat it. Arab leaders would have done better to resist the temptations of anti-Semitism and follow the Jews’ example. The recovery of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel showed, and continues to show, the possibilities of creative renewal. Who knows what Arab societies could accomplish if they likewise had the confidence to look inward and undertake serious reform?
For their own safety, those already living in free societies have to hunt down the terror cells to destroy them. But beyond them, what needs to be confronted is the ideology that brought terrorism into being. Only the incubators of this fatal hatred can accomplish that. The rest of the world can help by refusing to join the diversion of condemning Israel and by urging Arab and Muslim leaders to make up for seven lost decades of blame.
Ms. Wisse a former professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of “Jews and Power” (Schocken, 2007) and “No Joke: Making Jewish Humor” (Princeton, 2013)
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http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/183350/frances-toxic-hate-4-le-pen-2?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=d720ccff6f-Thursday_January_15_20151_15_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-d720ccff6f-207194629
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A second post, related to the previous one:
http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/182311/frances-toxic-hate-5?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=9285c18b91-Friday_January_16_20151_16_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-9285c18b91-207194629
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http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/188423/jews-lose?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=074bfdab05-Thursday_January_22_20151_22_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-074bfdab05-207194629
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpGPzoaNVCU&x-yt-ts=1421914688&x-yt-cl=84503534
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Perhaps some Non Jews think that if only Israel would go away the world's radical Muslim problem would also go away. Hey Muslims are just mad at the Jews in their neighborhood. Otherwise they have no beef with anyone.
Think again. The Non Jews problems will be worse.
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https://www.facebook.com/memorialine
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Perhaps some Non Jews think that if only Israel would go away the world's radical Muslim problem would also go away. Hey Muslims are just mad at the Jews in their neighborhood. Otherwise they have no beef with anyone.
Think again. The Non Jews problems will be worse.
A phrase commonly heard in the Muslim world goes to the effect of "First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people".
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Don't know the accuracy of these numbers:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/02/19/entrenched-anti-semitic-views-very-rare-among-whites-and-asian-americans-common-among-blacks-and-latinos/
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The vast majority of white evangelical Christians are ardent supporters of Israel.
Don't know the accuracy of these numbers:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/02/19/entrenched-anti-semitic-views-very-rare-among-whites-and-asian-americans-common-among-blacks-and-latinos/
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Last Tuesday, a group of Holocaust survivors, by now gaunt and frail, made their way back to Auschwitz, the West’s symbol of evil—back to the slave-labor side of the vast complex, with its mocking inscription Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work makes you free”), and back to the death camp, where a million and a quarter human beings, most of them Jews, were gassed, burned and turned to ash. They were there to commemorate the day, 70 years ago, when Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and saw, for the first time, the true dimensions of the greatest crime since human beings first set foot on Earth.
The moment would have been emotional at the best of times, but this year brought an especially disturbing undercurrent. The Book of Genesis says that, when God told Abraham what would happen to his descendants, a “fear of great darkness” fell over him. Something of that fear haunted the survivors this week, who have witnessed the return of anti-Semitism to Europe after 70 years of political leaders constant avowals of “Never again.” As they finished saying Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for mourners, one man cried out, “I don’t want to come here again.” Everyone knew what he meant. For once, the fear was not only about the past but also about the future.
The murder of Jewish shoppers at a Parisian kosher supermarket three weeks ago, after the killing of 12 people at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, sent shivers down the spines of many Jews, not because it was the first such event but because it has become part of a pattern. In 2014, three visitors were killed at the Jewish museum in Brussels. In 2012, a rabbi and three young children were murdered at a Jewish school in Toulouse. In 2008 in Mumbai, four terrorists separated themselves from a larger group killing people in the city’s cafes and hotels and made their way to a small Orthodox Jewish center, where they murdered its young rabbi and his pregnant wife after torturing and mutilating them. As the Sunday Times of London reported about the attack, “the terrorists would be told by their handlers in Pakistan that the lives of Jews were worth 50 times those of non-Jews.”
Two Jews, kneeling at right, about to be put to death by the sword as revenge for the death of Jesus, who looks on at top left. Manuscript illumination, c1250, from a French Bible. ENLARGE
Two Jews, kneeling at right, about to be put to death by the sword as revenge for the death of Jesus, who looks on at top left. Manuscript illumination, c1250, from a French Bible. Photo: The Granger Collection
An ancient hatred has been reborn.
Some politicians around the world deny that what is happening in Europe is anti-Semitism. It is, they say, merely a reaction to the actions of the state of Israel, to the continuing conflict with the Palestinians. But the policies of the state of Israel are not made in kosher supermarkets in Paris or in Jewish cultural institutions in Brussels and Mumbai. The targets in these cities were not Israeli. They were Jewish.
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According to the Middle East Media Research Institute, an Egyptian cleric, Muhammad Hussein Yaqub, speaking in January 2009 on Al Rahma, a popular religious TV station in Egypt, made the contours of the new hate impeccably clear: “If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. We will never love them…They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing…You must believe that we will fight, defeat and annihilate them until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth…You will not survive as long as a single one of us remains.”
Not everyone would put it so forcefully, but this is the hate in which much of the Middle East and the Muslim world has been awash for decades, and it is now seeping back into Europe. For Jews, “never again” has become “ever again.”
The scope of the problem is, of course, difficult to gauge precisely. But recent polling is suggestive—and alarming. An Anti-Defamation League study released last May found “persistent and pervasive” anti-Jewish attitudes after surveying 53,100 adults in 102 countries and territories world-wide. The ADL found that 75% of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa held anti-Semitic attitudes; the number was 24% in Western Europe, 34% in Eastern Europe and 19% in the Americas.
Or consider a 2011 Pew Research Center study, which found that favorable views of Jews were “uniformly low” in predominantly Muslim regions that it surveyed: 4% in Turkey and the Palestinian territories, 3% in Lebanon, and 2% in Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan.
At this juncture in the history of hate, we must remember what anti-Semitism is. It is only contingently, even accidentally, about Jews. Jews die from it, but they are not its only victims. Today Christian communities are being ravaged, terrorized and decimated throughout the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, and scores of Muslims are killed every day by their brothers, with Sunnis arrayed against Shiites, radicals against moderates, the religious against the secular. The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.
A copy of Adolf Hitler's ‘Mein Kampf’ is sold at a street shop in Cairo in 2009. ENLARGE
A copy of Adolf Hitler's ‘Mein Kampf’ is sold at a street shop in Cairo in 2009. Photo: Agence France-Pesse/Getty Images
Anti-Semitism has existed for a very long time. One critical moment came around the end of the 1st century C.E., when the Gospel of John attributed to Jesus these words about the Jews: “You belong to your father, the Devil.” From being the children of Abraham, Jews had been transformed into the children of Satan.
But it took a millennium for this text to spark widespread violence against Jews. That came in 1095, when Pope Urban II delivered his call for the First Crusade. A year later, some Crusaders, on their way to “liberate” the holy city of Jerusalem, paused to massacre Jewish communities in Northern Europe, in Cologne, Worms and Mainz. Thousands died. Many Jews committed suicide rather than submit to the mob and forcible conversion to Christianity. It was a traumatizing moment for European Jewry—and the portent of worse to come.
From the time of the Crusades onward, Jews in Christian Europe began to be seen not as human beings but as a malevolent force, a demonic and destructive power that mysteriously yet actively sought the harm of others. Jews were accused of desecrating the sacramental bread used in communion, poisoning wells and spreading the plague. They were held responsible for the Black Death, the epidemic that in the 14th century cost millions of lives. They lived in fear.
This period added to the repressive vocabulary of the medieval West such terms as book burning, forced conversion, Inquisition, auto-da-fe, expulsion, ghetto and pogrom. In duration and intensity, it ranks among the most sustained chronicles of enmity in history. What had happened to activate a hate that had been incubating for 10 centuries, since Christianity emerged from Judaism?
The same question could be asked about Nazi Germany. Had someone been asked in the 1890s to identify the epicenters of anti-Semitism in Europe, the answers would probably have been Paris (where Alfred Dreyfus, a French military office of Jewish descent, was framed as a spy and unjustly imprisoned) and Vienna (whose bigoted mayor, Karl Lueger, became Hitler’s inspiration and role model). Why was it Germany that conceived and executed the Final Solution, an elaborate program with the sole purpose of exterminating Europe’s Jews?
The answer is the same in both cases: Anti-Semitism becomes deadly only when a culture, nation or faith suffers from a cognitive dissonance so profound that it becomes unbearable. It happens when the way a group sees itself is contradicted by the way it is seen by the world. It is the symptom of an unendurable sense of humiliation.
Christianity, which had been transformed by the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, found itself overtaken by Islam by the 11th century. Germany, which had seen itself as the supreme nation in Europe, was defeated in World War I and then punished under the Treaty of Versailles.
These humiliations resulted not in introspection but in a search for foreign culprits—for external enemies who could be blamed and destroyed. The parallel in Islam over the past century was the defeat and dissolution of its one remaining bastion of imperial power, the Ottoman Empire, in 1922. Six years later, radical political Islam was born in Egypt in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In 2009, the entrance of a synagogue in Lille, northern France, was defaced with graffiti referring to the supposed ‘Zionist Occupation Government’ that many anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists claim controls the government, finance and the media. ENLARGE
In 2009, the entrance of a synagogue in Lille, northern France, was defaced with graffiti referring to the supposed ‘Zionist Occupation Government’ that many anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists claim controls the government, finance and the media. Photo: agence France-Pesse/Getty Images
Hate cultivated for such cultural and political ends resolves the dissonance between past glory and current ignominy. By turning the question “What did we do wrong?” into “Who did this to us?”, it restores some measure of self-respect and provides a course of action. In psychiatry, the clinical terms for this process are splitting and projection; it allows people to define themselves as victims.
The question then becomes: victims of whom? There were many possibilities. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, Europe blamed witches and killed some 40,000 of them, according to the British historian Ronald Hutton. But Europe’s problems remained. For two millennia, another candidate also has been available: the Jews.
Despite what some intemperate voices claim, anti-Semitism has no genuine provenance within Islam. The historian Bernard Lewis used to draw a wry distinction: Islam has traditionally had contempt for the Jews, he would say, not hate—adding, “From contempt you don’t die. From hate you do.” Anti-Semitism entered Islam from the outside, in the form of two classic myths imported from Europe.
The first was the blood libel, the mad idea that Jews kill Christian children to use their blood to make matzo, the unleavened bread eaten during Passover. The idea is absurd, not least because even the tiniest speck of blood in food renders it inedible in Jewish law. The libel was an English invention, born in Norwich around 1144, and was unsuccessfully condemned by several popes. It was introduced into the Middle East by Christians in the 19th century, leading to trials of innocent Jews in Lebanon and Egypt and, most famously, in Damascus in 1840.
The blood libel is still in circulation. In 1983, Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass embraced it in his book, “The Matzo of Zion,” according to scholars like Stephen Eric Bonner and Anthony Julius. In 1991, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the Syrian delegate to the U.N. Human Rights Commission praised this “valuable book,” saying it “unmasked the racist character of Zionism.”
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Automation Makes Us Dumb
Yes, America Should Be the World’s Policeman
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Ebola: What Should We Do Now?
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“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”—a late 19th-century forgery about a supposed global Jewish conspiracy, produced by members of the czar’s secret police and exposed as a fiction by the Times of London as early as 1921—become one of Hitler’s favorite texts. In Nazi Germany, it became, as the historian Norman Cohn put it, a “warrant for genocide.” The “Protocols” were introduced into the Middle East in Arabic translation in the 1930s by, among others, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, who spent World War II in Berlin, producing Arabic broadcasts for the Nazis.
“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” continues to be reprinted and widely read. In 2002, a 41-part dramatic series called “Horseman Without a Horse,” which the Anti-Defamation League reported “portrays the ‘Protocols’ as historical fact,” was shown on Egyptian television during Ramadan. In 2003, a similar series called “Diaspora” was shown on a Lebanon-based satellite television network owned by the terrorist organization Hezbollah, also according to the Anti-Defamation League. The 1988 charter of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas warns that the Zionists’ “plan is embodied in the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.”
Tragically, Europe, having largely cured itself of anti-Semitism, now finds it returning, carried by the very cultures that Europe itself infected with the virus. Fortunately, there are young Muslims, some of them ex-radicals, who are working for a more tolerant Islam, and in organizations such as the Coexist Foundation and New York University’s Of Many Institute, you find Jews and Muslims fighting anti-Semitism and Islamophobia together.
The real tragedy would be if the West continued to see anti-Semitism as a strictly Jewish problem. It isn’t. Jews die from it, but it isn’t about Jews.
The blood libel was the creation of Christians who believed in the Eucharist and feared that the power of the sacraments and the Church were slipping away. The “Protocols” were a fabrication of Russian czarists, dreaming of empire and glory while fearing that their world was about to be shattered by revolution. To understand hate, it is crucial to examine the hater, not the hated.
Judeophobia in the Middle Ages led Christians to defeat in the Crusades. Anti-Semitism led Germany to self-destruction and moral shame. Today, anti-Semitism is a key ingredient in the poisonous mix of ideas that has turned so much of the Middle East into a cruel state of nature, a war of “every man against every man,” as Thomas Hobbes memorably described it. Hate harms the hated, but it destroys the hater.
A passage in Deuteronomy has momentous modern-day implications. Moses, nearing the end of his life, is addressing the next generation of Israelites, the people who will cross the Jordan River and enter the Promised Land. “Do not hate an Egyptian,” he tells them, “for you were a stranger in his land.”
This is one of the most counterintuitive verses in the Bible. The Egyptians had enslaved the Israelites and planned a slow genocide against them. Was this not a reason to hate them?
But Moses’ words are among history’s wisest political insights. If the Israelites had continued to hate their erstwhile persecutors, Moses might have succeeded in leading them out of Egypt, but he would have failed in taking Egypt out of them. The Israelites would still have been slaves: to their memories and resentments, their sense of humiliation—slaves, in short, to the past. To be free, you have to let go of hate. You have to stop seeing yourself as a victim—or else you will succeed only in making more victims.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are religions of love, not of hate. We must listen and heed the survivor in Auschwitz this week when he said, “I don’t want to be here again”—for that is the end of the road that begins in hate. All of us—Jews, Christians and Muslims, brothers and sisters in Abraham’s family—must choose another way.
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I don't know if Israel is safer than Europe for Jews. In some ways I feel Jews should stand their ground where they are but that could be easy for me to say sitting here in NJ.
OTOH I sense the sheep moving to Israel for a real slaughter aka Iran and the rest of the Jew hating Muslim world.
http://news.yahoo.com/netanyahu-urges-jews-move-israel-copenhagen-attacks-111012753.html
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I don't know if Israel is safer than Europe for Jews. In some ways I feel Jews should stand their ground where they are but that could be easy for me to say sitting here in NJ.
OTOH I sense the sheep moving to Israel for a real slaughter aka Iran and the rest of the Jew hating Muslim world.
http://news.yahoo.com/netanyahu-urges-jews-move-israel-copenhagen-attacks-111012753.html
At least in Israel you can own a gun. Israel intends to fight. Better than hiding in the shadows of euro-stan.
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Btw, getting out of NJ is probably a good idea too.
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By
Jason Chow
Feb. 16, 2015 8:50 a.m. ET
23 COMMENTS
PARIS—France’s top leaders rushed Monday to reassure the country’s Jews about their safety after a Jewish graveyard in eastern France was desecrated and a gunman in Copenhagen targeted a synagogue, a month after deadly attacks in Paris.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls called for France to unite against “Islamo-fascism,” and reaffirmed his call for French Jews to stay in France, even amid encouragement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for European Jews to move to Israel. ("Islamo Fascism"? Nice to see the term I repeated have suggested here over the years to be coming into accepted usage.)
“France is injured as you are and France doesn't want you to leave,” Mr. Valls told French radio, in what he described as a message to French Jews. “France once again expresses its love for you, its support and solidarity.”
France is grappling with a growing sense of insecurity among its Jewish community, who feel threatened by a rise of anti-Semitic attacks.
The graveyard vandalism left around 300 out of 400 tombstones knocked down and spray-painted in Sarre-Union, a town near the French-German border. The incident came just over a month after a gunman killed four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris, part of a three-day spree of violence that left 17 people dead. Over the weekend, Jewish fears were further fanned when a lone gunman in Copenhagen killed a 37 year-old Jewish man who was guarding the door of a bat mitzvah ceremony in a parish hall.
Danish police said they shot and killed the gunman, a day after he also attacked a seminar on free speech that featured a Swedish cartoonist who has lampooned Islam.
‘France is injured as you are and France doesn't want you to leave.’
—French Prime Minister Manuel Valls
Since the January attacks, France has tightened security at Jewish institutions, posting police and soldiers outside Jewish schools, community centers and places of worship. The community, which is already on edge, was further rattled after a man wielding a knife attacked soldiers guarding a Jewish center in the southern French city of Nice earlier this month.
France has the world’s third-largest Jewish population after Israel and the U.S., according to most estimates, but many French Jews have been moving to Israel, citing fears about their security at home.
France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls--pictured here, second from right, with Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders from the Paris suburb of Evry earlier this month--has vowed to ensure the protection of the country’s Jews after the desecration of a Jewish cemetery at the weekend. ENLARGE
France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls--pictured here, second from right, with Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders from the Paris suburb of Evry earlier this month--has vowed to ensure the protection of the country’s Jews after the desecration of a Jewish cemetery at the weekend. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Anti-Semitic attacks have been on the rise in France. In 2013, the latest year for which data have been compiled, there were 423 reported anti-Semitic incidents in France, compared with 82 in 1999, according to the Jewish Community Security Service, a body that compiles data based on police reports.
Around 6,900 French Jews moved to Israel in 2014, up from 3,300, according to the Jewish Agency for Israel, an Israeli organization that oversees the immigration process. The number is expected to grow to 10,000 in 2015, the agency said in January after the Paris attacks.
President François Hollande also sought to stem the tide. “I won’t allow words spoken in Israel that allow people to think that Jews don’t have their place in Europe and, in particular, in France,” he said earlier Monday. Mr. Hollande is scheduled to visit the cemetery on Tuesday.
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Somehow, were I a Jew in France, the reassurances from the French government wouldn't be very reassuring.
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This would be an example of why:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/191381#.VOILhS5UWAh
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It really is 1930's Nazism all over again. "Never again". But it IS happening again.
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Indeed.
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Indeed.
Good thing Obama wore a kippa at AIPAC! Right Rachel?
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http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/93625/the-jewish-vote?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=f34ca40066-Monday_February_16_20152_16_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-f34ca40066-207194629
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/03/01/one-state-majority-rules-us-the-muslims-watch-this-video-to-see-just-how-anti-israel-college-campuses-have-gotten/
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second post
http://www.algemeiner.com/2015/02/25/2015s-first-resolution-calling-for-more-investment-in-israel-passed-by-university-of-georgia-students/
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Just a matter of time before we see violence on college grounds.
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https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-jews-who-fought-back-6bc5cf186f58
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Remember this post:
http://pamelageller.com/2015/03/saturday-night-cinema-night-will-fall.html/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOYY_UPBcFE
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http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2015/04/02/europe-has-a-problem-with-virulent-anti-semitism?src=usn_tw
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"Who are committing these acts? While some are nativists, neo-Nazis and skinheads, many others are religious extremists radicalized by those who distort Islam to fit their intolerant agendas. All are deeply hostile to pluralism and democratic liberties."
No rocket science here. Muslims around the world hate Jews. More Muslims in Europe. More Jew haters in Europe.
Lets see the last time I thought about it 1 + 1 = 2.
"radicalized by those who distort Islam." What is this BS? It IS right in the Koran to kill or convert infadels. This is not a distortion of Islam. It is Islam.
For God's sake. Stop the ridiculous dance around the truth. They want to 'f' kill us.
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I don't know which thread this should go under. Recognizing past discriminations is fine but I don't get apologizing for the discriminations done by others. In all my life I cannot recall any significant discrimination because I am Jewish. Not one time. Of course if this guy wants to pay me some reparations because of abuse of Jews by other people to other people I guess I could accept a check:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-quigley/a-christian-apology-to-je_b_7003756.html
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/09/08/meet-the-muslims-who-sacrificed-themselves-to-save-jews-and-fight-nazis-in-world-war-ii/
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I never thought I'd be complementing Larry King - frankly I'm shocked he agreed to have David on his show - but this is a good interview which gives you insight into David's background and his current campaign against Jew-hatred on college campuses.
www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/david-horowitz-on-larry-kings-politicking/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/04/29/a-german-woman-started-putting-yellow-stickers-on-israeli-students-visiting-auschwitz-at-first-they-didnt-get-what-she-was-trying-to-do-but-then-it-became-clear/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Firewire&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%204-30-15%20FINAL
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http://pamelageller.com/2015/05/german-party-lifts-requirement-for-muslim-students-to-visit-concentration-camps.html/
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http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/191087/ebb-tide-in-the-golden-country?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=ed57fac792-&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-ed57fac792-207194629
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The One Number That Shows Why Jews Really Vote Liberal
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On June 25, 2015
The debate over why Jews vote the way that they do is an old one, but it’s rarely backed by much data except the estimates of the Jewish vote from the last election.
There is, however, one piece of data [2] that currently predicts the Jewish vote. It’s religious attendance.
60 percent of Jews [3] that attend weekly religious services disapprove of Obama. Only 34 percent approve.
Among those who don’t attend religious services, approval of Obama stood at 58 percent to 38 percent.
There are really two Jewish votes; the religious Jewish vote and the secular Jewish vote.
Something similar happens when we break down Obama’s approval ratings [4] by church attendance. Among those who attend church weekly, Obama’s approval ratings hover between 39 percent and 46 percent. Among those who never attend church, between 53 to 57 percent approve of Obama.
These numbers come from a Gallup poll taken [2] this year that did what few polls of American Jews do in breaking down the seemingly monolithic vote to find some interesting things. The most interesting thing is that the Jewish vote is more demographically out of step with Americans than politically out of step.
When we break it down by behaviors and beliefs, the Jewish vote is not that different than the overall American vote. What is different is the balance of behaviors and beliefs in the Jewish community.
Only 11 percent of American Jews attend religious services weekly. Among Americans in general, it’s over 40 percent.
Recently I noted that American Jews had become a liberal outlier [5] globally as Jews in the UK, Canada, Israel and Australia were voting conservative. And Jewish communities in those countries also tend to be relatively more traditional and religious than in the United States.
UK Jews are more than [6] twice as likely to attend synagogue services weekly as American Jews.
63 percent of Israeli Jews “believe completely” that there is a G-d while only 34 percent of American Jews are certain that they believe in G-d, a universal spirit or something. 63 percent of Israeli Jews keep Kosher as do 52 percent of UK Jews and 22 percent of American Jews. Intermarriage is at 44 percent among American Jews, 26 percent among UK Jews and negligible among Israeli Jews.
Traditional religious values naturally align with conservative politics. And vice versa.
The political left with its messianic obsessions, environmental apocalypses and fanatical devotion to the cause occupies a space traditionally filled by religion.
When religion leaves, other things replace it instead. The Jewish left is the hole left by the absence of Judaism and any meaningful Jewish historical, national and cultural identity.
When asked what it means to be Jewish, 56 percent of American Jews mentioned social justice, 42 percent mentioned comedy and only 43 percent mentioned Israel. 28 percent mentioned being part of a Jewish community. Only 19 percent mentioned anything involving religion.
People with Jewish last names for whom being Jewish is leftist politics and a joke should not be expected to care about Israel. If being Jewish means nothing to them, why would the Jewish State?
However among UK Jews, 61 percent listed Jewish peoplehood, 40 percent mentioned social justice, 38 percent listed religion and 36 percent mentioned the Sabbath. Those are still poor numbers, but they explain why the UK Jewish community is politically healthier and saner than its American cousins.
The political results of that difference in worldviews expressed itself when 70 percent of UK Jews [7] voted conservative while 69 percent of Jews [8] voted for Obama. (Down to 61 percent Democrat [8] affiliation this year.)
It’s all a question of whether you think being Jewish means being part of a community, a nation and a religion… or laughing at Jon Stewart’s jokes.
Religion is a significant predictor of political orientation, but it’s not the only significant factor.
Obama’s biggest base of support is among Jewish college graduates. That’s where he enjoys a 54 to 43 percent approval rating. Among post-graduates that climbs to 62 percent against 36 percent.
That’s not too radically different from the overall Obama approval ratings for college graduates in the general population which has hovered between 53 percent and 46 percent [4].
Among Jews with only a high school diploma or less, 53 percent disapproved of Obama while only 39 percent approved. These numbers are far more negative on Obama than the national average, but those numbers are skewed by a disproportionate share of minority supporters in that category.
If Jews had the same percentage of college grads and post-grads as the rest of the country, the Jewish vote might be conservative. But while 29 percent of adults overall have a college degree and 10 percent have a post-graduate degree, 58 percent of Jews have a college degree and 28 percent have a post-graduate degree. The fundamental difference here isn’t so much political as demographic.
The problem with American Jews is an internal imbalance in which higher education has displaced traditional Jewish learning and the ideals of social justice have displaced Judaism. Jewish culture has been reduced to neurotic self-mockery and hipster knowingness.
This isn’t a purely Jewish problem. It’s a situation that exists among some non-Jewish elites whose Christianity doesn’t venture beyond social justice and whose identity is making fun of their own ‘whiteness’. It’s worse among Jews because a higher percentage of them live and think this way.
American Jews are more dysfunctional than Jews in the UK or Israel, because their leaders more enthusiastically adopted the worldview of the liberal Protestants they were trying to imitate.
The fight against slavery and then for civil rights that came to religiously define some liberal Protestant churches also became the closest thing to religion for liberal Jewish denominations. Abraham Joshua Heschel marching at Selma was a defining spiritual experience for them, incessantly referenced, but incapable of being repeated. It was a theology that depended on the vicarious experience of the otherness of others. Like their liberal Protestant cousins, a secular religious movement was desperately drawing on the religious tradition of another group of people while making oppression into their faith.
British Jews are rediscovering their religion and the focus on social justice is plummeting for those under 40. But British Jews never lost their sense of self to the same extent that American Jews did. That is why it will take more than the renewed threat to Israel to shift the American Jewish vote. Rising anti-Semitism on the left and the isolation of Jews in liberal spaces, on and off campus, will play its part as it has in Europe, but the European Jews have done a better job of holding on to what being Jewish means.
In both the UK and the US, the middle ground is vanishing with the secular social justice Jews leaving while the Orthodox population increases generationally. A third of Jewish children in the UK are being raised in Orthodox homes. New York City will have an Orthodox majority before too long.
An emerging Jewish conservative majority among American Jews will badly traumatize and infuriate a Jewish liberal consensus that views leftist politics as identity and religion. The fallout is already beginning and it will only get uglier. American Jewish leaders who want a united Jewish community will have to move to the middle. They will have to recognize that controversies such as the protests against UJA-Federation funding of anti-Israel groups [9] are a small taste of much larger things to come.
Jews around the world are living and voting conservative. American Jews may lose Woody Allen and Jon Stewart, but they will gain healthier communities and families. There will be fewer college graduates, but there will also be fewer screaming BDS activists smashing Jewish store windows. And American Jews will finally become part of the circle of Jewish communities around the world and in the Jewish State.
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http://freebeacon.com/issues/poll-85-of-greeks-believe-the-jews-have-too-much-power-over-global-finance/
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Objectivist,
Thanks for that post by Daniel Greenfield. I like the correlation to religious attendance and Jewish liberalism.
Yet I don't know that this correlation totally explains the (IMHO crazy) fervor liberal Jews elevate the Democrat party agenda to the 10 Commandments, and perhaps Mr. Greenfield would agree with me that that is only part of the equation.
Jews were Democrats from day one in this country even when they were attending synagogue at higher rates. And prior to that they were disproportionately socialists in Europe were they migrated from.
I would also add my theory about the narcissism implicit among liberal Jews who view themselves as superior to others precisely because they hold their view of social justice as a great virtue. They are educated so they believe they are too smart for ancient religious theories and they are smart enough to *see past* ancient cultures. This use of the term 'tribalism' to describe all differences amongst peoples is an example. The concepts of country, of ethnicity, of nationalism, religion, social or economic class is all just a bunch of medieval nonsense that evolved before science showed we are nothing more than specks in a vast universe. They see beyond this. It is science that should determine our existence. Science above all that should determine rules, regulations, discourse, and social justice.
Liberal Jews are therefore better than those who 'cling' to such ancient concepts. They are more virtuous than others who fail to feel the pain of all the oppressed of the world. People who are not equally virtuous by their definition are just a bunch of primitive and ignorant people.
"People with Jewish last names for whom being Jewish is leftist politics and a joke"
Yes, The Democrat party is their new religion. It is ironic they cannot see they are even more intolerant, tyrannical, and enslaving by forcing everyone to agree with their view of the world. Those that don't like the world and their lives dominated by central socialist think tanks, like the Republican party, are the new Nazis.
"When religion leaves, other things replace it instead. The Jewish left is the hole left by the absence of Judaism and any meaningful Jewish historical, national and cultural identity."
Yes. And I don't think they even identify as Americans anymore. America is now a racist, too white, too large a gap between the rich and poor, too imperialistic.
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Thus - the reason that American Jews voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama in the last two elections - despite the damage he is clearly inflicting on the country. They share his communist view of America as a racist, bigoted, imperialist nation which needs to be cut down to size.
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http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/07/anti-semitism-france-hostage-hyper-cacher-kosher-market
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http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/07/anti-semitism-france-hostage-hyper-cacher-kosher-market
If you have to ask if it is time to leave, it is time to leave.
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http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/192492/john-kerry-if-iran-deal-crumbles-blame-israel?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=post&utm_content=John+Kerry%3A+If+Iran+Deal+Crumbles%2C+Blame+Israel&utm_campaign=july2015
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http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/192492/john-kerry-if-iran-deal-crumbles-blame-israel?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=post&utm_content=John+Kerry%3A+If+Iran+Deal+Crumbles%2C+Blame+Israel&utm_campaign=july2015
I understand that Obama, Kerry and Iran are working on a plan to end the hatred of Israel. Something about a final solution...
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EXACTAMUNDO, GM - I'm convinced that Obama views Israel as THE problem in the Middle East, and would not shed a tear if it were nuked off the face of the earth by Iran or anyone else.
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PARIS—France’s National Front said Wednesday that 94% of party members wanted honorary chairman Jean-Marie Le Pen out of the party he helped found over four decades ago.
The French far-right party released the results of a partywide vote conducted earlier this month, weeks after Mr. Le Pen reiterated comments he made 25 years ago belittling the Holocaust. Of the total 51,552 party members, 28,664 participated in the vote, a spokesman said.
The vote has no legal value, as a French court recently ruled that the tally violated the party’s internal rules. Still, it could undermine Mr. Le Pen’s efforts to cling on to the party he put on the country’s political map. The release of the vote’s results, despite the court’s ruling, could also exacerbate tensions between Mr. Le Pen and his daughter, party leader Marine Le Pen, with whom he has been locked in a fierce battle for months over the future of the party.
“This massive vote shows the high level of confidence party members have for the National Front leadership,” the party spokesman said.
“I ask the National Front leaders to find the way back to reason and unity before it’s too late,” Mr. Le Pen said Wednesday.
Two months ago, a special committee of party members led by Ms. Le Pen proposed a vote to strip her father of his honorary chairman title, after he described gas chambers as a mere “detail” of World War II history in a media interview. Party members were invited to vote electronically by July 10.
But two days before the end of the vote, a French court suspended it, following a complaint filed by Mr. Le Pen. On Tuesday, an appeals court in Versailles, a suburb outside Paris, upheld the previous ruling and ordered the far-right party to pay Mr. Le Pen’s costs.
Related
Le Pen Vote Violates National-Front Rules, Says Court
French Court Rules National Front Can’t Strip Jean-Marie Le Pen of Honorary Title
France’s National Front Suspends Jean-Marie Le Pen
The National Front said it was “very surprised” by the court’s decision, which will allow Mr. Le Pen to keep a position that he “no longer deserves given his unspeakable behavior,” and that it would nevertheless release the vote’s results on Wednesday.
Write to Noemie Bisserbe at noemie.bisserbe@wsj.com
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http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2015/08/01/obama-calls-out-his-left-wing-troops-on-behalf-of-the-iran-deal/#undefined
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/10/06/howard-stern-loses-it-over-pink-floyd-frontmans-open-letter-scolding-bon-jovi-for-performing-in-israel/
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Berkeley's Hatem Bazian: No Sharing the Temple Mount with Jews
by Cinnamon Stillwell • Nov 3, 2015
Cross-posted from Campus Watch
http://www.meforum.org/blog/2015/11/bazian-jews-on-temple-mount
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Rabbi Reuven Israel Kott was a Torah prodigy whose cleverness and chutzpah saved thousands of Jews from annihilation by the Nazis.
Born in a Polish shtetl in 1897, Reuven was one of fifteen children. His family were Hasidic followers of the Ger Rebbe.
Reuven's exceptional intellect was apparent at a young age. He was a gifted scholar of Talmud and Jewish scripture, so precocious that he was given rabbinic ordination when only 17 years old.
The Rebbe took a special liking to Reuven, and every Friday night Reuven sat next to the great man at his festive Sabbath gathering. Small in size - he stood only 5’1” - Reuven was known for his big brain, and big heart.
Reuven was selected by his community to represent them as the Jewish voice on the local provincial council. When the Polish president died in the 1920’s, young Reuven stood at the graveside with other clergy and delivered a eulogy on behalf of the Jews of Poland.
Although life seemed fairly good for Polish Jews at the time, the Ger Rebbe sensed that big trouble was coming. He urged his followers to get out of Poland and move to Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), at that time British Mandate Palestine.
As the Rebbe’s right-hand man, Rabbi Reuven Kott threw himself into the mission of helping Jews leave Poland and return to their ancestral homeland.
The British had a quota system restricting the number of Jewish families they let in. Reuven took advantage of a bureaucratic loophole defining “family” as two parents and an undetermined number of offspring.
Reuven collected money and bribed Polish authorities to get blank birth certificates. He would then “create” new families, matching people up, changing names and identities as needed. Every “family" had at least a dozen children.
Reuven told those he helped that they must stick with their fake identity. Most people complied, but a few didn’t and were caught. Under threat of being sent back to Poland, somebody gave Reuven’s name to the authorities.
Reuven and his brother were on a train in Warsaw when three plain-clothes officers approached. After verifying his identity, they arrested Reuven for bribery and forgery and threw him in jail.
As a pious Jew, Reuven couldn’t eat the non-kosher jail food, so every day his daughter brought him a kosher meal - a two hour journey each way.
After several long months, his brother finally got word that there was going to be a hearing in the case. He went to visit Reuven in jail, told him the news and asked which lawyer he wanted to hire.
Reuven scribbled something on a scrap of paper, folded it up and slipped it through the bars of his cell.
Outside the jail, Reuven’s brother unfolded the note. He was shocked to read the contents: “Hire me the most anti-Semitic lawyer in Warsaw!"
Reuven's family was baffled. With so many top-notch Jewish lawyers, why would he want an anti-Semite? Had his incarceration led to a mental breakdown?
Reuven's brother assured them that he was of sound mind, and he went to Warsaw and found an attorney notorious for his fierce hatred of Jews.
The day of the hearing arrived, and the courthouse was packed with hundreds of Hasids from Reuven’s community. Reuven was allowed only three minutes with his lawyer, and then the hearing began.
To everybody’s shock, Reuven’s lawyer stood up, made a brilliant argument, and got the case dismissed.
Back home in the shtetl, everybody wanted to know what Reuven had said to his lawyer in those three minutes. Reuven said his Talmud study had taught him that in a business deal, if you get three “Yes” answers, the deal will close.
He asked his lawyer three questions:
- You hate us Jews, don’t you?
- Do you want to see me rot and die in jail?
- Would you like all of us Jews gone from Poland?
The lawyer answered yes to all three questions. Reuven immediately shot back, “What good would it do if one measly Jew rots in jail? If you set me free, I can get all the Jews out of Poland!”
Reuven got what he wanted by blinding the lawyer with his own hate. He continued his work “creating” large families and helping them move to Palestine. The Jew-hating attorney even helped him procure more blank birth certificates.
People often asked Reuven when he would go to Eretz Yisrael. He said, “I’m like the captain of a sinking ship. It is my responsibility to get all the passengers out before I get in the lifeboat.”
Over the course of 20 years, Reuven helped tens of thousands of Jews escape Poland. Today, almost half a million descendants of those Polish Jews owe their lives to Rabbi Reuven Israel Kott.
Unfortunately, Reuven himself never made it to Israel. He was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942.
For proving that one small man in three short minutes can accomplish miracles beyond measure, we honor Rabbi Reuven Israel Kott as this week’s Thursday Hero at Accidental Talmudist.
With thanks to Reuven’s granddaughter, Ziporah Bank.
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http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1065461
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http://www.thetower.org/article/in-the-safe-spaces-on-campus-no-jews-allowed/
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http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/07/22/france-jewish-shops-riot_n_5608612.html
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I have previously had harsh criticism of Ted Nugent for calling Baraq a "mongrel", now this.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/02/09/ted-nugent-blasted-by-jewish-groups-and-gun-owners-over-facebook-post-on-jews-and-gun-control/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%202-9-16%20FINAL&utm_term=Firewire
Ted can be good fun sometimes, but not someone I think we should include in "our side".
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http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/BDS-activist-to-represent-Holocaust-survivors-at-Austrian-state-event-445528
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I have previously had harsh criticism of Ted Nugent for calling Baraq a "mongrel", now this.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/02/09/ted-nugent-blasted-by-jewish-groups-and-gun-owners-over-facebook-post-on-jews-and-gun-control/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%202-9-16%20FINAL&utm_term=Firewire
Ted can be good fun sometimes, but not someone I think we should include in "our side".
Nugent is a dick. Fcuk him.
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The old tropes are coming to life again:
http://politicalvelcraft.org/2013/08/28/hungary-orders-rothschilds-imf-to-vacate-the-country-now-issuing-debt-free-money/
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I wondr how the college would have reacted if the speaker was Jewish and the topic was black conspiracy theories:
http://nypost.com/2016/03/02/oberlin-college-president-stands-by-anti-semitic-professor/
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"I wonder how the college would have reacted if the speaker was Jewish and the topic was black conspiracy theories"
Exactly so.
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Evidently George Soros and the heir to the Hobby Lobby fortune are behind this propaganda campaign. I can't imagine that many U.S. Christians believe this garbage. Today was literally the first I'd ever heard of this "replacement theology" crap. How ignorant/stupid and/or evil does one have to be to be taken in by this blatant distortion of Scripture? Sounds like a new variation on "Liberation Theology" (Jeremiah Wright's twisted brand of Christianity.)
The Subversion of American Evangelicals
March 9, 2016 - Caroline Glick - frontpagemag.com
Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.
Monday the Bethlehem Bible College, an Evangelical Christian college in Jesus’s hometown, opened its fourth biennial Christ at the Checkpoint conference. The conference, which is directed specifically toward US Evangelicals, will run through the week.
Today, Evangelical communities in the US number anywhere between 60 and 150 million people, depending on who is counting. They form the backbone of American support for the Jewish state. It is the support of the Evangelical community, rather than the Jewish community in the US that ensures that come hell or high water, no matter how Israel is demonized in the media and in academia, the majority of Americans continue to support Israel.
But will this support last? One of the more surprising aspects of the 2016 elections is Evangelical support for businessman Donald Trump. Trump in many ways personifies everything that people who take the Bible seriously are supposed to oppose. He owns casinos. He curses and uses profanity in his public appearances. He has donated to Planned Parenthood and forcefully supported abortions on demand.
Trump has also insisted repeatedly that he will be neutral toward Israel.
Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of Evangelical support for Trump is that he takes these positions as he runs against primary opponents who all wear their faith on their sleeves. All of his opponents have records of standing with the Evangelicals on social and other salient issues – including support for Israel.
What are we to make of this seemingly inexplicable phenomenon? At least as far as Israel is concerned, the readiness of Evangelicals to support the most anti-Israel candidate running for the Republican presidential nomination is no surprise.
To understand why this is the case, the Christ at the Checkpoint conference taking place this week in Bethlehem is a good place to look.
According to its website, the mission of the biennial conference “is to challenge Evangelicals to take responsibility to help resolve the conflicts in Israel/ Palestine by engaging with the teaching of Jesus on the Kingdom of God.”
The problem begins with the organizers’ interpretation of those teachings. College officials, among them keynote speakers at the conference, embrace and teach replacement theology. That theology maintains that God’s covenant with the Jews ended with Christianity.
In recent years, replacement theology has extended its biblical revisionism from Jews as people reviled for their rejection of Jesus and their supersession by Christians to Israel. The Jewish state is reviled as a religiously prohibited entity whose very existence is a sin against God.
According to current replacement theology, Jesus was not a Jew. He was a Palestinian. The Jews are not a people. They have no rights to the land of Israel.
Israel, it is asserted, has no historical or theological right to exist. Rather, according to the rewritten scriptures, the Palestinians are the chosen people.
Jews are colonialist invaders who have taken the land of Israel away from their rightful, biblically sanctioned owners.
This basic view is encapsulated in the very name “Christ at the Checkpoint.”
Today a Jewish Jesus would be prohibited from entering Bethlehem. Jews are barred from entering Palestinian population centers because Palestinians have a habit of murdering them. Indeed, just last week two IDF soldiers who accidentally entered a Palestinian village north of Jerusalem escaped a lynch mob by the skin of their teeth.
On the other hand, a Palestinian Jesus can be in Bethlehem. But to leave he has to go through an Israeli checkpoint (to ensure that he isn’t a terrorist, to be sure, but whatever).
So the image evoked by the name “Christ at the Checkpoint” ignores the reality of Palestinian terrorism.
And it leaves us with an image of the repression of a Palestinian Jesus at the hands of the Jews.
The replacement theology at the heart of the conference was made explicit by Rev. Jack Sara, president of the Bethlehem Bible Conference, at the 2012 conference. In his speech Sara edited Chapter 37 of the book of Ezekiel to transform the dry bones prophecy. That prophecy, of course, is one of the most Zionist passages in the Bible. God speaks to Ezekiel and tells him that the people of Israel will be reborn. They will be gathered from the four corners of the earth, return to Israel and restore the Davidic kingdom.
Yet in Sara’s revised version, the people of Israel, the descendants of Jacob, are replaced by the Palestinians.
Sara preached, “The hand of the Lord was on me and He brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and sent me in the middle of the West Bank – Bethlehem, Jenin and Salvit and Nablus and Ramallah.
It was full of bones.... He asked me, ‘Son of Man, can these bones live? Can the Palestinian people live?’ Then He said to me ‘prophesy to these bones and same to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.’” Sara then said, “You see, the Palestinian people were and are a lot like this valley of dry bones that is in need of the Church to come and prophesy life on them.”
Last March the Bethlehem Bible College posted a promotional video ahead of a summer Christ at the Checkpoint conference directed toward young adults.
As Tricia Miller, who works as a senior research analyst for CAMERA noted, Christ at the Checkpoint director Munther Issac billed the conference as a means to empower Palestinian Christians.
The conference website said that the conference’s aim was “to motivate Palestinian Christian youth to take an active role as followers of Christ in spreading justice and peace, through discussing the challenges of our societies from a biblical perspective.”
Yet, as Miller noted in an article in The Times of Israel, the promotional video for the conference made clear that the conference had no intention of “spreading justice and peace.”
The video interlaced footage of Palestinians walking in heavy traffic and waiting to cross into sovereign Israel with footage from Islamic State (ISIS) videos showing hostages about to be beheaded and burned alive. Israeli flags flapping in the wind were juxtaposed with the ISIS flag.
And then, apropos of nothing, the video showed the cellular structure of the H1N1 swine flu virus.
The implied message was clear. Just as Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as viruses, so the Christ at the Checkpoint video depicted Israel as the moral equivalent of ISIS and the medical equivalent of swine flu.
In 2014, David Brog published in article in Middle East Quarterly detailing the key role the Bethlehem Bible College plays in a wider campaign directed toward American Evangelicals whose goal is to undermine and eventually end their support for Israel.
Key figures in this undertaking bring American church leaders and academics to Bethlehem and feed them a diet of anti-Israel propaganda and outright lies masquerading as biblical teaching and objective assessments of reality. These American Christian leaders have taken up the cause of ending support for Israel among Evangelicals upon their return home.
Key financiers, like Mart Green, the heir of the Hobby Lobby fortune and the chairman of the board of trustees of Oral Roberts University, and financier George Soros have been instrumental in disseminating these positions to all levels of the Evangelical community in the US.
In September 2014, Senator Ted Cruz spoke before Middle Eastern Christians, who convened in Washington ostensibly to discuss the genocide of Christians in the Middle East. Cruz was booed off the stage after telling the audience, “Today Christians have no greater ally than the Jewish state.”
Cruz added, “The very same people who persecute and murder Christians right now, who crucify Christians, who behead children, are the very same people who target and murder Jews for the very same reason.”
Cruz’s statement marked the first time a major US political leader stood up to the Jew hatred of Middle Eastern Christians and pointed out its irrationality and self-defeating core.
It could have been a seminal moment in the discourse on Islamic persecution of Christians. But rather than be embraced for his willingness to speak the truth to those who reject it even in the face of genocide, Cruz was assaulted as undiplomatic by Washington Post writer Jennifer Rubin. His message was largely ignored outside of policy circles.
To be sure, the largest Evangelical communities remain solidly supportive of Israel, and their size dwarfs that of the rising forces of replacement theology and its concomitant hatred of Israel. Yet, as Brog noted, the long-term trends are discouraging.
Moreover, the readiness of Evangelical voters to support the only Republican candidate who says he will be neutral in his handling of the Palestinian conflict with Israel indicates that anti-Israel Christians may already be having a profound impact on their communities.
This trend represents a strategic threat to US-Israel relations. Those who wish to maintain those relations in the long term must fight this trend head on, beginning with this week’s Christ at the Checkpoint conference.
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Father of the left's beloved royal family. His hatred of Jews.. This is a section out of Wikipeiai:
******According to Harvey Klemmer, who served as one of Kennedy's embassy aides, Kennedy habitually referred to Jews as "kikes or sheenies". Kennedy allegedly told Klemmer that "[some] individual Jews are all right, Harvey, but as a race they stink. They spoil everything they touch."[40] When Klemmer returned from a trip to Germany and reported the pattern of vandalism and assaults on Jews by Nazis, Kennedy responded, "Well, they brought it on themselves."[44]
On June 13, 1938, Kennedy met with Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador to the United Kingdom, in London, who claimed upon his return to Berlin that Kennedy had told him that "it was not so much the fact that we want to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to us, but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied this purpose. [Kennedy] himself fully understood our Jewish policy."[45] Kennedy's main concern with such violent acts against German Jews as Kristallnacht was that they generated bad publicity in the West for the Nazi regime, a concern that he communicated in a letter to Charles Lindbergh.[46]
Kennedy had a close friendship with Viscountess Nancy Witcher Langhorne, wife of Viscount Waldorf Astor of the Astor family. The correspondence between them is reportedly replete with anti-Semitic statements.[47] According to Edward Renehan:
As fiercely anti-Communist as they were anti-Semitic, Kennedy and Astor looked upon Adolf Hitler as a welcome solution to both of these "world problems" (Nancy's phrase)..... Kennedy replied that he expected the "Jew media" in the United States to become a problem, that "Jewish pundits in New York and Los Angeles" were already making noises contrived to "set a match to the fuse of the world".[48]
By August 1940, Kennedy worried that a third term as the President for Roosevelt would mean war. As Leamer reports, "Joe believed that Roosevelt, Churchill, the Jews, and their allies would manipulate America into approaching Armageddon."[49] Nevertheless, Kennedy supported Roosevelt's third term in return for Roosevelt's promise to support Joseph Kennedy, Jr., in a run for Governor of Massachusetts in 1942.[50] However, even during the darkest months of World War II, Kennedy remained "more wary of" prominent American Jews, such as Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, than he was of Hitler.[51]
Kennedy told the reporter Joe Dinneen:
It is true that I have a low opinion of some Jews in public office and in private life. That does not mean that I..... believe they should be wiped off the face of the Earth..... Jews who take an unfair advantage of the fact that theirs is a persecuted race do not help much..... Publicizing unjust attacks upon the Jews may help to cure the injustice, but continually publicizing the whole problem only serves to keep it alive in the public mind.******
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Who are the American Jews? Good article by Charles.
May be a reason for Jews identifying with the Democrat party as their new religion though I don't think this fully explains it:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-holocaust-and-the-jewish-identity/2016/03/10/0cfe842c-e702-11e5-b0fd-073d5930a7b7_story.html
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/03/29/famous-comedian-and-activist-says-she-was-severely-shaken-after-realizing-her-comrades-were-naked-bigots/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%203-29-16%20FINAL&utm_term=Firewire
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Doesn't mean she ain't still a die hard Democrat.
She should vote for Cruz if she is sincere about it.
She should also recognize that Jews are on very tenuous ground with American Blacks including Obama. Interesting that the vast majority of Blacks are going for Hillary and not the Jew.
Get it.
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http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2510995
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A question I have pondered here for years. I still would add the psychiatric angle involving and element of narcissism. Whether that can be linked to the concept of "we are the chosen people" or not I don't know:
""Liberalism has become more than a political outlook. It has for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right...For many, moving to the right is invested with much the same horror their forefathers felt about conversion to Christianity."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307456250/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0307456250&linkCode=as2&tag=thefede01-20&linkId=XNKRIA76KJUSBZAQ
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http://www.jpost.com/printarticle.aspx?id=452551
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434730/leftist-anti-semitism
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sppNXQ6KR0M
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http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/05/23/horowitz-portland-state-university-students-aid-hamas.html
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All we hear is Islamophobia. We never hear how the Muslims are spreading all over the world bringing their hate with them:
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/05/31/french-jews-flee-paris-suburbs-rising-anti-semitism/
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https://mic.com/articles/144228/echoes-exposed-the-secret-symbol-neo-nazis-use-to-target-jews-online
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http://thefederalist.com/2016/08/12/anti-semitism-at-the-2016-olympics-is-completely-out-of-control/
Anyone shocked?
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http://observer.com/2016/08/not-shocking-george-soros-funds-progressive-war-on-israel/
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https://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/saudi-arabia-warming-jews
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second post of day
http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/211561/a-george-soros-funded-palestinian-media-outlet-runs-an-anti-semitic-article-series?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=post&utm_content=A+George+Soros-Funded+Palestinian+Media+Outlet+Runs+an+Anti-Semitic+Article+Series&utm_campaign=august2016
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Soros is I am afraid the perfect stereotype of the dastardly Jewish person behind the scenes that is manipulative, dishonest, and profiting by betting against nations.
Of course I would not condemn *Jews* for such but I cannot help but look at this guy and think, this is exactly the kind of behavior that led to Jews being the scapegoats of history.
The rich Jew behind the scenes manipulating politics for profit and not for the interests of the people who live in countries that are affected.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/29/leaked-soros-document-calls-for-regulating-internet-to-favor-open-society-supporters/
Just like man Italians are disgusted by those of them who in the Mafia, just like some Muslims who are ashamed of the terrorists among their ranks, I am ashamed of Soros.
Just speaking how I feel.
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I think of people like that [Soros in this case] as Orthodox Leftist. That is the religion. Anything else like Jewish heritage or beliefs is secondary. Same goes for Catholic leftists and others. Catholics vote for pro-choice candidates at the same rate as the rest of the population.
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Muslim Terrorists and Jewish Anti-Semites Against Trump
Moderate Saudi businessmen who fund terror warn of Trump’s "extremism."
September 2, 2016
Daniel Greenfield
“I was often the ‘designated yeller.’”
That’s how Hillary Clinton described her relationship with the Israeli prime minister. Yelling and cursing was her particular specialty.
One marathon Hillary yelling session allegedly lasted 45 minutes. Afterward the Israeli ambassador said that relations between the United States and Israel had reached their lowest point.
Her favorite name for Netanyahu was, “F____ Bibi.”
But it wasn’t just about her hatred of any particular Israeli leader. The same year that Hillary was yelling herself hoarse at a man who had fought terrorists on the battlefield, she addressed the American Task Force on Palestine, a leading terror lobby, and blasted Israel and praised Islamic terrorists.
Hillary told the terror lobby, “I may have been the first person ever associated with an American administration to call for a Palestinian state.” She praised Mahmoud Abbas, the PA terror dictator who had boasted, “There is no difference between our policies and those of Hamas.”
She celebrated Naomi Shihab Nye who had written of the Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli cities, “Oppression makes people do desperate things.” Echoing her, Hillary denounced the “indignity of occupation”. A few years later she accused Israelis of a lack of “empathy” in understanding “the pain of an oppressed people.”
Perhaps they were too busy mourning their dead to emphasize with the terrorists who were killing them.
But fighting for her political life, Hillary and Huma dug through her closet and threw on a blue and white pantsuit. Her campaign placed an editorial in the Forward headlined, “How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu.”
Probably by yelling “F___ Bibi” at him for another 45 minutes.
When Hillary Clinton promised to reaffirm her “Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu” it was in the pages of The Forward. And, striving to sell a rotten radical to skeptical Jews, the left-wing paper has decided to run a piece claiming that “Trump Would Be Israel’s Worst Nightmare”. As if anyone in Israel goes to bed dreaming of eight years of Hillary.
The Forward shares Hillary’s view of Netanyahu. And it violently loathes Israel.
Its quick costume change from denouncing anything and everything about the Jewish State to a sudden bout of concern for Israel is as unconvincing as Hillary Clinton’s southern accent.
Jay Michaelson, the author of the editorial warning us how bad Trump would be for Israel, followed that up with another piece accusing Israel of being an apartheid state. During Passover, Michaelson’s seething hatred for the Jewish State had pushed him to declare, “I’m Seeking Freedom From the Organized Jewish Community This Passover.”
Should American Jews take their cues on how dangerous Trump would be for Israel from a guy who hates Israel? Who hates Israel so much that he can’t even stand the Jewish community?
The Forward, like Hillary, hates Israel. Its pages are dedicated to rationalizing, justifying and defending the Muslim hatred of Israel and Jews. There’s Lisa Goldman explaining that the Muslim anti-Semitism displayed at the Rio Olympics was really a “Jewish persecution complex” that lacked “nuance.” It’s not an outlier. The Forward’s view of Israel is as hostile and negative as any white supremacist website.
Or Hillary Clinton’s inbox where the likes of Max Blumenthal regularly made appearances.
Do the Forward or Hillary Clinton actually care about Israel? All they’re trying to do is keep the American Jews who don’t believe that Israel is an apartheid state or that Muslim anti-Semitism is the fault of the Jews on the Democratic reservation by scaring them with bedtime stories about Trump.
Michaelson warns us that Trump would destabilize the Middle East and endanger Israel. It’s hard to imagine how he could do so more than Hillary’s Arab Spring which turned Egypt over to the Muslim Brotherhood, sowed terrorist dragon’s teeth across the region, including an ISIS affiliate in the Sinai.
Trump would destroy American credibility, he tells us. What credibility? Nobody thinks we have any credibility now. Not on Syria, Iran, Libya, China, Russia or anything else. And much of that took place under Hillary Clinton.
Then we are told that Trump is an “extremist” because “moderate Saudi businessmen” don’t like him.
Whom should American Jews better take their guidance from than “moderate Saudi businessmen”? Perhaps Jay Michaelson, Hillary Clinton and the Forward. It’s hard to tell who in that gruesome bunch hates Israel more.
The “moderate” Saudi businessman whom Michaelson quotes is Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Alaweed had his post 9/11 donation thrown back in his face after blaming America for the attack. And Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, claimed that he was an Al Qaeda supporter.
He had also donated $27 million to terrorism against Israel at a telethon whose host declared on television, “Do not have any mercy, neither compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. Allah made them yours. Why don't you enslave their women? Why don't you wage jihad? Why don't you pillage them?”
The Forward and Jay Michaelson would like American Jews to heed this warning about Trump’s extremism from a “moderate Saudi” who donated to the mass murder and rape of Jews.
Also, Jay Michaelson and the Forward warn American Jews not to vote for Trump because he “famously promised to “bomb the s___ out of ISIS.” This, according to Jay, ”would entail the murder of thousands of innocent people.” Some of whom might even be “moderate Saudi businessmen.”
Finally, we are warned that under Trump, “Egypt and Syria will soon resemble Hamas and Hezbollah: extremist, Islamist and violent.” This was formerly known as Obama and Hillary’s Arab Spring.
Michaelson contends that Republicans are voting from “that part of the brain that sends out constant ‘fight or flight’ messages based on threats and fear.” That’s an odd lack of self-awareness from a man who just desperately tried to hammer together some “fight or flight” messages on Trump.
But attacking Trump is easier than defending Hillary. And so we get this pathetic showing of Muslim terrorist financiers and Jewish anti-Semites against Trump. It’s as meaningful as Hillary’s pro-Israel pandering.
The real Hillary, the one caught with an inbox full of attacks on Israel, including approval for the bigotry of Max Blumenthal whose work was cited by the Kansas City Jewish Community Center gunman, is quite a different creature from the public Hillary who suddenly loves Israel.
The real Hillary, the one who kissed Arafat’s wife and listened placidly to her rant about Israeli poison gas, has a long anti-Israel history. Her time as Secretary of State has already given us a preview of her policies. She will continue demanding apartheid segregation for Jews living in ’67 Israel and she will go on pushing for more concessions to Islamic terrorists. She will back the Iran deal that she championed.
Hillary will go on financing Iran’s wave of Islamic terrorism while ignoring its nuclear violations.
But there is nothing extraordinary about any of this. Hillary is not a radical in a party of moderates. The Democratic Party has drifted so far into the fever swamps of the radical left that opposition to Israel is mainstream. The only reason that Hillary reserves her fulminations for phone calls and private emails is that even though her inner circle of advisers is vocally anti-Israel, some in her outer circle of donors are pro-Israel. And she still needs their support. At least while the election is still going on.
Israel has ceased to be a bipartisan issue. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton reversed JFK and LBJ’s pro-Israel policies. This rejection has been cloaked in euphemisms about “two states for two people”, but that really means championing the creation of Islamic terror states inside Israel.
This policy, which has until recently been bipartisan, represents the greatest threat to Israel.
Donald Trump is the first Republican presidential nominee to firmly break with it. Unlike Hillary, Trump hasn’t kissed Arafat’s wife or spent an hour on the phone yelling at the Prime Minister of Israel. Instead he has said that Jews should be able to keep on living and building houses in ’67 Israel.
Jews living as a free people in their own land is the essence of Zionism. And it’s a rejection of the hateful ravings of Hillary Clinton, the Forward and the “moderate” Saudi businessmen of Islamic terror.
Tags: 2016 Presidential Election, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton
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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/09/04/anti-semitic-bds-movement-shuts-down-pro-israel-perspectives-on-campus.html
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Dershowitz was on JBL ? cable channel. I couldn't find a link for it but he and host were explaining how they would not move or recommend any Jew move to Europe as anti semitism is expanding exponentially along with the Muslim populations and their political influence there. Just like on a smaller scale here. Where ever one sees anti semitism here including the universities it seems it is always tied to Jewish hating Muslims:
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Sports/Italian-fans-boo-Israeli-anthem-give-Nazi-salute-at-world-cup-qualifier-467197
BTW , Dershowitz who is a Democrat who I usually will not agree with and get annoyed with (over politics) is a staunch supporter of Israel and has an ongoing feud with Soros who he actually called "EVIL". He also admitted that the antisemitism that we are seeing in the US is "not coming from the right but from the LEFT". I appreciated that admission.
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http://www.algemeiner.com/2016/09/08/uc-berkeley-offers-a-class-in-erasing-jews-from-israel-and-destroying-the-jewish-state/
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Like Dershowitz points out the anti semitism in the US now comes from the LEFT. Not only academic muslims but many Jews as well.
On the bright side we have toilets for all.
And stamping and trampling on an American flag is fashionable.
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Like Dershowitz points out the anti semitism in the US now comes from the LEFT. Not only academic muslims but many Jews as well.
On the bright side we have toilets for all.
And stamping and trampling on an American flag is fashionable.
I see it every day, especially from here. I feel like a bird on a perch, watching everything from outside.
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:x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x
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:x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x
You wrote something to the effect once, that was spot on, in regard to the right not pushing their values on others, but the left being intolerant of anything remotely unlike them. This is just more of the same.
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http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Twilight-of-American-Jewry-467862
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Yup. 80 % of Jews are Democrats now first. Dershowitz can say he is for Israel but he still remains a Democrat.
Ironic isn't it. That despite 911 liberals including Jews spend more time defending Muslims than their own.
All the while the Muslim population and political strength is growing and the anti semitic segment of the Blacks in the US has gained power.
Though the one bright side is the recent 10 yr 38 billion dollar aid package to Israel just signed.
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Not sure the aid package will do much to mitigate a nuclear Iran.
Yup. 80 % of Jews are Democrats now first. Dershowitz can say he is for Israel but he still remains a Democrat.
Ironic isn't it. That despite 911 liberals including Jews spend more time defending Muslims than their own.
All the while the Muslim population and political strength is growing and the anti semitic segment of the Blacks in the US has gained power.
Though the one bright side is the recent 10 yr 38 billion dollar aid package to Israel just signed.
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http://www.algemeiner.com/2016/09/08/uc-berkeley-offers-a-class-in-erasing-jews-from-israel-and-destroying-the-jewish-state/
Berkeley just shut the course down mid semester. It will be interesting to see what kind of waves this makes in court because the instructor (an undergrad), is not happy about it.
https://academeblog.org/2016/09/15/berkeley-bans-a-palestine-class/
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Berkley just reinstated the course:
http://observer.com/2016/09/cal-reinstates-class-observer-deemed-effort-to-erase-jewish-history-from-israel/
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Berkley just reinstated the course:
http://observer.com/2016/09/cal-reinstates-class-observer-deemed-effort-to-erase-jewish-history-from-israel/
I've started studying law here, and have been teaching English, Industrial Security and mathematics here. I think perhaps, I'll send a proposal to Berkeley for my course on targeting Muslims and see how it's received.
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"I think perhaps, I'll send a proposal to Berkeley for my course on targeting Muslims and see how it's received."
You can highlight the course using the LEft's favorite terminology of the day:
Course on history of Muslim *tribilism*, *colonialism* (isn't that what was Persian Hittite Babylonian Assyrian Ottomam Calipahte empires were all about), *warmongering*,
*misogyny*, *homophobia*, *xenophobia*, *intolerance*,(I would include anti semitism but these days that is no longer accepted as a term of the left) are just some examples you can use in your course.
Try getting that to be taught at Berkely.
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"I think perhaps, I'll send a proposal to Berkeley for my course on targeting Muslims and see how it's received."
You can highlight the course using the LEft's favorite terminology of the day:
Course on history of Muslim *tribilism*, *colonialism* (isn't that what was Persian Hittite Babylonian Assyrian Ottomam Calipahte empires were all about), *warmongering*,
*misogyny*, *homophobia*, *xenophobia*, *intolerance*,(I would include anti semitism but these days that is no longer accepted as a term of the left) are just some examples you can use in your course.
Try getting that to be taught at Berkely.
Should probably throw pedophilia in there too. I'm not being rude or crass, and not saying everyone does it, but to say that there aren't dancing boys there and under-aged marriages allowed, would be an understatement.
Berkeley's position on this is a clear double standard.
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http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/264397/top-ten-schools-supporting-terrorists-frontpagemagcom
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Seems to be a big anti zionist crowd in the Dem party including Obama and H Clinton or at least her right hand woman:
http://nypost.com/2016/10/06/huma-abedin-in-hot-water-for-dismissing-aipac-as-that-crowd/
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Listening to Mona Charen last night on John Batchelor she made a comment that Trump's anti-globalization pitch is basically anti-semitic. This disgruntled ex Breitbart empolyee echoes the same thing here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435527/anti-semitism-donald-trump-right-nationalism-white-supremacism
This is totally off the mark and nothing whatsoever to do with Jews in my opinion.
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Great question often explored here by me:
http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/10/06/counterfactual-files-watergate-what-if-nixon-didnt-resign-timothy-naftali-jql.cnn/video/playlists/stories-worth-watching/
The answer is actually I think multifaceted.
Of course the MSM will try to make this valid worthy question as some sort of flag that Schilling is somehow anti-semitic just for asking it.
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Why is this in this thread?
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"Anti-semitism & Jews" is title of thread . So the topic is about Jews.
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Umm , , , what I'm seeing is a hypothetical "What if Nixon had not resigned?", , ,
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Crafty ,
That was not the link I meant . My apologies.
This is the link of Curt Schilling and Jake Tapper:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/curt-schilling-jews-democrats-jake-tapper-230169
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As usual, absurd PC bullturds. :roll:
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https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/11/13/pro-israel-jewish-groups-university-of-texas-austin-pull-sponsorship-caroline-glick-zionist-speaker-over-fear-alienating-students/
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I like and appreciate this piece because it discusses themes I have posted about for years on this thread. He even uses the adjecctive that I use. Liberal (Dennis likes Left wing better though he admits they are now similar) are NARCISSITIC. They absoluetely do think they are better then us because of their thinking. They are the ones closer to the truth and justce (and unlike the opening dialogue in the old Superman TV serail - ***NOT the American Way***) - but rather the concept of the single world communist or perhaps socailist way. How many times do we see liberal Jews with their snarky, cynical sarcastic remarks and grins when someone else speaking disagrees with them . Folks this is delusional narcissm.
Prager also states quite accurately then Jews sitting Shiva for the election of Trump ( :-o ) could be the best example yet of the concept the for liberal Jews their religion is not Judaism. It is Leftism.
It could well be that Dennis theory that this has its' roots in Marxism from the 1800's. It may have been understandable then that Jews would take to Communism since in Tsarist Russia Jews may have been outcasts and a one author who I do not recall now suggested, "where else would Jews turn to if not Communism?" (Democracy did not, of course, exist then in Russia). However, this does not completely explain today's American Jews who have a viable alternative in American Democracy and quite literally have thrived in it.
Something has kept them in the Democrat Party which itself has become a party not within American ideals but a party that wants to replace American ideals with a new world order.
I would also add that the Jewish holocaust brought about by Nazi Germany has very much changed Jewish thought.
Take today their constant claims that Trump is Hitler. Republicans are eqatable to the Nazi Party. Like I have emphasized before that Republicans are held to more dangerous and evil then any other group in the world today. There is a lot more about this but too deep for my time to try to philosophically explore more.
But after my ruminations about the Dennis prager's piece , here it is. And in my opinion Bill Kristol who is conservative is not a "renegade" Jew. But I have no qualms saying that the liberal or leftist Jews often are:
******
Dennis Prager 11/15/16
Left-Wing Jews Are Embarrassing Judaism
When you sit shiva over the election of a president, you’ve made a religion of politics. A highly respected American rabbi, Yitz Greenberg, used to tell American Jewish audiences, whether Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, “I don’t care what denomination you’re a member of, as long as you’re ashamed of it.”
I have adopted that phrase and apply it to religions generally. One could just as easily say to Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims: “I don’t care what religion you identify with, as long as you’re ashamed of it.” Meaning, of course, ashamed of what many of its members have done to it.
Just think of what has happened to much of mainstream Protestantism; to much of Catholicism, including, sadly, the current pope; and most especially to the Islamic world.
Given the subject of this column — the destructive influence of leftism on Jews and Judaism — it is relevant to mention some of my Jewish involvement. Among other things, I taught Jewish history and religion at Brooklyn College, was the spokesman for the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, have written two books and hundreds of essays and columns on Jews and Judaism, received the American Jewish Press Association Award for Excellence in Jewish Commentary, have brought many thousands of Jews to Judaism, and have lectured to more Jewish groups in the past 40 years than almost any living Jew.
So, I say this with only sadness: Many American Jews on the left, including rabbis and lay leaders, are embarrassing Jews and Judaism. I say this to ring an alarm in Jewish life and to tell non-Jewish America that these people represent leftism, not Judaism. Furthermore, I am talking only about leftist, not liberal, Jews. Unfortunately, however, both within and outside of Judaism, liberalism has become synonymous with leftism.
This past week the embarrassing behavior of left-wing Jews reached a new level.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Jews and their clergy at various synagogues around America were gathering to “sit shiva” — the Hebrew and Jewish term for the seven-day period of grieving that Jews engage in after the loss of an immediate relative — because Donald Trump was elected president.
Consider for a moment how childish and narcissistic this is: using the sacred ritual reserved for the death of one’s child or parent as a way to express disappointment over a presidential election.
And, of course, there were the irresponsible, over-the-top outbursts by Jewish columnists and academics.
Take Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who devoted his column after the election to writing an open letter to his twelve-year-old daughter.
“As I watched the returns at Donald Trump’s celebration here Tuesday night,” Milbank began, “the hardest part was trying to reassure my seventh-grade daughter at home, via phone and text, that she would be okay.
“She had expected to be celebrating the election of the first female president, but instead, this man she had been reading and hearing horrible things about had won, and she feared her own world could come apart.”
The man’s twelve-year-old daughter “feared her own world could come apart” because of the election result. He reassured her, however, that her world would be fine, especially since she would be receiving so much love at her upcoming bat-mitzvah.
Milbank’s daughter’s trauma was more than matched by the reaction of a Jewish adult, Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine. On November 12, he tweeted “This is the worst thing that has happened in my life.” Chait was 31 years old on 9/11.
A response to his tweet by a woman named Bethany S. Mandel pretty well summarized the maturity level of Chait’s comment: “I took my mom off life support at 16 & dad hanged himself 3 yrs later. I’m sorry this election was so hard for you.”
I am sure Ms. Mandel would join me in paying Mr. Chait a shiva call.
Speaking of 9/11, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said on Bill Maher’s show that Trump’s victory was “a moral 9/11.” He suggested that Trump’s becoming president might be worse: 9/11 happened to us, but we “did this [elect Trump] to ourselves.”
And his colleague at the New York Times, Paul Krugman, wrote that he now realizes that he “truly didn’t understand the country we live in.”
Never have truer words been written. It’s tough to understand those for whom you only have contempt. When Jews abandoned Judaism, many of them did not abandon Judaism’s messianic impulse.
Add similar comments made during the election by other Jewish leftists in the media and academia and you get the picture.
How are we to understand this? Here’s one explanation:
When Jews abandoned Judaism, many of them did not abandon Judaism’s messianic impulse. Beginning with Karl Marx, the grandson of two Orthodox rabbis, they simply secularized it and created secular substitutes such as Marxism, humanism, socialism, feminism, and environmentalism.
If left-wing Jews want to sit shiva, they should do so for their religion, which, like much of Protestant Christianity and Roman Catholicism, has been so deeply and negatively influenced by leftism. — Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code, was published by Regnery. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com. © 2016 Creators.com
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442198/left-wing-jews-embarrassing-judaism-making-politics-their-religion
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https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/11/15/cancellation-of-caroline-glick-lecture-at-u-of-texas-spurs-pro-zionist-students-to-reject-break-away-from-liberal-jewish-monopoly-on-views-about-israel/
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Ellison is perfect for the LEFT. Criticize him and you will be labelled to death as racist or one of the new invented phrases "islamaphobe". right up their alley:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/11/30/ellison-schumer-bannon-jewish-nevertrump-site-defends-trump/
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http://www.timesofisrael.com/university-students-in-toronto-walk-out-on-vote-to-mark-holocaust-education-week/
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A post from elsewhere by a friend:
============================
Google, democracy and the truth about internet search
Tech-savvy rightwingers have been able to ‘game’ the algorithms of internet giants and create a new reality where Hitler is a good guy, Jews are evil and… Donald Trump becomes president
ere’s what you don’t want to do late on a Sunday night. You do not want to type seven letters into Google. That’s all I did. I typed: “a-r-e”. And then “j-e-w-s”. Since 2008, Google has attempted to predict what question you might be asking and offers you a choice. And this is what it did. It offered me a choice of potential questions it thought I might want to ask: “are jews a race?”, “are jews white?”, “are jews christians?”, and finally, “are jews evil?”
Are Jews evil? It’s not a question I’ve ever thought of asking. I hadn’t gone looking for it. But there it was. I press enter. A page of results appears. This was Google’s question. And this was Google’s answer: Jews are evil. Because there, on my screen, was the proof: an entire page of results, nine out of 10 of which “confirm” this. The top result, from a site called Listovative, has the headline: “Top 10 Major Reasons Why People Hate Jews.” I click on it: “Jews today have taken over marketing, militia, medicinal, technological, media, industrial, cinema challenges etc and continue to face the worlds [sic] envy through unexplained success stories given their inglorious past and vermin like repression all over Europe.”
Google is search. It’s the verb, to Google. It’s what we all do, all the time, whenever we want to know anything. We Google it. The site handles at least 63,000 searches a second, 5.5bn a day. Its mission as a company, the one-line overview that has informed the company since its foundation and is still the banner headline on its corporate website today, is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. It strives to give you the best, most relevant results. And in this instance the third-best, most relevant result to the search query “are Jews… ” is a link to an article from stormfront.org, a neo-Nazi website. The fifth is a YouTube video: “Why the Jews are Evil. Why we are against them.”
More here:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook
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If one has time one may want to delve a bit into the "comments" posted after the article of Kerry's speech. All the Jew haters on the wonderful inclusive Huffington post site.
Yet liberal Jews will persist with claiming the anti- semitism in on the Right. I have news for them. Wake up.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kerry-to-lay-out-new-israel-palestine-peace-in-last-ditch-speech_us_5863d81fe4b0eb586487b4a6?u8oy4mh30k6opf1or
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http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/220665/no-one-is-afraid-of-aipac?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=76689e08c5-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_01_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-76689e08c5-207194629
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As a Republican I am certainly no fan of Soros who has done everything he could to support Democrat Party causes (and globalism at the expense of the sovereignty of the US).
When I said he would have been the poster boy for Hitler as the behind the scenes evil rich Jew profiting from the anarchy he promotes I in no way would be happy to see a reaction to him like Nazis did to Jews they singled out as scapegoats.
This is what I was afraid of. The idea that Soros is being singled out . There are no other globalists ? And the last paragraph that mentions other prominent Jews . :-o
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-10/trump-s-win-prompts-hungarian-call-for-crackdown-on-soros-groups
I don't like Hungary using Trump as some sort of justification for this either. This feeds right into the narrative of the LEFT that we are seeing return of a Nazism right here in the US. No way.
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https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2017/01/72-nations-gather-in-paris-to-impose-auschwitz-borders-on-israel-will-kerry-stop-them
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Holly cow ( in the words of the late Phil Rizzuto though I would still have to see it to believe it:
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2017/01/01/dershowitz-ill-leave-democratic-party-if-ellison-becomes-dnc-chair-n2265440
Would other Jews follow?
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A good warning shot across the bow, hinting of deep changes in the underlying Jewish Democrat mindset.
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https://www.clarionproject.org/news/german-court-rules-setting-synagogue-fire-legit-protest
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This is REALLY bad. :x
Firebombing a temple is not anti semitic but drawing a picture of Allah in a cartoon is the worst crime deserving of death a Muslim can think of.
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Wow I guess Keith Ellison is not anti semitic and likes us Jews after all. :roll: (Some Jews are useful idiots sadly):
http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2017/02/13/anti-trump-jewish-rally-for-refugees-organizer-funded-by-obama-government-to-resettle-refugees/
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Investigators with the University City Police Department are working to determine who knocked over or damaged dozens of headstones at a local Jewish cemetery Thursday morning. Police would not say if they considered the vandalism at Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery to be a hate crime. It is believed there was some organization behind the crime, meaning this was not the act of one individual. The tombstones vandalized are in an older section of the cemetery; much of which pre-date 1960. A steady stream of people were stopping by to see if the toppled headstones belonged to any of their family members who are buried at the site. Police said they're reviewing security camera footage from the area. More than 100 headstones were damaged. The investigation coincides with yet another round of bomb threats at Jewish community centers across the nation. According to cemetery executive director, Anita Feigenbaum a clean-up effort is being planned. Feigenbaum, said the Muslim community has offered to help with the effort as well.
The incident coincides with waves of bomb threats directed at Jewish community centers across the US. On Monday at least 10 Jewish community centers were targeted with bomb threats, for the fourth time in five weeks. The threats have been called in to JCCs across the country, according to Paul Goldenberg, the director of Secure Community Network — an affiliate of the Jewish Federations of North America that advises Jewish groups and institutions on security.
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http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Our-World-Perez-Ellison-and-the-meaning-of-antisemitism-482767
This is referenced in the article:
http://lidblog.com/next-anti-trump-protest-terrorist-who-killed-two-college-students/
Here is more on her:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmea_Odeh
Odeh was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison on March 12, 2015, stripped of her US citizenship, and will be deported from the United States to Jordan once she is done serving her time.[15][16][17][17][18] She is free on bail while she appeals.[15] Her conviction was unanimously vacated by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals and sent back to the District Court in February 2016.[19]
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http://thehill.com/policy/technology/321805-sen-schumer-wants-the-fcc-to-grant-waiver-to-trace-jewish-center-bomb
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second post
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2014/02/27/researchers-were-very-surprised-to-discover-few-right-wingers-sent-anti-semitic-hate-mail-heres-who-did/
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From CD above : "http://www.theblaze.com/news/2014/02/27/researchers-were-very-surprised-to-discover-few-right-wingers-sent-anti-semitic-hate-mail-heres-who-did/"
This is consistent with what I have seen and posted here for example post #: 6732 from December 28 '16:
If one has time one may want to delve a bit into the "comments" posted after the article of Kerry's speech. All the Jew haters on the wonderful inclusive Huffington post site.
Yet liberal Jews will persist with claiming the anti- semitism in on the Right. I have news for them. Wake up.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kerry-to-lay-out-new-israel-palestine-peace-in-last-ditch-speech_us_5863d81fe4b0eb586487b4a6?u8oy4mh30k6opf1or
Are you listening Soros???
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http://dailycaller.com/2017/03/03/anti-trump-communist-arrested-for-jewish-community-center-bomb-threats/
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http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/226013/sarsour-odeh-anti-trump-movement?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=e7bcc85742-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_03_05&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-e7bcc85742-207194629
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This thread can be titled the Cognitive Dissonance of Jews:
http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/trump-approval-rating-jews/2017/03/17/id/779407/
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Jews have always been heavily Dem. These numbers may well be an improvement.
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And many of those from Europe were socialists and communists
Just look a the names on suspected communists lists from the 50 and 60's . Many are Jewish names.
They live like capitalists and vote like socialists. I am fed up with many of my own people. I feel bad about it, but it is true.
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http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/227312/hungary-kirchick-end-of-europe?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=889bad77b0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_03_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-889bad77b0-207194629
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/us/jcc-bomb-threats.html?emc=edit_na_20170323&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
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http://thefederalist.com/2017/03/28/campus-intersectionalism-breeds-anti-semitism-like-chicago-jewish-privilege-flyers/
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http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/1.780873
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http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/1.780873
It's ok, the islamic conquest of europe would have resulted in the plaque being removed sooner or later anyway.
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http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/229930/politicos-dubious-chabad-story-receives-widespread-criticism?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=post&utm_term=Politico%E2%80%99s+Dubious+Chabad+Story+Receives+Widespread+Criticism&utm_content=apr2017
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http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/230985/remembering-warsaw-ghetto-uprising?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=1498db9d05-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_04_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-1498db9d05-207194629
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3205754/Blood-oozed-soil-grave-sites-pits-alive-secrets-Ukraine-s-shameful-Holocaust-Bullets-killing-centre-1-6million-Jews-executed.html
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http://m.jpost.com/app/article/492025
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http://www.meforum.org/6487/anti-semitism-awareness-act?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=d392fa1b76-romirowsky_asaf_2017_01_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-d392fa1b76-33893945&goal=0_086cfd423c-d392fa1b76-33893945
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"Academia has unconsciously revealed that Jews and Israelis are the canaries in the coal mine."
I would say this is almost true. White hetero men are the most reviled by libs unless of course they speak Spanish
so would be all Republicans
and from the Middle Easterners Christians too almost as well as Jew.
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http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/242674/jewish-general-invented-a-muslim-country?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=4a4f4c9d54-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_08_07&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-4a4f4c9d54-207194629
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http://www.israellycool.com/2017/08/28/watch-linda-sarsour-compares-zionists-to-white-supremacists-and-neo-nazis/
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I am positive that Elie Wiesel is turning in his grave at the from this. He would definitely have NOT approved.
Perhaps he was my last living hero.
I cannot think of anyone else now................ There are others including my father but they are long gone......
But I digress:
http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Holocaust-chic-at-the-Video-Music-Awards-503617
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With the massive antisemitism of the left and some of the Alt Right, my first reaction is that this seems a fine gesture to me.
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Wiesel would have (I believe) looked at this and thought it is a political stunt .
To think that the badge of horror is used as some chic artsy or celebrity in your face attention seeking (obviously geared as through association anti Trump) as demeaning to the true depth and the horror of the holocaust.
Personally I find it repulsive.
to find someone wearing a "Jewish" star at some celebrity event on his outfit 'cheapens' the evil of history
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Your analysis is not without logic, but FWIW IMHO given the bigotry of the left, I am OK with stars flying the flag a bit.
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" Your analysis is not without logic, but FWIW IMHO given the bigotry of the left, I am OK with stars flying the flag a bit. "
but Crafty , you know this is not a statement against the LEFT. This is directly at the right and is meant to anti Trump.
This is just another Hollywood thing against the Right.
We don't see these Hollywood Jews coming out with Nazi stars of David when the Left displays any anti semitism
I agree with you that it is good Jews might speak up for themselves but this is not just that in my opinion.
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Perhaps the law of unintended consequences applies here too?
:wink:
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/371690.php
Dershowitz: Why Is the Media Playing Down Valerie Plame's Nazi-Level Antisemitism?
The Entitled Caste protects other members of the Entitled Caste. That's the whole point of an Entitled Caste.
Related: Check out this thread from Omri Ceren noting that Plame is just talking the way Obama and Kerry talked about American Jews having a divided loyalty and controlling the country for Israel's interests.
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http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/245953/this-anti-semitic-bbc-interview-perfectly-illustrates-britains-left-wing-anti-semitism-problem
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http://freebeacon.com/politics/senior-democratic-staffer-not-care-anti-semitism/
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One prominent liberal Jew who admits to being *duped* by Obama. It also seems Dershowitz is getting very put off by the anti American stance of the Democrat Party
I am not sure he could be switching sides but he may be more of a Truman or JKF Democrat:
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2018/01/27/dershowitz-wouldnt-campaigned-obama-knew-farrakhan-photo/
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/01/27/it-could-soon-be-a-crime-to-blame-poland-for-nazi-atrocities-and-israel-is-appalled/?undefined=&utm_term=.9e0b8046f252&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
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second post
http://www.melaniephillips.com/poles-use-holocaust-denial-wash-filthy-hands/
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http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/255252/qatar-and-american-jews?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=cfe41eb625-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_13&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-cfe41eb625-207194629
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http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2018/02/20/caroline-glick-poland-antisemitism-symptom-larger-european-problem/
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http://jewishbreakingnews.com/2018/02/21/acid-placed-stroller-burns-french-rabbis-baby-possible-anti-semitic-attack/
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/danny-davis-louis-farrakhan-congressman-friendship/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202018-03-05&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
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https://gellerreport.com/2018/03/splc-jewhaters.html/
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second post
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-met-anti-semitism-democrats-farrakhan-20180306-story.html
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/new-left-embraces-louis-farrakhan-identity-politics/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202018-03-13&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/03/29/labour-quietly-reinstated-six-councillors-posted-anti-semitic/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
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https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/03/why-my-generation-is-indifferent-to-anti-semitism/
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http://www.speroforum.com/a/BAIJCNMECL10/83230-Jews-are-warned-against-wearing-skullcaps-in-Germany?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=CABANTAYRU27&utm_content=BAIJCNMECL10&utm_source=news&utm_term=Jews+are+warned+against+wearing+skullcaps+in+Germany#.WuPC_3rcBGA
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http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/260862/m-project-franklin-delano-roosevelt-jews
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https://pjmedia.com/trending/dc-dems-are-embarrassing-the-city-government-with-anti-semitic-conspiracy-theories/
" White said he had no idea that the Rothschild conspiracy theory could be construed as anti-Semitic and awkwardly tried to make amends.
He attended a Passover Seder and met with Jewish community leaders for breakfast over bagels and lox. He went on a guided tour of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum but abruptly left halfway through without explanation. "
LOL give the guy bagels and lox and he will love Jews
have walk thru the Holocaust museum and suddenly he will realize Jews are as down trodden as Blacks . LOL
This stupidity of liberal Jews never ends
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https://israelunwired.com/one-of-the-most-vile-anti-semites-is-running-for-the-u-s-senate/
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RIP:
http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2018/06/10/holocaust-survivor-gena-turgel-consoler-of-anne-frank-dies/
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http://carolineglick.com/the-peril-of-politicized-anti-semitism/
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https://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2018/07/11/brutalised-climate-germany-to-combat-rise-in-bullying-of-jewish-students/
Muslin pop goes up thus rise in anti semitism goes up.
No surprise .
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Corbyn's portents for Israel and Western Jewry
If the current violence between Israel and the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza escalates into a full-scale war, one thing is certain. The main thoroughfares of the West’s great cities will be filled with thousands of protesters marching in support for Hamas and its strategic goal of annihilating Israel.
The anti-Israel demonstrations this time around will dwarf all those that preceded them. We also know with mathematical certainty that Jewish institutions and Jews will be violently assaulted from London to Melbourne, Paris to San Francisco. Every public demonstration in support of Israel, indeed, every public demonstration of Judaism, including Jewish people walking to synagogue on Shabbat – will become a focal point for attacks.
We also know with absolute certainly that just as the violent assaults against Jews in the West during Operation Protective Edge in 2014 dwarfed the attacks from earlier wars, so the violence directed against Jews and Jewish institutions in Europe and the US in the next war will dwarf all that preceded it. We know that the anti-Israel demonstrations will be bigger and violence against Jews more widespread now than in the past because over the past four years, leftist antisemitism has grown in scope and extremism throughout the Western world.
Hatred of Jews, based in a rejection of Israel’s right to exist and expressed first and foremost through the demonization of Israel’s supporters as racists, has become more widespread. Its expressions have become more extreme and more violent.
Consider the situation in Britain. Last month, US President Donald Trump paid a visit to the US’s closest ally. The Red-Green alliance of the Left and the Muslims was beside itself. Its queer, feminist, jihadist and animal rights members banded together to organize a major demonstration against Trump in London.
As British Jewish writer and activist David Collier documented on his website, two aspects of the demonstrations stood out. First the marchers weren’t against Trump. They were anti-American. As far as they were concerned, Trump is just a manifestation of America’s inherent evilness. His predecessor Barack Obama was also terrible.
The second notable aspect of the supposedly anti-Trump, Red-Green rally in London was the prevalence of anti-Israel messages. Collier posted videos of crowds at every corner happily shouting out chants calling for Israel to be destroyed, (“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free,”) and supporting Hamas, (“From Palestine to Mexico, racist walls have got to go!”).
It’s worth asking how the protesters at an anti-Trump rally naturally gravitated towards anti-American and antisemitic messages.
Why did the people who supposedly hate Trump snap up “Free Gaza” stickers like hotcakes? What possesses British feminists to support a jihadist regime that routinely attacks Israel for no reason and treats women like property?
The answer is simple enough. They aren’t thinking. They are following.
Continue reading...
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British Jews Have Reason to Fear Corbyn’s Labour Party
The opposition leader has called Hamas terrorists ‘brothers’ and disparaged even domestic ‘Zionists.’
By Dovid Efune
Sept. 5, 2018 7:09 p.m. ET
Lord Jonathan Sacks isn’t known to throw around accusations. So when the Commonwealth’s former chief rabbi weighed in on Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, people took notice.
Rabbi Sacks last week described Mr. Corbyn as “an anti-Semite” who has “given support to racists, terrorists and dealers of hate.” He called one Corbyn comment “the most offensive statement made by a senior British politician since Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech,” a vicious anti-immigration diatribe. Rabbi Sacks was referring to Mr. Corbyn’s 2013 description of British “Zionists”: “They don’t want to study history and . . . they don’t understand English irony either.” On Sunday Rabbi Sacks doubled down, telling the BBC that the prospect of Mr. Corbyn as prime minister was a “danger” to British Jewry.
In July, 68 leading U.K. rabbis had written an open letter to the Guardian accusing Labour’s leadership of ignoring the Jewish community and the “severe and widespread” anti-Semitism plaguing the party. Shortly after, in an unprecedented move, the country’s three leading Jewish newspapers published joint cover stories describing the potential of a Corbyn-led government as an “existential threat to Jewish life” in Britain.
Some members of Mr. Corbyn’s own party have been unforgiving. A day after Rabbi Sacks’s remarks were published, Labour veteran Frank Field resigned from the party’s group in Parliament over the issue. Another senior party member, Dame Margaret Hodge, furiously confronted Mr. Corbyn in July and called him a “racist and anti-Semite.” Dozens of other party leaders have expressed outrage over the matter.
But Mr. Corbyn and his acolytes are having none of it—and have engaged in concerted efforts to undermine their critics.
A Labour spokesman called Rabbi Sacks’s comments “absurd and offensive.” The party briefly put Ms. Hodge under investigation. Labourites who participated in a March protest over anti-Semitism were accused of attempting to smear the party leader and were threatened with dismissal from the party via a process known as “deselection.” A letter endorsed by thousands of Corbyn supporters alleged that the gathering was the work of a “very powerful special interest group.” For his part, Mr. Corbyn claimed in an interview: “I’m not an anti-Semite in any way, never have been, never will be.”
His actions and words tell a very different story. He was long associated—unwittingly, he says, with Holocaust denier Paul Eisen. In 2012 he approved of a mural that grotesquely depicted Jewish bankers, and he did not reverse himself until earlier this year. He was long a member in Facebook groups that featured anti-Jewish conspiracies.
His worst blind spot, though, is his failure to distinguish between criticism of Israeli policies and an irrational and thoroughly bigoted hatred of Israel itself. It’s an obsession that has led him to align with those who oppose the idea of Jewish self-determination in the Levant, as well as those who have made their purpose to seek Israel’s destruction, and even those who have murdered or championed the murder of Israelis and their supporters.
In 2010 Mr. Corbyn hosted an event on Holocaust Memorial Day in which the Israeli government was compared to the Nazis. In 2012 he appeared on Iranian television to celebrate the release of Palestinian terrorists by Israel in a painful prisoner exchange with Hamas. He referred to the returning convicts as “brothers.”
Perhaps the starkest disclosure emerged last month: In 2014 he laid a wreath at the graves of terrorists involved in the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Summer Olympics in 1972. At the event he was pictured standing beside a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group with a 50-year history of terrorism in Israel and overseas.
Most offensive are his efforts to redefine anti-Semitism in a way that carves out a comfortable nook for his own brand of the world’s oldest hatred to thrive. When his party sought to establish a definition for anti-Semitism, Mr. Corbyn initially made sure to exclude commonly accepted language formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, a 31-member intergovernmental educational organization. The omitted language labels as anti-Semitic the demonization, delegitimization and use of double standards against Israel.
On Tuesday, as the matter threatened to tear Labour apart, the party grudgingly voted to accept the full definition. The decision included an accompanying declaration protecting the freedom of expression of Israel critics, which was panned by leading Jewish groups.
Mr. Corbyn himself, adding insult to injury, reportedly pushed for a statement allowing party members to refer to “Israel, its policies or the circumstances around its foundation as racist.” The party’s governing body overruled him.
On Sunday former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown had called for the party to “support unanimously, unequivocally and immediately” the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. Mr. Brown is right. The party’s actions fall far short of both unanimity and lack of equivocation. Mr. Corbyn has no business negotiating with or lecturing Jews on what forms of bigotry they should or should not endure. This wouldn’t be tolerated with respect to any other minority group.
It’s a shameful stain on the Labour Party that it has elevated Mr. Corbyn to within one election of leading the country. At this stage only a party revolt or a punishing defeat for Labour at the ballot box can restore a sense of comfort to the Jewish community in the U.K.
Until that time a dark cloud will hang over Britain’s 270,000 Jews, and the entire country often described as America’s closest ally.
Mr. Efune is editor in chief and CEO of the Algemeiner, a New York-based newspaper.
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http://www.elderstatement.com/2014/04/the-strange-phenomenon-of-black-anti.html?m=1
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"The Strange Phenomenon Of Black Anti-Semitism"
Great post . I am glad to see someone else noticing this and pointing out the obvious.
But it does not answer the original question . So what is the source of Black antisemitism?
I have seen many Jewish produced movies from years back that made Blacks looks stupid or foolish. I watch now and cringe .
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The S African leader was accusing the Jews giving and arming and training the white landowners he is taking land from . I assume he is referring to Israeli (Probably ex military) training them or I otherwise don't know why he pulled "Jews" out of the hat.
https://www.news24.com/Columnists/HowardFeldman/its-not-easy-being-a-jew-in-south-africa-20180226
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https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/272350/the-vanishing-ivy-league-jew?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=c79389a9e9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_10_16_02_49&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-c79389a9e9-207194629
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https://israelunwired.com/jewish-protestors-assaulted-by-corbyn-thugs-at-north-london-event/
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https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/COLUMN-ONE-Defeating-Hamas-in-America-452551?fbclid=IwAR0ZSKrgLnIxw0Ak6qyZN77gLbsa7p4T3rVFDf5-Oxg_3Z6cv9IVbijqrS4
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https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/republican-jewish-coalition-calls-resignation-democrats-ties-farrakhan/story?id=53601481
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/377830.php
We Must Face the Fact That One Political Party is Mainstreaming and Normalizing Antisemitism
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https://www.theinvisibleman.org/blog/where-do-jews-go-for-solace?fbclid=IwAR05decfuH-5DGjhSFWemFueeXCI33qlEWbvHiVZXqulWOlVwfgN1t0nGLo
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https://pjmedia.com/trending/6-liberal-democrats-photographed-with-anti-semite-louis-farrakhan/?utm_source=PJMCoffeeBreak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=October2018
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https://pjmedia.com/trending/6-liberal-democrats-photographed-with-anti-semite-louis-farrakhan/?utm_source=PJMCoffeeBreak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=October2018
Funny how the antisemitism of the Obama era was a non-issue.
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"Funny how the antisemitism of the Obama era was a non-issue."
That is because many Jews are no longer Jews (or Americans). They are Democrats first.
And as i have said for yrs, Republicans are worse then Nazis. So calling Trump a Nazi is just par for the course and more obvious where their priorities are.
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"Funny how the antisemitism of the Obama era was a non-issue."
That is because many Jews are no longer Jews (or Americans). They are Democrats first.
And as i have said for yrs, Republicans are worse then Nazis. So calling Trump a Nazi is just par for the course and more obvious where their priorities are.
A Hitler with Jewish grandchildren that has been the best friend of Israel to ever live in the White House. Quite a strange Hitler.
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http://carolineglick.com/american-jewrys-false-prophets/
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[http://carolineglick.com/american-jewrys-false-prophets/]
I am glad to see my fellow Jews finally calling out the phony hypocrite 75 % narcissistic American Jews who are beloved to the Democrat party They definitely think they are superior precisely because they vote Democrats : " I am for the poor , as I vote Democrat ". " What a wonderful caring loving live and let live human being I am".
Who are they kidding!
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"Who (sic) are they kidding!" :lol:
"That is because many Jews are no longer Jews (or Americans). They are Democrats first."
A bit more precise I think to say that their religion of Judaism has been replaced with the religion of Progressivism.
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https://www.dennisprager.com/left-wing-jews-a-jewish-and-american-tragedy/
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Could not agree more with the above article
I don't recall reading what Marx himself a grandson of two rabbies thought of Jews. But then all capitalists were pigs I suppose.
As for Trotsky in the Stalin biographies I read it is noted that many Jews were communists . One could argue the only alternative at the time was the Tsar.
The conclusion was simple - while most Communists in Russia were certainly not Jews , Jews made up a larger proportion of Communists than other Russians .
As for this: "In 1970, a Harris study showed that 23 percent of Jewish college students termed themselves “far left” versus 4 percent of Protestants and 2 percent of Catholics."
It has to be higher now. Unless Democrat Jews don't see themselves as "far left" and thus are undercounted.
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https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/274662/american-left-1?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=5b208ef96b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_11_16_09_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-5b208ef96b-207194629
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https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/09/europe/france-anti-semitic-acts-increase-intl/index.html
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https://israelunwired.com/jews-saved-from-muslim-car-ramming-attack-in-la/
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https://israelunwired.com/jews-saved-from-muslim-car-ramming-attack-in-la/
(https://pics.me.me/letsinotjumptoconclut-aaaand-its-muslims-net-memegenerator-lets-not-jump-to-21572651.png)
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https://israelunwired.com/jews-saved-from-muslim-car-ramming-attack-in-la/
https://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2018/11/27/ben-shapiro-called-it-story-of-mans-attempt-to-run-down-jews-with-his-car-dies-a-quick-death/?utm_campaign=twitchywidget
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https://www.westernjournal.com/insiders-womens-march-leaders-spouted-anti-semitic-theories-first-meeting/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=westernjournalism&utm_content=2018-12-12&utm_campaign=manualpost&fbclid=IwAR1OV7dAdABFPmKDCJFPTYL6iZKPq-gmGPVIz95C7JnRJ3gDeClGkzu9tP8
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http://carolineglick.com/the-new-inquisition/
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https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/277273/the-new-york-times-just-published-an-unqualified-recommendation-for-an-insanely-anti-semitic-book?fbclid=IwAR2ZD6oUlxr3akIenNr1KuaKFUqc7r0-x8vg99rawRmIuyREsrE8ovzPpJk
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second post
https://www.dailywire.com/news/39657/womens-march-leader-yeah-jews-are-white-hank-berrien?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_content=062316-news&utm_campaign=dwbrand
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third post
https://www.timesofisrael.com/belgian-soccer-fans-sing-chant-about-burning-jews/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&fbclid=IwAR3afcTlhZcrQqVyHmmtn1XMLuGEaLJx3PwI6PnVoFpgMgtGtSNlm32bdQo
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https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ashkenazi-jews-are-indigenous-to-israel-not-europe/?fbclid=IwAR2aV5E1VnQ2lrUoEvuBNyFMFtLPFSxCOAbVXXUREmnDIvl1z8giCqtE_8g
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https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/cleveland-doctor-fired-clinic-following-investigation-dozens-threatening-anti-semitic-tweets-183416657.html
I remember a Palestinian in med school who expressed his hatred of Jews.
He was caught cheating and thrown out of the program
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Prominent Sponsors Bail on Women's March
Jan 15, 2019 at 11:17 am
https://www.investigativeproject.org/7784/prominent-sponsors-bail-on-women-march
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https://www.timesofisrael.com/after-banning-israelis-malaysia-blocked-from-hosting-paralympics-swimming-meet/?fbclid=IwAR3_EPADUDqgp8e6V2PqLfJkoEPnXQCCsMm1mZ545EUwIjQ-yAK_GFpQQ9I
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https://bigleaguepolitics.com/breaking-virginia-democrat-ibraheem-samirah-apologizes-for-anti-semitic-posts-i-am-so-sorry/
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https://bigleaguepolitics.com/breaking-virginia-democrat-ibraheem-samirah-apologizes-for-anti-semitic-posts-i-am-so-sorry/
"I am so sorry I got caught!"
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https://news.grabien.com/story-rep-ilhan-omar-goes-anti-semitic-twitter-rampage
What is amazing are the 3 Jews in the comments section who are defending Omar.
Democrats before Jews.
One even says "I am a Jew who does not like the occupation ". I wonder what he thinks the "solution" is.
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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilytamkin/israel-dnc-bds-democrats-2020
I never thought I would see the day a majority of young American Jews would turn on Israel.
I think the millennials "know not what they do". They drink from the fountain of Democrat Progressive dogma they are forced to worship at .
They are not learning from history .
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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilytamkin/israel-dnc-bds-democrats-2020
I never thought I would see the day a majority of young American Jews would turn on Israel.
I think the millennials "know not what they do". They drink from the fountain of Democrat Progressive dogma they are forced to worship at .
They are not learning from history .
All part of the left's mainstreaming of antisemitism.
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Democrats and Anti-Semitism
The problem isn’t ‘tropes’ that are ‘hurtful.’ It’s policies that aim to wipe out the only Jewish nation.
332 Comments
By Abigail Shrier
Feb. 12, 2019 6:45 p.m. ET
Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar at the State of the Union, Feb. 5.
Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar at the State of the Union, Feb. 5. Photo: NurPhoto via Getty Images
The Democrats have an anti-Semitism problem, and it isn’t subtle. Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted Sunday that congressional support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins baby,” a slang term for $100 bills—a straightforward accusation that American lawmakers who support the Jewish state are being bought off. Who does she think is paying American politicians to be pro-Israel, the Forward’s opinion editor asked. “AIPAC!” Ms. Omar gleefully replied, notwithstanding that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee does not contribute to political campaigns.
House Democratic leaders—though none of the Democrats running for president—quickly condemned Ms. Omar’s smear, saying in a statement that her “use of anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel’s supporters” was “hurtful” and “deeply offensive.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said her “anti-Semitic stereotype” was “offensive and irresponsible.”
All true, but beside the point.
That Ms. Omar would slander Israel is disturbing not because of the feelings it tramples. Since her appointment to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, her statement raises alarm about how her enmity for the world’s only Jewish country—and the world’s largest Jewish population—might translate into policy aims. The issues for Israel’s supporters are security and survival, not hurt feelings, which are trivial in comparison. Assuming that all Jews love gefilte fish, play klezmer music, and suffer overbearing mothers? Those are stereotypes. Actively working to isolate Israel and accusing pro-Israel Jews of bribing Congress isn’t “insensitive.” It’s something far darker and more malevolent.
Talk of “tropes” and “stereotypes” betrays the left’s understanding of prejudice, which recognizes no distinction between threats and thoughts. Ms. Omar’s statements require no sophisticated parsing, nor a deep understanding of historical prejudice; real hatred rarely does. Hers is repeated, focused, overt and jubilant. It is bookended with musical notes, as her “all about the Benjamins” tweet was; it ends in an exclamation mark or is stamped with an arm-flex emoji, as was her “apology,” which ran under the defiant heading “Listening and learning, but standing strong,” and read in part: “I unequivocally apologize. At the same time . . .”
There is an air of comeuppance in her persistent design to delegitimize Israel, as when she told Yahoo! News last month that “I almost chuckle” at the idea that Israel is a democracy. Or in her hair-raising proclamation on Twitter , in 2012: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”
Last month, she apologized for this “anti-semitic trope” she “unknowingly used”—as if Jews had a peculiar sensitivity to being accused of using mind control to disguise their evil. It is also unlikely that she meant “Israel” had “hypnotized the world”; Israel has famously few friends on the world stage.
She meant Jews—the people of Israel—a group that can credibly be claimed to hold some political influence in the West. That’s the power to which she objects. They are the people who irk her so much they are already a constant focus of her first weeks of congressional energies.
Among newly prominent Democrats, she is not alone. She and Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan began their time in office by announcing their support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which calls on the world to sever economic and cultural ties with Israel, treating it as a pariah state akin to apartheid South Africa. It doesn’t matter to BDS supporters that Muslim and Arab citizens of Israel enjoy full rights, including representation in the Knesset. For them, it is enough that Jews live on any piece of land to which the Palestinian Arabs claim entitlement. That Jews are native to the land is a detail to overlook, or to deny outright, until these hatemongers decide what to do with them.
Like Ms. Omar, Ms. Tlaib vents toward Israel and Jews an obsessive, focused hostility, which she takes no pains to hide. In 2006 she contributed a column to Louis Farrakhan’s blog. When former CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill echoed Hamas’s language in calling for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea” and defended terrorism against Israeli civilians, Ms. Tlaib praised him for “calling out the oppressive policies of Israel.” Last month, she invited a Hezbollah and Hamas supporter to a private family dinner celebrating her elevation to Congress—a man who has said Israel has no right to exist and called for “Zionist terrorist” Jews to return to Europe. Lest anyone fail to get the message, immediately upon being sworn in, Ms. Tlaib affixed to a map in her office a Post-it Note reading “Palestine” and pointing to Israel.
What does she imagine would happen to the Jews who inhabit the land if Israel were replaced by “Palestine”? Whether she envisions expulsion or genocidal war, the malign intent is unmistakable.
Perhaps we can drop the charade that obsessive hatred of Israel has anything to do with tropes, stereotypes, cultural insensitivity and the like. Such talk permits wrongdoers to claim credibly that they were not aware of a particular Jewish sensitivity. And it makes fools of us all, as lies tend to do.
As long as Democrats continue to condemn anti-Semitism while trivializing its presence within their party, this anti-Semitism is unlikely to subside. Melissa Byrne, a former aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, tweeted of Ms. Omar: “She is a new MoC”—member of Congress—“figuring out how to navigate calling out AIPAC (which is a terrible organization aligned with Bibi).” The soft bigotry of low expectations: Ms. Omar is new here! She didn’t know it was offensive to accuse pro-Israel Jews of graft.
Sometimes hate is just hate. But threats cause alarm because of what they hope to achieve, not because they are hurtful in themselves. Democrats should stop pretending that hatred is a matter of feelings and take Ms. Omar, Ms. Tlaib and their compatriots at their word.
Ms. Shrier is a writer living in Los Angeles.
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" Sometimes hate is just hate. But threats cause alarm because of what they hope to achieve, not because they are hurtful in themselves. Democrats should stop pretending that hatred is a matter of feelings and take Ms. Omar, Ms. Tlaib and their compatriots at their word."
I guess they thought that having her over for a bagel she was going to fall in love with them .
Fools again.
Not me brother.
The only thing I can hope for is that the lib dems start treating this Jew hater like Republicans and make her one term.
She only one by a fluke anyway.
Don't think she has any love for Christians either.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/02/13/local-jewish-leaders-staged-intervention-with-ilhan-omar-in-2018-very-troubled-by-the-answers-we-received/
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https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/280547/virginia-democratic-candidate-apologizes
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just flippant talk
nothing more here folks
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http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/23517?fbclid=IwAR3Y_K6frqSgBnzNIUuxBDJ5fozhxQNOlthCRA6ALAo6JtD-wQOFxotCw64
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/44130/stop-treating-ilhan-omar-child-her-anti-semitism-ben-shapiro?utm_source=shapironewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=030219-news&utm_campaign=position1
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https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2019/03/01/the-last-temptation-michael-cohen/1d1163vl6NuUpSndJ7wOpO/story.html
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second post
https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Terra-Incognita-Growing-anti-Jewsh-retoric-in-the-US-582468?fbclid=IwAR28anfPbiVaBjJLCAngDFqaIxtoAywmn2xaop5t_C6jK60DzmpdrWdcOBM
https://www.jns.org/farrakhan-talmudic-jewish-influence-responsible-for-pedophilia-slave-trade-moses-taught-the-jews-tricknology/?fbclid=IwAR3f4EoiA4eAgwXnHYj2BeOzMdZFWgmycLDGc7tkrKrqsZIhE6qSY_3UmXA
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My first time posting wisdom from this famous and powerful man. Good for him for speaking out and naming names. I wonder if he knew that his party would back off from rebuking her when he wrote this.
There is another party that agrees with him on respect for our good ally Israel and respect for American Jews. Everyone welcome. Did I previously mention the irony of American Muslims sharing a political party with America's gays and Jews. What could possibly go wrong?
To display his Leftist credentials, he includes a lie-hate-slam against Trump that Trump thinks all Muslims are terrorists. That kind of hate lie bigotry is different than what he is writing about because shut up.
People like Rahm think Omar needs to be 'educated' but she already is. She was raised to hate Jews, Israel and America as we know it. Getting her to stop saying what she truly believes, now that she is here legally (via immigration fraud), is un-American. The problem isn't that people like her hate Israel and hate Jews; it is that the Democrats of Minneapolis area including a major Jewish community vote for people like her - thinking that makes them "inclusive". Inclusive is to respect the right of people like Omar to run for office and openly express her hatred but to vote for someone who doesn't.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/ilhan-omars-dual-loyalty-charge-was-anti-semitic/584314/
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https://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Genetic-research-almost-25-percent-of-Latinos-Hispanics-have-Jewish-DNA-581959?fbclid=IwAR2c5__1qkzIAXZtHiqyjAtlIz58FXc8vePOLS_QHPahKIGnCrZPtTmCm3s
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https://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Genetic-research-almost-25-percent-of-Latinos-Hispanics-have-Jewish-DNA-581959?fbclid=IwAR2c5__1qkzIAXZtHiqyjAtlIz58FXc8vePOLS_QHPahKIGnCrZPtTmCm3s
In my old neck of the woods, there are a lot of people who have figured out they are descended from those that fled the inquisition.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/02/19/275862633/crypto-jews-in-the-southwest-find-faith-in-a-shrouded-legacy
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/03/07/david-duke-calls-ilhan-omar-most-important-member-of-the-us-congress/
What do the Dems do now? :evil:
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Her bigotry including the 2012 tweet was fully covered up through her election. Before November, only Scott Johnson at Powerline and us were covering the extremist that Minneapolis thought appropriate to replace Keith Ellison in the US House of Representatives. Now it's in the NYT for all my liberal friends to see. Never Trumper Bret Stephens isn't buying the story that she just didn't understand the weight of her words.
NYTIMES.COM ›
Ilhan Omar Knows Exactly What She Is Doing
BRET STEPHENS MARCH 07, 2019
There’s an old joke about upper-class British anti-Semitism: It means someone who hates Jews more than is strictly necessary. Ilhan Omar, the freshman representative from Minnesota, more than meets the progressive American version of that standard.
Like many self-described progressives, Omar does not like Israel. That’s a shame, not least because Israel is the only country in its region that embraces the sorts of values the Democratic Party claims to champion. When was the last time there was a gay-pride parade in Ramallah, a women’s rights march in Gaza, or an opposition press in Tehran? In what Middle Eastern country other than Israel can an attorney general indict a popular and powerful prime minister on corruption charges?
But America is a free country, and Omar is within her rights to think what she will about Israel or any other state. Contrary to a self-serving myth among Israel’s detractors, there’s rarely a social or reputational penalty for publicly criticizing Israeli policies today. It’s ubiquitous on college campuses and commonplace in editorial pages. And contrary to some recent comments from Senator Elizabeth Warren, no serious person claims criticism of Israel is ipso facto anti-Semitic. My last column called on Benjamin Netanyahu to resign. Last I checked, the Anti-Defamation League has not denounced me.
Omar, however, isn’t just a critic of Israel. As the joke has it, her objections to the Jewish state go well beyond what’s strictly necessary.
“Israel has hypnotized the world,” she tweeted in 2012. “May Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” Last month, she wrote that U.S. support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins baby.” A few weeks after that, she told an audience in D.C. that “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K. to push for allegiance to a foreign country.” Confronted with criticism about the remark from her fellow Democrat Nita Lowey, she replied: “I should not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress or serve on committee.”
Under intense pressure, Omar recanted those first two tweets. But she’s standing her ground on her more recent comments. It’s a case study in the ease with which strident criticism of Israel shades into anti-Semitism.
For those who don’t get it, claims that Israel “hypnotizes” the world, or that it uses money to bend others to its will, or that its American supporters “push for allegiance to a foreign country,” repackage falsehoods commonly used against Jews for centuries. People can debate the case for Israel on the merits, but people who supports the state should have to face allegations that their sympathies have been purchased, or their brain hijacked, or their loyalties divided.
It’s also a case study in the insidious cunning and latent power of anti-Jewish bigotry— proof that anti-Semitism is not, after all, merely the socialism of fools. Omar, I suspect, knows exactly what she is doing. She pleads ignorance when it suits her, saying she was unaware that her references to hypnosis and “Benjamins” might be considered offensive. Or she wraps herself in the flag, sounding almost like Pat Buchanan when he called Congress “Israeli-occupied” territory. Or she invokes free speech, telling Lowey “our democracy is built on debate” — as if the debate she wants to force is as innocuous as a dispute over a spending bill.
As the criticism of Omar mounts, it becomes that much easier for her to seem like the victim of a smear campaign, rather than the instigator of a smear. The secret of anti-Semitism has always rested, in part, on creating the perception that the anti-Semite is, in fact, the victim of the Jews and their allies. Just which powers-that-be are orchestrating that campaign? Why are they afraid of open debate? And what about all the bigotry on their side?
The goal is not to win the argument, at least not anytime soon. Yet merely by refusing to fold, Omar stands to shift the range of acceptable discussion — the so-called Overton window — sharply in her direction. Ideas once thought of as intellectually uncouth and morally repulsive have suddenly become merely controversial. It’s how anti-Zionism has abruptly become an acceptable point of view in reputable circles. It’s why anti-Semitism is just outside the frame, bidding to get in.
House Democrats are now wrangling over the text of a resolution that was initially intended as a condemnation of anti-Semitism, with Omar as its implicit target. At this writing it is mired in predictable controversy, as members of the party’s progressive wing and black caucus rally to Omar’s side in the first open challenge to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership. In the Senate, the presidential hopefuls Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Warren have weighed in with statements that painted Omar as a victim of Islamophobia — which she is — without mentioning that she’s also a purveyor of anti-Semitic bigotry — which she surely is as well.
It says something about the progressive movement today that it has no trouble denouncing Republican racism, real and alleged, every day of the week but has so much trouble calling out naked anti-Semite in its own ranks. This is how progressivism becomes Corbynism. It’s how the left finds its own path toward legitimizing hate. It’s how self-declared anti-fascists develop their own forms of fascism.
If Pelosi can’t muster a powerful and unequivocal resolution condemning anti-Semitism, then Omar will have secured her political future and won a critical battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. At that point, the days when American Jews can live comfortably within the Democratic fold will be numbered.
https://outline.com/VryxtZ
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https://www.theblaze.com/glenn-tv/amid-accusations-of-anti-semitism-omar-and-tlaib-fund-raise-for-organization-linked-to-islamic-terror-groups?utm_content=bufferae608&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=glennbeck&fbclid=IwAR1lFpmkiTyCbdBH9isIkXA1ynZsqKLY-OYBB8wS5VYmFPRMbPk0SxdV16k
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The neglect of the local media to scutinize, vet her is a big part of why we have a "firebrand" like representative Omar in power. Star Tribune ignored her affiliations with terror fund raising. Now they say Representative Omar is unfairly being singled out for her [justifiable?] anti-semitism.
http://m.startribune.com/ilhan-omar-s-actions-fuel-fresh-doubts-divisions-in-her-district/506932182/
In a morally relativistic world, is it "extreme" to agree with all the Middle East that Israel is evil and all Jews should be exterminated? To take it a step further for people on the side of Osama bin Laden, if Israel is the problem and America is the enabler, destroying America is rational and doing it from within is the most cost effective way.
I just wish she would disclose all her views (below) on her campaign literature for voters to consider.
"I will achieve a bold, progressive agenda—where we have Medicare for All, tuition- and debt-free college, housing as a human right, a clean environment for future generations, and elections that cannot be bought."
https://www.ilhanomar.com/
And I will fund peace loving organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah that attack evil places like Israel and western civilization. Peace to those who choose the path [of Jihad]. Death to all others. Love, heart and smiley face, Ilhan.
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Strange, I was under the impression that when we imported 3rd world savages to the west, the magic soil of the west made them into nice, tolerant people, not to say that Somalia isn't internationally known for it's niceness and tolerance. In fact, I think relocating the UN to Mogadishu would be good for everyone!
The neglect of the local media to scutinize, vet her is a big part of why we have a "firebrand" like representative Omar in power. Star Tribune ignored her affiliations with terror fund raising. Now they say Representative Omar is unfairly being singled out for her [justifiable?] anti-semitism.
http://m.startribune.com/ilhan-omar-s-actions-fuel-fresh-doubts-divisions-in-her-district/506932182/
In a morally relativistic world, is it "extreme" to agree with all the Middle East that Israel is evil and all Jews should be exterminated? To take it a step further for people on the side of Osama bin Laden, if Israel is the problem and America is the enabler, destroying America is rational and doing it from within is the most cost effective way.
I just wish she would disclose all her views (below) on her campaign literature for voters to consider.
"I will achieve a bold, progressive agenda—where we have Medicare for All, tuition- and debt-free college, housing as a human right, a clean environment for future generations, and elections that cannot be bought."
https://www.ilhanomar.com/
And I will fund peace loving organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah that attack evil places like Israel and western civilization. Peace to those who choose the path [of Jihad]. Death to all others. Love, heart and smiley face, Ilhan.
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https://forward.com/opinion/420508/the-ussr-was-famous-for-state-sponsored-anti-zionism-is-america-heading-in/?fbclid=IwAR0IzvdOOoqU-Iwss0v9K4miQQBKTQZ9VcU4iVqeht73yvFs_Zop2SaiPAk
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Only 51 % of jews call themselves crats??
weird. So who will 31 % who call themselves independent vote for, Schultz? - i guarantee it won't be a conservative.
they are all libs except for the minority of us including myself:
Gallup: 51% of Jews identify as Democrats, 16% as Republicans
MARCH 14, 2019 8:53 AM
A voter shown casting a ballot in Kent, Ohio, Nov. 6, 2018. (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
(JTA) — About half of American Jews identified as Democrats in Gallup polls in 2018.
Some 52 percent of American Jews identified as Democrat, 16 percent as Republican and 31 as independent in combined Gallup tracking poll data for 2018, which encompassed over 75,000 interviews with U.S. adults, including 938 self-identified Jewish Americans.
Jews were the religious group with the highest percentage identifying as Democrats. By contrast, 30 percent of Catholics and 27 percent of Protestant and other Christians identified as Democrats, as well as 29 percent of all Americans.
Meanwhile, Gallup polling found that Jewish Americans were among the least likely in 2018 to approve of President Donald Trump of all religious groups in 2018, with just 26 percent approving and 71 percent disapproving.
By contrast, 50 percent of Protestants and other Christians, and 61 percent of Mormons approved of Trump’s performance, compared to 40 percent of all Americans.
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https://www.fort-russ.com/2019/03/christchurch-attack-decoded-a-manifestation-of-israels-master-plan-to-orchestrate-war-between-the-muslim-and-christian-world/
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https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/american-jews-on-the-brink-of-civil-war/
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From PJ Media . previously I just read "Pajama Media"
He wonders if we will see a shift in Jewish political allegiance . My thoughts are we may see a few who may change but none of the ones I know of are any different:
https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/american-jews-on-the-brink-of-civil-war/
Roger was a typical Liberal American Jew until he realized otherwise:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_L._Simon
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/opinion/philosophy-anti-semitism.html?fbclid=IwAR31_GjKfnETHKRzth3xl-vQs2VuyKYn-cs-rwjQnYi7pE9TrRYHauu42l4
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https://clarionproject.org/nazi-propaganda-new-york-times-cartoon/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=4882fa60b4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_03_17_12_03_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-4882fa60b4-6358189&mc_cid=4882fa60b4&mc_eid=d7eaaa3130
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https://clarionproject.org/nazi-propaganda-new-york-times-cartoon/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=4882fa60b4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_03_17_12_03_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-4882fa60b4-6358189&mc_cid=4882fa60b4&mc_eid=d7eaaa3130
It's very surprising that the party of Sharpton, Obama and Wright has gone all in on antisemitism!
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"It's very surprising that the party of Sharpton, Obama and Wright has gone all in on antisemitism!"
That is because the liberal jews let them!
don't think any of the Democrat Jews they will vote Republican now.
And they won't stay home either.
They will do their duty and be good Democrats - because they are for the poor.
The party takes the Jews )along with their money for granted)
You think the likes of Schiff Nadler Maher are going to admit they are wrong ?
Dumb asses are giving their country away and being taken for granted by the Dem candidates just
like they do with the Blacks.
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A Despicable Cartoon in The Times
The paper of record needs to reflect deeply on how it came to publish anti-Semitic propaganda.
Bret Stephens
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
April 28, 2019
As prejudices go, anti-Semitism can sometimes be hard to pin down, but on Thursday the opinion pages of The New York Times international edition provided a textbook illustration of it.
Except that The Times wasn’t explaining anti-Semitism. It was purveying it.
It did so in the form of a cartoon, provided to the newspaper by a wire service and published directly above an unrelated column by Tom Friedman, in which a guide dog with a prideful countenance and the face of Benjamin Netanyahu leads a blind, fat Donald Trump wearing dark glasses and a black yarmulke. Lest there be any doubt as to the identity of the dog-man, it wears a collar from which hangs a Star of David.
Here was an image that, in another age, might have been published in the pages of Der Stürmer. The Jew in the form of a dog. The small but wily Jew leading the dumb and trusting American. The hated Trump being Judaized with a skullcap. The nominal servant acting as the true master. The cartoon checked so many anti-Semitic boxes that the only thing missing was a dollar sign.
The image also had an obvious political message: Namely, that in the current administration, the United States follows wherever Israel wants to go. This is false — consider Israel’s horrified reaction to Trump’s announcement last year that he intended to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria — but it’s beside the point. There are legitimate ways to criticize Trump’s approach to Israel, in pictures as well as words. But there was nothing legitimate about this cartoon.
So what was it doing in The Times?
For some Times readers — or, as often, former readers — the answer is clear: The Times has a longstanding Jewish problem, dating back to World War II, when it mostly buried news about the Holocaust, and continuing into the present day in the form of intensely adversarial coverage of Israel. The criticism goes double when it comes to the editorial pages, whose overall approach toward the Jewish state tends to range, with some notable exceptions, from tut-tutting disappointment to thunderous condemnation.
For these readers, the cartoon would have come like the slip of the tongue that reveals the deeper institutional prejudice. What was long suspected is, at last, revealed.
The real story is a bit different, though not in ways that acquit The Times. The cartoon appeared in the print version of the international edition, which has a limited overseas circulation, a much smaller staff, and far less oversight than the regular edition. Incredibly, the cartoon itself was selected and seen by just one midlevel editor right before the paper went to press.
An initial editor’s note acknowledged that the cartoon “included anti-Semitic tropes,” “was offensive,” and that “it was an error of judgment to publish it.” On Sunday, The Times issued an additional statement saying it was “deeply sorry” for the cartoon and that “significant changes” would be made in terms of internal processes and training.
In other words, the paper’s position is that it is guilty of a serious screw-up but not a cardinal sin. Not quite.
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The problem with the cartoon isn’t that its publication was a willful act of anti-Semitism. It wasn’t. The problem is that its publication was an astonishing act of ignorance of anti-Semitism — and that, at a publication that is otherwise hyper-alert to nearly every conceivable expression of prejudice, from mansplaining to racial microaggressions to transphobia.
Imagine, for instance, if the dog on a leash in the image hadn’t been the Israeli prime minister but instead a prominent woman such as Nancy Pelosi, a person of color such as John Lewis, or a Muslim such as Ilhan Omar. Would that have gone unnoticed by either the wire service that provides the Times with images or the editor who, even if he were working in haste, selected it?
The question answers itself. And it raises a follow-on: How have even the most blatant expressions of anti-Semitism become almost undetectable to editors who think it’s part of their job to stand up to bigotry?
The reason is the almost torrential criticism of Israel and the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism, including by this paper, which has become so common that people have been desensitized to its inherent bigotry. So long as anti-Semitic arguments or images are framed, however speciously, as commentary about Israel, there will be a tendency to view them as a form of political opinion, not ethnic prejudice. But as I noted in a Sunday Review essay in February, anti-Zionism is all but indistinguishable from anti-Semitism in practice and often in intent, however much progressives try to deny this.
Add to the mix the media’s routine demonization of Netanyahu, and it is easy to see how the cartoon came to be drawn and published: Already depicted as a malevolent Jewish leader, it’s just a short step to depict him as a malevolent Jew.
I’m writing this column conscious of the fact that it is unusually critical of the newspaper in which it appears, and it is a credit to the paper that it is publishing it. I have now been with The Times for two years and I’m certain that the charge that the institution is in any way anti-Semitic is a calumny.
But the publication of the cartoon isn’t just an “error of judgment,” either. The paper owes the Israeli prime minister an apology. It owes itself some serious reflection as to how it came to publish that cartoon — and how its publication came, to many longtime readers, as a shock but not a surprise.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
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Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. @BretStephensNYT • Facebook
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Amazing that the most prominent criticism of this New York Times' mistake was published in the New York Times.
Isn't this the exact same point Representative Omar just made and Democrats refused to single out and condemn?
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" .A Despicable Cartoon in The Times"
What is even more weird is the NYT is controlled by Jews since 1896. ( which is what I thought but just confirmed)
F rom Wikipedia : "The paper is owned by The New York Times Company, which is publicly traded and is controlled by the Sulzberger family through a dual-class share structure.[11] It has been owned by the family since 1896; A.G. Sulzberger, the paper's publisher, and his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the company's chairman, are the fourth and fifth generation of the family to helm the paper.[12]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times
Which confirms what I have posted for years.
Lib Jews are more in love with their Democrat Party then their own religion.
To them everything and everyone is a dichotomy :
Democrats vs Evil or Nazis
Their political party is their new religion.
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https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/04/30/caroline-glick-new-york-times-central-clearinghouse-of-antisemitism-in-america/?fbclid=IwAR0MgHra3RlHoCBHG0J8A9x5luAmJz6wme8fQBaMi-e73PW_Gq7qyKqskEs
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1/2 hr discussion on NYT history of anti semitism
and more. Worth the time. I learned a few things I did not know like the NYT cover up or the Stalin caused famine in Ukraine as well as the cover up of concentration camps in WWII
I wondered if NYT is trying not to be a shill for Jews and instead is trying to appear not pro Jew.
In any case hard to believe Jewish controlled newspaper is this way.
And Wash compost the same.
Mark states , as I have here for yrs . for lib Jews, the Democrat Party is first and foremost:
https://www.conservativereview.com/news/levin-new-york-times-complicit-rise-anti-semitism-almost-century/
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What does the fact that one might get matzo ball soup and have access to a rabbi have anything to do with anything here?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-former-lawyer-heads-u-prison-offers-matzo-100246226.html
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https://www.reallyamerican.com/white-supremacists-chant-six-million-more-after-crashing-holocaust-remembrance-day-event-in-arkansas-405?fbclid=IwAR2ydS2CPcr7bX8N6fSou1eBF21fHYM02Btks7QNbXXyT5-tFraT6F-1nNA
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*******https://www.reallyamerican.com/white-supremacists-chant-six-million-more-after-crashing-holocaust-remembrance-day-event-in-arkansas-405?fbclid=IwAR2ydS2CPcr7bX8N6fSou1eBF21fHYM02Btks7QNbXXyT5-tFraT6F-1nNA*******
Clearly bad but for some reason news media without exception always show close ups of such protestors making it look like it is some huge demonstration when in reality it maybe no more than 10 to 20 people if that many.
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Indeed. Here is video
https://5newsonline.com/2019/05/06/holocaust-remembrance-day-event-in-russellville-interrupted-by-white-supremacists-rally/amp/?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR2QEb6qEzm7RHLFL_lgMnlEaTYDyWztH5fmCwecp95hnys47tj6uuJrmFo
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*******https://www.reallyamerican.com/white-supremacists-chant-six-million-more-after-crashing-holocaust-remembrance-day-event-in-arkansas-405?fbclid=IwAR2ydS2CPcr7bX8N6fSou1eBF21fHYM02Btks7QNbXXyT5-tFraT6F-1nNA*******
Clearly bad but for some reason news media without exception always show close ups of such protestors making it look like it is some huge demonstration when in reality it maybe no more than 10 to 20 people if that many.
The dems have more anti-semites than that serving in congress...
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https://www.thejc.com/culture/features/the-jews-driven-out-of-homes-in-arab-lands-1.448713?fbclid=IwAR0oS2MgpiWCdrXFvu8tkePg0lXRRRNdfBEMX79h9hzJ11me7uyqJL3YaiY
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https://www.thejc.com/culture/features/the-jews-driven-out-of-homes-in-arab-lands-1.448713?fbclid=IwAR0oS2MgpiWCdrXFvu8tkePg0lXRRRNdfBEMX79h9hzJ11me7uyqJL3YaiY
but wait ,
I thought as per members of US Congress , we were given history lessons that Jews were welcome in Arab lands and offered safe haven.
( if these Congress members spoke of Blacks this way they would be run out of DC !)
1/3 of Bagdadians were Jewish in 1939!!! :-o
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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48411735?fbclid=IwAR1_SQwSYJ28u4QAqYx1eC2wMn68hhOx6foTzHz4ut5HuMHiGRBtbGv7glc
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43812273
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38661621
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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48411735?fbclid=IwAR1_SQwSYJ28u4QAqYx1eC2wMn68hhOx6foTzHz4ut5HuMHiGRBtbGv7glc
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43812273
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38661621
I doubt much of the attacks have much to do with the German right.
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7087929/Pro-Palestine-group-supported-Corbyn-forces-Jewish-shops-close.html?fbclid=IwAR3DvHCZkyXPTYJbzSGJLwxeya6NSdNBYBta_Hefrz0Vnt_Wzw5GiQ-ITTY
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https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/06/24/amid-antisemitism-surge-boston-area-rabbi-urges-congregants-to-bring-guns-to-services/?fbclid=IwAR3-m5Dy129BJ6iu3EfiN2JCxGhMC4EkAnch8QgmVJoUQHaHyqQ_rfzvZ5c
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https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/07/03/in-unhrc-speech-ex-miss-iraq-sarah-idan-blasts-antisemitism-biased-media-coverage-against-israel/?fbclid=IwAR0QBkok7qQ9hzHE8fxO4tHwFaWLAsoeDQcqp5APN3Zr2RJcBxwpCSaxgQ4
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cannot verify the Holocaust occurred
in Boca Raton (which is 70+ % Jews - I lived there for 3 yrs):
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/schools/fl-ne-william-latson-comments-20190708-cm5wzlw4lrayrl5y2r3vljxhnu-story.html
LOL
That would be like me going to teach in Harlem and claim I cannot verify there was ever slavery in the US. I'd be dead before I left the room.
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"cannot verify the Holocaust occurred"
To paraphrase Captain Von Trapp, the principal suffers from a deplorable lack of curiosity if he she zhe cannot verify the Holocaust occurred. I am far from unique in having known two eyewitnesses, my father and his war buddy who I met with after my dad passed. They were both first responders at Buchenwald. To quote Lenny Woods, everyone that lived near it knew what was happening by the smell. He named a Jewish member of their unit who vomited uncontrollably as they approached through the stench of human incineration.
Yeah maybe it didn't occur...
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Can Ilhan Omar Overcome Her Prejudice?
I was born in Somalia and grew up amid pervasive Muslim anti-Semitism. Hate is hard to unlearn without coming to terms with how you learned it.
By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
July 12, 2019 6:24 pm ET
Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar at a news conference in Washington, April 10. Photo: jim bourg/Reuters
I once opened a speech by confessing to a crowd of Jews that I used to hate them. It was 2006 and I was a young native of Somalia who’d been elected to the Dutch Parliament. The American Jewish Committee was giving me its Moral Courage Award. I felt honored and humbled, but a little dishonest if I didn’t own up to my anti-Semitic past. So I told them how I’d learned to blame the Jews for everything.
Fast-forward to 2019. A freshman congresswoman from Minnesota has been infuriating the Jewish community and discomfiting the Democratic leadership with her expressions of anti-Semitism. Like me, Ilhan Omar was born in Somalia and exposed at an early age to Muslim anti-Semitism.
Some of the members of my 2006 AJC audience have asked me to explain and respond to Ms. Omar’s comments, including her equivocal apologies. Their main question is whether it is possible for Ms. Omar to unlearn her evident hatred of Jews—and if so, how to help.
In my experience it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to unlearn hate without coming to terms with how you learned to hate. Most Americans are familiar with the classic Western flavors of anti-Semitism: the Christian, European, white-supremacist and Communist types. But little attention has been paid to the special case of Muslim anti-Semitism. That is a pity because today it is anti-Semitism’s most zealous, most potent and most underestimated form.
I never heard the term “anti-Semitism” until I moved to the Netherlands in my 20s. But I had firsthand familiarity with its Muslim variety. As a child in Somalia, I was a passive consumer of anti-Semitism. Things would break, conflicts would arise, shortages would occur—and adults would blame it all on the Jews.
When I was a little girl, my mom often lost her temper with my brother, with the grocer or with a neighbor. She would scream or curse under her breath “Yahud!” followed by a description of the hostility, ignominy or despicable behavior of the subject of her wrath. It wasn’t just my mother; grown-ups around me exclaimed “Yahud!” the way Americans use the F-word. I was made to understand that Jews—Yahud—were all bad. No one took any trouble to build a rational framework around the idea—hardly necessary, since there were no Jews around. But it set the necessary foundation for the next phase of my development.
At 15 I became an Islamist by joining the Muslim Brotherhood. I began attending religious and civil-society events, where I received an education in the depth and breadth of Jewish villainy. This was done in two ways.
The first was theological. We were taught that the Jews betrayed our prophet Muhammad. Through Quranic verses (such as 7:166, 2:65 and 5:60), we learned that Allah had eternally condemned them, that they were not human but descendants of pigs and monkeys, that we should aspire to kill them wherever we found them. We were taught to pray: “Dear God, please destroy the Jews, the Zionists, the state of Israel. Amen.”
We were taught that the Jews occupied the Holy Land of Palestine. We were shown pictures of mutilated bodies, dead children, wailing widows and weeping orphans. Standing over them in military uniform were Israeli soldiers with large guns. We were told their killing of Palestinians was wanton, unprovoked and an expression of their hatred for Muslims.
The theological and the political stories were woven together, as in the Hamas charter: “The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The Stones and trees will say, “O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill me.” ’ . . . There is no solution for the Palestine question except through Jihad.”
That combination of narratives is the essence of Muslim anti-Semitism. Mohammed Morsi, the longtime Muslim Brotherhood leader who died June 17 but was president of Egypt for a year beginning in 2012, urged in 2010: “We must never forget, brothers, to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews”—two categories that tend to merge along with allegations of world domination.
European anti-Semitism is also a mixture. Medieval Christian antipathy toward “Christ killers” blended with radical critiques of capitalism in the 19th century and racial pseudoscience in the 20th. But before the Depression, anti-Semitic parties were not mass parties. Nor have they been since World War II. Muslim anti-Semitism has a broader base, and its propagators have had the time and resources to spread it widely.
To see how, begin at the top. Most men (and the odd woman) in power in Muslim-majority countries are autocrats. Even where there are elections, corrupt rulers play an intricate game to stay in power. Their signature move is the promise to “free” the Holy Land—that is, to eliminate the Jewish state. The rulers of Iran are explicit about this goal. Other Muslim leaders may pay lip service to the peace process and the two-state solution, but government anti-Semitism is frequently on display at the United Nations, where Israel is repeatedly compared to apartheid South Africa, accused of genocide and demonized as racist.
Media also play their part. There is very little freedom of expression in Muslim-majority countries, and state-owned media churn out anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda daily—as do even media groups that style themselves as critical of Muslim autocracies, such as Al Jazeera and Al-Manar.
Then there are the mosques, madrassas and other religious institutions. Schools in general, especially college campuses, have been an Islamist stronghold for generations in Muslim-majority countries. That matters because graduates go on to leadership positions in the professions, media, government and other institutions.
Refugee camps are another zone of indoctrination. They are full of vulnerable people, and Islamists prey on them. They come offering food, tents and first aid, followed by education. They establish madrassas in the camps, then indoctrinate the kids with a message that consists in large part of hatred for Jews and rejection of Israel.
Perhaps—I do not know—this is what happened to Ms. Omar in the four years she spent in a refugee camp in Kenya as a child. Or perhaps she became acquainted with Islamist anti-Semitism in Minnesota, where her family settled when she was 12. In any case, her preoccupation with the Jews and Israel would otherwise be hard to explain.
Spreading anti-Semitism through all these channels is no trivial matter—and this brings us to the question of resources. “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” Ms. Omar tweeted in February, implying that American politicians support Israel only because of Jewish financial contributions. The irony is that the resources available to propagate Islamist ideologies, with their attendant anti-Semitism, vastly exceed what pro-Israel groups spend in the U.S. Since the early 1970s the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has spent vast sums to spread Wahhabi Islam abroad. Much of this funding is opaque, but estimates of the cumulative sum run as high as $100 billion.
Thousands of schools in Pakistan, funded with Saudi money, “teach a version of Islam that leads [to] anti-Western militancy,” according to Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy—and, one might add, to an anti-Semitic militancy.
In recent years the Saudi leadership has tried to turn away from supporting this type of religious radicalism. But increasingly Qatar seems to be taking over the Saudi role. In the U.S. alone, the Qatar Foundation has given $30.6 million over the past eight years to public schools, ostensibly for teaching Arabic and promoting cultural exchange.
For years, Qatar has hosted influential radical clerics such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi and provided them with a global microphone, and the country’s school textbooks have been criticized for anti-Semitism. They present Jews as treacherous and crafty but also weak, wretched and cowardly; Islam is described as inherently superior. “The Grade 11 text discusses at length the issue of how non-Muslims should be treated,” the Middle East Media Research Institute reports. “It warns students not to form relationships with unbelievers, and emphasizes the principle of loyalty to Muslims and disavowal of unbelievers.”
The allegation that Jewish or Zionist money controls Congress is nonsensical. The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that the Israeli government has spent $34 million on lobbying in Washington since 2017. The Saudis and Qataris spent a combined $51 million during the same period. If we include foreign nongovernmental organizations, the pro-Israel lobbying figure rises to $63 million—less than the $68 million spent lobbying for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
In 2018 domestic American pro-Israeli lobbying—including but not limited to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac—totaled $5.1 million. No comparable figures are available for domestic pro-Islamist lobbying efforts. But as journalist Armin Rosen observes, Aipac’s 2018 total, at $3.5 million, was less than either the American Association of Airport Executives or the Association of American Railroads spent on lobbying. Aipac’s influence has more to do with the power of its arguments than the size of its wallet.
Now consider the demographics. Jews were a minority in Europe in the 1930s, but a substantial one, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Today Jews are at a much greater disadvantage. For each Jew world-wide, there are 100 Muslims. In many European countries—including France, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K.—the Muslim population far exceeds the Jewish population, and the gap is widening. American Jews still outnumber Muslims but won’t by 2050.
The problem of Muslim anti-Semitism is much bigger than Ilhan Omar. Condemning her, expelling her from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, or defeating her in 2020 won’t make the problem go away.
Islamists have understood well how to couple Muslim anti-Semitism with the American left’s vague notion of “social justice.” They have succeeded in couching their agenda in the progressive framework of the oppressed versus the oppressor. Identity politics and victimhood culture also provide Islamists with the vocabulary to deflect their critics with accusations of “Islamophobia,” “white privilege” and “insensitivity.” A perfect illustration was the way Ms. Omar and her allies were able to turn a House resolution condemning her anti-Semitism into a garbled “intersectional” rant in which Muslims emerged as the most vulnerable minority in the league table of victimhood.
As for me, I eventually unlearned my hatred of Jews, Zionists and Israel. As an asylum seeker turned student turned politician in Holland, I was exposed to a complex set of circumstances that led me to question my own prejudices. Perhaps I didn’t stay in the Islamist fold long enough for the indoctrination to stick. Perhaps my falling out with my parents and extended family after I left home led me to a wider reappraisal of my youthful beliefs. Perhaps it was my loss of religious faith.
In any event, I am living proof that one can be born a Somali, raised as an anti-Semite, indoctrinated as an anti-Zionist—and still overcome all this to appreciate the unique culture of Judaism and the extraordinary achievement of the state of Israel. If I can make that leap, so perhaps can Ms. Omar. Yet that is not really the issue at stake. For she and I are only two individuals. The real question is what, if anything, can be done to check the advance of the mass movement that is Muslim anti-Semitism. Absent a world-wide Muslim reformation, followed by an Islamic enlightenment, I am not sure I know.
Ms. Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali
There is quite a lot about her.
In my mind she speaks the truth and is thus criticized for it in many circles
including the usual radical academics.
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City of Champaign Appoints Anti-Jewish Extremist to Anti-Discrimination Commission
by Sam Westrop
Daily Wire
July 23, 2019
https://www.meforum.org/58999/city-of-champaign-appoints-anti-jewish-extremist
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Really wish the Southern Poverty Law Center was not cited as a source. That said, I find myself in a very weird position. I am a Jew who believes in the Great Replacement Theory-- but for me it is not RACIAL but cultural. America is not a race, America is a Creed.
The propaganda of the Goolag and the Pravdas now frontally attacks the very foundations of natural law and the American Creed. "America was never that great" say Obama, Gov. Cuomo and others and the Big Lie of America being founded upon racism and slavery is pushed everywhere.
The apparent gathering storm of impending tragedy is that those attacked by the Goolag and the Pravdas have taken on its accusation of racism instead of defending themselves/us? as the Creed that we are.
The tremendous disparity in Jewish achievement and political power, aligned in great part as it is with the Goolag, provides fertile ground for the seeds of the Old Hatred.
==================================================
In Georgia, It's Open Season for the Far-Right
By Onnik James Krikorian
A young Georgian, right, wears a T-shirt with the Stormfront logo and the number 14/88 during a September 2016 rally. The number 14 denotes David Lane’s 14-word white supremacist mantra while 88, as the eighth letter of the alphabet, signifies HH, which stands for Heil Hitler.
(ONNIK JAMES KRIKORIAN)
Contributor Perspectives offer insight, analysis and commentary from Stratfor’s Board of Contributors and guest contributors who are distinguished leaders in their fields of expertise.
Highlights
Georgia's far-right movement has been growing in recent years, presenting a dangerous threat to the Jewish, LGBTQ and other non-Georgian Orthodox communities.
Despite a recent high-profile murder and campaigns of intimidation, the government has done little to halt the spread of far-right radicalization.
Plans to implement proportional representation with no electoral threshold could allow far-right parties to grab a greater foothold in Parliament.
It should have been a night like any other for Vitali Safarov. The 25-year-old civil rights activist had gone to a bar in central Tbilisi to socialize when he got into an argument with two neo-Nazi gang members. The altercation soon took a fatal turn and, in the early hours of Sept. 30, 2018, 21-year-old Avtandil Kandelakishvili and 24-year-old Giorgi Sokhadze killed Safarov, stabbing him 10 times.
Sokhadze, better known to his acquaintances as "Slayer," was known to have fascist leanings while Kandelakishvili had a swastika tattoo. A key witness in their trial also testified that the pair made anti-Semitic remarks as they killed Safarov, who was of Jewish and Yazidi descent. Despite the attackers' racial epithets, the court failed to qualify Safarov's murder as a hate crime.
Ultimately, the court sentenced Kandelakishvili and Sokhadze to 15 years in prison in June. Safarov's family, however, intends to appeal the decision, with the victim's mother, Marina Alanakyan, noting her determination to understand why her son was killed and ensure the case sets an important precedent for punishing hate crimes in Georgia.
Others in civil society are just as eager to discover why the government and police have failed to address the increasingly visible problem of far-right radicalization in the country. Indeed, with authorities often turning a blind eye to far-right and neo-Nazi activities and an increasingly unpopular government opening the way for more ultraconservative groupings to enter Parliament and spread their views, Georgia stands on the verge of a shift much further to the right.
A Reality Ignored
To date, violent extremism in Georgia has been framed only in the context of the Islamic State, Syria and the country's minority Muslim population. Even so, there are few effective projects to counter violent extremism in Georgia — none of which deal with far-right disengagement or deradicalization.
The Tolerance and Diversity Institute, for example, noted in a press release less than two weeks after Safarov's murder that neo-Nazi groups had been active around Tbilisi's Freedom Square for at least a year, specifically targeting bars frequented by tourists and other foreigners. Moreover, they alleged that police consistently failed to respond to complaints, including those involving the two neo-Nazis responsible for Safarov's murder.
"This was a truly tragic and fatal result of unpunished hate crimes around us," said Agit Mirzoev, who works for the Center for Participation and Democracy, where Safarov once worked. "We have been systematically talking about the dangers of (far-right) radicalization for the last four or five years, but neither the public nor the government has displayed a proper response to these concerns."
In fact, it was only when Georgians awoke to the news of the Christchurch mosque massacres in March and saw photographs of Georgian script — along with Cyrillic, Armenian and Latin — scrawled on the shooter's weapons that many began to worry about the possible connection between the Georgian far-right and radicals overseas. One of the names inscribed on attacker Brenton Tarrant's armaments was that of David the Builder, the Georgian king who led Georgian forces to victory over the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Didgori in 1121. David, his flag and 1121 have all become touchstones for far-right groups like the Georgian March, whose members have made the king's unicorn flag their main symbol and begun to wear T-shirts bearing the date of the Battle of Didgori.
Two women members of the far-right Georgian March wear T-shirts featuring an image of Georgian King David the Builder crossing himself and the year of 1121, when Georgians defeated the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Didgori. 1121 has now become an important symbol for ultranationalists.
(ONNIK JAMES KRIKORIAN)
Immediately following the New Zealand massacres, the Georgian government vowed to investigate any possible links between the country's neo-Nazis and far-right militants abroad. Since then, however, there has been no progress.
The Christchurch attacker's manifesto appeared to borrow heavily from that of Anders Breivik, the far-right terrorist who killed 77 people, including a Georgian, in a bomb attack in Oslo and a massacre on Utoya island in Norway in July 2011. Both Breivik and Tarrant appear to have been fascinated with Georgia and other Christian countries that shared a historical enmity with Muslims. Both, too, were obsessed with the "Great Replacement," a far-right conspiracy theory that non-Europeans are taking the place of white Europeans. Today, the Great Replacement is a key narrative among far-right groups in Georgia and elsewhere.
One Georgian site, MyStar, even translated the works of David Lane, a member of the U.S. domestic terrorist organization the Order, into Georgian. In the wider world, Lane is better known for his 14 words, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children," which has become a mantra for white supremacists and neo-Nazis the world over. Meanwhile, another MyStar post quoted the Old Testament to justify the execution of children in Nazi Germany. The site did not renew its hosting at the beginning of this year, and the domain is now used to sell wallets and handbags.
Nevertheless, other sites continue to post similar content. One such group is the neo-Nazi Georgian Power, which is prolific in its dissemination of alt-right memes depicting Pepe the Frog, references to the red and blue pills from "The Matrix" (which has been appropriated by the far-right), and patriarchal images of "pure" women. It has also adopted Lane's 14 words as a Georgian hashtag on Facebook.
Most recently, ultra-conservative and nationalist groups such as the neo-Nazi National Unity and the populist Georgian March have also stepped up their activities. In May last year, both groups converged on the Georgian Parliament to face off with nightclub patrons who were protesting a particularly heavy-handed police raid on the city's famous Bassiani Club.
Sandro Bregadze, the founder of the far-right populist Georgian March, instructs his supporters to break through police lines to attack a demonstration staged by young Georgians against heavy-handed anti-drug police raids on the Bassiani nightclub in March 2018.
(ONNIK JAMES KRIKORIAN)
Despite the show of force, neither Sandro Bregadze (Georgian March's leader) nor Giorgi Chelidze (the head of National Unity) faced any changes at the time. In fact, it was only in September 2018 that authorities prosecuted Chelidze for the illegal possession of munitions — an act that came to light after he posted a video on Facebook of himself and others training with semi-automatic weapons. In the trial that followed, Chelidze and his supporters made Nazi salutes in the courtroom, imitating Breivik during his trial. Nevertheless, the court sentenced the National Unity leader to only 3.5 years in prison in May.
Moreover, the Georgian government failed to show any interest in tackling the problem of far-right radicalization, even though Tbilisi hosted an Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe seminar in June on countering violent extremism.
The country's former public defender, Ucha Nanuashvili, accused the government of maintaining a double standard, displaying inconsistencies in the fight against extremism and merely reacting in exceptional cases — and even then, only inadequately. "There is no coordination of state institutions in this regard, and the impression is that the authorities are not aware of the devastating effects that are caused by encouraging these groups," Nanuashvili said.
In June, for example, the Interior Ministry refused to provide security for Tbilisi's LGBTQ community for the first-ever Pride event in what remains a country with conservative mores. Undeterred, organizers said they would hold the event anyway, even as far-right and ultranationalist groups threatened violence in response. The Georgian Orthodox Church called for calm but warned that any violence would be the fault of the Pride organizers.
A priest leads an anti-immigrant demonstration by the far-right Georgian March on Tbilisi's Aghmashenebeli Avenue in 2017. Alleged to have financial links with Russia, the movement acts against members of Georgia’s LGBTQ community and nongovernmental organizations funded by George Soros’ Open Society Institute.
(ONNIK JAMES KRIKORIAN)
Enter the Demagogue
After a tense standoff between ultraconservative groups and LGBTQ activists outside the State Chancellory on June 14, millionaire businessman Levan Vasadze announced two days later that he was forming vigilante groups to identify and abduct anyone considered likely to attend or support Tbilisi Pride. Despite warnings from the Interior Ministry that such calls violated Article 223 of the Criminal Code, which prohibits the formation of illegal groupings, Vasadze has yet to be prosecuted.
In May last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center named Vasadze as a representative of the anti-LGBTQ World Congress of Families, which is linked to Alexander Dugin, who has connections to the Kremlin. In December 2017, the center noted that Vasadze spoke in Chisinau, Moldova, at Dugin's Eurasian Conference, an event that also drew neo-Nazis and Identitarians.
Georgian ultranationalists deny any links to Moscow, Nanuashvili said. "However, their talking points are similar to those of Russian far-right groups and represent Russian 'soft power,'" he said. "Most of these groups are truly anti-Russian, but relatively large and influential groups such as Georgian March and other organizations united around leaders such as Vasadze cannot hide their pro-Russian attitudes."
George Marjanishvili, director of the Center for Participation and Democracy, is not surprised by the lack of action from authorities. "Vasadze represents a pretty influential group in Georgia," he said.
Levan Vasadze, a Georgian businessman who made his fortune in Russia, speaks outside the State Chancellory in June 2019. The location had been planned for a pro-LGBTQ rally, but Vasadze and the Georgian March instead took it over, threatening civil society actors and members of the LGBTQ community in Georgia. Although Vasadze has illegally called for the formation of anti-LGBTQ vigilante groups, authorities have yet to prosecute him.
(ONNIK JAMES KRIKORIAN)
"It is a group that has support from the Georgian Orthodox Church and the patriarch himself," Marjanishvili said. "Most of society views (Vasadze) as the 'megaphone' of the Georgian Patriarchate so the government tries to avoid any controversy with him precisely because of this influence. Vasadze can create bigger problems for the government than the opposition, so the government usually chooses to bury its head in the sand."
Of more concern, according to critics, is speculation that the government might use such far-right groups politically. "It's quite clear that the government occasionally uses these groups to frighten and demonize liberal and other groups with different opinions from them," Nanuashvili said. "All of this reinforces the assumption that these groups have the favor and support of some government officials."
This also raises fears about next year's parliamentary elections. With its popularity at the lowest in years, the ruling Georgian Dream party is currently polling at just 21 percent, according to a recent poll from the National Democratic Institute, just six points higher than the opposition United National Movement.
With public discontent growing, especially in the wake of violent anti-government protests on June 20 and daily rallies since, Georgian Dream's founder and chairman, the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, has acceded to one of the demonstrators' demands, namely, that he bring forward plans to implement proportional representation to next year, instead of 2024. Ivanishvili is considered by local and regional analysts to be the real power in Georgia.
The far-right probably has enough supporters to gain seats in the Georgian Parliament, achieve legitimization and use Parliament to spread hate and xenophobia.
Crucially, Ivanishvili has also decided to abort initial plans to set an electoral threshold, meaning there will be no barrier to parliamentary representation. "We know that these groups have political ambitions, and I think this is concerning in light of changing the electoral system," Marjanishvili said. "Now the minimum barrier is almost non-existent and they probably have enough supporters to gain seats in the Georgian Parliament, achieve legitimization and use Parliament to spread hate and xenophobia."
Such concerns are not unfounded. Even under the current electoral system, the ultraconservative populist Alliance of Patriots, considered by many to be pro-Russian, entered Parliament in 2016 with six seats after narrowly scraping past the 5 percent threshold.
In 2013, Tabula, a popular online site that used to also publish a regular print edition, forecast such a scenario. "The current government is friendly toward (Vasadze) and he thus has full freedom to act," the magazine wrote. "Of primary importance, however, is how influential this new political actor will become and what degree of harm he will inflict on Georgia's interests and security."
Tabula's call has been prophetic: In the six years since, the views of Vasadze and the rest of Georgia's far-right have wormed their way further into society. And as things stand now, their influence is only likely to increase.
-
When the left pushes "Everything is racist, including America" and "everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi, who I can then act violently towards, without legal consequence" and constant attacks on "whiteness", what are they creating?
Really wish the Southern Poverty Law Center was not cited as a source. That said, I find myself in a very weird position. I am a Jew who believes in the Great Replacement Theory-- but for me it is not RACIAL but cultural. America is not a race, America is a Creed.
The propaganda of the Goolag and the Pravdas now frontally attacks the very foundations of natural law and the American Creed. "America was never that great" say Obama, Gov. Cuomo and others and the Big Lie of America being founded upon racism and slavery is pushed everywhere.
The apparent gathering storm of impending tragedy is that those attacked by the Goolag and the Pravdas have taken on its accusation of racism instead of defending themselves/us? as the Creed that we are.
The tremendous disparity in Jewish achievement and political power, aligned in great part as it is with the Goolag, provides fertile ground for the seeds of the Old Hatred.
==================================================
In Georgia, It's Open Season for the Far-Right
By Onnik James Krikorian
A young Georgian, right, wears a T-shirt with the Stormfront logo and the number 14/88 during a September 2016 rally. The number 14 denotes David Lane’s 14-word white supremacist mantra while 88, as the eighth letter of the alphabet, signifies HH, which stands for Heil Hitler.
(ONNIK JAMES KRIKORIAN)
Contributor Perspectives offer insight, analysis and commentary from Stratfor’s Board of Contributors and guest contributors who are distinguished leaders in their fields of expertise.
Highlights
Georgia's far-right movement has been growing in recent years, presenting a dangerous threat to the Jewish, LGBTQ and other non-Georgian Orthodox communities.
Despite a recent high-profile murder and campaigns of intimidation, the government has done little to halt the spread of far-right radicalization.
Plans to implement proportional representation with no electoral threshold could allow far-right parties to grab a greater foothold in Parliament.
It should have been a night like any other for Vitali Safarov. The 25-year-old civil rights activist had gone to a bar in central Tbilisi to socialize when he got into an argument with two neo-Nazi gang members. The altercation soon took a fatal turn and, in the early hours of Sept. 30, 2018, 21-year-old Avtandil Kandelakishvili and 24-year-old Giorgi Sokhadze killed Safarov, stabbing him 10 times.
Sokhadze, better known to his acquaintances as "Slayer," was known to have fascist leanings while Kandelakishvili had a swastika tattoo. A key witness in their trial also testified that the pair made anti-Semitic remarks as they killed Safarov, who was of Jewish and Yazidi descent. Despite the attackers' racial epithets, the court failed to qualify Safarov's murder as a hate crime.
Ultimately, the court sentenced Kandelakishvili and Sokhadze to 15 years in prison in June. Safarov's family, however, intends to appeal the decision, with the victim's mother, Marina Alanakyan, noting her determination to understand why her son was killed and ensure the case sets an important precedent for punishing hate crimes in Georgia.
Others in civil society are just as eager to discover why the government and police have failed to address the increasingly visible problem of far-right radicalization in the country. Indeed, with authorities often turning a blind eye to far-right and neo-Nazi activities and an increasingly unpopular government opening the way for more ultraconservative groupings to enter Parliament and spread their views, Georgia stands on the verge of a shift much further to the right.
A Reality Ignored
To date, violent extremism in Georgia has been framed only in the context of the Islamic State, Syria and the country's minority Muslim population. Even so, there are few effective projects to counter violent extremism in Georgia — none of which deal with far-right disengagement or deradicalization.
The Tolerance and Diversity Institute, for example, noted in a press release less than two weeks after Safarov's murder that neo-Nazi groups had been active around Tbilisi's Freedom Square for at least a year, specifically targeting bars frequented by tourists and other foreigners. Moreover, they alleged that police consistently failed to respond to complaints, including those involving the two neo-Nazis responsible for Safarov's murder.
"This was a truly tragic and fatal result of unpunished hate crimes around us," said Agit Mirzoev, who works for the Center for Participation and Democracy, where Safarov once worked. "We have been systematically talking about the dangers of (far-right) radicalization for the last four or five years, but neither the public nor the government has displayed a proper response to these concerns."
In fact, it was only when Georgians awoke to the news of the Christchurch mosque massacres in March and saw photographs of Georgian script — along with Cyrillic, Armenian and Latin — scrawled on the shooter's weapons that many began to worry about the possible connection between the Georgian far-right and radicals overseas. One of the names inscribed on attacker Brenton Tarrant's armaments was that of David the Builder, the Georgian king who led Georgian forces to victory over the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Didgori in 1121. David, his flag and 1121 have all become touchstones for far-right groups like the Georgian March, whose members have made the king's unicorn flag their main symbol and begun to wear T-shirts bearing the date of the Battle of Didgori.
Two women members of the far-right Georgian March wear T-shirts featuring an image of Georgian King David the Builder crossing himself and the year of 1121, when Georgians defeated the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Didgori. 1121 has now become an important symbol for ultranationalists.
(ONNIK JAMES KRIKORIAN)
Immediately following the New Zealand massacres, the Georgian government vowed to investigate any possible links between the country's neo-Nazis and far-right militants abroad. Since then, however, there has been no progress.
The Christchurch attacker's manifesto appeared to borrow heavily from that of Anders Breivik, the far-right terrorist who killed 77 people, including a Georgian, in a bomb attack in Oslo and a massacre on Utoya island in Norway in July 2011. Both Breivik and Tarrant appear to have been fascinated with Georgia and other Christian countries that shared a historical enmity with Muslims. Both, too, were obsessed with the "Great Replacement," a far-right conspiracy theory that non-Europeans are taking the place of white Europeans. Today, the Great Replacement is a key narrative among far-right groups in Georgia and elsewhere.
One Georgian site, MyStar, even translated the works of David Lane, a member of the U.S. domestic terrorist organization the Order, into Georgian. In the wider world, Lane is better known for his 14 words, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children," which has become a mantra for white supremacists and neo-Nazis the world over. Meanwhile, another MyStar post quoted the Old Testament to justify the execution of children in Nazi Germany. The site did not renew its hosting at the beginning of this year, and the domain is now used to sell wallets and handbags.
Nevertheless, other sites continue to post similar content. One such group is the neo-Nazi Georgian Power, which is prolific in its dissemination of alt-right memes depicting Pepe the Frog, references to the red and blue pills from "The Matrix" (which has been appropriated by the far-right), and patriarchal images of "pure" women. It has also adopted Lane's 14 words as a Georgian hashtag on Facebook.
Most recently, ultra-conservative and nationalist groups such as the neo-Nazi National Unity and the populist Georgian March have also stepped up their activities. In May last year, both groups converged on the Georgian Parliament to face off with nightclub patrons who were protesting a particularly heavy-handed police raid on the city's famous Bassiani Club.
Sandro Bregadze, the founder of the far-right populist Georgian March, instructs his supporters to break through police lines to attack a demonstration staged by young Georgians against heavy-handed anti-drug police raids on the Bassiani nightclub in March 2018.
(ONNIK JAMES KRIKORIAN)
Despite the show of force, neither Sandro Bregadze (Georgian March's leader) nor Giorgi Chelidze (the head of National Unity) faced any changes at the time. In fact, it was only in September 2018 that authorities prosecuted Chelidze for the illegal possession of munitions — an act that came to light after he posted a video on Facebook of himself and others training with semi-automatic weapons. In the trial that followed, Chelidze and his supporters made Nazi salutes in the courtroom, imitating Breivik during his trial. Nevertheless, the court sentenced the National Unity leader to only 3.5 years in prison in May.
Moreover, the Georgian government failed to show any interest in tackling the problem of far-right radicalization, even though Tbilisi hosted an Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe seminar in June on countering violent extremism.
The country's former public defender, Ucha Nanuashvili, accused the government of maintaining a double standard, displaying inconsistencies in the fight against extremism and merely reacting in exceptional cases — and even then, only inadequately. "There is no coordination of state institutions in this regard, and the impression is that the authorities are not aware of the devastating effects that are caused by encouraging these groups," Nanuashvili said.
In June, for example, the Interior Ministry refused to provide security for Tbilisi's LGBTQ community for the first-ever Pride event in what remains a country with conservative mores. Undeterred, organizers said they would hold the event anyway, even as far-right and ultranationalist groups threatened violence in response. The Georgian Orthodox Church called for calm but warned that any violence would be the fault of the Pride organizers.
A priest leads an anti-immigrant demonstration by the far-right Georgian March on Tbilisi's Aghmashenebeli Avenue in 2017. Alleged to have financial links with Russia, the movement acts against members of Georgia’s LGBTQ community and nongovernmental organizations funded by George Soros’ Open Society Institute.
(ONNIK JAMES KRIKORIAN)
Enter the Demagogue
After a tense standoff between ultraconservative groups and LGBTQ activists outside the State Chancellory on June 14, millionaire businessman Levan Vasadze announced two days later that he was forming vigilante groups to identify and abduct anyone considered likely to attend or support Tbilisi Pride. Despite warnings from the Interior Ministry that such calls violated Article 223 of the Criminal Code, which prohibits the formation of illegal groupings, Vasadze has yet to be prosecuted.
In May last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center named Vasadze as a representative of the anti-LGBTQ World Congress of Families, which is linked to Alexander Dugin, who has connections to the Kremlin. In December 2017, the center noted that Vasadze spoke in Chisinau, Moldova, at Dugin's Eurasian Conference, an event that also drew neo-Nazis and Identitarians.
Georgian ultranationalists deny any links to Moscow, Nanuashvili said. "However, their talking points are similar to those of Russian far-right groups and represent Russian 'soft power,'" he said. "Most of these groups are truly anti-Russian, but relatively large and influential groups such as Georgian March and other organizations united around leaders such as Vasadze cannot hide their pro-Russian attitudes."
George Marjanishvili, director of the Center for Participation and Democracy, is not surprised by the lack of action from authorities. "Vasadze represents a pretty influential group in Georgia," he said.
Levan Vasadze, a Georgian businessman who made his fortune in Russia, speaks outside the State Chancellory in June 2019. The location had been planned for a pro-LGBTQ rally, but Vasadze and the Georgian March instead took it over, threatening civil society actors and members of the LGBTQ community in Georgia. Although Vasadze has illegally called for the formation of anti-LGBTQ vigilante groups, authorities have yet to prosecute him.
(ONNIK JAMES KRIKORIAN)
"It is a group that has support from the Georgian Orthodox Church and the patriarch himself," Marjanishvili said. "Most of society views (Vasadze) as the 'megaphone' of the Georgian Patriarchate so the government tries to avoid any controversy with him precisely because of this influence. Vasadze can create bigger problems for the government than the opposition, so the government usually chooses to bury its head in the sand."
Of more concern, according to critics, is speculation that the government might use such far-right groups politically. "It's quite clear that the government occasionally uses these groups to frighten and demonize liberal and other groups with different opinions from them," Nanuashvili said. "All of this reinforces the assumption that these groups have the favor and support of some government officials."
This also raises fears about next year's parliamentary elections. With its popularity at the lowest in years, the ruling Georgian Dream party is currently polling at just 21 percent, according to a recent poll from the National Democratic Institute, just six points higher than the opposition United National Movement.
With public discontent growing, especially in the wake of violent anti-government protests on June 20 and daily rallies since, Georgian Dream's founder and chairman, the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, has acceded to one of the demonstrators' demands, namely, that he bring forward plans to implement proportional representation to next year, instead of 2024. Ivanishvili is considered by local and regional analysts to be the real power in Georgia.
The far-right probably has enough supporters to gain seats in the Georgian Parliament, achieve legitimization and use Parliament to spread hate and xenophobia.
Crucially, Ivanishvili has also decided to abort initial plans to set an electoral threshold, meaning there will be no barrier to parliamentary representation. "We know that these groups have political ambitions, and I think this is concerning in light of changing the electoral system," Marjanishvili said. "Now the minimum barrier is almost non-existent and they probably have enough supporters to gain seats in the Georgian Parliament, achieve legitimization and use Parliament to spread hate and xenophobia."
Such concerns are not unfounded. Even under the current electoral system, the ultraconservative populist Alliance of Patriots, considered by many to be pro-Russian, entered Parliament in 2016 with six seats after narrowly scraping past the 5 percent threshold.
In 2013, Tabula, a popular online site that used to also publish a regular print edition, forecast such a scenario. "The current government is friendly toward (Vasadze) and he thus has full freedom to act," the magazine wrote. "Of primary importance, however, is how influential this new political actor will become and what degree of harm he will inflict on Georgia's interests and security."
Tabula's call has been prophetic: In the six years since, the views of Vasadze and the rest of Georgia's far-right have wormed their way further into society. And as things stand now, their influence is only likely to increase.
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"The tremendous disparity in Jewish achievement and political power, aligned in great part as it is with the Goolag, provides fertile ground for the seeds of the Old Hatred."
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The American Jewish community has replaced Judaism with Progressivism and Globalism as its religion. Percentage wise, Jews such as me a very much an outlier (though our numbers do begin to grow I think). As a group, proportionally Jews outperform pretty much every other ethnic group on the planet.
For a struggling cracker trying to understand what the hell is happening to his country to the point where our Founding Fathers are being sent down the memory hole and belief in our borders a sign of bigotry and racism, who sees the massive Jewish dominance in Hollywood, TV, and the Pravdas, it is not difficult to understand how some will take the path of the old hatred.
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Yes, I agree.
And ironically, George Soros, a holocaust survivor is the perfect poster boy for the "old hatred".
OTOH the hatred so far seems to be more on the Left than Right.
Just because they vote Democrat does not mean the rest won't come after them - like they think.
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Huf post discovers why Soros has ironically become the face of Nazi propaganda:
Dobbs and MM are not anti semites .
They both fervently have supported Israel
They speak the truth about Soros ,
soros IS a poster child of what Nazi's used to stir up anti semtism
Of course I don't defend that and would as a Jew myself defend him but nonetheless the truth hurts:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lou-dobbs-anti-semitism-tentacles-george-soros_n_5d79b8b9e4b0a938a42dd84a
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https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/american-jewrys-days-of-reckoning/?fbclid=IwAR0azOGSjgP2KseRKAR76FiLea3gr88IkzBA39TRIzgsuglAAEJJM0KJqDo
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https://historicalfencer.com/jewish-duelists-acceptance-and-honour-or-death/?fbclid=IwAR0HnRiX6AbQvVOU4cTYJnTXpezAPFiBCRcwX51rkzRinrf7yKGCphjojBU
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https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/brooklyn-man-arrested-for-egging-synagogue-turns-out-not-to-be-a-white-supremacist/?fbclid=IwAR0v_MfvPEjIs69EZ5JjmXGcYQqJcdrZln5ugsi2NqOGEB-9A2prt1J9Ivo
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http://carolineglick.com/our-european-friends/
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Anti-Semitism Soars in Eastern Europe
The old canard of ‘dual loyalty’ also has currency in Western European countries like Spain and Belgium.
By William A. Galston
Nov. 26, 2019 6:49 pm ET
Opinion: Rising Anti-Semitism Threatens Liberal Democracy
Politics & Ideas: A recent global survey by the Anti-Defamation League found that anti-Semitic attitudes have increased significantly across Europe since 2015. Image: Czarek Sokolowski/Associated Press
During the past decade, as internal struggles have preoccupied the U.S., the rest of the world hasn’t been standing still. China has risen, as has populist nationalism—and so too, it turns out, has anti-Semitism.
The latest global survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League finds that anti-Semitic attitudes have increased significantly since 2015 in Central and Eastern Europe, which before the Holocaust was home to most of European Jewry. According to the ADL’s 11-question index, in use for more than 50 years, the share of the adult population expressing a high level of anti-Semitic views rose from 37% to 48% in Poland, 32% to 46% in Ukraine and 23% to 31% in Russia. Hungary showed a more modest increase of 2 points, but from a high base of 40% in 2015.
In these four countries, classic stereotypes prevailed. Asked whether “Jews have too much power in the business world,” 72% of Ukrainians agreed, as did 71% of Hungarians, 56% of Poles and 50% of Russians. Sixty-eight percent of Ukrainians, 67% of Hungarians, 56% of Poles and 40% of Russians agreed that “Jews have too much power in international financial markets.” Fifty-six percent of Ukrainians, 51% of Hungarians and 40% of Poles believe that “Jews have too much control over global affairs.” (Russians trailed at 29%, perhaps because they believe—correctly—that Vladimir Putin is more powerful than a mythical Jewish conspiracy.)
Citizens of these four countries also resent being reminded of the Holocaust. Asked whether “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them” in the genocide, 74% of Poles answered in the affirmative, as did 59% of Hungarians, 50% of Russians and 44% of Ukrainians.
This view is widespread in Western Europe as well. Fifty-two percent of Austrians regard the discussion of the Holocaust as excessive, as do 42% of Germans, 40% of Belgians, 38% of Italians and 37% of Spaniards.
Demography makes a difference. To a remarkable extent, anti-Semitism is now (and perhaps always has been) a predominantly male phenomenon. In the 14 European countries the ADL surveyed, men were more likely than women to express high levels of anti-Jewish sentiments, often by huge margins—22 percentage points in Poland, 15 in Hungary and 11 in Ukraine. In most of these countries, moreover, older citizens were more likely than younger ones to express these sentiments. One significant exception is Hungary, where those aged 50 and older were significantly less likely to voice prejudice.
The creation of the state of Israel has provided a new focal point for the ancient charge of Jewish disloyalty. Throughout the European countries surveyed, remarkably high shares of the population agree that “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the countries in which they live.” Even in Sweden, which the ADL finds to be one of the least anti-Semitic countries in the world, 25% of citizens embrace this view.
The ADL did not resurvey the U.S. in 2019, but in 2015 it ranked low on the global spectrum, with only 10% of adults expressing a high level of anti-Semitism. Even so, fully 33% of Americans thought that Jews were more loyal to Israel than to the U.S., a figure that all Americans—Jews as well as non-Jews—should ponder. It is unlikely that this figure has declined during the past four years, a period in which anti-Semitic incidents have risen sharply.
The charge of disloyalty is a pervasive fact of contemporary Jewish life. Globally, 38% of respondents to the ADL survey agreed that Jews were more loyal to Israel than to the countries in which they lived, usually as citizens. In the most recent responses for all 102 countries the ADL has surveyed, majorities of the population in exactly half—51 countries—thought that Jews’ first loyalty was to the Jewish state. It isn’t evident what can be done about this.
Most scholars believe that anti-Semitism reflects a deep-seated antipathy to Jews and Judaism as such, rather than a critique of Jewish conduct. Nevertheless, 45% of Poles and 42% of Ukrainians believe that “people hate Jews because of the way Jews behave,” a view echoed by 32% of Austrians and 31% of Germans.
The resurgence of anti-Semitism suggests that old battles must be fought anew, with all the vigor defenders of liberal democracy can command, if we are to avoid regressing to dark times.
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https://worldisraelnews.com/jews-are-dead-thats-great-bystanders-spew-anti-semitic-barbs-after-nj-attack/
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/evangerstmann/2019/12/11/the-truth-about-trumps-order-on-campus-anti-semitism/#35ff1e7670c4
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/trump-antisemitism-executive-order-israel-judaism.html
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https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/black-nationalist-hate-group-praised-media-shot-daniel-greenfield/
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https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/black-nationalist-hate-group-praised-media-shot-daniel-greenfield/
Ah, but these are brave truth-telling professional journalists!
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The bystanders in the video spewing anti semitic remarks
Were not white nationalists. One was a black female complaining about her children in the school across the street in danger and another with an Arabic accent.
Yes I get it. Orthodox Jews move into a neighborhood and two Blacks murder a few of them (and policeman) and the logical conclusion is it is the fault of the Jews.
Makes perfect sense. No Bias , no hatred , no bigotry and of course probably no mention on CNN or the WP NYT. or maybe page 149.
Obviously the Jews should pay the people of JC some reparations for the violence they brought to town, yes?
"we had no problem till the Jews moved in":
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1rQLPzq1797wkX37KyBO9_PxFo6A&hl=en&gl=us&ptab=2&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&ll=40.72593352946568%2C-74.07237250000003&z=12
http://newjersey.news12.com/story/40653266/police-6-people-arrested-in-jersey-city-gang-bust
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"Yes I get it. Orthodox Jews move into a neighborhood and two Blacks murder a few of them (and policeman) and the logical conclusion is it is the fault of the Jews."
...
"we had no problem till the Jews moved in"
---------------------------
(ccp sarcasm alert)
Racism is ok if blacks do it. Anti-semitism is ok if blacks do it?
A black leader was interviewed about blacks not supporting Buttigieg (why should they?) and he pointed out it's hard to overcome the anti-gay feeling in the black community. What? They admit anti-gay feelings? Anti-gay is ok if blacks do it?
But one black declares himself or herself to be conservative and it's "self hatred", totally unacceptable, crossing a line that cannot be crossed.
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"Yes I get it. Orthodox Jews move into a neighborhood and two Blacks murder a few of them (and policeman) and the logical conclusion is it is the fault of the Jews."
...
"we had no problem till the Jews moved in"
---------------------------
(ccp sarcasm alert)
Racism is ok if blacks do it. Anti-semitism is ok if blacks do it?
A black leader was interviewed about blacks not supporting Buttigieg (why should they?) and he pointed out it's hard to overcome the anti-gay feeling in the black community. What? They admit anti-gay feelings? Anti-gay is ok if blacks do it?
But one black declares himself or herself to be conservative and it's "self hatred", totally unacceptable, crossing a line that cannot be crossed.
These are the rules in 2019. American Jews will respond by overwhelmingly voting for democrats once again.
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https://clarionproject.org/west-still-propping-up-alliance-of-nazis-and-islamist-supremacists/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=773cf6324f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_17_01_55&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-773cf6324f-6358189&mc_cid=773cf6324f
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKUyajBKZmg&feature=youtu.be
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https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/295595/pride-and-prejudice-at-fieldston?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=2ffd1fc6ee-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_18_09_53&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-2ffd1fc6ee-207194629
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Another excellent piece by Caroline Glick:
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/why-american-jews-slander-president-trump-caroline-glick/
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second post
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=33&v=BCKAZI1kdnw&feature=emb_logo
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https://clarionproject.org/rampant-anti-semitism-us-today/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=0cca4c1b7b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_30_12_08&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-0cca4c1b7b-6358189&mc_cid=0cca4c1b7b
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http://www.memorialdelashoah.org/upload/minisites/ukraine/en/en_exposition1.htm
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if the anti Jew is Black, Muslim , and absolutely a Democrat.
Black kills rabbi in his own home
and the fault lies with a certain orange hair man.
DeBlasio
he may not be mayor again but we all know he will not go away .
maybe he could get an MSNBC like the cockroach on Politics Nation
another huckster
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/despicable_black_attacks_on_jews_are_rooted_in_democrats_coddling_of_antisemites.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/20/opinion/black-demagogues-and-pseudo-scholars.html
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https://vosizneias.com/2019/12/29/watch-orthodox-jews-stand-guard-with-assault-style-rifles-in-monsey/
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https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/soros-war-against-jews-daniel-greenfield/#.XgtYjcP13pJ.facebook
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second post
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/if_jews_want_peace_they_must_prepare_to_defend_themselves.html
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second post
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/if_jews_want_peace_they_must_prepare_to_defend_themselves.html
Exactly.
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https://collive.com/jewish-man-assaulted-punched-in-head-crown-heights/#.Xgq3fj_mA3N.facebook
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https://www.jewishpress.com/blogs/abu-yehuda/why-they-attack-jews-in-new-york/2019/12/30/?utm_source=spotim&utm_medium=spotim_recirculation&spotim_referrer=recirculation
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https://www.jewishpress.com/blogs/abu-yehuda/why-they-attack-jews-in-new-york/2019/12/30/?utm_source=spotim&utm_medium=spotim_recirculation&spotim_referrer=recirculation
"Jews there will have to study krav maga along with Talmud. Just like Israelis."
And get guns, and learn to use them. If you look like food, you will be eaten.
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https://www.jewishpress.com/blogs/abu-yehuda/why-they-attack-jews-in-new-york/2019/12/30/?utm_source=spotim&utm_medium=spotim_recirculation&spotim_referrer=recirculation
"Jews there will have to study krav maga along with Talmud. Just like Israelis."
And get guns, and learn to use them. If you look like food, you will be eaten.
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/385100.php
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https://gothamist.com/news/facing-anti-semitic-attacks-new-york-jews-are-learning-to-fight-back
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https://gothamist.com/news/facing-anti-semitic-attacks-new-york-jews-are-learning-to-fight-back
Yup. If you are a Jew, better get in touch with your inner Israeli.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D6afDXbU0AAwSIk?format=jpg&name=medium)
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https://worldisraelnews.com/dershowitz-why-its-not-surprising-to-see-jew-hatred-increase-in-western-europe
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https://worldisraelnews.com/dershowitz-why-its-not-surprising-to-see-jew-hatred-increase-in-western-europe/#.Xj9R0rOPZHA.facebook
#.Xj9R0rOPZHA.facebook Tracking for Facehugger
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Thanks for the catch. Corrected.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/nyregion/new-jersey-antisemitism-high-school.html?referringSource=articleShare
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/nyregion/new-jersey-antisemitism-high-school.html?referringSource=articleShare
The NYT is very vigilant in reporting stories like this!
Meaning ones where white males can be blamed.
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https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-york-mayor-deblasio-coronavirus
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https://lidblog.com/french-jews/
Enlightened leftists!
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/389072.php
Zero media coverage.
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/389072.php
Zero media coverage.
https://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2020/07/08/former-nfl-rb-larry-johnson-defends-desean-jackson-with-a-different-fake-anti-semitic-quote/
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from wikipedia
no stereotype ; just the facts.
don't blame white people for this:
****
Legal troubles
Johnson has been arrested at least six times since 2003. Five of the arrests were on various assault charges against women, four while he was an active player in the NFL. In 2003, he was arrested for felony aggravated assault and misdemeanor domestic battery for waving a gun at his then-girlfriend, during an argument at his home. The charges were dropped when Johnson agreed to participate in a domestic violence diversion program. In 2005, he was again arrested for assault when a woman accused Johnson of pushing her to the ground, but the case was dropped after the alleged victim failed to appear in court for three hearings.
His third arrest for assault came in February 2008, after allegedly pushing a woman's head at a nightclub.[35] In October 2008 Johnson was arrested for the fourth time and charged with one count of non-aggravated assault for allegedly spitting a drink in a woman's face at a Kansas City nightclub on October 11. The woman involved filed a civil suit against Johnson, accusing him of negligence, assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligent infliction of emotional distress.[36]
Johnson was deactivated for the October 19, 2008, game against the Tennessee Titans for violating an undisclosed team rule.[37] The team said his suspension for this game was unrelated to the criminal investigation.
In March 2009, Johnson pleaded guilty to two counts of disturbing the peace, regarding the two incidents in 2008, and was sentenced to two years' probation.[38]
On October 5, 2012, Johnson was again arrested in Las Vegas for domestic violence charges that include strangulation, after meeting a former girlfriend at a Las Vegas Strip hotel and casino. The 32-year-old woman was said to have had several injuries to her face and bruising on her neck.[39] He was booked into the Clark County Detention Center with bond set at $15,000 and was released after spending 18 hours behind bars.[40] He was eventually convicted of domestic violence battery and assault, was sentenced to one year of probation and ordered to pay a $345 fine, along with being sentenced to 48 hours of community service and six months of counseling.[41]
On October 7, 2014, Johnson was arrested for the sixth time after punching a man in a Miami Beach club and allegedly cutting him with a broken bottle.[42] He was charged with aggravated battery and booked into the Miami-Dade County jail with bond set at $7,500. Johnson later pleaded guilty to battery and was sentenced to 12 months' probation, 60 hours of community service, and must submit to substance abuse evaluations, in addition to staying away from the victim and the club.[43]
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And Drew Brees is the one that had to grovel.
from wikipedia
no stereotype ; just the facts.
don't blame white people for this:
****
Legal troubles
Johnson has been arrested at least six times since 2003. Five of the arrests were on various assault charges against women, four while he was an active player in the NFL. In 2003, he was arrested for felony aggravated assault and misdemeanor domestic battery for waving a gun at his then-girlfriend, during an argument at his home. The charges were dropped when Johnson agreed to participate in a domestic violence diversion program. In 2005, he was again arrested for assault when a woman accused Johnson of pushing her to the ground, but the case was dropped after the alleged victim failed to appear in court for three hearings.
His third arrest for assault came in February 2008, after allegedly pushing a woman's head at a nightclub.[35] In October 2008 Johnson was arrested for the fourth time and charged with one count of non-aggravated assault for allegedly spitting a drink in a woman's face at a Kansas City nightclub on October 11. The woman involved filed a civil suit against Johnson, accusing him of negligence, assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligent infliction of emotional distress.[36]
Johnson was deactivated for the October 19, 2008, game against the Tennessee Titans for violating an undisclosed team rule.[37] The team said his suspension for this game was unrelated to the criminal investigation.
In March 2009, Johnson pleaded guilty to two counts of disturbing the peace, regarding the two incidents in 2008, and was sentenced to two years' probation.[38]
On October 5, 2012, Johnson was again arrested in Las Vegas for domestic violence charges that include strangulation, after meeting a former girlfriend at a Las Vegas Strip hotel and casino. The 32-year-old woman was said to have had several injuries to her face and bruising on her neck.[39] He was booked into the Clark County Detention Center with bond set at $15,000 and was released after spending 18 hours behind bars.[40] He was eventually convicted of domestic violence battery and assault, was sentenced to one year of probation and ordered to pay a $345 fine, along with being sentenced to 48 hours of community service and six months of counseling.[41]
On October 7, 2014, Johnson was arrested for the sixth time after punching a man in a Miami Beach club and allegedly cutting him with a broken bottle.[42] He was charged with aggravated battery and booked into the Miami-Dade County jail with bond set at $7,500. Johnson later pleaded guilty to battery and was sentenced to 12 months' probation, 60 hours of community service, and must submit to substance abuse evaluations, in addition to staying away from the victim and the club.[43]
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https://dailycaller.com/2020/07/13/nick-cannon-podcast-professor-griff-anti-semitic-melanin/
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https://dailycaller.com/2020/07/13/nick-cannon-podcast-professor-griff-anti-semitic-melanin/
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https://dailycaller.com/2020/07/13/nick-cannon-podcast-professor-griff-anti-semitic-melanin/
Don't forget Professor Griff! Look up.
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https://israelunwired.com/anti-israel-leader-shredded-by-missouri-state-representatives/
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JewsAndCollege.com
This townhall series is generously sponsored by Liz Lange.
Dear Readers,
For decades, many of us, myself included, dedicated much of our energy and many of our resources to studying and teaching at the nation's finest universities—institutions we regarded as springboards to a better future and as the cornerstones of a more equitable, enlightened society.
We were wrong.
American universities—those once-proud hotbeds of innovation that gave us rocket fuel and Gatorade, the polio vaccine and the burglar alarm, and some of our finest thinking and writing and grappling with the world—have become abbeys for a small sect of ideological zealots who stifle dissent, fetter free inquiry, and asphyxiate any attempt at intellectual diversity. This is bad enough for the republic, but it is particularly grim for Jews, who, forever the canaries in the cultural coalmine, are facing an unprecedented torrent of harassment on campus. From fake and menacing eviction notes slipped under the doors of Jewish students to scholarly associations actively seeking to single out the Jewish state for calumny, these are tough times to be a Jew on the quad. And this situation is not likely to change anytime soon.
Which, for us Jews, leaves only one solution: Get out.
On Tuesday, July 21, at 7:30 PM, I will have the pleasure of discussing this provocative idea—that Jews should stop attending, teaching at, and otherwise supporting American universities—with Tikvah Fund Executive Director Eric Cohen as part of Tikvah's excellent Future of College Townhall series.
We will discuss how and why universities got so bad so fast, why Jews should no longer take part in the farce that is American higher education, and what some of the more exciting, venerable, and profitable alternatives might be.
Please join us for this rollicking conversation!
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https://clarionproject.org/ny-times-decides-intl-accepted-definition-of-antisemitism-is-disputed/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6dcf43c3fb-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_08_13_10_05&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-6dcf43c3fb-6358189&mc_cid=6dcf43c3fb
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https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/al-sharpton-jonathan-greenblatt-adl
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I sick and tired of hearing from these Jews who are so infatuated with their beloved Dem Party
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I sick and tired of hearing from these Jews who are so infatuated with their beloved Dem Party
To clarify, our ccp is Jewish. Judaism is a fine, fine religion full of great people. Our frustration is with their politics.
Almost 3 out of 4: In 2016, 70% voted Democrat (Hillary Clinton) and 25% Republican (Trump).
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/clinton-won-majority-of-jewish-american-vote-polls-say-1.5459522
How the Leftward politics of this group is in their own best interest or in our national interest is a mystery to me.
Trump has many accomplishments advancing the US alliance with Israel including moving our embassy to their capital city as promised and negotiating a major Middle East peace and security agreement. For all that, he will likely win over zero liberal Jewish voters.
I guess we can feel good that they don't carry a dual allegiance.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/ilhan-omars-dual-loyalty-charge-was-anti-semitic/584314/
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Well, I'm Jewish and I can't stand my fellow Jews who have made progressivism their true religion. :-D
PS: Check out the rabbi's opening prayer for tonight's Rep Convention.
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Well, I'm Jewish and I can't stand my fellow Jews who have made progressivism their true religion. :-D
PS: Check out the rabbi's opening prayer for tonight's Rep Convention.
Leftist Jews are the Neo-Hellenes.
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https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2020/08/26/ohio-medical-board-issues-verdict-on-muslim-doctor-who-boasted-shed-give-jews-wrong-meds-n850290
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furthermore, to think that jews would donate money to Al Sharpton. :-(
are they cowards ? think they will be called racist?
are they really believers in Al Sharpton?
or is it all because they are demo crats ?
is this a way to advance the party ? keep the minorities happy and in line with the Dems?
may be all the above ? not sure .
wonder if they donated to some of the black organizations we have seen mentioned at the RNC or on Mark Levin show and other conservative outlets .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Public_Policy_Research#Project_21
I bet they don't.
I just can't help thinking Al Sharpton must be laughing behind our backs at what fools we are.
Could anyone imagine he would really appreciate their (certainly would never get a cent from me) generosity?
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https://nypost.com/2019/04/03/democrats-are-so-afraid-to-piss-off-al-sharpton/
he must have a huge mob behind him
or is it everyone is that terrified of being called "racist" by this charlatan with a megaphone?
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I just got called a "Nazi" on FB :-D
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I just got called a "Nazi" on FB :-D
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/05/democrats-and-their-reductio-ad-hitlerum-slander.php
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https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1944/01/09/85146337.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
https://clarionproject.org/antisemitic-content-voted-into-california-public-school-curriculum/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=5023af8408-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_09_10_10_29&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-5023af8408-6358189&mc_cid=5023af8408
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Nearly two-thirds of US young adults unaware 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust.
Almost two-thirds of young American adults do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust, a new survey has found, revealing shocking levels of ignorance about the greatest crime of the 20th century.
According to the study of millennial and Gen Z adults aged between 18 and 39, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during the second world war.
Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure. One in eight (12%) said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.
More than half (56%) said they had seen Nazi symbols on their social media platforms and/or in their communities, and almost half (49%) had seen Holocaust denial or distortion posts on social media or elsewhere online.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/16/holocaust-us-adults-study
---------------------------------------------------
18-39 is a pretty broad range of young people!
Reasonable people should be shocked at what young people are taught and not taught. If you're not a far Leftist, you're probably not involved with setting curriculum. It's honestly gotten to the point that the longer young people stay in indoctrination school the more they know that isn't so. Meanwhile social media giants are busy removing perfectly valid opposing viewpoints.
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https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2020/09/29/a-reminder-to-american-jews-civilization-is-fragile-n2577098
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https://www.israelunwired.com/the-story-of-how-sweden-is-falling-apart-due-to-muslim-immigration/
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https://cnsnews.com/article/washington/lucy-collins/162-democrats-vote-against-amendment-protect-jewish-students
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https://forward.com/opinion/455003/republicans-abandoned-jewish-students-the-media-blamed-the-democrats/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPDy-XQarTY
Republican Jews - the new nazis
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Not a fan of the ADL, and several of the accusations herein seem bullshit, but this is worth noting:
https://www.adl.org/blog/proud-boys-bigotry-is-on-full-display?fbclid=IwAR29eHETA-9LaFOiKaYsEYZ3Q6EQql0bmBYxW99ZQ1Ej12Q-_9kct3284EM
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there are a few of us
though I don't know what he was thinking trespassing into the Capitol
should have stayed outside
like the rest
"https://www.yahoo.com/news/ny-judge-son-pictured-capitol-151721419.html"
I can only here it now
Shame shame shame !
threat to democracy
Jew turned Nazi
etc
yes , it is Jew against Jew.
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Judah Macabee fought who?
there are a few of us
though I don't know what he was thinking trespassing into the Capitol
should have stayed outside
like the rest
"https://www.yahoo.com/news/ny-judge-son-pictured-capitol-151721419.html"
I can only here it now
Shame shame shame !
threat to democracy
Jew turned Nazi
etc
yes , it is Jew against Jew.
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/393895.php
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Here is the news clip mentioned:
https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2021/05/19/police-investigate-possible-jewish-hate-crime-attack-at-beverly-grove-restaurant/
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17389/europe-anti-semitism-protests
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https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-new-furies-of-the-oldest-hatred?fbclid=IwAR1CwA2wSZJgtTD67QqUj3wIgL39wBx0PBd2S7H6oHdbtOFjokhgI0vxsyI
https://www.facebook.com/Dr.Gad.Saad/videos/1157954008050189/
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Dov Fischer :
https://spectator.org/left-jews-anti-semitism-israel-hamas/
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Amid a Spate of Anti-Semitic Attacks, Orange County Muslim Leader Incites More Hatred
by Steven Emerson
IPT News
May 25, 2021
https://www.investigativeproject.org/8869/amid-a-spate-of-anti-semitic-attacks-orange
-
OPINION COMMENTARY
The Pandemic of Anti-Semitism
Jew-hatred is wrong whether it comes from neo-Nazis or left-wing activists.
By Donna Brazile
May 27, 2021 12:01 pm ET
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Anti- and pro-Israel demonstrators in New York’s Times Square on May 20.
PHOTO: SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES
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As if the coronavirus pandemic isn’t bad enough, another sickness is breaking out across the world—a pandemic of anti-Semitism. Hatred of the Jewish people is only one expression of the virus of prejudice. Even our most brilliant scientists can’t develop a vaccine for this disease. All of us—citizens and government officials—need to do our best to stamp it out.
“The recent attacks on the Jewish community are despicable, and they must stop,” President Biden tweeted Monday. “I condemn this hateful behavior at home and abroad—it’s up to all of us to give hate no safe harbor.” All Republicans and Democrats should applaud Mr. Biden’s firm stance.
Hours later, the president signed the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act into law, in response to racist attacks against Asian-Americans carried out by bigots who blame them for the coronavirus pandemic.
The latest eruption of anti-Semitism has been sparked by fighting between Israel and Hamas, the terrorist group that controls the Gaza Strip. But the perpetrators of these vile anti-Semitic attacks, in the U.S. and elsewhere, use the actions of Israel as an excuse to mount assaults against Jews.
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There is nothing anti-Semitic about policy disagreements with the government of Israel. Jews themselves, including Israelis, are sharply divided in their opinions of the government, just as Americans are sharply divided in our views of the U.S. government. But attacking people because they’re Jewish isn’t about a policy dispute—it is about simple hatred.
Those on the left who profess to champion Palestinian rights are sorely misguided if they believe praising Adolf Hitler, beating up Jews in New York and elsewhere, and defacing synagogues in the U.S. and Europe with swastikas will aid Palestinians.
Those on the right who embrace Nazi mass murderers—such as participants at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., who marched with tiki torches while chanting “Jews will not replace us!”—are motivated by the same fanatical anti-Semitism that motivated Hitler and his Nazi followers long before the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
Likewise, the gunman who murdered 11 congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 was motivated by a burning anti-Semitism that had nothing to do with Israel. Police said he shouted, “All Jews must die!” as he opened fire and had earlier posted on social media denouncing “filthy EVIL jews” and making many anti-Semitic slurs.
The synagogue shooting came three years after a white racist murdered nine black congregants during a Bible study at the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, S.C. Both mass murders were rooted in the same evil.
I am the descendant of enslaved Africans who were bought and sold like farm animals and denied the most basic human rights because white racists considered them subhuman. My grandparents and parents weren’t enslaved, but they were subjected to horrific discrimination in the Jim Crow South, which still refused to recognize them as full-fledged human beings.
As a black woman, I’ve experienced plenty of discrimination, though far less than my ancestors suffered. And in the past year I’ve watched the same videos and read the same accounts that millions of people around the world have seen—images of police killing unarmed black people in American cities. I cried over these horrific killings, as I cried for the victims gunned down at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston.
Anti-Semitism is based on the same belief as racism and other forms of prejudice—“the other” is inferior and not entitled the same human rights as the “superior” class. So while I’m not Jewish, I can empathize with the pain and the injustice anti-Semitism inflicts in the same way Jews have expressed empathy for the racist oppression black Americans have suffered for centuries.
Jews were among the most prominent and important nonblack supporters of the civil-rights movement, helping found and fund the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and numerous black colleges and universities. Jewish Americans remain among the strongest supporters of African-American causes.
A few years ago I attended a Remembrance Day ceremony at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. I was among those asked to read aloud the names of a few of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. I was overcome with emotion, but the Holocaust survivor who stood next to me read names stoically, showing remarkable strength. It is something I will never forget, along with my three visits to Israel and the time I met Holocaust chronicler Elie Wiesel.
I am proud to stand with Jews against anti-Semitism, just as many Jews have stood and continue to stand with black Americans against racism. We haven’t stamped out the virus of hatred yet, but all people of goodwill must continue trying to achieve this vital task.
Ms. Brazile is a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
-
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/2005/02/27/Black-leaders-discuss-state-of-their-union/94941109555669/
OPINION COMMENTARY
The Pandemic of Anti-Semitism
Jew-hatred is wrong whether it comes from neo-Nazis or left-wing activists.
By Donna Brazile
May 27, 2021 12:01 pm ET
SAVE
PRINT
TEXT
718
Anti- and pro-Israel demonstrators in New York’s Times Square on May 20.
PHOTO: SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES
This article is in your queue.Open Queue
As if the coronavirus pandemic isn’t bad enough, another sickness is breaking out across the world—a pandemic of anti-Semitism. Hatred of the Jewish people is only one expression of the virus of prejudice. Even our most brilliant scientists can’t develop a vaccine for this disease. All of us—citizens and government officials—need to do our best to stamp it out.
“The recent attacks on the Jewish community are despicable, and they must stop,” President Biden tweeted Monday. “I condemn this hateful behavior at home and abroad—it’s up to all of us to give hate no safe harbor.” All Republicans and Democrats should applaud Mr. Biden’s firm stance.
Hours later, the president signed the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act into law, in response to racist attacks against Asian-Americans carried out by bigots who blame them for the coronavirus pandemic.
The latest eruption of anti-Semitism has been sparked by fighting between Israel and Hamas, the terrorist group that controls the Gaza Strip. But the perpetrators of these vile anti-Semitic attacks, in the U.S. and elsewhere, use the actions of Israel as an excuse to mount assaults against Jews.
Sign up for Opinion: Morning Editorial Report.
All the day's Opinion headlines.
See a preview
SUBSCRIBED
There is nothing anti-Semitic about policy disagreements with the government of Israel. Jews themselves, including Israelis, are sharply divided in their opinions of the government, just as Americans are sharply divided in our views of the U.S. government. But attacking people because they’re Jewish isn’t about a policy dispute—it is about simple hatred.
Those on the left who profess to champion Palestinian rights are sorely misguided if they believe praising Adolf Hitler, beating up Jews in New York and elsewhere, and defacing synagogues in the U.S. and Europe with swastikas will aid Palestinians.
Those on the right who embrace Nazi mass murderers—such as participants at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., who marched with tiki torches while chanting “Jews will not replace us!”—are motivated by the same fanatical anti-Semitism that motivated Hitler and his Nazi followers long before the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
Likewise, the gunman who murdered 11 congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 was motivated by a burning anti-Semitism that had nothing to do with Israel. Police said he shouted, “All Jews must die!” as he opened fire and had earlier posted on social media denouncing “filthy EVIL jews” and making many anti-Semitic slurs.
The synagogue shooting came three years after a white racist murdered nine black congregants during a Bible study at the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, S.C. Both mass murders were rooted in the same evil.
I am the descendant of enslaved Africans who were bought and sold like farm animals and denied the most basic human rights because white racists considered them subhuman. My grandparents and parents weren’t enslaved, but they were subjected to horrific discrimination in the Jim Crow South, which still refused to recognize them as full-fledged human beings.
As a black woman, I’ve experienced plenty of discrimination, though far less than my ancestors suffered. And in the past year I’ve watched the same videos and read the same accounts that millions of people around the world have seen—images of police killing unarmed black people in American cities. I cried over these horrific killings, as I cried for the victims gunned down at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston.
Anti-Semitism is based on the same belief as racism and other forms of prejudice—“the other” is inferior and not entitled the same human rights as the “superior” class. So while I’m not Jewish, I can empathize with the pain and the injustice anti-Semitism inflicts in the same way Jews have expressed empathy for the racist oppression black Americans have suffered for centuries.
Jews were among the most prominent and important nonblack supporters of the civil-rights movement, helping found and fund the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and numerous black colleges and universities. Jewish Americans remain among the strongest supporters of African-American causes.
A few years ago I attended a Remembrance Day ceremony at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. I was among those asked to read aloud the names of a few of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. I was overcome with emotion, but the Holocaust survivor who stood next to me read names stoically, showing remarkable strength. It is something I will never forget, along with my three visits to Israel and the time I met Holocaust chronicler Elie Wiesel.
I am proud to stand with Jews against anti-Semitism, just as many Jews have stood and continue to stand with black Americans against racism. We haven’t stamped out the virus of hatred yet, but all people of goodwill must continue trying to achieve this vital task.
Ms. Brazile is a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
-
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/06/10/house-democrat-leadership-to-omar-no-moral-equivalency-between-u-s-israel-to-terrorists/
did google search on omar looking for comments on boko haram
nothing comes up
only anti semitic comments
only anti american comments
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Ilhan Omar at it again:
https://freebeacon.com/politics/ilhan-omar-knows-what-shes-doing/
Excerpt:
The Minnesota congresswoman’s latest broadside came Tuesday afternoon, when she told CNN’s Jake Tapper that her Jewish Democratic colleagues "haven’t been partners in justice" and have yet to apologize for their allegedly Islamophobic comments.
Omar’s statement came after Tapper asked whether she regrets her comments last month comparing the United States and Israel with terrorist organizations like Hamas and the Taliban. Her answer was unequivocal: "I don’t."
That’s funny, because Omar at the time "clarified" that statement, which elicited a rebuke from Democratic leaders and a dozen Jewish Democrats, saying that she did not say what in fact she said: "I was in no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries." To be clear, she also believes Israel is a terrorist nation.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
My Dem friends, some of them Jewish, are puzzled by Omar's electoral success but only offended by Republicans, small government and freedom.
This article gets it. She knows what she's doing. She offends. Offers weak non-apology apology. Offends again. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
She is a hater. She is a divider. Not just Jews and everything Israel, she hates this country.
"It's all about the Benjamins, baby".
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/02/11/its-all-about-benjamins-baby-ilhan-omar-again-accused-anti-semitism-over-tweets/?noredirect=on
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The party of Obama/Sharpton/Farrakhan hates Jews?
No way!
Ilhan Omar at it again:
https://freebeacon.com/politics/ilhan-omar-knows-what-shes-doing/
Excerpt:
The Minnesota congresswoman’s latest broadside came Tuesday afternoon, when she told CNN’s Jake Tapper that her Jewish Democratic colleagues "haven’t been partners in justice" and have yet to apologize for their allegedly Islamophobic comments.
Omar’s statement came after Tapper asked whether she regrets her comments last month comparing the United States and Israel with terrorist organizations like Hamas and the Taliban. Her answer was unequivocal: "I don’t."
That’s funny, because Omar at the time "clarified" that statement, which elicited a rebuke from Democratic leaders and a dozen Jewish Democrats, saying that she did not say what in fact she said: "I was in no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries." To be clear, she also believes Israel is a terrorist nation.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
My Dem friends, some of them Jewish, are puzzled by Omar's electoral success but only offended by Republicans, small government and freedom.
This article gets it. She knows what she's doing. She offends. Offers weak non-apology apology. Offends again. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
She is a hater. She is a divider. Not just Jews and everything Israel, she hates this country.
"It's all about the Benjamins, baby".
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/02/11/its-all-about-benjamins-baby-ilhan-omar-again-accused-anti-semitism-over-tweets/?noredirect=on
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Doug writes :
"My Dem friends, some of them Jewish, are puzzled by Omar's electoral success but only offended by Republicans, small government and freedom."
Typical Jewish Democrats NEVER ADM
IT they are wrong!
it is the Republicans they view as Nazis not bigoted Somali Jew and American hating
Islamists.
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(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/075/618/598/original/ecc3b7d0d6f43191.jpg)
Second look at Sharia?
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Regarding previous post, gays in Omar's preferred country.
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mostly stuff posted here for yrs
I like this line though:
1). " Because Jews became less and less committed to Judaism, substituted the New York Times for the Torah. "
Reminds my of my deceased relative who studied her Times like others studied their Bible.
She was a self appointed authority on everything and whatever the NYT printed was the "TRUTH". Any other opinion was stupid.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
AND essentially Jews are not Jews , they are Democrats:
2). "Most American Jews have signed on to just about every secular substitute for Judeo-Christian religions: feminism, environmentalism, “anti-racism,” humanism, socialism. Jews, I have often noted, may well be the most religious people in the world — but for the great majority of them, Judaism is not their religion. And the Democratic Party is the party of all these secular religions."
https://pjmedia.com/columns/dennis-prager/2021/10/05/and-jews-will-still-vote-democrat-n1521721
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https://dailycaller.com/2021/10/20/environmentalist-group-activists-sunrise-dc-jewish-antisemitism/
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Europe's Jewish Students Face Anti-Semitic Onslaught
by Abigail R. Esman
IPT News
December 6, 2021
https://www.investigativeproject.org/9082/europe-jewish-students-face-anti-semitic-onslaught
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What an Antisemite’s Fantasy Says About Jewish Reality
Jan. 21, 2022
Credit...Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by selimaksan/Getty Images
1089
Bret Stephens
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
A man travels 4,800 miles from the north of England to the heart of Texas.
Once there, appearing to be homeless, he gains entry into a synagogue just before its Shabbat services. The rabbi welcomes him with a cup of tea. With a handgun, he takes the rabbi and others hostage for 11 hours while demanding the release of a convicted terrorist held in a nearby prison. He phones a prominent New York rabbi to help push for the terrorist’s release. A hostage reports him as saying, “I know President Biden will do things for the Jews.” A witness, who sees the drama unfold on a livestream, watches him “ranting about Jews and Israel” and saying he has chosen his target because “America only cares about Jewish lives.”
Antisemitism? You would think it could not be more obvious, as everyone from the prime minister of Israel to the president of the United States to the Council on American-Islamic Relations agrees. But first you’d have to climb over a strange wall of obfuscation, misdirection and doubt.
“He was singularly focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community, but we are continuing to work to find motive,” the F.B.I. special agent in charge, Matthew DeSarno, said shortly after the standoff ended, presumably referring to the assailant’s bid to free the imprisoned terrorist. Both The Associated Press and the BBC parroted the line, with the Beeb tweeting, “Texas synagogue hostage standoff not related to Jewish community — F.B.I.”
The A.P. later deleted a tweet making a similar claim. And the F.B.I. amended its case on Sunday, calling the attack “a terrorism-related matter, in which the Jewish community was targeted.” On Thursday, the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, finally acknowledged that it was an antisemitic attack.
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Yet the only substantial reporting I found from a major American news organization that explicitly acknowledges the antisemitic nature of the attack was one astute story in The Washington Post. Instead, there was a focus on the assailant’s supposed mental illness, along with additional reporting on the ever-increasing security-consciousness of synagogues worldwide.
Compare that with the mountain of reporting regarding the anti-Asian hate that allegedly animated the killer in last year’s attacks on Atlanta-area massage parlors. Or compare it with the coverage of the unquestionably racist 2015 shooting at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. For that matter, compare it with the naked Jew-hatred that drove the killer in the 2018 synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, which has been extensively reported and discussed. (His immediate “motive” was opposition to immigration.)
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In the days since the attack, the F.B.I.’s head-in-sand approach, along with so much of the media’s strange pattern of omission, has been the chief topic of discussion in every Jewish circle to which I belong. How can it be, we ask ourselves, that Jews should be victimized twice? First, by being physically targeted for being Jewish; second, by being begrudged the universal recognition that we were morally targeted, too? And how can it be that in this era of heightened sensitivity to every kind of hatred, bias, stereotype, -ism and -phobia, both conscious and unconscious, there’s so much caviling, caveating and outright denying when it comes to calling out bias aimed at Jews?
*
The answer begins with the shapeshifting nature of antisemitism, which some perpetrate, others participate in (sometimes unwittingly), and a still greater number fail to recognize for what it is — in part because each successive mutation doesn’t exactly resemble its predecessor.
What we generally call antisemitism is a 19th-century coinage that helped turn an ancient religious hatred into a racial hatred. As racial hatred came to be considered uncouth after World War II, anti-Zionism (that is, blanket opposition to a Jewish state, not criticism of particular Israeli policies) became a more acceptable way of opposing Jewish political interests and denigrating Jews. Should Israel cease to exist, new forms of bigotry will surely develop for the next stage of anti-Judaism, adapted to the prevailing beliefs of the times.
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The common denominator in each of these mutations is an idea, based in fantasy and conspiracy, about Jewish power. The old-fashioned religious antisemite believed Jews had the power to kill Christ. The 19th-century antisemites who were the forerunners to the Nazis believed Jews had the power to start wars, manipulate kings and swindle native people of their patrimony.
Present-day anti-Zionists attribute to Israel and its supporters in the United States vast powers that they do not possess, like the power to draw America into war. On the far right, antisemites think that Jews are engaged in an immense scheme to replace white, working-class America with immigrant labor. Tucker Carlson and others have taken this conspiracy theory mainstream, much to the delight of neo-Nazis like David Duke, even if they are careful to leave out the part about Jews.
The man who attacked the synagogue entertained the same type of fantasy. Just as Willie Sutton was said to rob banks because “that’s where the money is,” this assailant took Jews hostage because that’s where the power was (or so he thought). The F.B.I.’s moral idiocy — there are no other words for it — in denying the specifically antisemitic nature of the attack lies in the idea that he could have imagined himself choosing just about any means to achieve his end, like taking hostages at the nearest church or convenience store. Similarly, the focus on his mental health evades the central fact that, crazy or not, his malice was not random. He aimed his gun at Jews.
The fantasy about Jewish power may seem outlandish, but it’s far more pervasive than many think — which gets to the point of people participating in antisemitism even when they aren’t knowingly perpetrating it.
Who, for instance, is most responsible for devising the war in Iraq? If your first-pass answer is “Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams and Perle,” you might ask yourself why you are naming second- and third-tier Bush administration officials, all of them Jewish, when all the top decision makers — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice — are Christians. (If your response to this is that Wolfowitz et al. were the ones who pulled the strings, then you’re an antisemite.)
Or take another example: if you think the reason Israel gets so much support in Congress is the money and influence of the pro-Israel lobby, you might be surprised to learn that that lobby ranks 20th on the most recent list of congressional donors, giving away a paltry $4.5 million compared with the $95 million that retiree interest groups donated. “All about the Benjamins” it is not, no matter what Representative Ilhan Omar might suppose.
***
But there’s a larger context here, which has to do with prevailing assumptions about power itself.
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A moral conviction of our time, especially prevalent on the cultural left, is that the powerful are presumptively bad while the powerless are presumptively good. These categories aren’t just political. They are also social, economic, ethnic and racial. It’s why so many conversations today revolve around the concept of “privilege” — a striking redefinition of success that removes the presumption of merit from those who have it and the stigma of failure from those who don’t.
It’s also the likeliest reason there was so much obvious hesitancy to describe the attack in Texas as antisemitic. Unlike the Pittsburgh shooter or the “Jews will not replace us” crowd at Charlottesville — white, right-wing, mostly Christian and therefore “privileged” — the Texas assailant was a British Muslim of Pakistani descent. Not white. Not privileged. Not right-wing. In the binary narrative of the powerful versus the powerless, his naked antisemitism just doesn’t compute: Powerless people are supposed to be victims, not murderous bigots. If he had ranted against Israel for oppressing Palestinians, it might have made more sense. And if he had donned a MAGA hat, we would certainly have had a much fuller exploration of his antisemitism, without time wasted exploring his other motives or state of mind.
For American Jews, this small silence about what happened last week should be profoundly worrisome, and not just as a matter of a journalistic lapse. It’s bad enough that the Jewish state, which gained what power it has because its neighbors threatened it with extinction, is still treated by so many as a global pariah — its sympathizers abroad risking social or professional ostracism by mere association. It’s bad enough, too, that the foul antisemitism of the right, yoked to its old themes of nativism, protectionism, nationalism and isolationism, is erupting into the public square like a burst sewage pipe.
Now American Jews find ourselves at perhaps the most successful period in our history, at a moment when much of the progressive left has decreed that privilege is a sin and that those who hold power should be stripped of it. Anyone with a long view of Jewish history should know how quickly economic and social privilege can turn to political and personal ruin, even — or especially — in countries where it might seem unthinkable.
There’s much to be thankful for about how things ended last week in Texas, and about the outpouring of love and support, across faiths, for a little Jewish community. But the wise counsel for Jews is to be grateful for last week’s good luck, while taking it as a warning that our luck in America may run out.
Bret Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
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“On the far right, antisemites think that Jews are engaged in an immense scheme to replace white, working-class America with immigrant labor. Tucker Carlson and others have taken this conspiracy theory mainstream, much to the delight of neo-Nazis like David Duke, even if they are careful to leave out the part about Jews.“
Oh really?
What an Antisemite’s Fantasy Says About Jewish Reality
Jan. 21, 2022
Credit...Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by selimaksan/Getty Images
1089
Bret Stephens
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
A man travels 4,800 miles from the north of England to the heart of Texas.
Once there, appearing to be homeless, he gains entry into a synagogue just before its Shabbat services. The rabbi welcomes him with a cup of tea. With a handgun, he takes the rabbi and others hostage for 11 hours while demanding the release of a convicted terrorist held in a nearby prison. He phones a prominent New York rabbi to help push for the terrorist’s release. A hostage reports him as saying, “I know President Biden will do things for the Jews.” A witness, who sees the drama unfold on a livestream, watches him “ranting about Jews and Israel” and saying he has chosen his target because “America only cares about Jewish lives.”
Antisemitism? You would think it could not be more obvious, as everyone from the prime minister of Israel to the president of the United States to the Council on American-Islamic Relations agrees. But first you’d have to climb over a strange wall of obfuscation, misdirection and doubt.
“He was singularly focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community, but we are continuing to work to find motive,” the F.B.I. special agent in charge, Matthew DeSarno, said shortly after the standoff ended, presumably referring to the assailant’s bid to free the imprisoned terrorist. Both The Associated Press and the BBC parroted the line, with the Beeb tweeting, “Texas synagogue hostage standoff not related to Jewish community — F.B.I.”
The A.P. later deleted a tweet making a similar claim. And the F.B.I. amended its case on Sunday, calling the attack “a terrorism-related matter, in which the Jewish community was targeted.” On Thursday, the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, finally acknowledged that it was an antisemitic attack.
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Yet the only substantial reporting I found from a major American news organization that explicitly acknowledges the antisemitic nature of the attack was one astute story in The Washington Post. Instead, there was a focus on the assailant’s supposed mental illness, along with additional reporting on the ever-increasing security-consciousness of synagogues worldwide.
Compare that with the mountain of reporting regarding the anti-Asian hate that allegedly animated the killer in last year’s attacks on Atlanta-area massage parlors. Or compare it with the coverage of the unquestionably racist 2015 shooting at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. For that matter, compare it with the naked Jew-hatred that drove the killer in the 2018 synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, which has been extensively reported and discussed. (His immediate “motive” was opposition to immigration.)
Dig deeper into the moment.
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In the days since the attack, the F.B.I.’s head-in-sand approach, along with so much of the media’s strange pattern of omission, has been the chief topic of discussion in every Jewish circle to which I belong. How can it be, we ask ourselves, that Jews should be victimized twice? First, by being physically targeted for being Jewish; second, by being begrudged the universal recognition that we were morally targeted, too? And how can it be that in this era of heightened sensitivity to every kind of hatred, bias, stereotype, -ism and -phobia, both conscious and unconscious, there’s so much caviling, caveating and outright denying when it comes to calling out bias aimed at Jews?
*
The answer begins with the shapeshifting nature of antisemitism, which some perpetrate, others participate in (sometimes unwittingly), and a still greater number fail to recognize for what it is — in part because each successive mutation doesn’t exactly resemble its predecessor.
What we generally call antisemitism is a 19th-century coinage that helped turn an ancient religious hatred into a racial hatred. As racial hatred came to be considered uncouth after World War II, anti-Zionism (that is, blanket opposition to a Jewish state, not criticism of particular Israeli policies) became a more acceptable way of opposing Jewish political interests and denigrating Jews. Should Israel cease to exist, new forms of bigotry will surely develop for the next stage of anti-Judaism, adapted to the prevailing beliefs of the times.
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The common denominator in each of these mutations is an idea, based in fantasy and conspiracy, about Jewish power. The old-fashioned religious antisemite believed Jews had the power to kill Christ. The 19th-century antisemites who were the forerunners to the Nazis believed Jews had the power to start wars, manipulate kings and swindle native people of their patrimony.
Present-day anti-Zionists attribute to Israel and its supporters in the United States vast powers that they do not possess, like the power to draw America into war. On the far right, antisemites think that Jews are engaged in an immense scheme to replace white, working-class America with immigrant labor. Tucker Carlson and others have taken this conspiracy theory mainstream, much to the delight of neo-Nazis like David Duke, even if they are careful to leave out the part about Jews.
The man who attacked the synagogue entertained the same type of fantasy. Just as Willie Sutton was said to rob banks because “that’s where the money is,” this assailant took Jews hostage because that’s where the power was (or so he thought). The F.B.I.’s moral idiocy — there are no other words for it — in denying the specifically antisemitic nature of the attack lies in the idea that he could have imagined himself choosing just about any means to achieve his end, like taking hostages at the nearest church or convenience store. Similarly, the focus on his mental health evades the central fact that, crazy or not, his malice was not random. He aimed his gun at Jews.
The fantasy about Jewish power may seem outlandish, but it’s far more pervasive than many think — which gets to the point of people participating in antisemitism even when they aren’t knowingly perpetrating it.
Who, for instance, is most responsible for devising the war in Iraq? If your first-pass answer is “Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams and Perle,” you might ask yourself why you are naming second- and third-tier Bush administration officials, all of them Jewish, when all the top decision makers — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice — are Christians. (If your response to this is that Wolfowitz et al. were the ones who pulled the strings, then you’re an antisemite.)
Or take another example: if you think the reason Israel gets so much support in Congress is the money and influence of the pro-Israel lobby, you might be surprised to learn that that lobby ranks 20th on the most recent list of congressional donors, giving away a paltry $4.5 million compared with the $95 million that retiree interest groups donated. “All about the Benjamins” it is not, no matter what Representative Ilhan Omar might suppose.
***
But there’s a larger context here, which has to do with prevailing assumptions about power itself.
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Continue reading the main story
A moral conviction of our time, especially prevalent on the cultural left, is that the powerful are presumptively bad while the powerless are presumptively good. These categories aren’t just political. They are also social, economic, ethnic and racial. It’s why so many conversations today revolve around the concept of “privilege” — a striking redefinition of success that removes the presumption of merit from those who have it and the stigma of failure from those who don’t.
It’s also the likeliest reason there was so much obvious hesitancy to describe the attack in Texas as antisemitic. Unlike the Pittsburgh shooter or the “Jews will not replace us” crowd at Charlottesville — white, right-wing, mostly Christian and therefore “privileged” — the Texas assailant was a British Muslim of Pakistani descent. Not white. Not privileged. Not right-wing. In the binary narrative of the powerful versus the powerless, his naked antisemitism just doesn’t compute: Powerless people are supposed to be victims, not murderous bigots. If he had ranted against Israel for oppressing Palestinians, it might have made more sense. And if he had donned a MAGA hat, we would certainly have had a much fuller exploration of his antisemitism, without time wasted exploring his other motives or state of mind.
For American Jews, this small silence about what happened last week should be profoundly worrisome, and not just as a matter of a journalistic lapse. It’s bad enough that the Jewish state, which gained what power it has because its neighbors threatened it with extinction, is still treated by so many as a global pariah — its sympathizers abroad risking social or professional ostracism by mere association. It’s bad enough, too, that the foul antisemitism of the right, yoked to its old themes of nativism, protectionism, nationalism and isolationism, is erupting into the public square like a burst sewage pipe.
Now American Jews find ourselves at perhaps the most successful period in our history, at a moment when much of the progressive left has decreed that privilege is a sin and that those who hold power should be stripped of it. Anyone with a long view of Jewish history should know how quickly economic and social privilege can turn to political and personal ruin, even — or especially — in countries where it might seem unthinkable.
There’s much to be thankful for about how things ended last week in Texas, and about the outpouring of love and support, across faiths, for a little Jewish community. But the wise counsel for Jews is to be grateful for last week’s good luck, while taking it as a warning that our luck in America may run out.
Bret Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
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"There’s much to be thankful for about how things ended last week in Texas, and about the outpouring of love and support, across faiths, for a little Jewish community. But the wise counsel for Jews is to be grateful for last week’s good luck, while taking it as a warning that our luck in America may run out."
Funny , after all the circular rambling arguments he makes, he never states from which political realm the anti semitism is coming from .
I would estimate that 95 % of it is coming from the LEFT!
Why did the media not mention the clearly anti semitic nature of the synagogue hostage situation ?
he claims because Jews are seen as privileged and the terrorist was not and due to political correctness and the push for race and class warfare. Well, ALL OF THIS IS COMING FROM THE LEFT.
Funny how most
Jews are die hard Democrat Leftists despite this OBVIOUS FACT.
Stephens has lost his way as all those previous conservatives who suffer brain damage from TDS.
Also,
I dunno . I have watched Tucker for decades and never felt he was anti semitic
An afterthought
Stephens works for two Leftist organizations
NYT and NBC
is he just to coward to say they are the problem?
Or that stubborn ?
hard to say
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Al Sharpton literally lead a pogrom against Jews in NYC. How many times did Obama invite him to the White House?
"There’s much to be thankful for about how things ended last week in Texas, and about the outpouring of love and support, across faiths, for a little Jewish community. But the wise counsel for Jews is to be grateful for last week’s good luck, while taking it as a warning that our luck in America may run out."
Funny , after all the circular rambling arguments he makes, he never states from which political realm the anti semitism is coming from .
I would estimate that 95 % of it is coming from the LEFT!
Why did the media not mention the clearly anti semitic nature of the synagogue hostage situation ?
he claims because Jews are seen as privileged and the terrorist was not and due to political correctness and the push for race and class warfare. Well, ALL OF THIS IS COMING FROM THE LEFT.
Funny how most
Jews are die hard Democrat Leftists despite this OBVIOUS FACT.
Stephens has lost his way as all those previous conservatives who suffer brain damage from TDS.
Also,
I dunno . I have watched Tucker for decades and never felt he was anti semitic
An afterthought
Stephens works for two Leftist organizations
NYT and NBC
is he just to coward to say they are the problem?
Or that stubborn ?
hard to say
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I should have added my own comments to the Stephens piece, but was in a hurry at the moment I posted it. I concur fully with the counterpoints made.
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I should have added my own comments to the Stephens piece, but was in a hurry at the moment I posted it. I concur fully with the counterpoints made.
"It's anodder Shoa!" gets really old.
Want to know why you have 20-something Proud Boy types expressing anti-semetic ideas? It's a reaction to visibly Jewish organizations and individuals who relentlessly work to destroy the US and western civilization from within. Most of these individuals are orthodox leftists with a thin candy shell of Jewish identity.
Example 1:
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/453359-jewish-group-blocks-entrances-to-ice-headquarters-during
Example 2:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jewish-groups-condemn-arizona-s-potential-use-gas-executions-n1270585
Janice Friebaum can trace family members who were murdered at the Nazi death camp of Treblinka — two grandparents, three great-grandparents, aunts, uncles and countless cousins — among the millions of Jews killed in gas chambers during the Holocaust.
The politicization of the Holocaust amid the coronavirus pandemic has only undermined the barbarity inflicted on the victims of genocide, she said, adding that Americans may become "desensitized by false analogies" like equating mass murder with mask-wearing mandates.
But when she learned her home state of Arizona reportedly refurbished its gas chamber for executions, a method of death last used there more than two decades ago, she decided it warranted speaking out.
"Uniformly, Holocaust survivors and their descendants are nothing short of horrified of this form of execution being utilized," said Friebaum, vice president of the Phoenix Holocaust Association, a nonprofit group that documents experiences of survivors and educates about genocide.
The gas chambers were a "Nazi innovation, and it was positively inhumane," she said. "To think our 'civilized society' today in the state of Arizona would utilize this Nazi innovation, I believe, is tantamount to giving posthumous approval to the evils conducted by the Nazis. We're basically saying what the Nazis did was OK."
Gas chambers for execution were first used by the state of Nevada in 1921, long before Hitler rose to power. It was seen as a more humane form of execution. It was NOT a nazi innovation.
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"Want to know why you have 20-something Proud Boy types expressing anti-semetic ideas? It's a reaction to visibly Jewish organizations and individuals who relentlessly work to destroy the US and western civilization from within. Most of these individuals are orthodox leftists with a thin candy shell of Jewish identity."
YES
WELL said
EXACTLY
We see and read endless parade of prominent Jews being the most vicious
partisans who are at the front lines of the news and behind the scenes shoving wokeness
Democrat party power and willingness to lie cheat manipulate and subvert the Constitution
corrupt politics the courts the law to
make us have to kneel before their adopted religion
(democrat party )
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I should have added my own comments to the Stephens piece, but was in a hurry at the moment I posted it. I concur fully with the counterpoints made.
"It's anodder Shoa!" gets really old.
Want to know why you have 20-something Proud Boy types expressing anti-semetic ideas? It's a reaction to visibly Jewish organizations and individuals who relentlessly work to destroy the US and western civilization from within. Most of these individuals are orthodox leftists with a thin candy shell of Jewish identity.
Example 1:
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/453359-jewish-group-blocks-entrances-to-ice-headquarters-during
Example 2:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jewish-groups-condemn-arizona-s-potential-use-gas-executions-n1270585
Janice Friebaum can trace family members who were murdered at the Nazi death camp of Treblinka — two grandparents, three great-grandparents, aunts, uncles and countless cousins — among the millions of Jews killed in gas chambers during the Holocaust.
The politicization of the Holocaust amid the coronavirus pandemic has only undermined the barbarity inflicted on the victims of genocide, she said, adding that Americans may become "desensitized by false analogies" like equating mass murder with mask-wearing mandates.
But when she learned her home state of Arizona reportedly refurbished its gas chamber for executions, a method of death last used there more than two decades ago, she decided it warranted speaking out.
"Uniformly, Holocaust survivors and their descendants are nothing short of horrified of this form of execution being utilized," said Friebaum, vice president of the Phoenix Holocaust Association, a nonprofit group that documents experiences of survivors and educates about genocide.
The gas chambers were a "Nazi innovation, and it was positively inhumane," she said. "To think our 'civilized society' today in the state of Arizona would utilize this Nazi innovation, I believe, is tantamount to giving posthumous approval to the evils conducted by the Nazis. We're basically saying what the Nazis did was OK."
Gas chambers for execution were first used by the state of Nevada in 1921, long before Hitler rose to power. It was seen as a more humane form of execution. It was NOT a nazi innovation.
(https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.GQ3rjM8EVQv9FO52-DhrwQHaJk%26pid%3DApi&f=1)
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Bloomberg and Zuckerberg throwing hundreds of millions of dollars to sway the '20 election into the Democrat Party's favor
not just to the Democrats but to pay Democrat operatives to rig the votes and aid ballot harvesting
and to pay off the Dem lawyers to get rules changed always in their favor in all the battleground locations.
one of the google guys is jewish
CEO of Pfizer withholding good news till just after the election
how could anyone not see this and
if you are on my side not be very angry ?
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/02/03/whoopi-goldberg-is-not-taking-her-view-suspension-very-well-n2602757
I don't get it.
"Jews" are not a race
we are a religious and cultural group
Hitler did not kill Jews because they were white
Semantically Whoopi is right
What is the rush to jump all over this - it is crazy
I am sure I could find other things the whoopi has said that I would truly disagree with
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/02/03/whoopi-goldberg-is-not-taking-her-view-suspension-very-well-n2602757
I don't get it.
"Jews" are not a race
we are a religious and cultural group
Hitler did not kill Jews because they were white
Semantically Whoopi is right
What is the rush to jump all over this - it is crazy
I am sure I could find other things the whoopi has said that I would truly disagree with
I wondered that too, race isn't the right word, still a stupid statement on her part, career ending if she were on the right.
Funny that Whoopi's real name is Karen. (Caryn)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whoopi
SLANG DICTIONARY: Karen is a pejorative slang term for an obnoxious, angry, entitled, and often racist middle-aged white woman who uses her privilege to get her way or police other people’s behaviors.
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Not that it matters, but IIRC she was raised by white people?
Remember when she was dating white guy Ted ______ and he did blackface with her?
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back in 1993.
last century !
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/14/garden/after-the-roast-fire-and-smoke.html
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10474545/Whoopis-Goldbergs-offensive-1993-Jewish-American-Princess-recipe-chicken.html
all very weird
was all this to suck up to Jewish Hollywood's big shots?
I never did understand it :?
Come to think of it - I wondered the same for Sammy Davis .........
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https://news.yahoo.com/3-arrested-passerby-attacked-neo-022057418.html
I remember taking a class with a rabbi in West Palm Beach (just across the intercoastal from Mar A Lago). in the mid 90's
who was explaining some Jews ID themselves through the Nazi genocide - "holocaust"
Somehow we only come up in the news when it is some sort or anti semitism topic.
I think we need to have a new PR agent - like Gilder who wrote a book about how remarkable the tiny country of Israel is for its contribution to tech science medicine etc
Not to forget the holocaust but to promote Jews as making huge contributions to religion,
science, medicine , law , philanthropy, culture, entertainment (think Jackie Mason, Rodney Dangerfield) etc
(leave out the communism shysterism and Rothschild stereotype (Soros)
While we are still victims and potential victims , we are more than this.
Just ruminating
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"I think we need to have a new PR agent - like Gilder who wrote a book about how remarkable the tiny country of Israel is for its contribution to tech science medicine etc"
YES.
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The Hate That CAIR Loves to Defend
by Steven Emerson
IPT News
March 21, 2022
https://www.investigativeproject.org/9154/the-hate-that-cair-loves-to-defend
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WTF?!?
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/lara-logan-theory-of-evolution-anti-semitism-1328721/?fbclid=IwAR0wFpfo7_BIuHn4ICUbuQems7Fisl0hXI39IDicLZgrT4NzuKLsjIhCofk
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ok Logan
I looked it up
nothing found
of any link
so where is your source?
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Fox Nation’s Lara Logan Suggests Theory of Evolution Is a Hoax Funded by Jews
Lara Logan’s latest anti-Semitic dog whistle is a claim that Charles Darwin only came up with the idea of evolution because Jews paid him to
By RYAN BORT
Lara Logan, chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, speaks prior to presenting Father Patrick Desbois with the Lantos Human Rights Prize during a ceremony on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on October 26, 2017, to honor his work and foundation, Yahad-In Unum, in researching and uncovering genocidal practices around the world. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)Lara Logan, chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, speaks prior to presenting Father Patrick Desbois with the Lantos Human Rights Prize during a ceremony on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on October 26, 2017, to honor his work and foundation, Yahad-In Unum, in researching and uncovering genocidal practices around the world. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
It wasn’t long ago that Lara Logan was a correspondent for CBS News, which is a little hard to believe considering the types of conspiracy theories she’s been pushing since she left the network. The latest came during an appearance on the right-wing podcast “And We Know,” during which Logan suggested that the theory of evolution is the result of a wealthy Jewish family paying Charles Darwin to devise an explanation for what gave rise to humanity.
“Does anyone know who employed Darwin, where Darwinism comes from?” Logan, now with Fox News’ streaming service Fox Nation, asked. “Look it up: The Rothschilds. It goes back to 10 Downing Street. The same people who employed Darwin, and his theory of evolution and so on and so on. I’m not saying that none of that is true. I’m just saying Darwin was hired by someone to come up with a theory — based on evidence, OK, fine.”
Logan rambled for a bit longer, but her point was that evolution is a “chicken or the egg” debate and “you can’t answer it scientifically” and, while we’re here, Jews are trying to control the world with their money. Media Matters caught the claim on Monday:
The Rothschilds, who Logan says is responsible for the theory of evolution, are a Jewish family that often shows up in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) famously wrote on Facebook that the Rothschilds funded a space laser that started the California wildfires.
Logan and Greene share more in common than anti-Semitic comments. Both the Fox Nation host and the bigoted, virulent conspiracy theorist lawmaker have pushed Russian propaganda since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine last month. Greene has blamed Ukraine for the invasion, while suggesting the nation’s military is rife with Nazis. Greene, however, at least made some sort of superficial effort to insist she’s not a Putin supporter. Logan made no such effort.
“Whether you like Putin or don’t like him, Putin is not willing to be a part of whatever global governing structure is coming our way,” Logan said last week on a right-wing podcast. “Vladimir Putin has been very calculating, he’s been very careful … he’s said for 15 years that he would not tolerate NATO expansion.”
“He’s the man standing between us and this New World Order,” she added after rambling about Ukrainian biolabs funded by Hunter Biden.
The idea of a “New World Order” constructed by Jews is a trope of anti-Semitic rhetoric. We’re starting to notice a pattern in Logan’s conspiracy theorizing.
In This Article: Anti-Semitism, Lara Logan, marjorie taylor greene
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Oh please. :roll:
Fox Nation’s Lara Logan Suggests Theory of Evolution Is a Hoax Funded by Jews
Lara Logan’s latest anti-Semitic dog whistle is a claim that Charles Darwin only came up with the idea of evolution because Jews paid him to
By RYAN BORT
Lara Logan, chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, speaks prior to presenting Father Patrick Desbois with the Lantos Human Rights Prize during a ceremony on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on October 26, 2017, to honor his work and foundation, Yahad-In Unum, in researching and uncovering genocidal practices around the world. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)Lara Logan, chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, speaks prior to presenting Father Patrick Desbois with the Lantos Human Rights Prize during a ceremony on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on October 26, 2017, to honor his work and foundation, Yahad-In Unum, in researching and uncovering genocidal practices around the world. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
It wasn’t long ago that Lara Logan was a correspondent for CBS News, which is a little hard to believe considering the types of conspiracy theories she’s been pushing since she left the network. The latest came during an appearance on the right-wing podcast “And We Know,” during which Logan suggested that the theory of evolution is the result of a wealthy Jewish family paying Charles Darwin to devise an explanation for what gave rise to humanity.
“Does anyone know who employed Darwin, where Darwinism comes from?” Logan, now with Fox News’ streaming service Fox Nation, asked. “Look it up: The Rothschilds. It goes back to 10 Downing Street. The same people who employed Darwin, and his theory of evolution and so on and so on. I’m not saying that none of that is true. I’m just saying Darwin was hired by someone to come up with a theory — based on evidence, OK, fine.”
Logan rambled for a bit longer, but her point was that evolution is a “chicken or the egg” debate and “you can’t answer it scientifically” and, while we’re here, Jews are trying to control the world with their money. Media Matters caught the claim on Monday:
The Rothschilds, who Logan says is responsible for the theory of evolution, are a Jewish family that often shows up in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) famously wrote on Facebook that the Rothschilds funded a space laser that started the California wildfires.
Logan and Greene share more in common than anti-Semitic comments. Both the Fox Nation host and the bigoted, virulent conspiracy theorist lawmaker have pushed Russian propaganda since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine last month. Greene has blamed Ukraine for the invasion, while suggesting the nation’s military is rife with Nazis. Greene, however, at least made some sort of superficial effort to insist she’s not a Putin supporter. Logan made no such effort.
“Whether you like Putin or don’t like him, Putin is not willing to be a part of whatever global governing structure is coming our way,” Logan said last week on a right-wing podcast. “Vladimir Putin has been very calculating, he’s been very careful … he’s said for 15 years that he would not tolerate NATO expansion.”
“He’s the man standing between us and this New World Order,” she added after rambling about Ukrainian biolabs funded by Hunter Biden.
The idea of a “New World Order” constructed by Jews is a trope of anti-Semitic rhetoric. We’re starting to notice a pattern in Logan’s conspiracy theorizing.
In This Article: Anti-Semitism, Lara Logan, marjorie taylor greene
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https://www.britannica.com/topic/Rothschild-family
We all know that bankers are wonderful people who never do anything wrong! Anyone who says otherwise is obviously a nazi, but the bad kind, not the good kind funded by Jewish Billionaires in the Ukraine.
Oh please. :roll:
Fox Nation’s Lara Logan Suggests Theory of Evolution Is a Hoax Funded by Jews
Lara Logan’s latest anti-Semitic dog whistle is a claim that Charles Darwin only came up with the idea of evolution because Jews paid him to
By RYAN BORT
Lara Logan, chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, speaks prior to presenting Father Patrick Desbois with the Lantos Human Rights Prize during a ceremony on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on October 26, 2017, to honor his work and foundation, Yahad-In Unum, in researching and uncovering genocidal practices around the world. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)Lara Logan, chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, speaks prior to presenting Father Patrick Desbois with the Lantos Human Rights Prize during a ceremony on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on October 26, 2017, to honor his work and foundation, Yahad-In Unum, in researching and uncovering genocidal practices around the world. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
It wasn’t long ago that Lara Logan was a correspondent for CBS News, which is a little hard to believe considering the types of conspiracy theories she’s been pushing since she left the network. The latest came during an appearance on the right-wing podcast “And We Know,” during which Logan suggested that the theory of evolution is the result of a wealthy Jewish family paying Charles Darwin to devise an explanation for what gave rise to humanity.
“Does anyone know who employed Darwin, where Darwinism comes from?” Logan, now with Fox News’ streaming service Fox Nation, asked. “Look it up: The Rothschilds. It goes back to 10 Downing Street. The same people who employed Darwin, and his theory of evolution and so on and so on. I’m not saying that none of that is true. I’m just saying Darwin was hired by someone to come up with a theory — based on evidence, OK, fine.”
Logan rambled for a bit longer, but her point was that evolution is a “chicken or the egg” debate and “you can’t answer it scientifically” and, while we’re here, Jews are trying to control the world with their money. Media Matters caught the claim on Monday:
The Rothschilds, who Logan says is responsible for the theory of evolution, are a Jewish family that often shows up in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) famously wrote on Facebook that the Rothschilds funded a space laser that started the California wildfires.
Logan and Greene share more in common than anti-Semitic comments. Both the Fox Nation host and the bigoted, virulent conspiracy theorist lawmaker have pushed Russian propaganda since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine last month. Greene has blamed Ukraine for the invasion, while suggesting the nation’s military is rife with Nazis. Greene, however, at least made some sort of superficial effort to insist she’s not a Putin supporter. Logan made no such effort.
“Whether you like Putin or don’t like him, Putin is not willing to be a part of whatever global governing structure is coming our way,” Logan said last week on a right-wing podcast. “Vladimir Putin has been very calculating, he’s been very careful … he’s said for 15 years that he would not tolerate NATO expansion.”
“He’s the man standing between us and this New World Order,” she added after rambling about Ukrainian biolabs funded by Hunter Biden.
The idea of a “New World Order” constructed by Jews is a trope of anti-Semitic rhetoric. We’re starting to notice a pattern in Logan’s conspiracy theorizing.
In This Article: Anti-Semitism, Lara Logan, marjorie taylor greene
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Your meaning is unclear , , ,
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Your meaning is unclear , , ,
1. It's the usual smear job from the left, lacking anything of merit.
2. If you can you can hear the dog whistle, you are the dog.
3. If you want to see valid examples of anti-semitism, I would refer you to many close associates of the sacred Obama, who somehow escape scrutiny for some reason.
4. Mentioning the Rothschilds isn't a crime, and the fact that so many seem so intent on making it into one suggests there is something about their history worth looking into.
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"Mentioning the Rothschilds isn't a crime, and the fact that so many seem so intent on making it into one suggests there is something about their history worth looking into."
What does this have to do with Logan stating
Rothschilds funded Darwin to come up with the theory of evolution
nothing I found on internet about this.
what is her source?
she says "go look it up"
so I did,
but nothing comes up
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"Mentioning the Rothschilds isn't a crime, and the fact that so many seem so intent on making it into one suggests there is something about their history worth looking into."
What does this have to do with Logan stating
Rothschilds funded Darwin to come up with the theory of evolution
nothing I found on internet about this.
what is her source?
she says "go look it up"
so I did,
but nothing comes up
I haven't found it either, but I did find that Darwin and Karl Marx were corresponding, which wasn't anything I had ever heard of before.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2708767
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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Darwin/Evolution-by-natural-selection-the-London-years-1836-42
"With his voyage over and with a £400 annual allowance from his father, Darwin now settled down among the urban gentry as a gentleman geologist. He befriended Lyell, and he discussed the rising Chilean coastline as a new fellow of the Geological Society in January 1837 (he was secretary of the society by 1838). Darwin became well known through his diary’s publication as Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle (1839). With a £1,000 Treasury grant, obtained through the Cambridge network, he employed the best experts and published their descriptions of his specimens in his Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (1838–43). Darwin’s star had risen, and he was now lionized in London."
Cambridge network?
No idea what that is.
"Mentioning the Rothschilds isn't a crime, and the fact that so many seem so intent on making it into one suggests there is something about their history worth looking into."
What does this have to do with Logan stating
Rothschilds funded Darwin to come up with the theory of evolution
nothing I found on internet about this.
what is her source?
she says "go look it up"
so I did,
but nothing comes up
I haven't found it either, but I did find that Darwin and Karl Marx were corresponding, which wasn't anything I had ever heard of before.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2708767
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Mentioning the Rothchilds has a very high correlation with vicious anti-semitism.
Period.
BEGIN
"Mentioning the Rothschilds isn't a crime, and the fact that so many seem so intent on making it into one suggests there is something about their history worth looking into."
What does this have to do with Logan stating
Rothschilds funded Darwin to come up with the theory of evolution
nothing I found on internet about this.
what is her source?
she says "go look it up"
so I did,
but nothing comes up
END
Exactly so.
Love Lara's work elsewhere, but this does not get a pass from me at all.
-
Mentioning the Rothchilds has a very high correlation with vicious anti-semitism.
Period.
BEGIN
"Mentioning the Rothschilds isn't a crime, and the fact that so many seem so intent on making it into one suggests there is something about their history worth looking into."
What does this have to do with Logan stating
Rothschilds funded Darwin to come up with the theory of evolution
nothing I found on internet about this.
what is her source?
she says "go look it up"
so I did,
but nothing comes up
END
Exactly so.
Love Lara's work elsewhere, but this does not get a pass from me at all.
Have we seen the actual transcript of what she said?
-
Mentioning the Rothchilds has a very high correlation with vicious anti-semitism.
Period.
BEGIN
"Mentioning the Rothschilds isn't a crime, and the fact that so many seem so intent on making it into one suggests there is something about their history worth looking into."
What does this have to do with Logan stating
Rothschilds funded Darwin to come up with the theory of evolution
nothing I found on internet about this.
what is her source?
she says "go look it up"
so I did,
but nothing comes up
END
Exactly so.
Love Lara's work elsewhere, but this does not get a pass from me at all.
Have we seen the actual transcript of what she said?
Funny enough, I can't find anything critical of Al Sharpton in Rolling Stone, although he is quoted in many articles.
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For me the relevant point here is that Lara Logan, someone whose reporting in other contexts we have taken to heart has dived into the muck here.
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A Century of U.S.-Israel Ties
Congress supported a Jewish state in 1922, and the conspiracy theories began.
Walter Russell Mead hedcutBy Walter Russell MeadFollow
Sept. 5, 2022 5:55 pm ET
One hundred years ago, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (R., Mass.) and Rep. Hamilton Fish (R., N.Y.) steered a joint resolution through Congress putting the U.S. on record in supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Senate vote was unanimous; the House whooped it through on a voice vote. In September 1922 President Warren G. Harding signed the resolution, launching a tradition of official American support for Zionist aspirations in Palestine that a long line of presidents from both parties have continued.
The Lodge-Fish Resolution unintentionally launched another tradition: belief among many Americans that American support for Zionism was the result of nefarious Jewish influence. Jewish wealth, the theory went, favored pro-Israel politicians while Jews supposedly imposed pro-Israel views on a press that they allegedly controlled. The two traditions coexist to this day. Support for Israel, while not unlimited or uncritical, dominates both parties in Congress, while controversies over the role of pro-Israel “Jewish money” in American elections continue to rage.
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But the past 100 years tell a different story. American Jews, contrary to legend, aren’t an irresistible political force. Two years after the Lodge-Fish resolution, Congress passed a system of immigration restriction that reduced Jewish immigration to the U.S. by about 90%. The American Jewish community was unable to block this legislation, just as it was unable to persuade Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration to take strong action to protect Jews in Hitler’s Germany. In 1944, Jewish leaders begged the American government to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz; those pleas were rejected.
Yet these years of Jewish powerlessness were peak years for anti-Semitic conspiracies. Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, a newspaper distributed nationally through the growing network of Ford auto dealers, was a platform for anti-Semitic propaganda. The so-called second Ku Klux Klan, a national revival of the Reconstruction-era organization originally formed to restore white supremacy in the South, was near the height of its influence as it campaigned against mass immigration of Catholics and Jews from Eastern and Southern Europe. Father Charles Coughlin’s infamous radio broadcasts emphasized the idea of a Jewish conspiracy even as discrimination against Jews at elite universities became deeply entrenched.
It wasn’t simply that American Jews were too weak to impose Zionism on the American political system. Most of them didn’t want to. Led by Henry Morgenthau, Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and the most influential Jewish political leader of the era, most prominent American Jews opposed the British government’s Balfour Declaration and the Lodge-Fish Resolution that endorsed it. The New York Times had been a pro-Zionist newspaper under non-Jewish ownership. It became anti-Zionist after it was bought by a Jewish publisher in 1896. Not until the 1940s did the American Jewish establishment embrace the Zionist cause.
That Jewish support had little impact on American policy. During the 19 years between Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence and its overwhelming victory in the 1967 Six Day War, American Jews were united and enthusiastic in supporting Israel. Yet U.S.-Israel relations were at their frostiest in that era. Both Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy preferred a strong relationship with Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser to close relations with Israel. Under Eisenhower, the U.S. sided with Egypt against Israel during the 1956 Suez crisis, and Kennedy focused his diplomatic efforts on an attempt to derail Israel’s drive for nuclear weapons.
The modern era of a close U.S.-Israel alignment began only after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel and rapprochement with the U.S. the key to his strategy. The relationship deepened after the shah of Iran fell in 1979, and again after the 9/11 attacks when Israeli intelligence significantly assisted American counterterror efforts around the world. The three presidents most associated with pro-Israel policies—Richard Nixon, George W. Bush and Donald Trump—were deeply unpopular with Jewish voters, and even unequivocally pro-Israel Republicans like Trump and Mitt Romney received less financial support from Jewish contributors than their Democratic opponents did.
It is the story of non-Jewish support for Israel that needs to be told. It is not only that American Christians going back to Boston Puritans like Increase Mather and colonial theologians like Jonathan Edwards believed that God would someday lead the Jews back to their biblical homeland. Politicians like John Adams and Theodore Roosevelt, and hardheaded businessmen like John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, supported Zionist aspirations as well.
One hundred years after the Lodge-Fish Resolution, Jewish and non-Jewish Americans alike continue to debate America’s relationship with the Zionist movement and the Jewish state. That is as it should be. Those who think that Jewish financial and media power are the forces that drive America’s Middle East policy continue to miss the point. Anti-Semitic myths about Jewish power can’t explain America’s past policy in the Middle East and provide no useful guidance for the future.
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https://newspaperarchive.com/nebraska-state-journal-nov-26-1936-p-2/
Arabs Read Hitler "My Struggle" Becomes Best Seller Among Anti-Semitics. BERLIN. November 26 (AP). -- Arabs, who join with Nazi Germany in antagonism to Jews, are reading Adolf Hitler's book "My Struggle." The Fuehrer's autobiography, with its anti-Semitic theroies, has been translated into Arabic and already is a best seller in Palestine, German newspapers say. The German edition once was barred in Palestine during the high point of Jewish immigration there, but Arabs who fought the Jewish influx, are reported much interested in the new translation.Nebraska State Journal Archives, Nov 26, 1936, p. 2 - NewspaperArchive
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https://jimleff.blogspot.com/2022/09/blacks-standing-up-for-jews.html?fbclid=IwAR2Evo8ncN4UP4CrcfOSTS28I6QcMokkoDJn4uiq44nMwUGN2gvkXJkNoiM
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A poster on my FB page:
.There are new books coming out all the time talking about FDR and the Holocaust. It seems that documents are being found that shed light on his administration and his hatred of all things Jewish.
For fifty years FDR has been almost a G-d to most dems. It is understandable, after all he was the leader of the country when the war began, and he led it almost to the end. But on the issue of minorities, he falls short of G-dhood. He did next to nothing to stop the transportation of Jews to the death camps, and in America he rounded up Japanese Americans and put them in camps. Every year from 1933 to the end of the war the US had left over immigration visas that could have saved Jewish lives. Only after the war did the US suddenly grow a conscious and let in Jewish refugees.....
And what did US Jewry do to push for more immigrants? Well Rabbi Wise was the de facto head of US Jewry and he was told to not make waves. "Three days before Yom Kippur in 1943, more than four hundred Orthodox rabbis marched to the White House to plead with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to rescue European Jews from the Nazis. For a cause which on its merits would seem unobjectionable, the march encountered a surprising amount of opposition. The president refused the rabbis’ request to hand him a petition. FDR’s Jewish advisers denounced the protesters. A prominent Jewish member of Congress urged them to cancel the march. Some Jewish leaders publicly condemned them. Why did the march provoke such criticism? Why did the organizers insist on going ahead with it, nonetheless?
In a generation that has seen hundreds of thousands of American Jews protest in Washington for Soviet Jewry (1987) and Israel (2002), a march by hundreds of Orthodox rabbis may not seem impressive. But it was the only such protest in the nation’s capital during the Holocaust. The very fact that it was so unusual contributed to the wave of alarm that it triggered in official Washington.
President Roosevelt’s decision to snub the rabbis was based on cold political logic. Jewish leaders in congress put down the demonstration as a stunt. The era’s most prominent American Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen Wise, criticized the march in somewhat similar terms. Wise, who headed the American Jewish Congress, the World Jewish Congress, and the American Zionist movement, wrote that “the orthodox rabbinical parade [ sic]” was a “painful and even lamentable exhibition.” He derided the organizers as “stuntists” and accused them of offending “the dignity of [the Jewish] people.”https://associationforjewishstudies.org/.../the-1943...
Wise was a staunch supporter of President Roosevelt and his administration and did his best to counter or suppress Jewish criticism of the president." Only after the war and the full truth of the destruction of European Jewry come out did Wise admit that he was wrong....
https://associationforjewishstudies.org/publications-research/ajs-perspectives/the-protest-issue/the-1943-jewish-march-on-washington-through-the-eyes-of-its-critics?fbclid=IwAR2FoaOCaDrgncRuiVIw5Fxm_Si4J9VzoHtHYROLYR8yfoSgWQTog6PzAyM
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Another poster adds:
The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust https://a.co/d/9ds1ERW
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So I went to the below link and saw this:
"I am not paranoid about this stuff. I normally go months without using the term "anti-Semite". It's not my normal shtick. But my spidy sense has been peaking geometrically (admittedly without any hard evidence), and at the exact same time I've noticed black writers and intellectuals suddenly appearing on TV to articulately and full-throatedly attack the anti-Semitism of Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano (who scares me a lot)."
WTF?
https://jimleff.blogspot.com/2022/09/blacks-standing-up-for-jews.html?fbclid=IwAR2Evo8ncN4UP4CrcfOSTS28I6QcMokkoDJn4uiq44nMwUGN2gvkXJkNoiM
================
A poster on my FB page:
.There are new books coming out all the time talking about FDR and the Holocaust. It seems that documents are being found that shed light on his administration and his hatred of all things Jewish.
For fifty years FDR has been almost a G-d to most dems. It is understandable, after all he was the leader of the country when the war began, and he led it almost to the end. But on the issue of minorities, he falls short of G-dhood. He did next to nothing to stop the transportation of Jews to the death camps, and in America he rounded up Japanese Americans and put them in camps. Every year from 1933 to the end of the war the US had left over immigration visas that could have saved Jewish lives. Only after the war did the US suddenly grow a conscious and let in Jewish refugees.....
And what did US Jewry do to push for more immigrants? Well Rabbi Wise was the de facto head of US Jewry and he was told to not make waves. "Three days before Yom Kippur in 1943, more than four hundred Orthodox rabbis marched to the White House to plead with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to rescue European Jews from the Nazis. For a cause which on its merits would seem unobjectionable, the march encountered a surprising amount of opposition. The president refused the rabbis’ request to hand him a petition. FDR’s Jewish advisers denounced the protesters. A prominent Jewish member of Congress urged them to cancel the march. Some Jewish leaders publicly condemned them. Why did the march provoke such criticism? Why did the organizers insist on going ahead with it, nonetheless?
In a generation that has seen hundreds of thousands of American Jews protest in Washington for Soviet Jewry (1987) and Israel (2002), a march by hundreds of Orthodox rabbis may not seem impressive. But it was the only such protest in the nation’s capital during the Holocaust. The very fact that it was so unusual contributed to the wave of alarm that it triggered in official Washington.
President Roosevelt’s decision to snub the rabbis was based on cold political logic. Jewish leaders in congress put down the demonstration as a stunt. The era’s most prominent American Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen Wise, criticized the march in somewhat similar terms. Wise, who headed the American Jewish Congress, the World Jewish Congress, and the American Zionist movement, wrote that “the orthodox rabbinical parade [ sic]” was a “painful and even lamentable exhibition.” He derided the organizers as “stuntists” and accused them of offending “the dignity of [the Jewish] people.”https://associationforjewishstudies.org/.../the-1943...
Wise was a staunch supporter of President Roosevelt and his administration and did his best to counter or suppress Jewish criticism of the president." Only after the war and the full truth of the destruction of European Jewry come out did Wise admit that he was wrong....
https://associationforjewishstudies.org/publications-research/ajs-perspectives/the-protest-issue/the-1943-jewish-march-on-washington-through-the-eyes-of-its-critics?fbclid=IwAR2FoaOCaDrgncRuiVIw5Fxm_Si4J9VzoHtHYROLYR8yfoSgWQTog6PzAyM
==========
Another poster adds:
The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust https://a.co/d/9ds1ERW
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"at the exact same time I've noticed black writers and intellectuals suddenly appearing on TV to articulately and full-throatedly attack the anti-Semitism of Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano (who scares me a lot)."
as for the first part:
black intellectuals on TV recently standing up against anti semitism
I HAVE NOT WITNESSED THE SAME THING!
As for blacks standing up for a Democrat running for governor who happens to be Jewish
I would believe that some black "intellectuals" would come out on MSNBC and CNN and call his opponent an anti semite.
Jeff Leff , who claims to know personally Jews who marched with the blacks in the civil rights movement comes off to me as the stereotype person who claims to have black friends - self righteous , virtue signals
OTOH he is pointing out that Blacks have not reciprocated appreciation of Jews help in civil rights
till now
[while conveniently doing so for a Democrat candidate - which strikes me as partisan not real
recognition for Jews etc]
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On the reputation with me of the person who posted that article I posted it here-- perhaps I should have been more careful , , ,
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https://www.revolver.news/2022/10/breaking-kanye-west-debanked-by-chase-days-after-controversially-implying-jews-control-finance-and-created-cancel-culture/
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FWIW :
I've posted before how Jews do have a seemingly out of proportion power in the media
law, politics, entertainment, academia , finance, wall street
that is undeniable; it is obvious
it is not anti - semitic to point that out although anyone who does
gets doxxed immediately -
we can think of dozens of Democrat Jews who are as ferocious partisans as anyone.
however that said, Kayne West was overboard
IMHO.
The Marlon Brando clip is interesting - i guess he only said hollywood is controlled by Jews
contrast that to Mel Gibson who cursed out jews
or the treatment of spike lee who said hollywood is controlled by jews
but that is not a hollow statement
look at all the big studios in early hollywood
they were all controlled by russian jewish immigrants...
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If I recall correctly, Jews are about 1% of the US population, meanwhile Asians are roughly 6% of the US population.
Where is all the Asian representation in American institutions?
FWIW :
I've posted before how Jews do have a seemingly out of proportion power in the media
law, politics, entertainment, academia , finance, wall street
that is undeniable; it is obvious
it is not anti - semitic to point that out although anyone that does
gets doxxed immediately -
we can think of dozens of Democrat Jews who are as ferocious partisans as anyone.
however that said, Kayne West was overboard
IMHO.
The Marlon Brando clip is interesting - i guess he only said hollywood is controlled by Jews
contrast that to Mel Gibson who cursed out jews
or the treatment of spike lee who said hollywood is controlled by jews
but that is not a hollow statement
look at all the big studios in early hollywood
they were all controlled by russian jewish immigrants...
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source Wikidpeia
Early moguls
Name Year of birth Studio
Jack L. Warner 1892 Warner Brothers. Jewish
Louis B. Mayer 1884 MGM. Jewish
Carl Laemmle 1867 Universal Pictures Jewish
Samuel Goldwyn 1879 MGM. Jewish
Darryl F. Zanuck 1902 Twentieth Century Fox Protestant
William Fox 1879 Fox Movie Corporation Jewish
I don't think that pointing this out makes me a bigot . :?
The Jewish ones all from Eastern Europe
I don't know about the big shots of Hollywood today though
but interesting to look it up when I get time
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Jewish/Prog power is quite strong in Hollywood.
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nearly ALL are crats
I didn't know our friend Jason is Jewish (Chaffetz)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_members_of_the_United_States_Congress
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That Chaffetz was Jewish had not registered with me.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/new-anti-semitism-woke-progressives-old-stereotypes/
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https://pjmedia.com/columns/rabbi-michael-barclay/2022/11/10/are-american-jews-finally-leaving-the-democratic-party-n1644969
"Jews voting for Democrats is like chickens voting for Colonel Sanders"
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m-gO0HSCYk
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https://www.timesofisrael.com/new-york-police-arrest-2-men-seize-weapons-over-threat-to-jewish-community/amp/?fbclid=IwAR0xgYYydi00OWF-IvVUZILy31EzWG3u7duQxDV7VRv6y5EC6uyyqAynhEg
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‘Inconvenient Anti-Semites’ in New York’s War on Hate
Three blind spots render incoherent the promises of liberal politicians to protect Jews from attack.
By Elliot Kaufman
Dec. 16, 2022 11:31 am ET
After a long month of attacks on Jews in New York City, the big guns held a symposium at a Manhattan synagogue Monday. One by one, Mayor Eric Adams, Gov. Kathy Hochul, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas pledged to fight anti-Semitism. After blaming Donald Trump, Ms. Hochul announced a new hate-prevention initiative and vowed, “When you attack one of us, anyone, that is picking a fight with 20 million other New Yorkers, starting with your governor.”
Liberals love to fight hate, but I’d rather they punish crime. Americans Against Antisemitism has studied 194 anti-Jewish assaults and 135 property incidents in New York City since 2018 but can identify only two offenders who have been sentenced to prison. Others receive probation or counseling or their charges aren’t followed up. “There are practically no serious consequences to be had,” the group concludes in a July report.
Examples abound: In May 2021, a Brooklyn man with an attempted-murder charge pending yelled “F—ing Jews! I’m going to f— you up” and punched a 67-year-old man in the head. He was arrested but hate-crime charges were dropped and he pleaded down to a misdemeanor.
The New York Police Department reported 45 hate crimes against Jews in November, more than double the monthly figure from a year ago. It records 278 such crimes this year, up 53%, and 100 arrests, up 61%. Why don’t prosecutions and prison sentences follow? “I’ve asked the question for years with the DAs of the world, with legislators,” Rabbi David Niederman, a top Satmar Hasidic leader in Brooklyn, says in an interview. He gets no answer.
This is the first blind spot in the war on hate. Determined to “end mass incarceration,” liberals have pulled back police, narrowed prosecutions, restricted cash bail, and gutted mandatory minimums. At the same time, liberals want to crack down on certain “bad” crimes, such as those motivated by hate. But the scholar James Q. Wilson showed long ago that criminals don’t really specialize. Just as substantial proportions of drug and property offenders go on to commit violent crimes, the majority of hate-crime offenders have prior, non-hate-related arrests.
Someone who punches a Jew on the street is also likely to punch and menace others, commit robberies and deface property. By fixating on special hate instead of shared criminality, liberals miss how bringing incarceration rates to multidecade lows has left on the streets antisocial criminals predisposed to attack Jews.
When they do attack, the system breaks down. Youths are unlikely to be prosecuted, so there’s little reason for police to book them. Harassment is barely worth a prosecutor’s time. An assault isn’t a hate crime unless the attacker states his motive—and even then, it’s burdensome to prove, so the hate-crime charge is often dropped and the attack treated as a regular assault. Then, many defendants plead down or have their charges dropped. “They get a slap on the wrist, at best,” Rabbi Niederman says. Since New York’s bail reform prohibits judges from considering the danger defendants pose to others, most criminals are released immediately. At last, when incarceration rates fall, activists call it justice.
The second blind spot is the victims. Israel Bitton, head of Americans Against Antisemitism, observes, “A lot of the secular Jews aren’t responding with the same alacrity they would if people started hitting heads of the United Jewish Appeal walking down Fifth Avenue.” Of the 194 anti-Jewish assaults his group has tracked, three-quarters were in four Brooklyn neighborhoods, and 184 of the victims were Orthodox Jews, identifiable by their dress. These are the Jews who can’t hide.
Less-religious Jews were stunned by Kanye West’s anti-Semitic ravings in a way that Orthodox Jews could never be. For many of the latter, Louis Farrakhan-inspired Hitler talk and conspiracies are humdrum, the stuff of street abuse. “This is an experience of anti-Semitism,” says Rabbi Motti Seligson of Chabad-Lubavitch, a Brooklyn-based Hasidic movement, “that the rest of the Jewish community not only doesn’t experience but is completely oblivious to.”
The third blind spot is the perpetrators. Bill de Blasio, New York’s mayor from 2014-21, was hardly unique in speaking of the threat to Jews only from white supremacists. Yet the majority of anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York are committed by other minorities—blacks especially, but also Hispanics and Muslims. “These are inconvenient anti-Semites,” Mr. Bitton says. Liberals would rather stick to their story: Minorities are always victims of racism, never racists themselves.
Meanwhile, surveys since the 1960s have shown that Jew-hatred in America is most prevalent among blacks. As traditional prejudices fused with radical separatist ideologies, anti-Semitism became part of the rhetoric of black politics and protest, the language not only of the street but of preachers and politicians, artists and intellectuals, imbuing criminal violence against Jews with spurious political significance.
When, after a tragic car accident, black rioters in Crown Heights beat up any Jew they could find for three straight nights in 1991, and the Rev. Al Sharpton denounced the victims as “diamond merchants” who reaped what they had sown, liberals looked the other way. Mayor David Dinkins feigned ignorance. The New York Times fudged the story. They couldn’t face up to black violence and Jew-hatred or the costs of hamstringing law enforcement.
Three decades later, the liberals who run New York are still looking away. That’s what makes them liberals.
Nothing did so much to improve black-Jewish relations in Brooklyn as the general reduction in crime since the 1990s. But as shootings in New York more than doubled between 2019 and 2021, alongside a deterioration in public order, attacks on Jews surged. Until there are consequences for criminals, including the Jew-haters among them, why should anyone expect the attacks to subside?
Mr. Kaufman is the Journal’s letters editor.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/department-of-education-opens-investigation-after-berkeley-law-student-groups-vow-not-to-host-pro-israel-speakers/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=30040425
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"Although the statement was circulated widely across the law school, only nine student groups joined, including Womxn of Color Collective, Queer Caucus, Women of Berkeley Law, Law Students of African Descent, as well as the school’s legal association for Muslim, Middle Eastern, and North African students."
gee this is a surprise
they do not sound like white supremacist - the biggest threat to Democracy and America
who could have guessed?
sounds like the reparations crowd .....
and the pedo crowd
and hate men crowd
and the hate Jew Muslim crowd
not proud boys who FBI told us in the biggest terrorist threat !
so where is the outrage from raskin , schiff, tribe, weissman, zuckerberg, page, nadler, sussman, gensler, fink , blumenthal , schumer , katz and many many more academics
:wink:
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"ONLY nine groups , , ,"
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https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/u-s-jews-political-views/
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/12/27/exclusive-conservatives-build-governing-machine-ready-2025/
to me Whoopi is technically correct
it was white on white
race had nothing to do with it
it was religion
so what is the beef ?
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If I am not mistaken, Nazis regarded Jews as distinct race.
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yes. I remember that
the Aryan "race" was the most superior
or something like that
I guess race is used differently
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/race
in Forensics in the 1970s is plain and simple
Caucasoid
Negroid
Mongoloid
this seems to be the "definition" according to Goldberg .
I dunno
I don't think she should be doxxed
over a definition
I don't think she was excusing the murder of millions...
this gets as nuts as being doxxed because I called someone him when he wants to be called her...........
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"I remember that
the Aryan "race" was the most superior"
---------------------------------------------
Until Jesse Owens won the Olympics with Hitler watching:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Owens :-D
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/12/29/report-97-anti-jewish-hate-crimes-minorities/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=v7t5USEbLrkC1uWbpSmwDpyR4BW1TZhzJOS3meJ3sB9mydlbqY2mH6NlDVqKd.3cX4EHOkGF
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https://americansaa.org/aaa-releases-alarming-report-on-anti-jewish-hate-crimes-and-prosecutions-in-nyc/?utm_source=sendinblue&utm_campaign=Extremism_Roundup_2023-01-05_Resend_01-10&utm_medium=email
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".Contrary to common perception, in NYC, the vast majority of
perpetrators of anti-Jewish hate crimes are members of other
minority groups, not white supremacists. "
ssssshhhh :wink:
just ask "mr ebonics" on MSLSD
about this .......
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https://www.accidentaltalmudist.org/heroes/2023/01/12/brave-austrian-sergeant/?fbclid=IwAR3FkxteDzIjLRbUuDfh7OrfM9A0629BRT-5hsjkCD4VRffdrAa8tufu2IY
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https://nypost.com/2023/01/12/manhattan-da-offers-cushy-deal-in-brutal-anti-semitic-attack/?fbclid=IwAR1WWRgxv1DN1xk7yWWxwJbLFgYYWIgMTEoClwIqc72qAydyGo_QstaJZRA
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I thought Federal laws on hate crimes
could force further pursuance of justice
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Like some Blacks play the racism card
Kapos Soros plays the "anti - semitism card"
and he has so many in the media on the payroll to be able to do this:
https://nypost.com/2023/01/23/how-george-soros-co-opts-the-media-and-keeps-criticism-down/
I had no idea how many media people are funded on the side by him.
PBS is just as Leftist DNC as is MSPCP
The only PBS show I can stand to watch is antique roadshow which I like.
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https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/125/826/617/original/0c72be4f5f5d3cdc.png
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/125/826/617/original/0c72be4f5f5d3cdc.png)
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American Jews
the righteous
the democrats
and anything their party stands for and gains more power - they stand for .
"we are children of refugees and a nation of immigrants!"
yada yada
me:
WHAT ABOUT *****ILLEGAL***** DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND!
I guarantee these same partisan Jews would be screaming and protesting exactly the opposite if it was thought all these illegals were likely future Republicans
GUARANTEED !
sorry to say most of my own heritage are hypocrites
if the illegals were threatening their education government employee accountant lawyer doctor and political jobs they would not be so righteous
now let me finish my coffee
:wink:
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Amen!!!
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https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/business/joseph-vazquez/2023/01/31/george-soros-propaganda-powerhouse
he really is the epitome of the stereotyped Jew who is behind the scenes and enormously influencing and buys everyone and I am sure at the same time uses it for investment as well.
my question to myself - would I mind so much if he was a patriotic conservative ?
probably a lot less...
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https://www.city-journal.org/ken-burns-documentary-distorts-the-historical-record
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I really liked Ken Burns Civil war which came out early 90's (being a Civil War buff) and later the one he did on baseball (being a baseball buff).
He has come out as such a partisan Democrat operative I truly feel super angry every time I see his self righteous I am better than thou face on TV and immediately have to change the station .
Kind of in the same vein as partisan historian John Meacham
who view everything through a self righteous Democrat partisan lens.
He even bashed Abraham Lincoln stating he was not forceful enough early on about emancipation... on I thinks some history channel or span interview a few weeks back
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/history-kurt-waldheim-from-the-nazi-student-federation-to-un-secretary-general-and-president-of-austria/5809565
-
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11799669/New-York-City-block-Harlem-anti-semitic-Nation-Islam-leader-Elijah-Muhammed.html
-
https://www.oann.com/newsroom/michigan-ag-i-was-the-target-of-a-plot-to-kill-jewish-state-officials/
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https://www.oann.com/newsroom/michigan-ag-i-was-the-target-of-a-plot-to-kill-jewish-state-officials/
Oh! Was he going to kidnap the governor as well?
:roll:
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Neo-Nazis Protest on Broadway
Neo-Nazis protested outside the first preview of “Parade” on Broadway, chanting, holding antisemitic banners and passing out false information about the show's subject.
The protesters held signs referring to the National Socialist Movement, one of the largest neo-Nazi groups in the U.S.
The play is about the trial and lynching of Jewish man in Atlanta in 1915. Read More
Goyim Defense League Harasses Florida Jewish Community
Antisemitic protesters from the Goyim Defense League (GDL) harassed Jewish people at the entrance of the Chabad House in Orlando, Fla.
The GDL frequently engages in antisemitic stunts to troll and harass Jews, including showing up at Jewish events in a van marked with swastikas and shouting profanities.
The GDL had recently moved its headquarters to Florida from California's Bay Area. Read More
Colorado Shooter Ran Neo-Nazi Site
According to police, Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22, the suspected gunman accused of killing five people at an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colo., ran a neo-Nazi website and used gay and racial slurs while gaming online.
Aldrich, who identifies as nonbinary and uses the pronouns they and them, administered the obscure website called “freespeech2.ru” that included what has been described as a “neo-Nazi white supremacist” shooting training video glorifying mass shootings.
Aldrich faces hate crime charges in addition to other charges, including murder and attempted murder. Read More
Hate Crimes
Tevin Grant
Tevin Grant - Broward County Sherrif’s Office, via NBC 6 South Florida screenshot
Man Arrested in Antisemitic Attack
Tevin Grant, 28, of Dania Beach, Fla., was arrested after being caught on camera attacking a bicyclist and calling him an antisemitic slur.
Grant was booked into jail and faces one count of aggravated assault. Read More
Man Charged With Hate Crime for Grocery Store Assault
Eugene Thompson, 19, of Montgomery County, Md., was indicted on hate crime and robbery charges.
Thompson allegedly knocked a victim unconscious and stole his keys at a Gaithersburg, Md., grocery store.
According to the charging documents, Thompson put up his hands in a fighting stance and shouted, “Let’s go, f–ng Jew.” Read More
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https://ace.mu.nu/archives/403470.php
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(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/6d0e1c55b7b7ed4a.png)
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/nyc-police-search-for-anti-semitic-teens-involved-in-several-passover-attacks/
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https://americanmind.org/salvo/forever-on-edge/
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ADL
like NAACP, like SPLC ->
they need to keep the *CHARADE * going
Look. at the ADLs funding {from 5 y ago} it is amazing:
https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/2022-05/ADL%202019%20Audited%20Financial%20Statements-1.PDF
I did not read the entire article but I assume ADL only speaks of the rare right wing anti semitism
and does not mention Black or Muslim antisemitism
which from reading the news is clearly the predominant feature of most reported anti - semitic events.
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https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2023/04/12/cnn-digs-up-hakeem-jeffries-editorial-defending-his-uncles-anti-semitic-remarks-and-louis-farrakhan-n543506
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since when does CNN go after a *Democrat* African American?
what is behind this ?
something we are not seeing
this does not just happen as a result of "nonpartisan" jurnolism
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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-usa-jews/israeli-official-under-fire-for-comments-on-american-jews-military-service-idUSKBN1DN18O
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She is, of course, quite correct.
And Netanyahu has to do the Kabuki theater that we see here because Israel needs the support of America and towards that end, of America's Jews.
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/05/18/jewish-activist-dov-hikind-elon-musk-absolutely-entitled-to-criticize-soros/
[thank you Dov - whoever you are ]
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was Jewish!
:-o
Elizabeth Taylor, born on February 27, 1932, was an Academy Award-winning British American actress who converted to Judaism in 1959 following the death of her third husband. Known for her roles in Father of the Bride, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Cleopatra, Elizabeth Burton was named seventh on the list of Female Legends created by the American Film Institutes. Throughout her life, Taylor traveled to Israel and helped to raise funds for the Jewish state during the Arab boycott in the 1970s.
like Sammy Davis :
https://forward.com/culture/537431/sammy-davis-jr-conversion-jewish-judaism-racism-comedy-rat-pack-jesse-jackson/
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this can go under several threads but we can start this here
https://www.memri.org/tv/sjp-activist-fatima-mohammed-cuny-law-school-commencement-speech-america-israel-empire-destruction
:x
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this can go under several threads but we can start this here
https://www.memri.org/tv/sjp-activist-fatima-mohammed-cuny-law-school-commencement-speech-america-israel-empire-destruction
:x
Some who shouldn't have ever set foot in this country.
-
now they hyjack commencement speeches and our campuses
https://nypost.com/2023/06/12/el-camino-grad-jana-abulaban-delivers-sick-anti-israel-speech-at-graduation/
Can
anyone imagine what the outcry would be if a Jew made a commencement speech
about Syrian civil war
Iraqis who slaughtered one another and all the other murders and mayhem in the Arab World in contrast.
-
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-new-york-times-just-can-t-stop-attacking-jews/ar-AA1cuNt9?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=9d8cb5fc999942888d22ee8a20d3fbf5&ei=21
-
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/roseanne-barr-s-holocaust-denial-call-for-violence-against-jews-is-an-unpardonable-sin/ar-AA1drR7k?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=239950d810414b95ab9c549906237b77&ei=15
-
https://nypost.com/2023/07/14/stranger-randomly-trips-jewish-woman-in-suspected-hate-crime-in-nyc-cops/?fbclid=IwAR0UAaKFP33YusLqPLV28FNetPpSlLQ_8D66F92iC35D4FyWMvS1Z76o93w
-
The inconsistency here is as predictable as it is loathsome.
https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/world-jewish-congress-rebukes-planned-burning-of-torah-in-stockholm?fbclid=IwAR3eGPSHwEbVRwy994aVMTXpvf3EL-AXYMnX5WyxgYOvQN0h9d9zhgC58A0#:~:text=NEW%20YORK%20%E2%80%93%20The%20World%20Jewish,approval%20from%20the%20local%20police
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Third
https://www.foxnews.com/world/doctors-reattach-boys-head-car-accident-thanks-amazing-surgery
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Anti-Semitism reaches new – old heights – in Orange County - Mid Hudson News
-
useful tools of the Democrat lawyer warfare apparatus
https://news.yahoo.com/entertainment/elon-musk-takes-aim-anti-234612036.html
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https://www.foxnews.com/world/canada-under-fire-applauding-literal-nazi-parliament-during-zelenskyy-visit
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/zelenskyy-trudeau-honor-actual-3rd-reich-nazi-standing-ovation?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1850
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from my earlier post :
"maybe some of the liberal Jews will actually get a wake up call. not holding my breath"
but this :
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/harvard-president-emeritus-larry-summers-blasts-university-over-its-response-to-attack-on-israel-i-am-sickened/ar-AA1hW7wN?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=6058b31f087540a39fd2c7bfe09cb0b4&ei=12
I was thinking how the events hit me , as a Jew in the gut.
Perhaps this is how Blacks feel when they see a black being treated badly it reminds them of what their ancestors went through with lynching and the rest and they experience an emotional response that gets triggered beyond their control
Blacks should stand with us - for same reason - but will they? Some will some will not.
They will identify more with Palestinians I suspect.
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I've been impressed by some of Mearsheimer's geopolitical analysis e.g. over the Uke War, so I was rather blind sided when in a FB convo I got hit with these:
https://www.adl.org/resources/news/review-mearsheimer-and-walts-israel-lobby-and-us-foreign-policy?fbclid=IwAR05QQiP0wSoeGCe9_9kd0g8zFpwC5xA2TFvazVLFPRI9I_WW4Bnffc6-fM
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/john-mearsheimer-endorses-a-hitler-apologist-and-holocaust-revisionist/245518/?fbclid=IwAR2-HbbZmu8n2OJG8OK1dDxhuIz3OupPG4mjmm04urqgLYGWB1b6MKnJnGI
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2006/04/05/yes-its-anti-semitic/e7de5f13-60d5-4567-9090-8d24c8237801/?fbclid=IwAR3vd8f9xgudslmbfBEJxPY8j0058O6obwqHeZF9fXswQXIMwd2QS9RsYbY
https://martinkramer.org/2006/03/23/john-mearsheimer-the-man-who-knew-too-little/?fbclid=IwAR1vHRWNwozlVahPLS3vjBx-sE8d4mf9kvGFvwZZBGE2IdZ4kSCzNomeO0U
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Harvard Shrugs at Jew-Hatred
The university’s response to students who excuse Hamas is belated and weak.
By J.J. Kimche
Oct. 10, 2023 1:59 pm ET
Cambridge, Mass.
Hamas’s attack on Israel was a small-scale Holocaust, a moment no Jew alive with the tiniest speck of communal feeling will ever forget. As a Jewish student, I was similarly chilled by the reactions at Harvard.
The university’s “Palestine Solidarity Groups,” a collection of some 30 student groups, issued a statement exculpating the terrorists for their acts of murder, rape, kidnapping and mayhem. “We, the undersigned student organizations,” it began, “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The signatories—groups such as the Harvard Islamic Society and Harvard Law School Justice for Palestine—made clear that they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with this “resistance,” fashionable doublespeak for those feverishly working to wipe Jews off the face of the earth. Harvard isn’t alone: Some 50 student organizations at the University of California, Berkeley declared their “unwavering support for the resistance in Gaza.”
Most Jewish students have harbored mixed feelings toward pro-Palestinian groups on our campuses. Some sympathize with their cause; others see them as hostile; most ignore them. By and large, we have been happy to regard members of such groups as fellow travelers on the journey of learning and discovery, with whom we share spaces and engage in respectful classroom discussion. But during a moment of stunning moral clarity—such as the live-streaming of masked terrorists gleefully machine-gunning Jewish families—one would expect fellow students of all political persuasions to unite in horror and condemnation. The deepest political differences can be tolerated if we all abide by a basic framework of decency.
Not only have our fellow students failed to condemn this proto-genocide; they have justified and celebrated it. The authors and signatories of this statement, men and women with whom we share dormitories and libraries, have exposed themselves as worse than common anti-Semites. They are enthusiastic proponents of our slaughter, a vanguard of apologists for those who seek the extermination of the Jewish people.
This realization has grave consequences not only for Jewish life on campus but for the university’s existence as a community. How can we share dormitories, classrooms and ideas with students who would makes excuses or even celebrate if we and our families were hacked to death by a Hamas terrorist tomorrow?
Harvard’s top administrators made no effort to assuage such fears. The Harvard media office didn’t respond to my request for comment on Monday afternoon. That night, 18 administrators put out an equivocal statement titled “War in the Middle East” that only mildly criticized Hamas and made no mention of the student groups cheering its atrocities. Only on Tuesday did President Claudine Gay “condemn the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.” She didn’t condemn the statement excusing Hamas, but merely distanced herself from it: “No student group—not even 30 student groups—speaks for Harvard University or its leadership.”
As a grandson of an Auschwitz survivor and a student of German-Jewish history, I was always incredulous that highly cultured Germans, the people of Goethe and Beethoven, could have displayed sympathy and even enthusiasm for the Nazi slaughter of the Jews. Now I believe it. I have seen it happen here.
Mr. Kimche is a doctoral student in Jewish history at Harvard.
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I am waiting to see how the Sharptons and his crew will respond.
We already know what Farrakhan is thinking......
-
woops I did not see post about BLM
if they think this about Jews I think it safe to assume they think the same about white people too.
-
not sure if an artifactual of distorted media coverage
but it seems like the most virulent Jew hatred is coming from the LEFT
not "white supremacists "
So 80% of Jews think voting for the crat party is righteous?
Sucking up the likes of the "Rev" (as he is affectionately called on MSLSD) is conciliatory?
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Biden's team of racists and anti-semites...
October 10, 2023 by David Horowitz and John Perazzo
[Order David Horowitz’s book: The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America.]
Editor’s note: Because of Hamas’ current barbaric terror attack inside Israel, it is vital to stress how the Biden administration has empowered the terror group in Gaza – and helped spawn its current destruction inside the Jewish state. Frontpage Editors have therefore deemed it urgent to run an article by David Horowitz and John Perazzo that originally appeared in PJMedia.com in its April 13, 2021 issue: Biden’s Team of Racists and Anti-Semites: An Anti-American Coalition in the Heart of the White House.
Formally introducing his cabinet to the public, Joe Biden proudly declared: “This is the first [time] in American history that the Cabinet looks like America.” Looking at the actual appointments and not just the gender, skin color and ethnic origins of the Biden team, it is a team that may look like America but doesn’t think like America. In fact, it is a team whose outlook is anti-American.
Take Biden’s Vice Presidential choice, Kamala Harris, whose antipathy for America oozes from her every pore. At a February 2019 presidential campaign stop, for example she said Columbus Day should be replaced with “Indigenous People’s Day” because “we are the scene of a crime when it comes to what we did with slavery and Jim Crow and institutionalized racism in this country.” This is an accurate summary of the way the Biden White House views its native land, and it is a view encapsulating three big lies.
What America did with the slave system it inherited from the British was end it. America’s abolition campaign began with its revolutionary proclamation that all men are created equal and have a God given right to liberty. America began implementing this right in 1787, the first year of its existence, with the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance, outlawing slavery in a territory the size of the original 13 colonies. Within twenty years slavery was abolished in all the northern states. As for the “original sin” of enslaving the black Africans brought to this country that properly is the achievement of the Africans themselves who then sold their brothers and sisters to Europeans at slave auctions in Ghana and Benin.
All forms of institutional and systemic racism including Jim Crow were outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In one of his first statements as president Biden claimed that “systemic racism” has been built into every aspect of our system.” This is a bald-faced lie. The opposite is the truth. Under the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, systemic racism is outlawed in America. With the exception of affirmative action policies sanctioned by the Supreme Court, there is no systemic racism in America,. If there were systemic racism, there would be a tsunami of legal suits to punish those who practiced it. There is no such tsunami because the claim is a baseless lie.
When 220 U.S. cities were attacked by criminal Black Lives Matter mobs last summer Kamala Harris called them “a coalition of conscience,” and supported the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which made bail payments on behalf of people who were arrested for criminal acts. At the time, Harris claimed that “the life of a Black person in America … has never been treated as fully human….” Tell that to the white majorities who elected Barack Obama the 43rd president of the United States twice. “America,” she claimed “has never fully addressed the systemic racism that has existed in our country.” Chinese communist propagandists couldn’t have framed this malicious indictment better. Not surprisingly Harris has praised racial arsonist and anti-Semite Al Sharpton as a “friend [who] has spent his life fighting for what’s right.”
Picking a cabinet and White House team by skin color and gender, is, of course, racist and “sexist” in their pure forms. Biden’s transgender Assistant Secretary of Health, Rachel Levine, picked to celebrate transgenderism is, in her actual political life, a criminal cohort of Andrew Cuomo, removing her own mother from a nursing home, as Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health, while committing COVID-19 patients to nursing homes where they killed thousands of not so well-connected elderly residents.
Biden’s Assistant Attorney General in charge of Civil Rights, Kristen Clarke, is the first black woman to be appointed to the position. She is also a racist, praising Farrakhan disciple Tamika Mallory and holding the Farrakhanite view that melanin which is responsible for rich black skin color “endows blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities” than white people. Clarke has long embraced the doctrines of critical race theory, a crackpot racism which maintains that America is permanently racist to its core, and that consequently the nation’s various institutions and traditions are, by definition, invalid. In 2020, Clarke denounced the “systemic racism that pervades every aspect of our lives, especially when it comes to policing and the operation of the criminal justice system of our country.” For reasons already mentioned this is a racist invention. If police departments were systemically racist how explain all the black police chiefs running those departments in major American cities, or the absence of major lawsuits invoking the Civil Rights Act which outlaws such practices?
In November 2020, Clarke said that collegiate policies permitting black students to be admitted under far lower academic standards than Asian students are “critical for promoting diversity … in an increasingly multi-ethnic society.” This is the statement of a racist who puts skin color first and meritocracy at the end of the line.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield is the second black U.S. Ambassador to the UN. For those not addicted to the new racism in fashion in the Democrat Party, her maiden address to the UN General Assembly praising the malicious and historically illiterate 1619 Project, is cause for alarm. The project conceived by a black racist frames America as a nation defined by slavery and racism, and denies that white America played any role in liberating blacks or creating a society which has made them the richest, freest, most privileged blacks anywhere in the world, including black Africa and the Caribbean. Naturally she has praised the Marxist Black Lives Matter organization as a noble movement for “racial justice.”
Late in his presidency, Donald Trump issued an executive order establishing The 1776 Commission, an advisory committee designed to encourage American schools to provide students with a “patriotic education,” and to counter the America-hating narrative of critical race theory and the 1619 Project. Biden revoked Trump’s executive order — on grounds that the “systemic racism that has plagued our nation for far, far too long couldn’t be ignored any longer.” Susan Rice, his newly appointed Director of the United States Domestic Policy Council, warns Americans about “how serious a problem we face from nationalists and white supremacists who have demonstrated a willingness to resort to violence in some instances.” On January 26, 2021, Rice said that “for too many American families, systemic racism and inequality in our economy, laws, and institutions still puts the American dream far out of reach. She didn’t explain – if what she says is true – why the Biden administration isn’t suing all those nationalists and white supremacists for practicing institutional and systemic racism which was outlawed over fifty years ago by the Civil Rights Act.
When it comes to Biden’s Middle-East policy, the president has diligently deployed skin-color racism to put a team of anti-Semites and supporters of the terrorist regimes in Teheran, the West Bank and Gaza in charge. Chief among them, of course is Susan Rice. In 2015, Rice publicly lauded the Iran nuclear deal as the “most comprehensive and effective” anti-nuclear agreement ever devised. She has continued to support the deal ever since. When President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal in 2018, for instance, Rice falsely stated that “Iran has fully complied with its obligations,” and that the inspections authorized by the deal were “the most intrusive international inspection and monitoring regime in history.”
Biden’s new Administrator of USAID, Samantha Power, is a dedicated opponent of Israel. During a 2002 interview Power said that even if it meant “alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import” (i.e., Jewish Americans), the United States should stop investing “billions of dollars” in “servicing Israel’s military,” and should invest that money instead “in the new state of Palestine” – a regime (not a state) that annually invests hundreds of millions of dollars in terrorism against men, women and children in the Jewish state. During a February 2016 UN Security Council debate on the Middle East, Power – then U.S. Ambassador to the UN equated Palestinian Arab acts of terrorism targeting Jews, with virtually non-existent “settler violence” by Jews in the West Bank. She also falsely portrayed the Palestinian Authority (PA) as an entity that was “pressing for calm,” when, in fact, the PA not only “pays Arabs huge sums of money to murder Jews,” but also “incites violence against innocent Jews in the PA’s speeches, official newspapers, social media, textbooks, schools, clubs, government-controlled mosques, government-controlled television specials, and government ceremonies honoring terrorists.”
Biden’s new Undersecretary of Defense, Colin Kahl, co-drafted the language that attempted – ultimately without success – to omit from the 2012 Democratic Party platform any reference to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. In an August 2012 op-ed in Foreign Policy magazine, Kahl praised President Obama’s call to push Israel’s borders back to the 1949 Armistice lines, which would reward 70 years of Arab aggression and deprive Israel of defensible borders; to accept the creation of a Palestinian state governed by the terrorist organizations PLO and Hamas; and to reject the notion of Jerusalem as Israel’s undisputed capital. In the same article, Kahl blamed the poor living conditions of Palestinians on the “economically debilitating effects of Israeli occupation” – rather than on the Palestinian leaders’ massive corruption and ongoing terrorist aggression.
Biden’s new Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights, Uzra Zeya, is a former staffer at the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, a notoriously anti-Israel publication, where she compiled research for a book claiming that “the Israel lobby” had established a secret network of PACs that bribed and extorted congressional candidates into adopting positions favorable to Israel, thereby “subvert[ing] the American political process to take control of U.S. Middle East policy.”
Wendy Sherman, Biden’s Deputy Secretary of State nominee, has referred to the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat, the world’s most prolific Jew-killer since Hitler, as “the leader of a resistance movement,” while minimizing the moral horrors of Palestinian suicide bombings against innocent Israeli civilians as “nagging disruptions from the Palestinian side.”
In her 2018 book, Not for the Faint of Heart,” Sherman claimed that the Iran nuclear deal, which she helped to negotiate on behalf of the U.S., “was anchored” by: (a) “a common wish to make peace,” and (b) additional “higher principles” that would help facilitate a “reimagining of the world” whereby Americans might “see our adversaries not as eternal enemies, or dispensable ones, but as virtual partners.” Moreover, Sherman falsely claimed that the Iran deal would allow for “intrusive” and “scrupulous” inspections of Iranian nuclear sites.
Symone Sanders is the Senior Advisor and Chief Spokesperson to Vice President, Kamala Harris. Sanders was one of the 2020 Biden presidential campaign’s three senior advisers who apologized to radical Islamic organizations after Biden staffer Andrew Bates had tried to distance Biden from Linda Sarsour, a notorious Jew-hater who, despite supporting the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement and having ties to numerous Islamic terrorist organizations, was a featured speaker at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. In addition to her apology, Sanders also retweeted a tweet by Emgage, a radical Islamist group, saying that Sarsour “has dedicated her career to fighting for justice.”
Biden’s new Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, is opposed to designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization and imposing sanctions on it, even though The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran established the IRGC explicitly to “strike terror into [the hearts of] the enemies of Allah” — meaning most prominently the U.S. and Israel — and to “expan[d] the sovereignty” of Islam across the globe. The IRGC’s “terror involvements” have included: “planning 9-11,” “murdering hundreds of American troops in Iraq,” promoting “Iranian nuclear proliferation and weapons delivery systems development,” and “providing weapons, training, funding, and logistical support to Iranian terrorist proxies.”
Biden’s new Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, is a signatory to a J Street letter arguing that the Democratic Party platform should incorporate additional criticism of Israel. The letter also draws a moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorists and their victims, Israeli Jews, by employing the phrase “violence, terrorism, and incitement from ALL sides.” Further, the letter rejects the notion of Israeli and Jewish sovereign rights in the historically Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria, and accuses Israel of perpetrating an “occupation” of Palestinian land. This is the lie genocidal Palestinian terrorists use to justify their unprovoked aggressions against the Jewish state, which was created – like Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq – on land that belonged to the Turks for 400 years previously. Turks are not Palestinians or Arabs.
Biden’s new Deputy Director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs is Reema Dodin. In her student days at UC Berkeley, Dodin was a campus radical who organized a number of anti-Israel rallies. Among other things, she was a leader of the Muslim Students Association, a Muslim Brotherhood front. The Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamic supremacist organization whose credo proclaims that “death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.” Dodin described the 9/11 attacks as an understandable Islamic response to U.S. support for Israel, which was “angering” Muslims worldwide. Drawing a parallel between the 9/11 hijackers and Palestinian jihadists, she said: “[N]ow you have three generations of Palestinians born under occupation. Maybe if you start to look at Palestinians as human beings, you will stop the suicide bombers.” In a 2002 speech in California, Dodin justified suicide bombing as “the last resort of a desperate people.”
At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 2010, Biden’s new Special U.S. Envoy for Iran, Robert Malley, called for the U.S. “to unveil a set of parameters” that included the creation of a Palestinian state along the “1967 borders,” which would have rewarded the Arab aggressors in the Six Day War and been suicidal for Israel. He also advocated: (a) the deployment of third-party armed forces in Judea-Samaria; (b) the forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes in that region; and (c) Israel’s relinquishment of control of the Golan Heights to Syria, on the premise that Syria was “unlikely to sponsor militant groups … [or] destabilize the region … once an agreement has been reached.”
Biden’s new Senior Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council is Maher Bitar. As a student at Georgetown University, Bitar was an executive board member of Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization that supports the Hamas terrorists and the BDS movement. A 2006 photo from that time period shows Bitar wearing a keffiyah – a terrorist emblem – while dancing in front of a banner reading, “Divest from Israel Apartheid.” At a Palestine Solidarity Movement conference at Georgetown in 2006, Bitar moderated a session that taught attendees how to demonize Israel as a nation guilty of “colonization,” “occupation,” and “oppression.”
Biden’s new Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israel and Palestinian Affairs is Hady Amr. In January 2002, Amr wrote: “I was inspired by the Palestinian Intifada.” Amr warned that Arabs “will never, never forget what the Israeli people, the Israeli military and Israeli democracy have done to Palestinian children. And there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders of innocents.” He also accused Israel engaging in the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians. Ethnic cleansing of Jews is of course the overt goal of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, whereas more than a million Palestinians are Israeli citizens with more rights than the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza.
In sum, while the Biden White House may “look like” America, once one gets past skin color and gender, it is a team of racists and anti-Semites. “Diversity” is exposed as a racist rationale for assembling an anti-American coalition in the heart of the White House itself.
David Horowitz is the founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the author of the newly published book, The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement Is Destroying America.
John Perazzo is the editor of DiscoverTheNetworks.org—an encyclopedic guide to the political Left and a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is the author of Black Lives Matter: Marxist Hate Dressed Up As Racial Justice.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/among-democrats-little-dissent-on-israel-in-wake-of-hamas-attack/ar-AA1i0mXM?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=1775323fb3b34de88838d1d57cc8ad17&ei=18
no mention of Republicans......
only mention of few squad members....
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https://www.camera.org/article/exposing-false-zionist-quotes-quote-busters/
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but of Harvard students:
https://nypost.com/2023/10/11/harvard-students-take-back-support-for-hamas/
:-D
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Dershowitz is on Newsmax a lot:
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/harvard-professor-calls-newsmax-host-034053934.html
funny how most Jewish Democrats are trying to deal with those in their party who are against Israel or / and Jews.
they refuse to really call them out except saying they are "fringe" "very few" "not significant"
etc.
They also all say how Iran has nothing to do with this (don't blame Biden policies ! )
CNN report anonymous source ( most likely CIA operative ) states NO PROOF IRAN involved so as to be consistent with downplaying Iran almost certaily gave the greenlight for this and has provided military and money to Hamas and other Jihadists.
Do all these liars think it is in our national interest to ignore Iran culpability?
Or just a protection racket for Biden Obamster policies ?
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https://nypost.com/2023/10/12/white-house-calls-squad-israel-comments-repugnant/
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https://forward.com/opinion/564190/hamas-charter-truth/
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From the always pithy David Burge:
https://x.com/iowahawkblog/status/1712394152241922488?s=61&t=L5uifCqWy8R8rhj_J8HNJw
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2nd post:
The ADL hearts BLM, and it’s time for that to change:
https://pjmedia.com/columns/rabbi-michael-barclay/2023/10/12/jonathan-greenblatt-must-go-n1734462?fbclid=IwAR0jy6HO_YOv3FwtDomcPmO4bjj0N-_Ib5IoX25d0l_efZ2_tIhZhkvekpQ
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I am shamed to say my place of employment had one of these awful rallies. The attendees, of course, hid their faces:
https://www.thefp.com/p/young-jews-brace-for-a-day-of-global-jihad?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&fbclid=IwAR379DvEEaksGImUR_cR7UzavTGL0TJdJqKRg7di3k4B5sIKqvlPMOfxqHQ
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I read he last book and was worth it . Easy read
not long
she eviscerated Columbia for being a bastion of Jew/American hating incubator.
she was shocked when she escaped N Korea and through S Korea she came to US and after being so thrilled to get into IVY university only to find they teach and preach to hate this country almost like N Koreans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeonmi_Park
I am not far from Rutgers - another university with very Left radical communist elements.
I wonder if there are demonstrations there going on.
Many Jews , Hindus , Muslims in the area - very mixed .
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Their goals aren't difficult to fathom:
https://jeffgoldstein.substack.com/p/how-dare-jew?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR1AqzOQfXk-mdtObgxRCpZPVzqlBloRuvJFxP26p1k5tkXIENPebTnw13A
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https://nypost.com/2023/10/13/after-hamas-horrors-why-is-it-so-hard-to-say-jewish-lives-matter/?&utm_campaign=nyp_postopinion&utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20231014&lctg=649c637ec7c6527b1b0fe213&utm_term=NYP%20-%20Post%20Opinion
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I have to admit I appreciated Mayor Adams
taking the line right out of the movie Pulp Fiction :
"We are NOT alright!"
In movie it was "I am NOT alright", but certainly sounded that was the model he used.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2023/10/14/eric-adams-finally-grows-a-pair-says-hamas-must-be-destroyed-completely-n1735123
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By any rational standard it’s utterly untrue:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2023/10/14/is-israel-really-an-apartheid-state-n1735101
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https://www.foxnews.com/media/berlin-city-official-advises-citizens-not-make-jewish-faith-visible?fbclid=IwAR07luVw2kWOQDqEXf7vT7K2Mz1s9IWRl8VzoZMC8eRC9ep8PGGAbWGAamE
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https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ashkenazi-jews-are-indigenous-to-israel-not-europe/?fbclid=IwAR2aV5E1VnQ2lrUoEvuBNyFMFtLPFSxCOAbVXXUREmnDIvl1z8giCqtE_8g
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I have mentioned my friend Allah here before in the context of her uncommon background with regards to Ukraine and Russia and what the Uke War looks like to her.
Here she is in the context of her job as a teacher in the NYC area.
She has just told me that the principal has told her to take down from her classroom an Israeli flag because, unlike gay-trans flags and Uke flags, it is too divisive.
====================
With her permission I quote:
Sadly this is what comes up if you Google mine name. There are many lies in the article bc the district did not call the police. I DID. They didn't want to do shit. Then they promised a bunch of stuff but covid started and this was forgotten.
But then last March I had another swastika. This time I kept my name out of the media and my students were interviewed. They came to me telling me what they have been going through. All the bullying. So, my friends and I leaked it on the local parent FB. And then it ended up in the news again. It was a long saga and a lot of lying on the part of my dumb principal but then I went to the superintendent and he seemed supportive. He came and met with the kids. Realized what a dumbass my principal is.
Even now, I don't think the school would have even said anything, but I emailed the super right after the attack and said he needs to acknowledge it bc we have a lot of Jewish kids in the community.
So a few teachers and I asked to wear blue on Friday to support Israel. Principal said yes if it's organized by my club. So we did and got very positive feedback from everyone. Then yesterday she sends an email saying that there were complaints about wearing blue and that we can't take sides.
"She also took down from my Jewish friends classroom door this image (Israeli flag meme saying "Stand with Israel against terrorism")
She said the Jewish star was divisive and offensive to some ppl and that there is no room for politics and religion in school. And she said it came from the central district office woman named Julie. So what I sent you. I sent to this Julie (who by the way is Jewish)
Our plan now is to leak this on the parent FB again. So all those parents who said they were so grateful for support will not be pissed.
I'm going to contact the local media again. Last year I also called the ADL so I will do that again.
Bc now it seems to be a systematic mishandling of anything that is directed against Jews.
And there is the hypocrasy of having a Ukranian flag and Rainbow flags in every room.
We don't have the Ukranian flags now. But when it happened our Union even sold t-shirts with blue and yellow and ppl wore ribbons
But the LGBTQ stuff has their own club. Their own therapist. They even led "training" for us teachers on how to properly treat them. Students lecturing teachers at a faculty meeting! Disgusting.
But wearing blue for Israel or writing letter of support to Israeli high school students or collecting supplies for ppl who lost their homes that's too political.
I'm livid!
We don't have freedom of speech or expression in school so I can't use that legal recourse. (MARC: It is a public HS) But I think we need to see what we can do legally bc there is definitely a double standard.
=========
Ha that Julie lady replied immediately that she wants to talk on the phone with me. Thank God for tenure! Lol
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In Spain, the country that made 1492 famous for 2 reasons:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/horrific-night-in-synagogue-people-were-praying-when-the-demonstrators-attacked/ar-AA1ivTyL?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=89222689980a4eb6aacd00b49f153805&ei=12
Christians are more safe because there are more of them than Muslims.
Otherwise they would be on the list too.
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https://www.newsweek.com/john-fetterman-israel-remarks-spark-furious-backlash-1835988?fbclid=IwAR0GYgiFGIYJVA3yRQW25eyd-lfo72pjkDnCnj93TjWWh3NCSA1EWmj9ms0
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https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2023/10/20/greta-thunberg-calls-for-israel-hamas-ceasefire-begins-strike-in-solidarity-with-palestine-and-gaza/
There was a time I thought she was cute though a total illogical zealot for Climate change.
I don't find her cute anymore.
Stop blaming Jews! Where is the protest to Hamas and the rest of the radical terrorrists.
:x
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but we do hear their side
they all hate Jews , hate the US
they want of Israel and kick the Jews out .
THAT is all I ever hear from them.
I have yet to hear any of them call for 2 states and absolute call for peace, stop the terrorism, recognize Israel or call out Hamas etc.
NEVER
so the answer is war. what do they expect.
we are dealing with zealot nuts.
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Elie Wiesel on never again:
https://twitter.com/MikeLaChance33/status/1711983450104775120?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1711983450104775120%7Ctwgr%5E8e0a73952f07ace0fd82e01cd41889063b4a1dc4%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Flegalinsurrection.com%2F2023%2F10%2Fvideo-scholar-and-holocaust-survivor-elie-wiesel-explains-the-meaning-of-never-again%2F
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On her alma matter Columbia Univ.:
It can go to hell.
https://nypost.com/2023/10/21/meghan-mccain-slams-columbia-university-for-israel-hamas-stance/
she needs to read Yeonmi Park's book.
When a N Korean escapes to the US and is thrilled to get into an IVY only to be disillusioned to the point she is bewildered that she comes to the US and finds as much BS propaganda here as in the N Korea, and cannot understand why American students hate America even more than the Norks a patriot can conclude " Houston we got a problem!"
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I feel the same about Columbia, and my undergrad U. of PA too!
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https://nypost.com/2023/10/21/hollywood-was-founded-by-jews-but-it-ignores-hamas-pogroms/
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https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-universities-in-connecticut/
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/zainab-khan-i-m-appalled-by-the-muslim-american-response-to-war-in-israel/vi-AA1iCejS?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=b6706ba01ed0463683a738ed606bcdce&ei=7
hard to know how many Muslims think this way vs the opposite
like hard to know how many Chinese in US are on our side vs CCP
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I noticed they introduced her as the "co-founder" of the Muslim American Leadership Alliance.
https://malanational.org/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cttgBPE015E
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https://unherd.com/2023/10/how-the-democrats-betrayed-the-jews/?=frlh&fbclid=IwAR1qAtCBtr4-s0P2s8BWrw6LfihRBkgm6I9YICreLSLCPz6rJ4R5WNWyXkk
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Several candidates for retroactive abortion here on inhumanitarian grounds:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/10/your-son-killed-jews-idf-releases-audio-of-hamas-terrorist-bragging-about-murdering-jewish-family/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=your-son-killed-jews-idf-releases-audio-of-hamas-terrorist-bragging-about-murdering-jewish-family
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A Record Of Pure, Predatory Sadism
THE ATLANTIC - GRAEME
MONDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2023
This afternoon, at a military base north of Tel Aviv, the Israel Defense Forces held a grisly matinee screening of 43 minutes
of raw footage from Hamas's October 7 attack. Members of the press were invited, but cameras were not allowed. Hamas had
the opposite policy on cameras during the attack, which it documented gleefully with its fighters' body cams and mobile
phones. Some of the clips had been circulating already on social media in truncated or expurgated form, with the footage decorously stopped just before beheadings and moments of death. After having seen them both in raw and trimmed forms, I can endorse the decision to trim those clips. I certainly hope I never see any of the extra footage again.
It was, as IDF Major General Mickey Edelstein told the press afterward, "a very sad movie." Men, women, and children are shot, blown up, hunted, tortured, burned, and generally murdered in any horrible manner you could predict, and some that you might not. The terrorists surround a Thai man they have shot in the gut, then bicker about what to do next. (About 30,000 Thais live in Israel, many of them farmworkers.) "Give me a knife!" one Hamas terrorist shouts. Instead he finds a garden hoe, and he swings at the man's throat, taking thwack after thwack. The audience gasped.
I heard someone heave a little at another scene, this one showing a father and his young sons, surprised in their pajamas. A terrorist throws a grenade into their hiding place, and the father is killed. The boys are covered in blood, and one appears to have lost an eye. They go to their kitchen and cry for their mother. One of the boys howls, "Why am I alive?" and "Daddy, Daddy." One says, "I think we are going to die." The terrorist who killed their father comes in, and while they weep, he raids their fridge. "Water, water," he says. The spokesman was unable to say whether the children survived.
The videos show pure, predatory sadism; no effort to spare those who pose no threat; and an eagerness to kill nearly matched by eagerness to disfigure the bodies of the victims. In several clips, the Hamas killers fire shots into the heads of people who are already dead. They count corpses, taking their time, and then shoot them again. Some of the clips I had not previously seen simply show the victims in a state of terror as they wait to be murdered, or covered with bits of their friends and loved ones as they are loaded into trucks and brought to Gaza as hostages. There was no footage of rape, although there was footage of young women huddling in fear and then being executed in a leisurely manner.
Edelstein said that the IDF chose to show the footage out of necessity. It is not every day that snuff films of Jews are shown
at an IDF screening hall. (The original site of the screening was a commercial theater, which would have been even worse.)
"What we shared with you," Edelstein said, searching for words, "you should know it." And he said he struggled to understand how some journalists could present the IDF and Hamas as comparable. This footage would refute that false equivalence.
"We are not looking for kids to kill them," he said. "We have to share it with you so no one will have an idea that someone is
equal to another."
To me the most disturbing section was not visual at all. Like the clip of the father and his boys hunted in their pajamas, it was upsetting in part because it showed a relationship between parent and child. The clip is just a phone call-placed by a terrorist to his family back in Gaza. He tells his father that he is calling from a Jewish woman's phone. (The phone recorded the call.) He tells his father that his son is now a "hero" and that "I killed 10 Jews with my own hands." And he tells his family, about a dozen times, that they should open up WhatsApp on his phone, because he has sent photographs to prove what he has done. "Put on Mom!" he says. "Your son is a hero!"
His parents, I noticed, are not nearly as enthusiastic as he is. I believe that the mom says "praise be to God" at one point, which could be gratitude for her son's crimes or pure reflex, indicating her loss for words to match her son's unspeakable acts. They do not question what their son has done; they do not scold him. They tell him to come back to Gaza. They fear for his safety. He says, amid rounds of "Allahu akbar," that he intends "victory or martyrdom"-which the parents must understand means that he will never come home. From their muted replies I wonder whether they also understand that even if he did come home, he would do so as a disgusting and degraded creature, and that it might be better for him not to.
Graeme Wood is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters With the Islamic State.
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/10/25/morris-liberal-secular-jews-growing-disillusioned-with-the-left/
I am dubious
This is a time that will test Jewish people's souls
Are you a Jew or a Democrat?
Hard to be both
if you ask me.
we shall see.
not holding my breath
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https://ace.mu.nu/archives/406756.php
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Bumped into this piece on FB; there is no url for it I could find. It, however, explains a lot”
June 2 ·
I was born to hate jews.
Av Kaseem Hafiz
It was part of my life. I never questioned that. I was not born in Iran or Syria. I was born in England. My parents moved there from Pakistan. Theirs was the typical immigrant story: Move to the West hoping to create a better life for themselves and their children.
We were a devoted Muslim family, but not extremists or radicals in any way. We only wanted the best for everyone - everyone except the Jews. The Jews, we thought, were aliens living in stolen Muslim land, occupiers involved in a genocide against the Palestinian people. Our hatred was therefore justified and just. And it left me and my friends vulnerable to radical extremist arguments. If the Jews were as evil as we've always believed, shouldn't those who support them - Christians, Americans and others in the West - be just as evil?
Starting from the 90s, speakers and teachers in mosques and schools began repeating this theme endlessly: We were not western. We were not British. We were Muslims, first and foremost. Our allegiance was to our religion and to our fellow Muslims. We owe nothing to western nations who welcomed us. As westerners, they were our enemies.
All of this had its desired effect. At least it did on me. It changed the way I looked at the world. I began to look at the suffering of Muslims, including in Britain, as the fault of Western imperialism. The west was at war with us, and the Jews controlled the west. My experience at the university in the UK only reinforced my increasingly radical conviction. Hating Israel was a badge of honor. Set up an anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian rally, and you were sure to attract a huge, approver
While in uni, I decided that the protests and propaganda against Israel were not enough. Real jihad requires violence. So I made plans to join the real fight. I want to drop out of college and join terrorist training camp in Pakistan. But, fortunately for me, fate intervened - in a bookstore.
I came across a book called The Case for Israel by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. The case for Israel? Which case could that be? The title itself infuriated me, and I started reading the pages almost like a travesty. How ill-informed, how stupid, can this guy be to defend the defenseless? Well, he was a Jew. That must have been the answer
Still I am reading. And what I read challenged all my dogmas about Israel and the Jews: I read that it was not Israel who created the Palestinian refugee crisis, it was the Arab countries, the UN and the corrupt Palestinian leadership. I read that Jews did not exploit the Holocaust to create the state of Israel; the movement to create a modern Jewish state dating back to the 19th. century, and eventually to the beginning of the Jewish people almost 4000 years ago. And I read that Israel is not engaged in genocide against the Palestinians. On the contrary, the Palestinian population has actually doubled in just twenty years.
All of this just pissed me off. I had to prove Dershowitz wrong to see with my own eyes how racist and oppressive Israel really was. Then I bought a plane ticket. I would go to Israel, the home of my enemy. And that's when everything changed. Alt.
What I saw with my own eyes was even more challenging than what Dershowitz had written. Instead of apartheid I saw Muslims, Christians and Jews coexisting. Instead of hate, I saw acceptance, even compassion. I saw a violent, modern, liberal democracy, full of flaws, for sure, but fundamentally decent. I saw a country that wanted nothing but to live in peace with its neighbors. I watched my hate melt before my eyes. I knew just then what I had to do.
Too many people on this planet are consumed by the same hate that consumed me. They have been taught to despise the Jewish state - many Muslims through their religion, many others by their university professors or student groups.
So here's my challenge to anyone who feels this way: do what I did - seek the truth for yourself. If the truth can change me, it can change anyone.
I am Kasim Hafeez from Prager University.
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https://nypost.com/2023/10/26/metro/hani-saleh-possessed-illegal-gun-in-swastikas-covered-car-da/
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If you do Twitter (X) and dig pithy David Burge/Iowahawk is well wort following. I particularly like his “5 Charlottesvilles a day” comparison:
David Burge
@iowahawkblog
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I'll lay even odds that at least one of these posts is from faculty or administration
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Breaking911
@Breaking911
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BREAKING: Police on scene and FBI notified after posts on Cornell University forum call for Jewish students to be killed
h/t: @AnnieSun16
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We are witnessing 5 fucking Charlottesvilles every day, and universities are like🤷🤷🤷♀️
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David Burge
@iowahawkblog
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1h
"I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling has been going on in here."
Quote
Daniel Silva
@danielsilvabook
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4h
“Nothing prepared me for antisemitism on college campuses” by Erwin Chemerinsky the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law.
Please read and share https://latimes.com/.../antisemitism-college-campus...…
David Burge
@iowahawkblog
The idea that virulent antisemitism on campus is some kind of shocking unforeseen phenomenon that suddenly appeared out of nowhere in October 2023 is fucking willful blindness. Every "elite" university in the US has spent 40 years creating sinecures and chairs and entire departments for Jew-hate-peddling lunatics, and for the last 20 years panhandled donations from every lunatic oil sheikhdom to pay for them.
9:07 AM · Oct 30, 2023
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David Burge
@iowahawkblog
·
1h
So college presidents and deans can spare me the shock when some of their edgy pity-hire faculty members chant support for Hamas into a bullhorn. You dumb fuckers knew full well what they were all about when you hired them in the first place, it was all there in their curriculum….
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/harvard-university-president-launches-anti-semitism-advisory-board/ss-AA1j6kSo?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=a05618ff26774130b8cc197f54ef0432&ei=8
me: money talks
it seems; reading about rich Jewish benefactors stopping the donations.
not clear what an "advisory board" would do though.
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Yes he is good!
https://twitter.com/iowahawkblog/status/332494589934047234?lang=en
Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow. Until they stop moving. - Iowa Hawk
BBG, I am not on X yet. I started to sign up but couldn't answer the first question, my name. Am I really going to put my real name out there? Or do all that work and have it be anonymous?
Burge had another funny one I recall, I'll have to paraphrase. People were supposed to submit questions for an online Town Hall conducted by President Obama. His question went something like this.
A passenger train leaves Iowa City for Chicago at 10:30 a.m., arrives in 4 hours and 14 minutes. Why?
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BBG, I am not on X yet. I started to sign up but couldn't answer the first question, my name. Am I really going to put my real name out there? Or do all that work and have it be anonymous?
I am not big into X or whatever Doug, having signed up mostly for day job reasons (I track customer complaints in my areas of responsibility & respond to ‘em), but IIRC it was possible to sign up under a pseudonym when I was first joining. IIRC further, “verified” accounts required more rigamarole, but again I’m far from an X pro a have always felt its news haiku model kinda lame.
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calling Jews in Israel genocidal for "75 yrs"
odd how the birth rate in Gaze and West bank has seen their numbers skyrocket over that time.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/10/31/watch-cornel-west-rants-against-the-existence-of-israel-75-years-of-genocide/
I am confused.
Leftist Democrat Jews have presumed for decades that if they fight for Civil Rights for blacks, vote only for Democrats (like most blacks), support BLM
donate money to their causes, call Al Sharpton reverend instead of cockroach
that blacks will love them back
do they not understand many blacks hate Jews, despise how Jewish movie moguls depicted them in most movies, envy our success in many venues.
they are not going to identify with us.
Surely not all but some.
Just because one votes Democrat does not mean one is safe.
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The Global War on the Jews
Anti-Semitism surges, even in the West, which shows why Israel exists.
By
The Editorial Board
Follow
Oct. 30, 2023 6:26 pm ET
The disturbing fact of the past month is that Jews are under attack not only in Israel and not only by Hamas. The weeks since the barbaric Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of Israel have witnessed physical assaults on Jews the world over, including in the U.S. and Europe. This most modern of pogroms—global, televised, politicized—demonstrates exactly what is at stake as Israel ramps up its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.
The Islamist group and its Western enablers are pursuing or justifying a genocidal war against Jews, not merely a territorial dispute with Israel. And since Western governments too often seem unable to protect the Jewish minorities in their midst, Israel must defend itself as the only safe home for the Jewish people.
This weekend hundreds of rioters in Dagestan, Russia, stormed an airport in search of Jewish travelers. Mobs raided hotels in other parts of the North Caucasus looking for Jews, and a Jewish community center under construction in the city of Nalchik was the target of an apparent attack.
Germany has witnessed a spate of anti-Semitic incidents, including an attack with Molotov cocktails against a synagogue in Berlin on Oct. 18. Some Jews found Stars of David painted on their homes, an echo of the Nazi persecution. German politicians have been forceful in their denunciations, but apparently not forceful enough in their policing.
Two Jewish schools in London closed for a period over safety concerns, and some British Jews no longer feel safe wearing visible symbols of their faith. They’re probably right to worry the state can’t protect them. Tens of thousands of protesters in London over three successive weekends called for “jihad” and chanted “from the river to the sea,” a demand for the erasure of Israel and by extension its citizens. A crowd in Sydney, Australia, chanted “gas the Jews” after the Hamas attack.
Americans like to believe such things couldn’t happen in the U.S. They have. The Anti-Defamation League last week reported a 388% increase in anti-Semitic incidents from Oct. 7-23 compared with the same period a year ago. The 312 incidents the ADL recorded include a car carrying individuals with Palestinian flags allegedly swerving toward a Jewish family and several alleged assaults by pro-Palestinian protesters. The ADL tally counts 109 anti-Israel rallies that featured support for Hamas or violence against Jews in Israel.
These and too many other incidents to count put paid to the notion that one can distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism since Oct. 7. If protesters wanted to burn Israeli flags in a fit of wrong-headed pique about a two-state solution, that is one thing. Only anti-Jewish hate can explain how synagogues, children and airports are targets of this outrage.
Yet many Western intellectuals—and a growing number of politicians—insist on maintaining this false distinction. They’ve seen what Hamas has done to innocent Israeli civilians, and what pro-Hamas protesters have said and done in Western streets. They’d nonetheless forgive any violence by Hamas or Hezbollah against Jews as anticolonial defiance.
This is why Israel is fighting, and must fight, as hard as it is for its survival as a state. And why it’s inexcusable for any Western politician now to demand a cease-fire in Gaza. No leader who is demonstrably incapable of protecting Jews in his or her own country should try to prevent Israel from defending itself. This is how the West slips from “never again” into “nowhere is safe.”
***
This global war on Jews also clarifies what is at stake for Western societies in this fight. The West spent the decades after the civilizational catastrophe of the Holocaust vowing never again to allow itself to slide into such barbarism. What we see now in the attacks on Jews is how that slide began.
Before there was a Chancellor Hitler in 1933, there were roving bands of Brownshirts inflicting political and anti-Semitic violence on the streets of Germany. They too often went unchecked by police, prosecutors and politicians who didn’t understand the menace, sympathized with the offenders, or merely felt overwhelmed by the scale of the danger. Hitler gained power in part because the German state no longer could maintain its monopoly on violence in defense of democratic values.
Today’s threats to democracy are different, but one lesson is the same and is crystal-clear: A Western society that can’t or won’t muster the will to defend its Jewish neighbors and fellow citizens won’t be able to defend itself.
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second
The Battle of Civilization
This isn’t only Israel’s war. If Hamas and Iran win, you will be their next target. But we will prevail.
By Benjamin Netanyahu
Oct. 30, 2023 6:22 pm ET
Until recently, many believed that the promise of progress in the 21st century would enable us to move beyond the barbaric horrors of the past toward a brilliant future—that we could go about our comfortable lives and that evil will simply pass us.
It will not. The horrors that Hamas perpetrated on Oct. 7 remind us that we won’t realize the promise of a better future unless we, the civilized world, are willing to fight the barbarians. The barbarians are willing to fight us, and their goal is clear: Shatter that promising future, destroy all that we cherish, and usher in a world of fear and darkness.
This is a turning point for leaders and nations. It is a time for all of us to decide if we are willing to fight for a future of hope and promise or surrender to tyranny and terror.
Rest assured, Israel will fight. Since Oct. 7, Israel has been at war. Israel didn’t start this war. Israel didn’t want this war. But Israel will win this war.
Hamas launched this war by perpetrating the worst savagery our people have seen since the Holocaust. Hamas murdered children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children. They burned people alive, raped women, beheaded men. They tortured Holocaust survivors and kidnapped babies. They committed the most horrific crimes imaginable.
Iran has formed an axis of terror by arming, training and financing Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and other terror proxies throughout the Middle East and beyond. In fighting Hamas and the Iranian axis of terror, Israel is fighting the enemies of civilization itself.
Victory over these enemies begins with moral clarity. It begins with knowing the difference between good and evil, between right and wrong. It means making a moral distinction between the deliberate murder of the innocent and the unintentional casualties that are the inevitable result of even the most just war.
It means holding Hamas accountable for the double war crime it commits every day by deliberately targeting Israeli civilians and deliberately using Palestinian civilians as human shields. It means not only making clear that the use of human shields is an immoral tactic of war, but making certain it is an ineffective one.
As long as the international community blames Israel for Hamas’s use of Palestinian human shields, Hamas will continue to employ this tool of terror. Hamas will continue to use the basements in Gaza’s hospitals as the command posts of its vast terror tunnel network. It will continue to use mosques as fortified military outposts and weapons depots. It will continue to steal fuel and humanitarian assistance from United Nations facilities.
While Israel is doing everything to get Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way, Hamas is doing everything to keep Palestinian civilians in harm’s way. Israel urges Palestinian civilians to leave the areas of armed conflict, while Hamas prevents those civilians from leaving those areas at gunpoint. Hamas is preventing foreign nationals from leaving Gaza altogether.
Most despicably, Hamas is holding more than 200 Israeli hostages, including 33 children. Every civilized nation should stand with Israel in demanding that these hostages be freed immediately and unconditionally.
I want to make clear Israel’s position regarding a cease-fire. Just as the U.S. wouldn’t have agreed to a cease-fire after the bombing of Pearl Harbor or after the terrorist attack on 9/11, Israel will not agree to a cessation of hostilities with Hamas after the horrific attacks of Oct. 7.
Calls for a cease-fire are calls for Israel to surrender to Hamas, to surrender to terrorism, to surrender to barbarism. That will not happen.
The Book of Ecclesiastes says that there is a time for peace and a time for war. This is a time for war—a war for our common future. Today we draw a line between civilization and barbarism. It is a time for everyone to decide where they stand. Israel will stand against the forces of barbarism until victory.
I hope and pray that civilized nations everywhere will back this fight. Because Israel’s fight is your fight. If Hamas and Iran’s axis of evil win, you will be their next target. That’s why Israel’s victory will be your victory.
Regardless of who stands with Israel, Israel will fight this battle until it is won. Israel will prevail. May God bless Israel, and may God bless all who stand with Israel.
Mr. Netanyahu is prime minister of Israel.
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third
Anti-Semitism Poisons America
Attacks on Jews are also attacks on our ideals of liberalism and pluralism.
Walter Russell Mead
By
Walter Russell Mead
Follow
Oct. 30, 2023 5:40 pm ET
As students and, worse, professors, at elite universities across the U.S. exulted at the news of mass murder and torture of Israeli Jews by Hamas terrorists, Jewish students were warned to take precautions on campus. Across the U.S., anti-Semitic incidents including vandalism, harassment and assault are up roughly 400% since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7.
That is a problem, and not only for American Jews. The beliefs that have made the U.S. a uniquely hospitable home for Jewish citizens are essential to national cohesion and strength. If we lose faith in what was once proudly called the American Way, there is little chance that society can summon the energy and unity to withstand attacks from our enemies abroad.
While doing research for my recent book, “The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel and the Fate of the Jewish People,” I was struck by the deep connection between America’s relative (and I stress relative) immunity to the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism and American faith in democracy and pluralism.
From the Middle Ages to the present day, violent anti-Semitism has flourished best among those who reject liberal ideas. Medieval Christian zealots trying to build a seamlessly Christian Europe, nationalists striving for “pure” societies in which a particular ethnic group establishes its own culture and institutions without the “alien” influences of ethnic and religious minorities, Islamists who want a pure Islamic state—none of these projected utopias have room for proud and free Jews.
The U.S. stands on a different foundation. For America to work, many different religious and ethnic identities must coexist under a common commitment to constitutional politics and the rule of law. That happens to be the kind of society in which Jews can flourish, and the America we live in today owes much to the energy, creativity and patriotism of its Jewish citizens.
America’s vital center is defined by the conviction that people of different cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds together can build a peaceful and prosperous society in which all can follow their consciences while upholding the framework of our common life. While America remains imperfect, the efforts of people of different races, ethnicities and religions over the centuries have created a miraculously prosperous and open society.
Three things unite 2017’s white nationalist marchers in Charlottesville, Va., on the illiberal right with today’s bile-spewing campus radicals. Both sides worship ethnicity, despise the American Way, and hate Jews. The illiberal right claims that America is a Caucasian ethno-state, and that Jews, blacks and other “inferior” groups want to destroy it through immigration and subversion. The campus left shares this conviction but reverses the polarity: Nonwhite ethnic groups are the good guys, and the white Founders are racists whose legacy needs to be buried. Both groups think Jews are part of the problem.
Jew hatred is the most damaging piece of the “horseshoe” consensus that brings the far left and far right together. This hatred is a sign of mental incapacity and is a barrier to learning. Someone who thinks “the Jews” control banking doesn’t understand how modern economies work. Someone who thinks “the Jews” control America’s media and political systems from the shadows can never really understand how American institutions work. And people who embrace conspiracy theories aren’t eager to learn because they think they already understand everything.
Jew hatred is both a disabling mental virus and a social blight. Societies dominated by irrational hatreds and conspiracy theories are rarely well-governed. Where Jews are hunted in the streets, no one’s liberty or property will long be secure.
Surging illiberalism and rising Jew hatred aren’t only a domestic problem. The world order Americans have tried to build since World War II is a projection of the American Way abroad. People from different ethnic and religious backgrounds can, the U.S. has argued since 1945, work together to build a peaceful and prosperous world. We cannot uphold these beliefs abroad if we no longer believe in them at home. And a society whose educated elite has contracted a destructive mind virus in our citadels of learning will neither govern itself well nor have much to contribute to the world.
These trends worry me deeply, but not to the point of despair. The last big surge of anti-Semitism was in the 1930s and very early 1940s, when the Depression had shaken faith in the American Way. But as our overseas enemies sought to take advantage of what they saw as America’s weakness, their deeds gradually revealed the unspeakable depravity and uncontrollable aggression to which illiberalism leads. We united, we rallied, and we overcame.
History offers hope but shouldn’t make us complacent. We face grave challenges abroad even as the foundations of unity and concord at home have corroded to a dangerous degree. Those whose job it was to preserve the health of our educational institutions have dramatically and horribly failed while those charged with American foreign policy failed to prepare for the challenges coming at us overseas.
The Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 unleashed a storm abroad and a storm at home. More storms, and worse ones, are likely as a disordered America struggles for balance in a disordered world.
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Had a related discussion w/ one of our former resident Progressives back in the day:
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10101927843278509&set=a.577011786689
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Good one!
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/my-father-elie-wiesel-survived-auschwitz-he-d-ask-these-questions-about-israel-hamas-war/ar-AA1jcoN2?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=11ab7d9e4a71445e9ceb9c2354dece3b&ei=8
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https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/23andme-user-data-targeting-ashkenazi-jews-leaked-online-rcna119324
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https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2023/11/03/dershowitz-there-is-an-international-war-against-the-jews/
what I found interesting was Dersh claims that 6 yo Muslim child stabbed to death recently was NOT related to Mideast war and was coincidence.
I had never learned that with our MSM bias.
Dersh really sounds like us lately though he continues to claim he is still a democrat - I am not sure why.
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I have long posted my disgust at the majority of American Jews because so many are rabid Democrat partisans
and how it does seem so many are in positions that can force feed DNC BS down our throats
While this is still true I can say today I am proud that Jews are sticking up for Jews and glad and hopeful that many are using their positions of influence to stick up , mostly for Israel.
Our influence has certainly helped Israel and hope it continues. I am not expecting them to abandon the Dem Party though.
None are going to become Republicans and none will commit suicide by voting for DJT.
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Very interesting ccp.
Two steps with each Dem constituency group. 1) Get them to see the flaw of being with this Dem party and their policies. 2) Getting them to join our side.
First part is very hard, only happens when they see it for themselves. Second part is closer to impossible. Like asking a Palestinian to convert to Judaism after all the hatred they were brought up with.
Imagine if we just had real facts and honest debates over policies and consequences of those policies ...
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"Like asking a Palestinian to convert to Judaism after all the hatred they were brought up with."
yes! Republicans maybe even more Nazi like to them then even Hamas; not clear to me who they think is worse.
Crazy thought but I think it true.
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The level of learned hatred (toward Republicans) is astounding.
Example: Biden’s inciteful use of the term " Extreme MAGA Republican", meaning everyone who supports those things that make up our Trump accomplishment thread, like energy independence, thriving free enterprise and peace through strength. Another example, FBI targeting disenchanted parents speaking up at school board meetings. They who oppose transgender advocacy in Kindergarten curricula are the biggest threat we face.
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New term: "Hamazis".
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https://www.newsweek.com/unreported-foreign-donations-universities-foment-anti-semitism-opinion-1546139?fbclid=IwAR17oxUs2xCJc9shF-1aKiuoru_xdShl38Fg2H4t693AutyXmRIKjp_VnYc
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/jewish-viewers-refuge-fox-news-174918953.html
Levin is certainly correct on his assessment and the resultant view of the NYT.
The NYT slimeballs probably thinking:
Jewish libs tuning into Fox News - "GOD FORBID!"
Is it possible some lib Jews WILL actually wake up to reality?
Perhaps we can pick up a small percentage but not holding my breath it would be that many.
The Jewish Democrat politicians still preach the DNC lines at least as far as I can tell from my couch.
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Kunstler: The Jewish-American Dilemma
Tyler Durden's Photo
BY TYLER DURDEN
FRIDAY, NOV 03, 2023 - 04:20 PM
Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,
“In a world that is not conforming to the narrative of continuous Progress, the response from self-declared progressives has been to try to rewrite our past into the multicultural utopia that they wish to see realised. This will not end well. The war on reality cannot be won.”
- Luke Dodson
At this moment, when there is an awful struggle over the Hebrews’ place in the world - so dire that you’re waiting for World War Three to vaporize everything you’ve ever cared about - one observes the Jewish American scene with trepidation. Since I am a Jewish American, I’m just going to flop this one on the table like so much meat to see what kind of animals it brings out of the woodwork to fight over it.
The Hamas war has exposed a deep current of animosity against Israel and against Jews generally world-wide, even here. This, you understand, is happening at a time of what we might call epic global political mental illness. A mass formation psychosis appears to grip many population groups, each in its own way, but often expressing itself as a longing for death, ranging from the economic suicide of Western Europe to the rise of Jihad to the desolate nihilism of American nose-ring youth.
Jewish Americans have played a leading role in American intellectual and political life through the 20th century and into this one. We Jews increasingly dominated the arenas of literature, academia, medicine, law, news media, and show biz. Business and government, too. In America, we mostly overcame (or seemed to) the deep, old-world superstitions against us, thanks to successful near-total cultural assimilation. I, for example, came from a Jewish family far more interested in baseball than Talmud, who put up a Christmas tree in the living room, and ate sweet-and-sour pork frequently. Perhaps this made us “bad” Jews, but frankly, it was more important to be good Americans — that is, people who cared more about our country than our ancestral origins.
American Jews have also been major players in the political Left through the past hundred-odd years, and especially within the Democratic Party.
Lately, it appears that the Democratic Party is bent on destroying the country, so one is naturally left to wonder how this happened and what is the role of American Jews in this.
I will offer a hypothesis.
Old World Jews, scattered in diaspora among alien nations, were united for centuries by the longing to return to Jerusalem, the ancestral homeland. “Next year in Jerusalem!” is the toast that concludes each Passover seder. The modern activist manifestation of that, starting in 19th century Europe, was Zionism, the political movement to reinhabit the Bible land of the Middle East. The label Zionism has recently been confabulated with a notion that it stands for Jews wielding a disdainful sense of superiority against non-Jews.
This is, of course, a false understanding. Mostly, it is an envious projection because Jews succeeded so well in America, and they succeeded, as I averred above, largely because they assimilated so completely. How else can you explain a Jew such as Samuel Goldwyn (born Szmuel Gelbfisz, later Samuel Goldfish) of Gloversville, New York, rising to run Hollywood’s MGM studio and turning out movies like Gone with the Wind that showed the rest of the nation what America was about? Or Irving Berlin who wrote God Bless America?
For the Jews who arrived here in the late 19th and early 20th century, America became even more of a promised land than that sliver of Biblical real estate on the Mediterranean. They succeeded here beyond their wildest dreams. Why dream idly about returning to the Middle East when the USA turned out to be the real Land of Milk and Honey? Hence, a revision in American Judaism became necessary.
Next year in Jerusalem was replaced as a central animating principle by an alternate shibboleth: tikkun olam.
Tikkun Olam means repair the world.
This has been driving American Judaism since the early 20th century. Meanwhile, the genocide of the 1940s gave new impetus to next year in Jerusalem for what remained of the European Jews, and thus you get the establishment of Israel in 1948 — notwithstanding the geopolitical legerdemain that actually brought it about.
American Jews, while sympathetic to a fault with the founding of Israel, and deeply vested emotionally in its success, had a different agenda in the USA after World War Two. They endeavored to repair America. Tikkun Olam!
Mostly this expressed itself in Jewish support and involvement in the Civil Rights movement, since the end of discrimination against anybody was considered a good thing for the Jews as well as humanity in general. The country needed a moral repair job, especially after defeating manifest evil in the big war. That effort climaxed in the mid 1960s with the federal legislation that ended Jim Crow policy in voting and public accommodations. Much of the actual on-the-ground work to make this happen was accomplished by Jewish lawyers. This is a fact, not an accusation.
But then something happened. Several things. One was that not all of black America necessarily regarded the Civil Rights movement as the great moral victory it was touted to be. A lot of black youth in the 1960s opted out early on and went their own way in black separatist movements of various kinds. As a practical matter, it also slowly became obvious that the new Civil Rights laws did not raise up the black underclass out of poverty and misery. Jewish liberal apostates would even argue that the vast federal social safety-net program largess that accompanied Civil Rights Inc. only made the condition of poor blacks worse.
This became a growing fiasco for American Jewish liberals, who, by the 1980s, then strove to impose another set of repairs (more tikkun olam) on American society: multiculturalism, meaning it was no longer necessary to promote a common culture that people would be encouraged to assimilate into, to join a consensus of values and behaviors. Instead, all cultures could behave according to their own rules.
That hasn’t worked out so well either, and the world repairers have lately had to resort to coercion such as tyrannical diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and the shoving aside of equal opportunity for enforced equal outcomes (“equity”). That business has only produced additional unintended consequences, such as the new epidemic of institutional incompetence and the resentment of at least half the population against new forms of counter-discrimination (cultural Marxism, in short).
Another poorly understood byproduct of this failure to repair the world is the guilt and shame secretly experienced by the American liberal Left over the apparent failure of the Civil Rights movement they fought so hard for, and the subsequent failed efforts to tweak it and save it (still more tikkun olam). Thus, we see the absurd racist “anti-racism” of the universities, and so many other affronts to common sense and reality itself.
But the worst byproduct of all this tragically misguided tikkun olam is that the main political vehicle for it, the Democratic Party, has gone so insane that it now devotes itself fanatically to the utter destruction of what remains of our country. This is most particularly true in the law, which might be considered the backbone of America. Lawfare attorneys such as Marc Elias, work tirelessly to turn American election law upside down and inside out so it becomes increasing impossible to know who is voting and if the ballots are legitimate.
The Democratic Party has decided it’s okay to use the law in bad faith to persecute and jail its political opponents. The Democratic Party has destroyed American’s faith in the federal courts, the Department of Justice, and the FBI. The Democratic Party allows an invasion of millions of unvetted aliens across the border, quite a few of them possibly bent on making mayhem here as global tensions careen into hot war. The Democratic Party is still pushing Covid vaccinations that are well-understood at this point to be ineffective and unsafe. And the Democratic Party is doing everything possible (with help from RINO Republicans) to destroy our financial system. You could easily make the case that the Democratic Party is the anti-American party.
If they really want to repair the world, it’s time for Jewish Americans to get out of the Democratic Party and re-assimilate into an American common culture - a consensus about reality - that is consistent with running a successful, orderly, and just society.
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CD
great article the better describes what I have been posting
how lib Jews have been totally miguided
while perhaps well meaning, their contributions to the LEFT has made things WORSE and effectively contribute to destroying the US
in all its dimensions - cultural, legal, education, spending, historical etc.
They also think that because they are pushing the party of equality, rights, etc that they will be protected from backlash, envy, hatred, jealousy,
Case in point :
Kunstler uses the example of (ironically) Goldwin's movie "Gone With the Wind" as a shining example of success . While it has been imensely successful
I read backlash from the DEI crowd for its' portrayal of Black slaves. Blacks do not appreciate the many movies by Jewish studios portraying black face,
blacks as servants, porters, maids, sometimes even dumb, in subservient roles.
" A lot of black youth in the 1960s opted out early on and went their own way in black separatist movements of various kinds"
Yes, and I suspect these blacks elders and their descendents are the most virulent anti-semites today.
" Another poorly understood byproduct of this failure to repair the world is the guilt and shame secretly experienced by the American liberal Left over the apparent failure of the Civil Rights movement they fought so hard for, and the subsequent failed efforts to tweak it and save it (still more tikkun olam). Thus, we see the absurd racist “anti-racism” of the universities, and so many other affronts to common sense and reality itself."
Yes, the sheer stupidity and stubborness of the Jewish LEFT!
And they are still all DNC - the only explanation I can come up with is they are move DNC than American more DNC then Jewish.
question remains, how many will wake up ?
I have not seen any Jewish politicians changing their views
All we ever see is 'get Trump', gain power by any and all means down whites USA etc.
Can anyone imagine in their wildest dreams any prominent Jewish Democrat "coming out" in a different way and state and admit they are wrong.
They will become independents or Republicans and leave the Dem party .
Can anyone imagine Raskdouche, Jerry Nads, Larry the Lib, Wiessdumb, DWassershmerderick doing this?
I don't know how to reach their tiny brains to make them realize Republicans are NOT the Nazis.
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Joe Lieberman on Cavuto
he is the only prominent Jewish politician who sounds like this (that I know of and in public):
https://news.yahoo.com/joseph-lieberman-spread-antisemitism-us-013515024.html
he is, of course, an independent now.
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The Savage Nihilism of ‘Free Palestine’
It’s time for us to reckon with the hopelessness at the heart of Arab and Western ‘liberationist’ ideology
BY
HUSSEIN ABOUBAKR MANSOUR
OCTOBER 09, 2023
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/savage-nihilism-free-palestine?utm_source=meta&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=eo_pro_traffic_evergreen_07%2F28%2F2023&utm_content=eo_news_nihilism-free-palestine_2023%2F10%2F30&utm_term=eo_static_custom_image_nihilishm-free-palestine_10%2F30%2F23&fbclid=IwAR3YjdVTthCYBqVoIUwYgd2dxAE0fwI3TVwk_2f5kh4aSV3X1yDne4OOcdU
Rally for Gaza at the Consulate General of Israel on Oct. 9, 2023, in New York City
MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO/GETTY IMAGES
COLLECTION
This article is part of Hamas’ War on Israel.
See the full collection →︎
“Free Palestine”—the slogan, the fantasy, and the policy—has always consciously implied the mass murder of Jews in their towns, streets, shops, and living rooms. Few are willing to say so openly, but in many intellectual, professional, and popular circles in the Middle East and the West, the idea of Palestinian national liberation has long been framed in terms that condone or necessitate the indiscriminate killing of Jews. For more unambiguous actors such as Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran, freeing Palestine simply means the total eradication of Israel without qualification. This is not a polemical point, but a basic reality and fact of our lives that demands scrutiny.
Consider the ideological milieu in which many Arabs and Muslims have been raised, including me. Growing up as a Muslim in Egypt, the concept of Palestine was never a geopolitical issue; it was a deeply ingrained part of our collective moral identity, the unifying element of both our religious and secular Arab nationalism. It was, and remains, a cause that resonated with us politically, socially, and spiritually, often approaching a fervor that defies rationality. This emotional charge, embedded in the political and religious narratives of much of the Arab Muslim world, has made rubbish of the idea that the Palestinian cause is merely based on anti-Zionism rather than antisemitism.
This milieu, however, is not in any way essential to what it means to be Arab or Muslim—it is a thoroughly modern phenomenon shaped largely by the influence of European revolutionary ideologies on Arab intellectuals and political activists. Among these imported systems of thought is a strain of revolutionary antisemitism that casts Jews as the eternal enemy not just of Arabs but of all human beings. Not every Arab or Muslim subscribes to these views, of course, but when fused with preexisting religious and cultural biases, they have infected almost every institution, pattern of thought, and aspect of life in the Arab Muslim world. Modern Arab political and religious literature is filled with the claim that Jews are hostis humani generis, the enemies of mankind—a classical European libel, and a French revolutionary cry.
https://www.tabletmag.com/collections/hamas-israel
The problems of this poisonous strain of thought are compounded by the concept that “freeing Palestine” is a species of resistance against foreign settler colonialists, a Fanonian revolution in which violence against civilians is defended as a legitimate means of achieving racial justice. The wholesale labeling of Israeli Jews—the vast majority of whom are refugees or descendants of refugees from Arab Muslim dictatorships and Soviet totalitarianism—as colonizers, settlers, and imperialists is in fact a type of collective ethnic punishment, nonsensical even on its own twisted terms, which recalls the medieval Christian denunciation of Jews as moral abominations, as a group and as individuals. You might have noticed in the last few days that those committed to liberating Palestine can’t seem to avoid the abject dehumanization of the Jews as a people—and that their aim is not for Palestinians to simply live in peace, dignity, and freedom alongside Israelis, but a state that is necessarily established upon the ruins of Israel. Hamas is explicit in its intention to murder the Jewish population of Israel and enslave any survivors; its partisans in the Middle East and the West are coyer on this point.
Islamists articulate the fantasy of Jewish eradication in the language of jihad, framed in eschatological terms, and imbued with a sense of divine justice and cosmic warfare—what Westerners would ordinarily recognize as a type of religious fascism. But while the Islamist version of this idea is potent for the purposes of mobilizing the impoverished and uneducated masses, the “left-wing” or secular version—couched in the language of Fanon and Karl Marx, of human emancipation, equality, anti-capitalism, and social justice—is the more effective means of mobilizing opinion among the Western intelligentsia. The point is that they are two sides of the same coin, the value of which is set in Jewish blood.
For those who are shaped by such a worldview—whether the “right-wing” or the “left-wing” version, the religious or the atheistic—celebrating the murder of innocent Israeli civilians, including children, women, and the elderly, is an expression of the partial fulfillment of a moral vision. As a teenager in Egypt, I recall nearly all the adults around me expressing such feelings when following the news of suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada. Egypt’s most prominent religious authorities declared the perpetrators to be martyrs and saints. In a way, it was not unlike the valorization and even canonization of those who destroyed livelihoods, burned property, and targeted police officers during the protests in America in the summer of 2020. I do not mean to inject American domestic politics where they do not belong, or to suggest a perfect moral equivalence, but there is a reason that leaders of Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran themselves insist that they are engaged in the same struggle against racism.
Almost every Arab Muslim knows that what I’m describing is not a personal opinion but objective reality. We may try to belittle these facts, or dismiss them as the delusional daydreams of uneducated know-nothings under the influence of religious and populist fanatics. But we should not deny that they are true.
My fear is that the impulse to dismiss and belittle is the byproduct not of sincere belief but of a deep sense of helplessness. After many recent conversations with the rising generation of young, intelligent, Westernized, and highly educated Arab professionals and diplomats, I have witnessed a strong urge not to confront this reality. Even among those who genuinely accept the legitimacy of Israel in a way their parents would have never been capable of, I almost always hear them describe the deaths of innocent Israelis as somehow being their own fault, or at least the fault of the Israeli government for not unilaterally making peace and ending the conflict. There is nothing more depressing than the surrender of the young to a problem they see as too big to solve.
My fear is that the impulse to dismiss and belittle is the byproduct not of sincere belief but of a deep sense of helplessness.
Those of us who belong to the cosmopolitan professional class of Arabs, who jump from country to country and from one lifestyle to another, benefiting from foreign cultures that live on the moral currency of liberalism and tolerance, are in many cases secretly ashamed. We see the antisemitism, the bloodlust, the insanity, and we cringe—but we hope it goes away. It’s easier for us to look forward to a hypothetical future where things are otherwise. It’s easier to ingratiate ourselves to the new social world where we want to belong, rather than grapple with the failures of the one we’ve left behind. We dismiss, we belitte, we explain away, we say, “What about Shireen Abu Akleh?”—and we go on pretending.
But even we are not as fresh or youthful as we like to think. We are walking in the footsteps of previous generations of modernizing, secular, intellectual Arabs. They too wanted nothing to do with their native lands, which they saw as having none of the power, prestige, or respect they craved. In their egotism and intellectual narcissism, they didn’t want to belong to “backward” societies. So they sought in foreign, mostly Western ideologies a refuge and a hiding place from backwardness. They joined the progressive secular movements and trendy revolutions because they offered an escape hatch from the drudgery of slow, marginal, local change. They became revolutionaries because they were afraid and insecure. Like Edward Said, they were anti-Zionist and anti-American “humanists” because they did not want to be, or could not be, “Arabs.” Their obvious cultural chauvinism was simply an urge to self-annihilate, to disappear into universalism. Their lives were a hopeless quest to shed their own skin.
To the Arabs of my own generation, I say we need a truly different approach. I’m not asking you to love Israel or Zionism, or to hang a poster of hipster Herzl in your bedroom. If you are critical of Israel and think there should be a Palestine, continue to do so. All I ask is for you to be authentically courageous, to admit that the murder we all witnessed in the last few days is an accurate representation and logical consequence of a catastrophic moral system, the one we all know intimately. This is a moment for collective introspection. It’s time to confront the darker corners of our ideological heritage, and question the ideas and beliefs we may have uncritically absorbed. Only by doing so can we hope to contribute to a more constructive and humane world for ourselves.
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This belongs under anti semitism thread
not social Justice warriors
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/erasing-the-name-of-anne-frank-shows-the-threat-to-jews-today/ar-AA1jxKSW?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=03ddde09b0854212b6525ab1af63efbe&ei=6
so invoking the memory of a holocaust victim is political and offensive ? ! :x
if so I don't EVER want to hear the name of George Floyd again
or Malcolm X
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wherever the Muslims move they bring their hatred for Jews (and Western) with them:
the new Nazis:
https://news.yahoo.com/hardly-taboos-left-anti-semitism-070923420.html
I thought anti-semitism was illegal in Germany?
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/germanys-laws-antisemitic-hate-speech-nazi-propaganda-holocaust-denial/
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https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/what-now
https://news.yahoo.com/hardly-taboos-left-anti-semitism-070923420.html
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/germanys-laws-antisemitic-hate-speech-nazi-propaganda-holocaust-denial/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqzdnPjPhW0 Britain
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PP
Media downplays the killing of a Jew in California: Perhaps Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats were too busy rooting out "Islamic-phobia" to notice, but a 69-year-old Jewish man was pogromed to death following an "altercation" with a pro-Palestinian thug at a Sunday afternoon rally in the LA suburb of Thousand Oaks. As Fox News reports, Kessler got into a "physical altercation" during which he "fell backwards and struck his head on the ground," the Ventura County Sheriff's Department said in a statement that added the medical examiner's office "determined the cause of death to be blunt force head injury and the manner of death homicide." Homicide indeed. But get a load of this mealy-mouth, passive-voice, politically correct headline from NBC News: "Man dies after hitting head during Israel and Palestinian rallies in California, officials say." What would we do without "officials"? Did Kessler hit himself in the head? Did he bump into a light pole? The headline doesn't say. As it turns out, he was smashed in the head with a megaphone by an as-yet unnamed 50-year-old assailant. And we wonder: Had the roles been reversed and a pro-Israel protester had offed a pro-Palestine protester, would the media be hiding the identity of the killer? We suspect not.
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/11/08/report-democrats-circulate-plan-to-open-floodgates-for-palestinians/
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https://twitchy.com/brettt/2023/11/07/professor-upset-israeli-actor-gal-gadot-to-hold-screening-of-propaganda-n2389539
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links hate crimes against both Jews and Muslims read the headlines
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/hate-crimes-against-jewish-and-muslim-new-yorkers-surge-by-135/ss-AA1jEQ89?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=2fb14db2cb0c4de880600d12c4a24c5c&ei=14
but then later on 69 against Jews 8 against Muslims
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https://rumble.com/v3uovha-antifa-and-pro-palestinehamas-supports-attack-holocaust-museum-in-los-angel.html
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/white-house-indicates-people-making-violent-antisemitic-threats-not-classified-as-domestic-terrorists/ar-AA1jaIM6
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And this from Blinks/Biden/Obama:
"America has issued its strongest condemnation of Israel's war in Gaza yet as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that 'far too many Palestinians have been killed'."
the Palestinian WH demonstration worked .
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Apparently, the desk jockeys in the State Dept are all wound up about the Gazan death toll threatening to resign blah blah.
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interesting take with a new angle :
seems to put more emphasis on separating Church and State in the Constitution.
Interesting the article participant points out the Jewish voting pattern for Democrats increased from 2/3 to 3/4 in the 60s when evangelicals took over the Republican party as its' "base".
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/03/24/why-most-american-jews-vote-for-democrats-explained/
For sure there was a lot of anti-semitism among Christians - I believe mostly in the past.
Jews were barred from higher education as much as possible certain clubs etc.
and seemed to viewed with suspicion.
Also they were taught the Jews killed Jesus in Catholic schools I remember. We were taught in Hebrew schools that this was not fair - it was the Romans who killed Jesus
though I am of the understanding the ancient Jews were suspicious of Jesus and probably did not mind Romans killing him (from what I can tell).
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NY GOV ANNOUNCES SOCIAL MEDIA SURVEILLANCE CAMPAIGN… Hochul Says NY Is Conducting Social Media ‘Surveillance Efforts’ To Monitor ‘Hate Speech’ (VIDEO)
Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Monday that the state is “very focused” on collecting data from social media platforms as part of an effort to counter online “negativity” and “hate speech” after a rise in antisemitic attacks.
Following a meeting with the state’s Jewish leaders, local law enforcement and federal authorities, Hochul spoke to the media to discuss the state’s efforts to combat hate crimes.
“It’s painful to me as the governor of this great state — that has been known for its diversity, and how we celebrate different cultures, different religions, different viewpoints — it’s painful to see the cruelty with which New Yorkers are treating each other. Everywhere from college campuses, to our streets, to schools, to playgrounds; even as they’re entering their houses of worship,” Hochul said, noting that she “immediately deployed the State Police to protect our synagogues and yeshivas and mosques and any other place that could be susceptible to hate crimes or violence.” […]
The New York governor went on to detail the state’s plan “to catch incitement to violence” and “direct threats to others” by monitoring social media activity.
“We’re very focused on the data we’re collecting from surveillance efforts – what’s being said on social media platforms. And we have launched an effort to be able to counter some of the negativity and reach out to people when we see hate speech being spoken about on online platforms,” Hochul said, insisting that no New Yorker “should feel they have to hide any indications of what their religious beliefs are.”
ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Does The First Amendment Protect Anti-Israel Protests?
This line is anything but clear. As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it a century ago: “Every idea is an incitement.” Yet the courts have tried — not always successfully — to distinguish between advocacy and incitement, without favoring some ideas over others.
As the Supreme Court put it in 1990: “Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries, but on the competition of other ideas.”
Marxists can advocate illegal overthrow of the government by force and violence as long as they do not immediately incite such violence. Hamas supporters can call for the end of Israel, but they can’t incite an angry crowd to kill a specific Jew or Zionist.
KARINGE: DEMS HAVE ‘DISAGREEMENTS’ ON WHETHER ISRAEL SHOULD EXIST … ‘That’s The Way It Is’: KJP Dismisses Democrats’ Anti-Israel Rhetoric As ‘Range Of Agreements And Disagreements’ (VIDEO)
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed Democrats’ anti-Israel rhetoric as a “range of agreements and disagreements” during Monday’s press briefing.
Daily Caller White House correspondent Reagan Reese asked whether far-left members of the Democratic Party breaking from President Joe Biden on Israel will drive a “wedge” within the party. Members of the party, notably Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, have expressed solidarity with Palestine while condemning Israel as war rages between Israelis and Hamas, an Islamic terrorist group.
“A lot of Democrats, particularly in and around ‘The Squad’ have openly disagreed with the president for being too supportive of Israel. There’s also been some grassroots groups who’ve backed the president now indicating that this could be a deal breaker for them. Is the president worried that this will continue to be a wedge issue within the party, and why can’t he get his fellow Democrats on the same page?” Reese asked.
“So look. In our party, there’s going to be [a] various range of agreements and disagreements, and that’s the way it is, right?” the press secretary replied. “And particularly in the Democratic Party, the president is gonna continue to be clear about this. You heard it at the top when Jake Sullivan was giving an update on the Middle East where the president stands. The president has been very clear, and when it comes to Israel and what we saw on October 7, Israel has the right to defend itself. They have a right to defend itself.”
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Apparently, the desk jockeys in the State Dept are all wound up about the Gazan death toll threatening to resign blah blah.
Jeepers, I sure hope they don’t toss us in that briar patch.
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I’m 1/16 Jewish according to family legend as it was quite a scandal when my great great grandmother married a Jewish gent, while my wife is a Jew, albeit one that has never practiced. As such I get pretty freaking annoyed by antisemitism, particularly in higher ed where I work and where their self-perception is that they are on the side of all that is fair, noble, and anti-racist … except those freaking Jews that need to be driven into the sea. VDH castigates just that attitude here:
https://twitter.com/VDHanson/status/1724513817106022472?fbclid=IwAR1rR5677njdNc6swoTlWWrAIkvSCjs2qh3bQ0fKiozErdmpQTvPRioMB8E
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3rd-ish post.
https://www.thefp.com/p/daniel-pearl-cousin-hamas-idealism?fbclid=IwAR2v8J8dfF44LRw6xSbdDyEN_g9A4CI4F0nooNb4ZRAgCmPHSIL2ZKQ3ZnU
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https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/elon-musk-tries-to-backpedal-after-agreeing-with-anti-semitic-tweet-and-fails-spectacularly/
As a Jew I don't see this as anti semitic
I do see this as a criticism of the LEFT. progressive portion of Jews and their (hypocritical virtue signalling, (IMHO) phony politics.
I agree to some extent that left wing Jews have embraced BLM, mass immigration, 1619 project, DEI, and criticisms of the "West" which is mostly white,
they were stupid to think that would ingratiate them to all those around the world.
I mean the ADL has been a vehicle for the above. Like Soros, like many of the Jewish politicians, those in media and in bureaucracies.
I have made this observation and made similar criticisms myself as those on the board know.
If Musk said Jews do not have right to Israel, if he said death to Jews etc
that would be a different story.
Of course the likes of Jake Tapper is insulted - he is an example of a liberal Democrat who embraces DNC Marxism.
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Agree!
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Watch a 5 minute video for a sampling of the peaceful march on Washington:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/11/thought-for-the-day-34.php
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Raskin :
it is everywhere
then blame Kevin McCarthy.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/cnn-s-jake-tapper-confronts-jamie-raskin-about-protesters-outside-dnc-hq-there-s-anti-semitism-in-the-democratic-party-these-days/ar-AA1kc485?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=a2c0646f1a2a46c7a9bff5f7881e27f9&ei=11
this is a common last stand defense by libs when they are pushed in a debate into a corner:
EVERY DOES it not just the libs.............
Beyond they change the subject
The ~ 40 Jewish Dems :
The Democrat party stands with Israel they scream to preserve the Jewish vote
I am not sure they need to even do that since many if not most or even all Jewish Dems practice the DNC religion more than Judaism or anything else.
Dershowitz while clearly a rare and different breed still vocalizes he is a Democrat.
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"Dershowitz while clearly a rare and different breed still vocalizes he is a Democrat."
I think he would even say he is a liberal Democrat. That doesn't mean willing to abandon the rule of law. Wish others had that integrity.
I believe both Victor Hanson Walter Russell Mead are Democrats as well. Democrats from a different time, maybe like JFK or Henry Scoop Jackson. That doesn't mean they are willing to jump to reckless endangerment of the American Creed just because their party did.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-bidens-staunch-support-israels-110133194.html
I don't understand - the Hollywood Jews are so supportive of Blacks browns, immigrants, and all religions
how did this happen ===> :wink:
stop supporting the DNC you stooges!
listening Rob Reiner, Streissand, Speilberg, and the rest?
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/north-carolina-progressive-dem-says-allowing-jewish-caucus-would-end-the-party-they-control-everything/ar-AA1kjwu1
"the Jews control everything" says the NC Democrat pol
between shifty lawyers we see on the news day in and day out, between the zuckerbergs and soros throwing their money around trying to push their agendas on many people
for their own agendas.
of course many non Jews do the same thing
I don't know why we get so much resentment. Even from the Dems.
That said I don't see conservative Jews doing this. Yes, we have the "great one" but he is working for freedom for our nation not against it, or us.
Only the politically hyperactive liberal ones causing resentment wrongly or right placed.
Is the problem us?
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The right to affiliate, associate, organize, (assemble), isn't that a higher right, a God given right, a constitutional right?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLzo2Hol6ic
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Why the Jewish Way of Living Matters
Since living here, I’ve come to think of Israel as the moral capital of the West.
By Leon R. Kass
Nov. 23, 2023 12:15 pm ET
Why do Jewish lives matter? Why do we suddenly care so much about Israel or Jewish survival? Is it merely from a nativist love of our own or a need to deny posthumous victories to Hitler? Is it only the Jew as eternal victim that we cherish? God forbid. “Never again” is never enough. What matters are not only Jewish lives, but the Jewish way of living.
Jewish identity, purpose and meaning are highly contested notions, not least in Israel. The nation’s recent political battles have been about nothing less than the Jewishness of the Jewish state: whether and in what ways “startup nation” should remain the people of the book.
Yet both sides of these debates appeal to Jewish principles—the Israeli left to the prophets’ demands for justice and regard for the other, the Israeli right to the law’s concern with holiness. Beneath these differences are widely shared beliefs and values, also Torah-based: A cultural disposition to gratitude for the astonishing gift of life and world. A belief in the equal dignity of all human beings, each in the image of God. The duty to honor father and mother, the foundation of family life and cultural transmission. Reverence for life and limb, body and soul. Equality before the law. Commitment to care for widows, orphans and the poor. Humane treatment of the stranger. Moral seriousness: a felt need to give an account of one’s life, to practice atonement, to seek and offer forgiveness.
There is a more fundamental feature of the Jewish way of life, a chief reason why Jews are hated. We are summoned to bear witness against idolatry, that universal temptation to fill the God-shaped hole in our hearts with things that cannot satisfy and that invariably lead astray. Idolatry was once the worship of the sun, moon and Earth and the golden calf. In modern times, it has come in the diabolical form of ideology: national socialism, communism, Maoism and radical Islam, deadly false gods to which millions of innocent lives have been sacrificed. Idolatry also includes worship of the market, of art and culture, and of human choice and fiat as the sole source of value. Against these, the Jewish people bear witness to the presence of a higher power and source of goodness.
Although the Jewish people are few in number, they are of enormous consequence for the Western world. Ideas central to our civilization first entered through the Hebrew Bible: all men are created equal; respect for life; the Ten Commandments. America’s political ideas may come from Locke and Montesquieu—modern science and technology are largely of European and North American origins—but humanly, morally and religiously speaking, the West is a biblical civilization.
In this time of moral confusion and social fragmentation, Israel by its example has something to teach us. Since I started living long stretches here in 2016, I have increasingly felt it is the moral capital of the West.
Israel is the only Western country that lives with a vital devotion to its future. Alone in the developed world, it has a birthrate above replacement, with a low level of out-of-wedlock births. In my neighborhood in Washington, people have dogs; in my neighborhood in Jerusalem, people have children. Extended families are strong, tradition alive and rich. Most Israelis, religious or secular, have Shabbat dinner with their parents. The holy tongue is the vernacular; the calendar orders sacred time; ancestral ghosts walk the land; popular music expresses spiritual longings in biblical idiom. National service is the norm. Memorial Day is marked with ceremonies in every neighborhood and with a national minute of silence, as people and cars stop in place to pay respect for the fallen soldiers to whom we owe our freedom.
As the past several weeks have shown, Israeli national solidarity runs deep. Thousands have organized to provide for those in need. Haredi men are volunteering for the army; secular soldiers are requesting tzitzit. Hamas’s barbarism revealed one nation, indivisible: an island of cultural and moral sanity in a world gone mad.
In synagogues around the world last month, Jews read the weekly Torah portion “Lech Lecha,” or “Go Forth.” It recounts God’s call and promise to Abraham and his people, summoned to carry God’s chosen way of righteousness. That meant life against the wild and bloody ways of antediluvian man and the soulless ways of the builders of Babel; against the tyrannical and technocratic ways of pharaonic Egypt; against the licentious and child-sacrificing ways of the Canaanites. We Jews survived the Babylonians, Romans, crusades, inquisition, European expulsions, pogroms, Shoah, gulag and murderous attacks of the modern Middle East.
And here we are, warts and all, still doing battle against these enduring human tendencies and evils, still aspiring to realize our covenantal promise to become a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. We fall short, but we don’t abandon the summons. We continue to stand for creation against chaos, life against death, good against evil, meaning against nihilism. We still aspire to be a light unto the nations. With God’s help, we shall overcome.
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this paragragh stirred some thought in me:
" There is a more fundamental feature of the Jewish way of life, a chief reason why Jews are hated. We are summoned to bear witness against idolatry, that universal temptation to fill the God-shaped hole in our hearts with things that cannot satisfy and that invariably lead astray. Idolatry was once the worship of the sun, moon and Earth and the golden calf. In modern times, it has come in the diabolical form of ideology: national socialism, communism, Maoism and radical Islam, deadly false gods to which millions of innocent lives have been sacrificed. Idolatry also includes worship of the market, of art and culture, and of human choice and fiat as the sole source of value. Against these, the Jewish people bear witness to the presence of a higher power and source of goodness. "
I would add blind love for the Democrat Party is, in the context of the above definition, a form of idolatry.
I would not say the same for Democracy, or Conservatism, or capitalism,
because history has proved the inherently good outcomes for people, nations, civilizations. ("warts and all")
Is Trump a false God?
Perhaps he is somewhere in between worthy of both support and opposition.
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"I would add blind love for the Democrat Party is, in the context of the above definition, a form of idolatry."
My mind organizes this a deal with the Devil to COERCE charity with the time and money of OTHERS.
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https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-british-jews-were-special-antisemitism?fbclid=IwAR0x84PxQLdo_4bKKfrfuOMEYAqMjMmlQ-WpeY7cBCAE4gi6cL670nC_tiA
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12791487/Queens-Jewish-teacher-pro-Israel-rampage.html
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https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2023/11/28/american-jews-who-worked-for-a-secular-america-made-a-fatal-error-n2631697
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great post!!!
I will share.
I never knew or realized Denis is Jewish wow -
I also did not know the founders appreciation of Jews.
But alas I still doubt Democrat wed Jews will suddenly change
they simply get more stubborn and twisted
look at Larry Lib who appears the same every time on TV dressed in black shirt and sports coat ( I am not sure if he is trying to emulate a Supreme Court Justice or a mafia hitman)
Raskin
Kruger
and the list goes on
Raskin on CNN giving show on how he loves the Constitution on same night Levin was on obvious as a counter
what a slap of our faces.
BTW I will add Prager to list of Jews whom I am proud of !
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Glenn Beck had a major riff about the role of the Book of Moses on the Dec of Ind. and the C. There is an important reference to/qote from? the Book of Moses in Congressional chamber IIRC. Can someone track this down?
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https://www.breitbart.com/2024-election/2023/11/29/schumer-jews-threatened-left-wing-antisemitism/
why we voted with the immigrants LBTQ etc, minorities etc.
how come they don't live us
psst Jews are seen as successful
it is called envy
what did you think moron
what is your response - ?
DNC Jews will not switch parties
they will not stop the DEI craze, they will not stop immigration
they will not warm up to Republicans, to Christians etc
they will not call out anti Americanism
they will not call out anti Western civilizationism
they will not stop calling everything racist or "xenophobic" or Islamaphobic
and until they do
they get what they asked for in defending the above
I am not happy about it but just saying kind of Elon Musk recently said
My usual Dem Party does NOT mean you are safe
thinks harder Chuck ! et al.
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https://nypost.com/2023/11/30/opinion/europes-clash-of-cultures-and-antisemitism-is-coming-to-america/?&utm_campaign=nyp_postopinion&utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20231201&lctg=649c637ec7c6527b1b0fe213&utm_term=NYP%20-%20Post%20Opinion
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She said this:
Margulies, who is Jewish, railed against support for Palestine, further saying Adolf Hitler “got his entire playbook from the Jim Crow South,” Margulies criticized the black community for not “embracing” Jews after “in the civil rights movement, the Jews were the ones that walked side by side with the blacks to fight for their rights.”
“The fact that the entire black community isn’t standing with us to me says either they just don’t know, or they’ve been brainwashed to hate Jews,” she added.
so she must say this or have your life ruined:
am horrified by the fact that statements I made on a recent podcast offended the Black and LGBTQIA+ communities, communities I truly love and respect.
I want to be 100% clear: Racism, homophobia, sexism, or any prejudice against anyone’s personal beliefs or identity are abhorrent to me, full stop. Throughout my career I have worked tirelessly to combat hate of all kind, end antisemitism, speak out against terrorist groups like Hamas, and forge a united front against discrimination.
I did not intend for my words to sow further division, for which I am sincerely apologetic.
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/12/03/actress-julianna-margulies-apologizes-for-saying-entire-black-community-brainwashed-to-hate-jews/
funny how so many Lib Jews thought the minorities would stand with them in tough times.
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Nation of Islam is illustrative of deep currents of anti-semitism in the black community for a long time. With Obama, Clinton, and others rubbing elbows with Farrakhan none of what we see now should have surprised.
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Below is a brilliant column by Daniel Greenfield regarding how American liberal Jews have forgotten how to fight leftist and Islamic Jew-hatred. It's a somewhat long read, but well-worth the time. His analysis of the situation is, as usual, superb.
American Jews Never Learned to Fight Leftist Jew-Hatred
And talking about ‘anti-Semitism’ is part of the problem.
December 1, 2023 by Daniel Greenfield
[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
After the Holocaust, the American Jewish community, like most liberals, reduced the mass murder of millions of Jews to a problem of intolerance and prejudice. A massive effort was undertaken to educate about what had happened rather than what was happening.
While the first Holocaust museums were being built, the persecution and killing of Jews had mostly shifted over to the Soviet Union and its allies in the Arab Muslim world. American Jews failed to grapple with this shift much as they failed to come to terms with the reality that black nationalist groups were quickly eclipsing the KKK when it came to the domestic hatred of Jews.
These are the key ingredients that led to the current open climate of Jew-hatred in America.
Instead of talking about what the hatred of Jews looked like today, American Jewish liberals insisted on dwelling on what it had looked like decades earlier in America and in Europe. Like the generals who are always refighting yesterday’s war, they were not dealing with the present.
They relied heavily on “antisemitism”: a term invented in the 19th century by a German socialist bigot, Wilhelm Marr, to emphasize the race of the Jews. But post-Holocaust hatred of Jews on the Left was more often cultural than racial. Karl Marx, the progenitor of Marxism, had been of Jewish descent from a Christian family, and had spread poisonous antisemitic venom. Lenin, who had one Jewish grandfather, oversaw the oppression of Jews while denying they were a distinct people. The Soviet expectation was that the Jews would disappear as a people, but, aside from Stalin’s final years, avoided any plans for the racial extermination of the Jews.
The Marxist and the Islamic position, unlike the Nazi racial position, did not require the physical extermination of the Jews at a genetic level, only a cultural genocide. Jews would be allowed to exist under Communism or Islam, as long as they abandoned their religion and national identity. The liberal focus on fighting racial antisemitism left it unprepared to fight such cultural hatred.
Even though the Soviet persecution of the Jews as a people had been underway for generations, American liberal Jews never developed a vocabulary for describing it. Or showed much particular interest in it until a new generation of young activists in the USSR and America finally made it a burning issue that rose to national and international attention in the 1970s.
The Communist persecution of Jews was manifested in many of the same ways as the contemporary leftist hatred of Jews. The party and the regime claimed to oppose ‘antisemitism’, even passed laws banning it, while suppressing Judaism and Zionism as ‘reactionary’ and ‘nationalistic’. The Soviet Union could point to examples of high-ranking Jewish figures who had rejected Zionism and Judaism, and represented the Communist ideal for the Jews.
As Lenin put it, “whoever, directly or indirectly, puts forward the slogan of Jewish national culture is (whatever his good intentions may be) an enemy of the proletariat… he is an accomplice of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie… on the other hand, those Jewish Marxists who mingle with the Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and other workers in international Marxist organizations, and make their contribution… towards creating the international culture of the working-class movement… uphold the best traditions of Jewry by fighting the slogan of ‘national culture.’”
Jews had to be culturally, but not racially eradicated. Those Jews who joined with non-Jewish Marxists in the rejection of Judaism and Zionism were praiseworthy Marxists. Those who did not were an “enemy of the proletariat” to be executed like a number of my great-uncles.
Like most Soviet implementations of Communist ideology, this was a ‘Potemkin village’ of lies. Jews, regardless of their religious observance or interest in Israel, had been explicitly targeted for persecution and mass murder, were specially designated as being Jews in government documents, and the government’s formal anti-Zionism and anti-Judaism was just the same old ‘antisemitism’, complete with hook-nosed cartoons, dressed up in progressive clothing.
Much the same is true of contemporary leftist Jew-hatred which is based on Marx’s stereotypes of Jews as capitalists, but draws heavily on the Soviet playbook of substituting anti-Zionism for antisemitism, and trotting out model Jewish socialists to defend the persecution of Jews.
The liberal Jewish failure to meaningfully confront the Soviet hatred of Jews left them unprepared for the leftist movements that mainstreamed the same hatred in America.
There were plenty of warnings. Decade after decade, academics pushing these positions on college campuses, journalists embedding them in magazines, and fringe politicians making these arguments grew in power and influence while the liberal establishment talked of ‘antisemitism’ purely in terms of far-right racial supremacism or small town prejudices.
The rise of black nationalist antisemitism in the seventies, which was often explicitly racialist in nature, produced flailing responses. The American Jewish liberal establishment held up faded pictures of Heschel marching with MLK, failing to grasp that this made black nationalists despise MLK rather than like Jews, and prattled about the Jewish contribution to civil rights. The liberal establishment was so committed to a model of top-down persecution that it was unable to defend Jews against antisemitism that appeared to be coming from a minority on the bottom.
When various forms of critical race theory made the formula official that black people and minorities could not be racist toward anyone with more privilege than them, a position that legitimized a general hatred of white people, Asians and Jews, there was little response. The formal understanding that Jews could now be freely hated was ignored by liberal Jews.
Some outnumbered figures launched a struggle for the soul of liberalism, but they had little and fleeting support from an establishment that was still influential enough to make a difference. The liberal Jewish establishment was more interested in being in the vanguard of civil rights than in protecting Jews from the emergence of an ideology that deprived them of their civil rights.
Only after the Hamas mass murder of over 1,000 Jews and the statements of support for it at major universities, did some donors and community leaders wake up enough to push back. It took the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and the widespread acceptance of it by their friends for them to realize how bad the situation had gotten, but not to realize why.
And that is the crucial issue.
The pro-Hamas Left insists that it is not ‘antisemitic’ and most of it probably believes that’s true because while traditional bigotry and hatred created the Islamic obsession with killing Jews and the conviction in the old Marxist Left that the Jews were not a legitimate people, the final product is cloaked in talk about liberation, decolonization and an end to privilege and oppression.
It may support the mass murder of Jews, but it doesn’t culturally ‘feel’ like ‘antisemitism’.
The Leftist hatred of Jews doesn’t fit the liberal model in which there is a continuity of oppression. A downtrodden minority faces prejudice, which escalates into political repression and then violence. First there are the jokes, then laws and then bullets. Leftists cheering for Hamas would argue that since they don’t tell ‘antisemitic’ jokes, they can’t be considered antisemitic even while they’re calling for the mass murder of Jews.
This is why the traditional model of talking about antisemitism has failed so badly.
The liberal insistence on teaching tolerance by addressing the roots of bigotry rather than its outcome has been a disastrous failure because where far-right bigotry is a continuity, left-wing bigotry is a discontinuity of ideological abstractions leading indirectly to mass murder. The ideological detachment from reality can be measured in the fact that inmates in Nazi camps did not shout, “Heil Hitler” before dying, but those in Soviet gulags were known to shout, “long live Stalin” before being executed. The Nazis knew what they were doing, Communists often did not. They existed and still exist in an ideological haze of slogans rather than people.
‘Antisemitism’ is an ideological abstraction that leftists reject because it appears to refer to a certain type of person and behavior that their ideological purity tells them that they couldn’t be. They’re not the sorts of people who talk about ‘jewing down’ or believe in the inferiority of races and therefore, even while they’re smashing Jewish store windows and attacking a Holocaust museum, they can’t be ‘antisemites’. They know ‘antisemites’ are ‘right wing’ and when they’re assaulting Jews in the street, they, like the Soviet Communists, are fighting against ‘Zionism’.
The emphasis on antisemitism, on the roots of bigotry rather than their outcomes, makes such moral evasiveness easy for leftists. Focus on the mass murder of Jews, the broken glass and a mob outside the doors of a Holocaust museum, and then you’re talking about hateful outcomes.
Those are much harder to evade than abstractions.
The analysis of ‘antisemitism’ rather than the concrete reality of Jew-hatred has played into the hands of a leftist culture of hate that uses analysis to disguise the reality of its actions.
Confronting the realities of the assaults on Jews will require taking stock of a cultural war, rather than a racial one, and deal with outcomes instead of motives. Talking about ‘antisemitism’ becomes misleading when confronting a form of antisemitism that hides its ethnic hatred behind cultural and political hostility. And that will require discussing cultural, religious and political differences, topics which liberal Jews are uncomfortable with.
The modern liberal consensus, like that of the Soviet Union, is racially diverse but ideologically unified. The illusion of multiculturalism in the Soviet Union or a college town in America is limited to only those cultural differences that don’t clash with the dominant leftist belief system. This is a comfortable echo chamber for those who agree and a repressive cage for those who do not.
Liberal Jews bought into this system in a big way because they were terrified of feeling different. They shed their religious traditions for non-threatening culturally Jewish versions of liberal Protestantism and stayed silent about the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. The rebirth of Israel challenged their theology and their politics, but mostly their anonymity.
While American Jewish anti-zionists lashed out at Israel in resentment for creating tension between their politics and their identity, Israel was just the canary in the coal mine. Black nationalists weren’t attacking Jewish teachers because of Israel. And Marxists weren’t targeting Jews because of the Jewish State. To a liberal establishment that was turning leftist, the existence of a traditional Jewish community was unsustainable in either Israel or America.
Oct 7, like the protests for Soviet Jewry and the defenses of Israel, forced American Jews to break with their political community in support of their religious and ethnic community. It’s a painful and alienating experience, but like any escape from a toxic relationship, also liberating.
Among the unexamined truisms that need to be rethought is ‘antisemitism’.
Antisemitism refers to race and when it comes to the hatred of Jews, culture trumps race. Aside from the Nazis and a few ‘Jewish Question’ obsessed racialists, hardly anyone who hates Jews would propose using genetic screening to track down people of Jewish descent who don’t even know that they are Jewish to exterminate them. Most cultural ‘antisemitism’ has a racial component, but it’s triggered by the idea of the Jews as a community and a people.
The term ‘antisemitism’ conflates someone who doesn’t like Jews, but would never engage in violence or support violence, with those who engage in and support violence against Jews. Furthermore some of those who support the mass murder of Jews don’t believe that they’re prejudiced against Jews, but believe that killing Jewish children is the right thing to do.
Talking about ‘antisemitism’ or even ‘hatred’ is wholly inadequate in such situations.
The idea of a continuity of bigotry often breaks down in the madness of contemporary political discourse. The same term used to describe someone who resents Jews moving into his town should not be used to also describe someone massacring Jews. Calling it all ‘antisemitism’ minimizes it and puts the local jerk on the same level as Hitler or Hamas. And that’s a mistake.
The liberal Jewish establishment has spent too much time fighting ‘prejudice’ and not enough time dealing with ‘eliminationist’ sentiments. The existential threat is not prejudice: it’s genocide.
Fighting the leftist and Islamic hatred of Jews will require developing a new terminology and a new approach than the same old tired ‘fight against antisemitism’ establishment rhetoric. Liberal Jews will have to confront their own fears and rethink their assumptions to take on the threat.
During the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Jews had to confront Communists and their sympathizers who were now suddenly insistent on a friendship with the Nazis. That genocidal alliance crystalized a rejection of Communism by American Jews as “Jewish workers assaulted Communists who tried to defend their alliance with the Nazis, calling them, ‘Communazis.’”
The pact between Islam and the Left manifested once again in the response to the Oct 7 atrocities should be met the same way. The Left should be rejected the same way the Communists were. The ‘Communazis’ have been replaced by ‘Commuhamasniks’, but that is the only thing that has changed. American Jews must relearn how to fight this enemy.
After three generations of failing to confront the leftist hatred of Jews, it’s time to fight.
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I didn't know that; though his mother's father converted to Christianity and Lenin knew none of this:
In mid-1863, Ilya married Maria,[9] the well-educated daughter of a wealthy Swedish Lutheran mother, and a Russian Jewish father who had converted to Christianity and worked as a physician.[10] According to historian Petrovsky-Shtern, it is likely that Lenin was unaware of his mother's half-Jewish ancestry, which was only discovered by Anna after his death.[11]
doubt he would have been any different to Jews had he did know as he was 100 % political.
"Stalin's Jew":
who somehow was one of the lucky few to survive Stalin's paranoia and lived until 1991:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lazar-Moiseyevich-Kaganovich
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The New Antisemitism Is the Oldest Kind
This isn’t the midcentury ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ variety. It’s the return of pure hatred of the Jews.
By Lance Morrow
Dec. 3, 2023 12:59 pm ET
I remember a dinner party on Martha’s Vineyard in the 1970s when I and my first wife, who was Jewish, shared lobster with a half-dozen nicely tanned Protestants in sherbet-colored golfing trousers. They chattered about what pests “those people” were, who kept “pushing” to join the local beach club, even though they were “not wanted.”
“Gee,” said a middle-aged Princeton man—pronouncing the word “jay”—“why don’t they stick to their own clubs?”
My then-wife and I left the party early, and in the car she burst into tears.
How innocent the moment seems. That was the postwar “Gentleman’s Agreement” version of American antisemitism—gentiles relaxing up-island, on their fourth glass of Chablis. The word “Jew” wasn’t mentioned. In the Martha’s Vineyard iteration—post-Auschwitz—American antisemitism often had a discreetly covert quality. It emerged from a kind of sly politesse because, after all, everyone at some time or other had seen the films from the Nazi camps—the ones that Gen. Eisenhower had ordered his troops to watch. In Elia Kazan’s 1947 movie based on the Laura Hobson novel “Gentleman’s Agreement,” desk clerks fidget and look away when Gregory Peck, as a journalist pretending to be Jewish, pushes them about renting a room.
America’s antisemites in those days were more fools than monsters. With exceptions—Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, et al.—their antisemitism seemed more snobbery than hate crime. It wasn’t political, programmatic or fanatical. One evening in 1918, Eleanor Roosevelt (of all people) came home from a Washington dinner party for the financier Bernard Baruch and wrote to her mother-in-law that “the Jew party was appalling.”
The antisemitism that has poured forth onto the country’s streets and campuses in the autumn of 2023 is a different thing—a reversion to a politics of aggressive, unapologetic hate. The ominous historical regression at work in the latest Jew-hatred takes up the themes of the mid-1930s, the spirit of Hitler’s brown shirts and Kristallnacht. Of course, the new Jew-haters—especially young people on campuses—think of themselves as perfectly virtuous. What is a thousand times worse, they think of their Jew-hatred as righteous. It’s morally fashionable among them.
To frame this in American terms, you might recall another Gregory Peck movie, “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962). Remember the scene in which, in the middle of the night, a mob of whites comes into town with intent to lynch Tom Robinson, a black man who has been falsely accused of raping a white girl. Peck’s Atticus Finch sits in front of the local jail, reading a book. The moment is tense. Just then, the children, Jem, Scout and Dill, step forward and, in the most innocent way, greet the leader of the lynch mob. Scout says, “Hey, Mr. Cunningham,” and she mentions Cunningham’s son, whom she knows from school. His brutal face grows suddenly embarrassed. The children have shamed him out of his violence. The mob backs off and dissolves into the Alabama night.
The most disgraceful and dangerous change that has occurred in the character of America’s “elites” during my lifetime is this: In 2023, at some of the most expensive universities in the country (who bothers to call them “the best” anymore?), Jem and Scout are leading the lynch mobs.
Sympathy for innocent Palestinian civilians who have been killed under the Israeli bombardment of Gaza? By all means. Who doesn’t feel that? The mirror neurons of any decent person must respond at the sight of child-sized body bags in the ruins of a Palestinian hospital; the stunned, unbearable grief on the faces of those still alive. The conscience recoils and cries, “Stop!”
But wait. Draw back. Who-whom, as Lenin said: How you assign blame for violence depends on who has done what to whom. The Americans didn’t bomb Yokohama on Dec. 7, 1941; the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. And the Japanese were responsible for what followed.
Why did Hamas attack on Oct. 7? Israeli oppression? Hamas has ruled Gaza since 2007, two years after the Israelis withdrew. Under decent, intelligent leadership—with a touch of vision, with investment by oil-rich Arab states—Gaza might now be a Mediterranean Singapore. Instead, Hamas has maintained Gaza as an anguished slum, an ongoing dramatization of the Palestinian victimhood that is the source of Hamas’s power and raison d’être.
Although it seems grotesque to say so, the casualties in Gaza have been relatively light by neighborhood standards. More than 300,000 of Saddam Hussein’s own people ended up dead or missing during his 24-year rule. In Syria under the regime of the Assads, father and son, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed and nearly 13 million people—more than half the country’s prewar population—have been turned out into the world as refugees.
Students at Harvard and Columbia don’t protest the region’s routine inhumanities. They do so only when there are Jews around to blame and to hate. It’s the Israelis’ Jewishness that brings the demonstrators out. This isn’t “a new antisemitism.” Antisemitism is never new. It’s an ancient beast that awakens from time to time and exhales such filth as “Gas the Jews” and “Hitler was right.”
Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of “The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism.”
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I recall growing up hearing my parents talk of country clubs that were not for Jews and one that was where all the Jews went.
" Instead, Hamas has maintained Gaza as an anguished slum, an ongoing dramatization of the Palestinian victimhood that is the source of Hamas’s power and raison d’être. "
that's why they make good Democrats.
"One evening in 1918, Eleanor Roosevelt (of all people) came home from a Washington dinner party for the financier Bernard Baruch and wrote to her mother-in-law that “the Jew party was appalling.”
first Eleanor wins the prize for by far the ugliest first lady in history .
second interesting information on Bernard Baruch who was a real patriot who advised Will Rogers to get out of the stock market just in time
was that his father was a Confederate who joined the KKK:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Baruch
Good fodder for Prof Gates geneology show.
I no zero about my ancestor in Europe . A tad about my grandparents but honestly very little.
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A friend writes in response to the Lance Morrow piece:
=================================
This is an excellent piece, amplifying ideas I have been telling to anyone who would listen for decades.
It never made any sense to me to prey on my emotions over the suicides at Masada or the various pogroms or the Holocaust.
The device of extolling Judaism because of that pervasive hatred, using that as a core reason even to be Jewish or practice the religion was precisely the device driving me away from that.
Further, It pissed me off to no end to never have had any response to the question of what to do about the current, modern day expressions of the hatred.
No one thought to teach us about pre-attack cues, how to fight, how to use a knife or accurately fire a pistol, or even how to shut down the vocal bigot.
They filled us with all of the existential potency of being solitary, unique, reviled( yet special) and they gave us precisely zero tools to counter any of that in real time.
What utter blindness, stupidity and a complete failure to manifest the insight required for 20th century manifestations of an ancient problem.
How could they though, mired as they were in the press of all of our history ?
In that sense, I forgive them, but what a squandered opportunity, one with huge ramifications.
Perhaps the events of 10/7 and what’s come since will pierce that carapace. We’ll see.
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I recall a rabbi telling us how some Jews define themselves as Jews by the holocaust
I thought what a strange thought.
I am not sure who your friend refers to when he says "they"
If he means Jewish leftist leaders (in the US at least), I think they thought by voting and saying they are for the poor, the downtrodden, minorities, calling for love peace no cultural bias, or religious bias
etc that would be their protection enough. No need for anything else.
If that is who he means by they I agree - we were let down big time
forget about crying over the holocaust Masada pogroms etc.
what about now.
we are seeing some divestment, public outcry, commercials and some fighting back in commercials and media
We see the Israelis actually risking their lives their blood their loved ones etc in fighting back
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From Which River to Which Sea?
College students don’t know, yet they agree with the slogan.
By Ron E. Hassner
Dec. 5, 2023 2:16 pm ET
When college students who sympathize with Palestinians chant “From the river to the sea,” do they know what they’re talking about? I hired a survey firm to poll 250 students from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S. Most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so (32.8%) and others to a lesser extent (53.2%).
But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel). Asked in what decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed. There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.
Would learning basic political facts about the conflict moderate students’ opinions? A Latino engineering student from a southern university reported “definitely” supporting “from the river to the sea” because “Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side.” Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to “probably not.” Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view.
An art student from a liberal arts college in New England “probably” supported the slogan because “Palestinians and Israelis should live together in one state.” But when informed of recent polls in which most Palestinians and Israelis rejected the one-state solution, this student lost his enthusiasm. So did 41% of students in that group.
A third group of students claimed the chant called for a Palestine to replace Israel. Sixty percent of those students reduced their support for the slogan when they learned it would entail the subjugation, expulsion or annihilation of seven million Jewish and two million Arab Israelis. Yet another 14% of students reconsidered their stance when they read that many American Jews considered the chant to be threatening, even racist. (This argument had a weaker effect on students who self-identified as progressive, despite their alleged sensitivity to offensive speech.)
In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography. Those who hope to encourage extremism depend on the political ignorance of their audiences. It is time for good teachers to join the fray and combat bias with education.
Mr. Hassner is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley
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When college students who sympathize with Palestinians chant “From the river to the sea,” do they know what they’re talking about? I hired a survey firm to poll 250 students from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S. Most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so (32.8%) and others to a lesser extent (53.2%).
But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel). Asked in what decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed. There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.
Would learning basic political facts about the conflict moderate students’ opinions? A Latino engineering student from a southern university reported “definitely” supporting “from the river to the sea” because “Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side.” Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to “probably not.” Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view.
An art student from a liberal arts college in New England “probably” supported the slogan because “Palestinians and Israelis should live together in one state.” But when informed of recent polls in which most Palestinians and Israelis rejected the one-state solution, this student lost his enthusiasm. So did 41% of students in that group.
A third group of students claimed the chant called for a Palestine to replace Israel. Sixty percent of those students reduced their support for the slogan when they learned it would entail the subjugation, expulsion or annihilation of seven million Jewish and two million Arab Israelis. Yet another 14% of students reconsidered their stance when they read that many American Jews considered the chant to be threatening, even racist. (This argument had a weaker effect on students who self-identified as progressive, despite their alleged sensitivity to offensive speech.)
In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography. Those who hope to encourage extremism depend on the political ignorance of their audiences. It is time for good teachers to join the fray and combat bias with education.
Mr. Hassner is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley.
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the same people know only one thing about Thomas Jefferson - he owned slaves
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/cowardly-city-college-which-refuses-to-denounce-antisemitism-should-take-my-dad-s-name-off-its-moynihan-center/ar-AA1llYvf?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=0156b7e0cd7a403bb9fadd26e3a8f76b&ei=9
He was one of the very, very few Democrats I actually respected.
I think he was a genius though of course I did not agree with many of his political beliefs.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/pro-palestinian-commentator-urges-allies-to-stop-with-from-the-river-to-the-sea-chant-incredibly-hurtful/ar-AA1loIfI?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=90eb14d1729a4fe3896306a27b0cc422&ei=17
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To say our elites have a blindspot where anti-Semitism is concerned is a grotesque understatement. Having spent years obsessing over fantasy forms of racism and fascism, having spent years soberly telling us that Boris Johnson was Eton’s answer to Hitler, the great and good look upon Jew-hating marches, attacks and even terror plots… and it barely registers.
Whether these people are ignoring anti-Semitism, making excuses for it, or participating in it, the story remains the same. Our supposedly ‘anti-racist’ betters, people who during the Black Lives Matter uprising just two years ago were taking knees and ‘doing the work’ and tweeting #SilenceIsViolence from their £4million townhouses, are so marinated in a divisive identity politics and a demented ‘anti-imperialism’ that they see Jews as ‘white’ oppressors, even when they’re being beaten up, and Israel as the aggressor, even when it is under attack.
The silence of the ‘anti-racists’ over the barbaric rise of anti-Semitism reminds us that these people were never anti-racists at all.
– Tom Slater
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonatan_Netanyahu
was the only Israeli soldier killed during Entebbe raid
Benjamin has another younger brother
All 3 served in elite IDF forces.
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Yes, they are so quick to call conservatives racist, homophobe, islamophobe, anti Semitic when we aren't. How is it they can be so sloppy with their own anti-semitism?
I see it as a matter of freedom of religion. I see Israel as a strategic partner, not an ethnic group. I see my Jewish friends as individuals, not as a group. I see it as a matter of right and wrong, not as political strategery.
If conservatives turned against Jews or Israel we would lose like two or three votes.
Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020 by 44,000 votes and presumably won the Jewish vote by millions. Isn't there a political risk in screwing with that?
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" Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020 by 44,000 votes and presumably won the Jewish vote by millions."
:cry:
not optimistic that would change much
it is nearly impossible to change a Jewish Libs devoutness to the DNC.
:cry:
I am heartbroken at that fact.
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" Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020 by 44,000 votes and presumably won the Jewish vote by millions."
:cry:
not optimistic that would change much
it is nearly impossible to change a Jewish Libs devoutness to the DNC.
:cry:
I am heartbroken at that fact.
Voters without a party, some people and some groups are becoming disaffected with the Democratic party. That doesn't make their revulsion of Trump and Republicans go away. One friend in particular is very interested in the no labels movement. But centrists are not all aligned with each other either. A Biden voter is possibly lost but not to be a Trump voter. They search for another way but political parties are hard to form and maintain. Next comes the calculation of a wasted vote and it can become a binary choice once again.
It's going to be a very strange political year.
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At the American Dream Mall (never been there):
https://pjmedia.com/victoria-taft/2024/01/04/jewish-family-attacked-by-hamas-backers-at-american-dream-mall-n4925213
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This iron should indeed be struck while hot:
January 4, 2024
Beating the Anti-Semites
By J.R. Dunn
A few years ago, I was nearly shot by a local anti-Semite. I was working at my computer when there was a sharp roar and I looked up to see that a bullet hole had magically appeared in my wall a couple feet above my head. My neighbor, toying with an AR while drunk, popped a cap by accident -- or at least that was his story. This particular individual was a rabid anti-Semite who belonged to a Christian Identity cult group, was an avid reader of the Protocols and similar trash, and had a habit of setting up a desk in front of his house to harangue passersby about the grand Jewish conspiracy.
A few years earlier, I had a female acquaintance who fancied herself a writer. She was a non-citizen, an immigrant of German background. When she learned that I was working on a book about the Holocaust, she went into overdrive in an effort to get me to drop it. As events wore on, certain remarks and references fell into place, making it apparent that Daddy had been an active SS officer, that he had been assigned to one of the camps, and that, in any case, the Jews got what was coming to them. (“They were taking over the banks! Something had to be done!”) She’d hit the immovable object, and spent the next year or so trying her damndest to sabotage the book’s publication and otherwise interfere with my writing career (The heavy irony here is that many of the people she was contacting were themselves Jewish).
You can gather from this that my esteem for these types is less than zero. So you can imagine my thoughts concerning the fact that anti-Semitism is now being mainstreamed by the universities, the Democrats, and the Left in general.
The U.S. will never become a new Reich. In our 250-year history, Jews have been killed by mobs exactly twice – Leo Frank, lynched by a mob in Atlanta in 1915 for a crime committed by somebody else (a Black man who confessed on his deathbed), and Yankel Rosenbaum, murdered by a Black mob egged on by Al Sharpton and David Dinkins in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in 1991. Anti-Semitism is not an American disease (the way anti-Catholicism is). It has required the import of European leftism to bring the ancient evil of Jew-hatred into the mainstream.
Which does not mean that action should not be taken. These people don’t just disappear even after their efforts have been stymied. The shooter was arrested, but pled out to a lesser charge and received probation. He fled the neighborhood shortly afterward. The wannabe writer applied for and got American citizenship (after years of disparaging the U.S. in favor of Deutschland, Canada, and even Yugoslavia). While they’ll never take control of the country (pesthole states such as California or Michigan may be another matter), they can cause plenty of social damage and human misery, particularly since neither the authorities nor the institutions (e.g., Harvard and MIT) show any inclination to control them.
We cannot simply leave it to the Jewish community. Jews survived in the Old World largely by taking their beatings and walking away. They were so outnumbered, and their oppressors so barbaric (the Cossacks, the Cathars, the Prussians, etc.) that they were left with little choice. As a result, Jewish culture has settled for an ingrained quietism, a fatalism that has not yet been left behind even after a century and more of American life.
But the U.S. is a different place, and these are different times. It’s often said that the Jews are canaries in the coal mine, representing the first warning sign of encroaching tyranny. Anti-Semites are threats to us all, whether they ‘re from Harvard, the NAACP, or the East Pancake, Arkansas, Aryan Liberation Front.
The first step is that Jews must abandon the Left. As I’ve mentioned previously, Jews became involved with the Left largely due to historical accident. Jewish emancipation in Western Europe during the 19th century coincided with the rise of the Left. They were natural allies, European Jews looking for support from all quarters while the leftists as political outcasts were eager to recruit anyone. Supporting Jewish hopes was a small price to pay, particularly since they could be cast aside as soon as leftists gained power, which is largely what occurred. Leftists have maintained the loyalty of the Jews by hiding their true feelings.
Anti-Semitism within the American Left is largely the product of intersectionality, the concept that all aspects of leftist activism – Blacks, Latins, gays, Muslims, and whatever -- are interwoven and must be mutually supportive. All leftists must accept and support all left-wing constituencies no matter what contradictions might exist. Civil rights activists must support abortion, union members must support gun control, and gay rights activists must support the Palestinians (despite the fact that they’d one and all be given a brief flying lesson if they were to be caught out in much of the Muslim world). This is how the Left asserts itself and gains power. It’s a Third Millennial version of the Popular Front politics of the mid-20th century, in which liberals, communists, social democrats and what have you were all called to do their part in fighting the bourgeois (which, in practice, meant putting the commies in power).
It follows from this that any leftist who buys into intersectionality – which is all of them – is objectively (as any good Trotskyite would put it) an anti-Semite. You can’t duck this or contradict it. If you support the American Left, then you support Hamas, which supports annihilating Jews “from the river to the sea.” There are consequences for holding such ideas, and those consequences will be forthcoming.
The flip side of this is that no American Jew who supports his community, who values his heritage, can honestly call himself a leftist. This despite the fact that most American Jews (the ultra-orthodox excepted) were raised in liberal-left traditions. It’s a difficult thing to overturn the convictions of a lifetime, but it has to be done. As it stands, American Jews are in the ghastly position of collaborating with those out to destroy them
Conservatives need make it easier. While it’s clear that the American center right has always been open to anyone no matter what their ethnic or religious background – as we saw, for a while anyway, with the neocons -- little effort has been made at outreach (likely because conservatism up until the mid-20th century was a WASP phenomenon, and WASPs just didn’t do outreach, whether to Blacks, Jews, Italians, or – God forbid – the Irish). This is over. The remnants of the WASP ascendancy have largely declared war on MAGA populism, so we won’t be losing much by brushing aside what remains. That includes eliminating the last vestiges of anti-Semitism (which do exist, as anyone who has ever confronted a Zero Hedge comment thread is well aware). We can start by hard-pedaling the simple truth that anti-Semitism is now leftist.
We need to inform the Jewish community as to what we can offer them -- our protection, above all, assurances that we will stand by them, as Americans, against any enemies that threaten them, whether domestic or emerging from some third-world hellhole. We must also make the effort to understand Jewish concerns and considerations. The Jews have one of the longest and deepest moral traditions in the human record, much of it in writing in the form of the Talmud. It wouldn’t hurt anybody to become more familiar with it.
In this, as in much else, the Left has abandoned the moral high ground. Last week they opened up new horizons in hypocrisy and contradiction by accusing Donald Trump of familiarity with Mein Kampf after weeks of failing to let out a peep against the droves of campus punks calling for genocide against the Jews. (Not to mention even younger ones in grammar schools.) They are vulnerable here. I’ll only add that by allying with the Jewish community, populist conservatism will dominate American politics for the rest of the century.
It’s time for American Jews to walk away, and for populist conservatives to pick up the sword of St. Michael.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/beating_the_antisemites.html?fbclid=IwAR1nG-3LpNjGKafiXNxKFuagEF3InGI5Xq4UeLygTZN7FV-QiimyIU34yj8
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44V68L4EcWI
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Give Yahya Sinwar the Eichmann Treatment
A public trial of Hamas’s leader would educate the world about its atrocities.
By Warren Kozak
Jan. 11, 2024 6:39 pm ET
Two top Palestinian commanders—Hezbollah’s Wissam Hassan Al-Tawil and Hamas’s Saleh al-Arouri—were both killed over the past two weeks in suspected Israeli airstrikes.
Hamas’s figurehead and the suspected mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack, Yahya Sinwar, is still at large, but it’s fair to assume he is high on Israel’s list of targets. After the horrific massacres that have galvanized and united the Jewish world, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called Mr. Sinwar a “dead man walking.”
Once found, many expect Israel to dispatch Mr. Sinwar with haste. But what if he were captured alive, brought back to Jerusalem, and put on trial like Adolf Eichmann more than 60 years ago?
Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi SS officer, was the primary organizer of the mass murder of millions of Jews, a task he appeared to relish. At the end of the war he was captured by U.S. forces, but he escaped and changed his identity. In 1950, with the help of Catholic Bishop Alois Hudal, he escaped to Argentina.
A decade later, Mossad agents confirmed that Eichmann was leading a quiet life near Buenos Aires, working as a factory foreman and taking public transportation to and from work every day. It would have been much easier for Israeli agents to kill this monster quietly on a dark street and be on their way. It certainly would have been justified.
But Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion understood that only 15 years after the gas chambers shut down, the world and Israel itself needed to hear exactly what had happened to the Jews of Europe from 1933 to 1945.
Ben-Gurion saw that young Israelis, who were raised to be fiercely proud of their Jewish identity and willing to defend it, had begun to think of Holocaust victims as weak and didn’t understand the degrading system the Nazis used to exterminate millions of Jews. Ben-Gurion even delayed Eichmann’s trial to wait for television to come into operation in Israel so the entire country would be able to watch.
Mossad captured Eichmann alive in 1960 and brought him back to Israel on an El Al plane—no easy feat. Israel was condemned by much of the world for a governmental kidnapping of a foreigner, notwithstanding his horrific past.
The prime minister’s gamble paid off nevertheless. The 1961 trial drew hundreds of reporters and the world watched as witness after witness described in excruciating detail what it was like to arrive in packed boxcars at Auschwitz, Treblinka or Buchenwald with their families and children. Witnesses told heartbreaking stories of standing in long lines waiting to be separated from their loved ones for the last time. Able-bodied men were sent to the right to work as slave laborers; the elderly, young and women were sent to the left, directly to the gas chambers.
As they listened, all eyes were drawn to Eichmann, a nondescript man sitting in a glass booth, squirming at times, his mouth twitching, as he was forced to hear these accounts.
A similar trial with Mr. Sinwar in the glass booth would give his victims of Oct. 7 an opportunity to confront this man and tell the world stories of the horrors he oversaw. It would also demonstrate Israel’s adherence to international law. One criticism of Israel in the Eichmann trial was that the defendant hadn’t technically committed any crime in Israel itself. This certainly isn’t the case with Mr. Sinwar, who was already tried in an Israeli court and convicted in 1989 for the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians. He received four life sentences but was released in 2011 with more than a thousand other prisoners in exchange for one kidnapped Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit.
Protesters around the world and especially on college campuses have supported and even glorified the Oct. 7 attacks. They should also be forced to hear what happened that day from the survivors, especially the women who were raped by Hamas terrorists. The world should hear what happened to the old people and the babies. The world should be able to judge the small man in the glass booth who perpetrated these disgusting crimes. Then the world might finally understand what really happened.
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https://newrepublic.com/article/89292/philosemitism-history-sutcliffe-karp?fbclid=IwAR1O4w9bXvMv1BG_1Q4JBCAkGQHSHJeHsBbV1fi24EUYzb3R6V4220sszDU
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/opinion/israel-hamas-war-genocide.html?unlocked_article_code=1.OU0.RIqh.2NNmda5VUlGS&smid=em-share
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From Wash Post's DeNeen Brown:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/why-namibia-invoked-a-century-old-german-genocide-in-international-court/ar-BB1gZs65?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=ef0a42ec34424d89a1d6cf2cd1972386&ei=42
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… is difficult to deny:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/01/house-committee-demands-u-penn-antisemitism-records-decries-hypocritical-mistreatment-of-prof-amy-wax/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=house-committee-demands-u-penn-antisemitism-records-decries-hypocritical-mistreatment-of-prof-amy-wax
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/texas-border-convoy-descends-into-antisemitism/ar-BB1hFieS?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=4a6b4bf767c94b97873ba28d7fdfca9b&ei=17
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/texas-border-convoy-descends-into-antisemitism/ar-BB1hFieS?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=4a6b4bf767c94b97873ba28d7fdfca9b&ei=17
If he would substitute the word liberal or leftist for Jewish, it might make a better point. I dont know who they are, soros?, but what does Jewish have to do with it, if true.
You could say they were short or tall too, but what does thay have to do with it. What matters is they are Leftists funding the invasion, if true. My two cents.
Mentioned previously, he lost me in his ad hominem takedown of Gov Abbott. We could all do more but dont conflate friend with enemy, IMHO.
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As a lone Cassandra with a remarkable record of ignored-until-too-late prescience, I can understand why MY can go over the top sometimes. Also, it is fair to remind ourselves that the group which he/the convoy guy criticizes self-identifies as Jewish.
That said, this is a serious error which is not acceptable- as Doug quite rightly points out.
All this is quite frustrating for me as a Jew.
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Posted by MY today:
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/5219420/https-open-substack-com-pub-michaelyon-p-texas-update
Actually this is even a better rejoinder than mine.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/texas-border-convoy-descends-into-antisemitism/ar-BB1hFieS?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=4a6b4bf767c94b97873ba28d7fdfca9b&ei=17
If he would substitute the word liberal or leftist for Jewish, it might make a better point. I dont know who they are, soros?, but what does Jewish have to do with it, if true.
You could say they were short or tall too, but what does thay have to do with it. What matters is they are Leftists funding the invasion, if true. My two cents.
Mentioned previously, he lost me in his ad hominem takedown of Gov Abbott. We could all do more but dont conflate friend with enemy, IMHO.
I used to follow him closely because, as Marc notes, he has caught on trends long before others, and isn’t shy about saying so. However his aggressive, dire, and un-nuanced opining too closely mirrors “Progressive” tactics & pronouncements. Aren’t we not only supposed to be better than that, but this equal and opposite stuff starts feeling like a marketing effort: “I’m the antithesis of these awful people so please click here to support my work.”
As for his dire predictions … he’s pretty darn dire about everything he writes about. As much of what he speaks to is ugly to begin with, it’s not much of a surprise when in becomes uglier. And hey, if it doesn’t get uglier … it falls by the wayside and isn’t touted as prescience. A lot of it seems like mix of cocktail party card tricks/cold mind reading sorts of techniques applied to writing.
Throw in some off the cuff stuff he writes when something is breaking or he feels the need to get something off his chest that comes off shrill, poorly written, poorly argued, and seems like he’s channeling Hunter Thompson on a bender … after a stroke affecting his speech center, and I started giving him a pass. His willingness to embrace stereotypes and riff of them shamelessly without clarifying his position or apologizing for prejudices that emerge when writing in haste and I stopped following him regularly.
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Columbia won’t allow a student anti-semitism club to be formed. I’ve been on all sides of this issue in my roles over the years, including the faculty sponsor* of a club. There are student clubs for EVERYTHING, some issue oriented, some interest oriented, some farcical, some social, and so on. I never heard of one getting turned down, though I suppose if one was blatantly racist or something they’d have some ‘splaining to do.
Forming a club to battle anti-semitism ought to be a slam dunk. At Columbia Law, alas, it is not:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/02/columbia-law-school-rejects-club-formed-to-combat-antisemitism/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=columbia-law-school-rejects-club-formed-to-combat-antisemitism
*Some of my student computer lab employees wanted to form a social club and basically obtain student club funds to do so. They were computer geek types and their club was intentionally farcical, calling themselves the [School Name] Pagans.
As some might surmise, my politics aren’t in line with many I work with. Indeed, there was a nasty flyer circulating around campus quite some time ago that identified me as a “ultra-right wing martial arts expert.” As such I used to enjoy watching the cognitive dissonance cross people’s face when I’d identify myself as the faculty advisor to the Pagan’s club….
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:-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o
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https://www.newsbreak.com/news/3335040228838-candace-owens-accuses-political-jews-of-fueling-anti-semitism-vile-dishonest-manipulative-people?_f=app_share&s=i1&pd=0DqmT5zR&lang=en_US&send_time=1708092123&trans_data=%7B%22platform%22%3A0%2C%22cv%22%3A%2224.5.2.2%22%2C%22languages%22%3A%22en%22%7D
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https://worldisraelnews.com/europe-is-allowing-hamas-members-to-operate-with-impunity/?fbclid=IwAR0yhyXk_8WwQr1vjCh0BUXGsMsz5QnhW3gCR07PTqqFZxeWvp7i2b6Nz44
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_of_Jews?fbclid=IwAR2iVFZNYX1HfZUUmNeymubcymbdcIi6Svi8ICDq4GoIDQC1-ndT3fZpa3Y#:~:text=%22Our%20recent%20study%20of%20high,be%20genetically%20indistinguishable%20while%20slightly
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https://www.algemeiner.com/2024/02/19/university-of-california-student-government-passes-invective-bds-legislation/?fbclid=IwAR2bxJE3UK9Elf8pIvqk7bseLPIXBznxLztFlu38L-jgsKBNYNJ4kTSfKYg
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Harvard’s anti-semitism task force chair resigns due to administration’s unwillingness to commit to real change:
https://nypost.com/2024/02/26/us-news/harvard-antisemitism-task-force-co-chair-resigns/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons&fbclid=IwAR3gxKOoUyyAPcxsqOmlfAINWUT_LbWRbGEjnTSkpch6bRW6ox2rUSO0soE
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Haven't read this yet. Very long Sent to me by a left of center Jewish friend:
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WHY THE MOST EDUCATED PEOPLE IN AMERICA FALL FOR ANTI-SEMITIC LIES
At Harvard and elsewhere, an old falsehood is capturing new minds.
By Dara Horn
FEBRUARY 15, 2024
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By now, december’s congressional hearing about anti-Semitism at universities, during which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT all claimed that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their university’s policies only “depending on the context,” is already a well-worn meme. Surely there is nothing left to say about this higher-education train wreck, after the fallout brought down two of those university presidents and spawned a thousand op-eds—except that all of the punditry about diversity and free speech and criticism of Israel has extravagantly missed the point.
The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn’t want free speech, or that they didn’t want to hear criticism of Israel. Instead, they didn’t want people vandalizing Jewish student organizations’ buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings’ windows. They didn’t want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors. They didn’t want their college instructors spouting anti-Semitic lies and humiliating them in class. They didn’t want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures, or their dorm windows plastered with fuck jews. They didn’t want people punching them in the face, or beating them with a stick, or threatening them with death for being Jewish. At world-class American colleges and universities, all of this happened and more.
I was not merely an observer of this spectacle. I’d been serving on now–former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s anti-Semitism advisory committee, convened after the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel and amid student responses to it. I was asked to participate because I am a Harvard alumna who wrote a book about anti-Semitism called People Love Dead Jews. As soon as my participation became public, I was inundated with messages from Jewish students seeking help. They approached me with their stories after having already tried many other avenues—bewildered not only by what they’d experienced, but also by how many people dismissed or denied those experiences.
In Congress, all three university presidents offered some version of the platitudes that “Hatred comes from ignorance” and “Education is the answer.” But if hatred comes from ignorance, why were America’s best universities full of this very specific ignorance? And why were so many people trying to justify it, explain it away, or even deny it? Our era’s 10-second news cycle is no match for these questions, because the answers are deep and ancient, buried beneath the oldest of assumptions about what we think we know.
Read: What Claudine Gay got right and the International Court of Justice got wrong
The through line of anti-Semitism for thousands of years has been the denial of truth and the promotion of lies. These lies range in scope from conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial to the blood libel to the currently popular claims that Zionism is racism, that Jews are settler colonialists, and that Jewish civilization isn’t indigenous to the land of Israel. These lies are all part of the foundational big lie: that anti-Semitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist. Today, the big lie is winning.
In 2013, David Nirenberg published an astonishing book titled Anti-Judaism. Nirenberg’s argument, rigorously laid out in nearly 500 pages of dense scholarship and more than 100 pages of footnotes, is that Western cultures—including ancient civilizations, Christianity, Islam (which Nirenberg considers Western in its relationship with Judaism), and post-religious societies—have often defined themselves through their opposition to what they consider “Judaism.” This has little to do with actual Judaism, and a lot to do with whatever evil these non-Jewish cultures aspire to overcome.
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Nirenberg is a diligent historian who resists generalizations and avoids connecting the past to contemporary events. But when one reads through his carefully assembled record of 23 centuries’ worth of intellectual leaders articulating their societies’ ideals by loudly rejecting whatever they consider “Jewish,” this deep neural groove in Western thought becomes difficult to dismiss, its patterns unmistakable. If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. “Anti-Judaism” thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice.
This dynamic forces Jews into the defensive mode of constantly proving they are not evil, and even simply that they have a right to exist. Around 38 C.E., after rioters in Alexandria destroyed hundreds of Jewish homes and burned Jews alive, the Jewish Alexandrian intellectual Philo and the non-Jewish Alexandrian intellectual Apion both sailed to Rome for a “debate” before Emperor Caligula about whether Jews deserved citizenship. Apion believed that Jews held an annual ritual in which they kidnapped a non-Jew, fattened him up, and ate him. Caligula delayed Philo’s rebuttal for five months, and then listened to him only while consulting with designers on palace decor. Alexandrian Jews lost their citizenship rights, though it took until 66 C.E. for 50,000 more of them to be slaughtered.
In medieval Europe, Jews were forced into disputations with Christian priests that placed Jewish texts and traditions on public trial, resulting in Jewish books being burned and Jewish disputants exiled. Later legal trials expanded on this concept, requiring Jews to defend themselves against the absurd charge known as the blood libel, in which Jews are accused of murdering and consuming non-Jewish children—a claim that has echoes in current lies about Israelis harvesting Palestinians’ organs.
The absurdity of these charges is less remarkable than the high intellectual profiles of those making them: people like Apion, a scholar of Homer and Egyptian history, as well as Christian and Muslim scholars who were among the best-read people of their time. Similarly absurd claims of Jewish perfidy were later endorsed by civilizational luminaries such as Martin Luther and Voltaire. “Anti-Judaism,” Nirenberg argues, “should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought. It was rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed.”
protest at Harvard University
Demonstrators at Harvard University on October 14, 2023 (Brian Snyder / Reuters)
I’ve been thinking about Nirenberg’s thesis in the months since the October 7 massacre in Israel, during which Hamas, an openly genocidal organizationwhose stated goal is the murder of Jews, lived up to its mission statement by torturing, raping, and murdering more than 1,200 people in southern Israel and taking more than 200 captives, including babies, children, and the elderly. Shortly after the attacks, a Cornell professor publicly proclaimed the barbarity “exhilarating” and “energizing,” while a Columbia professor called it “awesome” and an “achievement.” Comparable praise percolated through America’s top universities, coming from students and faculty alike. On campuses around the country, students began gathering regularly to chant “There is only one solution: intifada revolution!”—a reference to a suicide-bombing campaign in Israel a generation ago that maimed and murdered well over 1,000 Jews. (If there is only one solution, perhaps one could call it the Final Solution.)
Students took these rallies inside libraries and other campus buildings. They vandalized university property with such slogans as “Zionism = Genocide,” “New Intifada,” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—referring to a geographic area that encompasses the entirety of the state of Israel, where half the world’s Jews live. (At Harvard, some students opted for chanting an Arabic version: “From water to water, Palestine is Arab.”) On some campuses, the exhilaration escalated into death threats and physical assaults against Jewish students. When a Jewish Tulane University student tried to stop an anti-Israel protester near campus from burning an Israeli flag, protesters attacked him and other Jewish students, breaking one student’s nose.
In Los Angeles, a man invaded a Jewish family’s home before dawn with a knife, breaking into the parents’ bedroom while their four children slept, screaming “Kill Jewish people.”
It wasn’t just universities. Crowds cheering for “intifada” gathered in cities around the country, shutting down and disrupting train stations and airport access roads. Lest their support for Hamas be mistaken for support for Palestinians in general, or for peace, U.S. rally organizers named their efforts “floods” (“Flood Seattle for Palestine,” “Flood Manhattan for Gaza”) after “Operation Al Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’s name for its October 7 butchery. The enthusiasm was hard to contain. Some people tore down or vandalized posters of Israeli hostages. Others targeted synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses, spray-painting them with swastikas and slogans like “Israel’s only religion is capitalism.” In New York City, a Jewish teacher’s online photo holding a sign that said i stand with israel was enough to prompt a schoolwide protest that devolved into a riot during which students destroyed school property; the teacher had to be moved to another part of the building to avoid the teenage mob screaming “Free Palestine!” In Los Angeles, a man invaded a Jewish family’s home before dawn with a knife, breaking into the parents’ bedroom while their four children slept, screaming “Kill Jewish people.” When police arrested him, he shouted, “Free Palestine!”
Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic: Jews are now required to recite this humiliatingly obvious sentence, over and over, as the price of admission to public discourse about their own demonization, in “debates” with people who are often unable to name the relevant river or sea. The many legitimate concerns about Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, and the many legitimate concerns about Israel’s current war in Gaza, cannot explain these eliminationist chants and slogans, the glee with which they are delivered, the lawlessness that has accompanied them, or the open assaults on Jews. The timing alone laid the game bare: This mass exhilaration first emerged not in response to Israel’s war to take down Hamas and rescue its kidnapped citizens, but exactly in response to, and explicitly in support of, the most lethal and sadistic barbarity against Jews since the Holocaust, complete with rape and decapitation and the abduction of infants, committed by a regime that aims to eviscerate not only Jews, but also all hopes of Palestinian flourishing, coexistence, or peace.
Read: When anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic
But there are nuances to sadistic barbarity against Jews, we are told, and sometimes gang-raping Jewish women is actually a movement for human rights. It hardly seems fair to call people anti-Semitic if they want only half of the world’s Jews to die. The phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” currently chanted at universities across America, perhaps widens the net a tiny bit—but really, who can say? Even the phrase “Gas the Jews,” chanted at a rally organized by NYU students and faculty, is so very ambiguous. How dare those whiny Jews presume to know what’s in other people’s hearts?
Besides, American Jews had nothing to whine about: Had any of them actually died in the United States from all this exhilaration? That question was answered in November, when a Jewish man died in California after an anti-Israel protester allegedly clubbed him over the head with a bullhorn, the kind used to chant entirely non-anti-Semitic slogans—and of course that question had already been answered repeatedly with other anti-Semitic murders in recent years, some more publicized than others. (One murder even happened on campus: In 2022, an expelled University of Arizona student who repeatedly ranted about Jews and Zionists shot and killed his professor—who wasn’t Jewish, though the student thought he was.) But now the goalposts move again: Those actual murders, along with many other physical attacks against American Jews, are all just one-offs, lone wolves, mental-illness cases, entirely unrelated to the anti-Semitic rhetoric swirling through American life.
It remains unclear why anti-Semitism should matter only when it is lethal, or if so, how many unambiguously anti-Semitic murders would be necessary for anti-Semitism to be happening outside whiny Jews’ heads. A realistic estimate might be 6 million. Even then, Jews have had to spend the past 80 years collecting documentation to prove it.
One confounding fact in this onslaught of the world’s oldest hatred is that American society should have been ready to handle it. Many public and private institutions have invested enormously in recent years in attempts to defang bigotry; ours is an era in which even sneaker companies feel obliged to publicly denounce hate. But diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have proved to be no match for anti-Semitism, for a clear reason: the durable idea of anti-Semitism as justice.
DEI efforts are designed to combat the effects of social prejudice by insisting on equity: Some people in our society have too much power and too much privilege, and are overrepresented, so justice requires leveling the playing field. But anti-Semitism isn’t primarily a social prejudice. It is a conspiracy theory: the big lie that Jews are supervillains manipulating others. The righteous fight for justice therefore does not require protecting Jews as a vulnerable minority. Instead it requires taking Jews down.
This idea is tacitly endorsed by Jews’ bizarre exclusion from discussion in many DEI trainings and even policies, despite their high ranking in American hate-crime statistics. The premise, for instance, that Jews don’t experience bigotry because they are “white,” itself a fraught idea, would suggest that white LGBTQ people don’t experience bigotry either—a premise that no DEI policy would endorse (not to mention the fact that many Jews are not white). The contention that Jews are immune to bigotry because they are “rich,” an idea even more fraught and also often false (about 20 percent of Jews in New York City, for instance, live in poverty or near-poverty), is equally nonsensical. No one claims that gay men or Indian Americans never experience bigotry because of those groups’ statistically higher incomes. The idea that money erases bigotry apparently applies only to Jews. Again and again, the ostensible reasons for not addressing anti-Semitism in DEI initiatives quickly reveal themselves to be founded on ancient, rarely examined assumptions about Jews as invulnerable villains.
The sordid history of the concept of anti-Zionism vividly illustrates this dynamic—and is particularly relevant for its success in scrambling the radar of well-meaning people. Jewish civilization has been centered for thousands of years, in ways large and small, on its homeland in Israel, where Jews have had a continuous presence since ancient times. The modern political idea of Zionism as Jewish self-determination in this homeland emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries amid many other anticolonial movements around the world, as global power dynamics shifted from empires (Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman, British, French, Japanese) toward nation-states. The large and often violent population upheavals following Israel’s creation, including the displacement of most Arabs from what became Israel and the displacement of nearly all Jews from what became Arab states, paralleled similar population upheavals around the world as new states emerged from receding empires. In this, Zionism was typical.
To borrow the language of DEI, the big lie is systemic.
But anti-Zionism as an explicit political concept has a history quite independent of the actions of Jews. In 1918, 30 years before the establishment of the state of Israel, Bolsheviks established Jewish sections of the Communist Party, which they insisted be anti-Zionist. The problem, Bolsheviks argued, was that Jewish particularism (in this case, Zionism) was the obstacle to the righteous universal mission of uniting humanity under communism—just as Christians once saw Jewish particularism as the obstacle to the righteous universal mission of uniting humanity under Christ. The righteousness of this mission was, as usual, the key: The claim that “anti-Zionism” was unrelated to anti-Semitism, repeated ad nauseam in Soviet propaganda for decades, was essential to the Communist Party’s self-branding as humanity’s liberators. It was also a bald-faced lie.
Bolsheviks quickly demonstrated their supposed lack of anti-Semitism by shutting down every “Zionist” institution under their control, a category that ranged from synagogues to sports clubs; appropriating their assets; taking over their buildings, sometimes physically destroying offices; and arresting and ultimately “purging” Jewish leaders, including those who had endorsed the party line and persecuted their fellow Jews for their “Zionism.” Thousands of Jews were persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, or murdered.
Later, the U.S.S.R. exported this messaging to its client states in the developing world and ultimately to social-justice-minded circles in the United States. A thick paper trail shows how the KGB adapted its propaganda by explicitly rebranding Zionism as “racism” and “colonialism,” beginning half a century ago, when those terms gained currency as potent smears—even though Jews are racially diverse and Zionism is one of the world’s premier examples of an indigenous people reclaiming independence. Facts were irrelevant: Soviets labeled Jews as racist colonialist oppressors, just as Nazis had labeled Jews as both capitalist and Communist oppressors, and just as Christians and Muslims had labeled Jews as God-killers and Prophet-defilers. Jews were whatever a given society regarded as evil. To borrow the language of DEI, the big lie is systemic.
Even naming it—that is, calling out bigotry against Jews—can be classed as yet another sign of assumed evil intent, of Jews attacking beloved principles of justice for all. In an April 2023 lecture, David Nirenberg, the historian, presented the example of an activist with a large following whose boundary-pushing rhetoric met with accusations of anti-Semitism. The activist pointed out, as Nirenberg put it, that anti-Semitism “was merely an accusation that Jews used to silence criticism and squash free speech.” He brought libel lawsuits against newspapers that accused him of anti-Semitism, and won them. It is unfortunate for those making this argument today that this activist was named Adolf Hitler.
Two weeks after the October 7 massacre, I wrote an op-ed for a national newspaper about the intergenerational fears many Jews were feeling, describing a few choice moments from several thousand years of anti-Semitic attacks. A friendly fact-checker followed up, asking me to prove that the Russian Civil War pogroms of 1918–21 involved gang rapes, and appending a judicious reportedly in front of a detail I’d included from the Farhud pogrom in Baghdad in 1941 about attackers taking Jewish women’s severed breasts as trophies. I dutifully provided additional sources, combing through sickening testimonies about mutilated Jewish girls in 1919 and 1941, while simultaneously avoiding videos of mutilated Jewish girls in 2023.
As I piled up evidence to prove that these things happened, I remembered an oral-history interview my sister once did with our grandfather to share with our family at his 97th-birthday party, in which he described his own grandparents’ decision to leave their town in Ukraine after an aunt was attacked during a pogrom. “They raided her, et cetera, et cetera,” my sister’s notes from the interview say. Et cetera, et cetera, I thought over and over, as I hunted down sources on gang rapes of Jewish women to submit to the fact-checker, my vision going blurry. At the time, I hadn’t wondered what those sanitized et ceteras meant.
The same week I spent emailing documentation to the fact-checker of pogroms long past, the newspaper, like many other news outlets, published a banner headline about Israelis bombing a hospital in Gaza and killing 500 people inside. This was quickly proven to be a lie told by Hamas—a lie similar to the medieval blood libel, about Jews deliberately targeting and murdering innocent non-Jewish babies—and a transparent psychological projection of the crimes that Hamas had actually committed in Israel, where Hamas terrorists had deliberately targeted and murdered hundreds of adults, children, and babies, and also repeatedly fired rockets at a hospital. Israel’s military has indeed killed many innocent people in Gaza during its war to destroy Hamas, and deserves the same scrutiny as any country for its conduct in war. But scrutiny is impossible when lies are substituted for facts. The newspaper later issued a regretful editorial note acknowledging its error. Unfortunately, Hamas’s lie had already inspired mass demonstrations around the world; rioters in Tunisia were so incensed by it that they burned a historic synagogue to the ground. I had been rightfully asked to prove that the Iraqi and Ukrainian pogroms happened. But the spokespeople for Hamas were taken at their word.
Shortly after the op-ed was published, I was invited to watch video footage of the October 7 attacks that the Israeli army had compiled from security cameras, online videos, and Hamas terrorists’ GoPro cameras. This grim footage was assembled specifically for the purpose of fighting back against denial. But even this horrifying and humiliating evidence, documented largely by the perpetrators themselves, apparently isn’t enough to prove that Jewish experiences are real. At a screening of the footage in Los Angeles, someone in the audience shouted, “Show the rapes!”
The attackers themselves provided footage of a woman’s naked, mutilated corpse and of a teenager with blood-soaked pants being dragged by her hair out of a truck. Since then, it has become clear that Hamas used rape and sexual torture systematically against Israeli women. Israeli first responders and forensic scientists have found corpses of women and girls with vaginal bleeding and broken pelvises. Teenage sisters were found murdered in their bedroom, one shot in the head with her pants pulled down, covered in semen; one woman was found with nails and other objects in her genitalia, while others were found to have been shot through their vaginas. Eyewitness testimony has included details about a woman who was passed among many men, murdered while one of them was still raping her; at one point, her severed breast was tossed in the air. It’s a detail familiar from the 1941 Baghdad pogrom, just as slicing a fetus out of a pregnant Jewish woman’s body is a tactic Hamas unknowingly replicated from the Khmelnytskyi pogroms of 1648 Ukraine. Et cetera, et cetera. But who would believe it? “Show the rapes!”
Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism
I was invited to these screenings multiple times, but never went. I didn’t want to watch people being brutalized. Also, I didn’t want to watch people being brutalized while hearing someone behind me screaming, “Show the rapes!”
On my travels around the country in recent months to discuss my work on Jews in non-Jewish societies, I met many Jewish college and high-school students who seem to have accepted the casual denigration of Jews as normal. They are growing up with it. In a Dallas suburb, teenagers told me, shrugging, about how their friends’ Jewish fraternities at Texas colleges have been “chalked.” I had to ask what “chalking” meant: anti-Semitic graffiti made by vandals who lacked spray paint. Synagogues are often chalked too. Another newly common verb among American Jews is swatting: fake bomb or active-shooter threats that force evacuations and instill fear. (The term is a reference to the SWAT teams that sometimes arrive at the scene, not knowing the threat is a hoax, and instill more fear.) These now happen so often at American Jewish institutions that they’re almost boring; nearly 200 were swatted during one December 2023 weekend alone. (When it happened at my own synagogue in November, forcing a girl’s bat-mitzvah service into a parking lot, the synagogue president warned congregants not to post any specific details about it online, in case people were tracking our evacuation procedures.)
Daniel Torday: What active-shooter trainings steal from synagogues
American Jews in recent years have also developed, at great expense, a robust system of threat detection and “target hardening” to prevent or defuse actual attacks. An organization called Secure Community Network trains Jewish leaders and community members in situational awareness and self-defense; a rabbi in Texas who was held hostage with three congregants for 11 hours by a jihadist in 2022 credited this training with saving his and his congregants’ lives. Another group, Community Security Initiative, tracks threats on social media 24 hours a day; one flagged online threat to attack synagogues in 2022 led to the arrest in New York’s Penn Station of two men carrying illegal weapons, ammunition, and a swastika armband.
Unfortunately, some bad actors find a sweet spot just past the security cameras. In Los Angeles, harassment of Jews walking to synagogue became common enough in recent years that some formed walking groups with volunteer guards; in December, one street harasser there assaulted an elderly Jewish couple, hitting the husband in the head with a belt buckle, causing a head wound—which was tame compared with a previous incident, in which two Jewish men were shot on their way home from two separate synagogues in February of last year. A week after the belt attack, a man in Washington, D.C., sprayed people leaving a synagogue with what police called a “foul-smelling” substance while shouting “Gas the Jews!”
pro hamas demonstrators
Pro-Palestine students gathered at UCLA on October 25, 2023. (Frederic J. Brown / AFP / Getty)
In Minneapolis, a woman who works in communications for a Jewish organization told me how “Free Palestine” had, even before October 7, become a kind of verbal swastika—not because of its meaning, but because of how it is deployed. Apart from its use in political or protest contexts, it has also been used as an online-harassment technique: Trolls tag any post with Jewish content—including material unrelated to Israel—with #FreePalestine, summoning more freedom fighters to the noble cause of verbally abusing Jewish teenagers who dare to post pictures of challah. This verbal vandalism made the jump to real life, the woman explained, and harassers now routinely scrawl it on Jewish communal buildings, shout it at their Jewish schoolmates, and scream it out of car windows at anyone wearing a kippah.
It is remarkable how little any of this has to do with anything going on in the Middle East. This harassment isn’t coming from an antiwar plea, or a consciousness-raising effort about Israeli policies, or a campaign for Palestinian independence, though those pretenses now serve as flimsy excuses. The only purpose of the chalking and swatting and taunting and assaulting and silencing is to dehumanize and demonize Jews. Every time Jews are forced to prove that they didn’t deserve this, or to hide who they are, it is already working.
This new normal for American Jews isn’t just communal, but personal. Many American Jews have quietly dropped friends in recent months after noticing those friends’ posts online casually endorsing the murders of Jews. But even more striking is the low bar for the friends who remain. I’ve seen this most clearly among the young. In upstate New York, a Jewish high schooler told me how a friend of hers regularly passed her cartoons in class. “He just thought it was really funny,” she said, and showed me a sample: a stick-figure caricature of a Hasidic Jew carrying a bag of money. “My friends,” she added, “use my Jewishness to insult me. So they’ll be like, ‘Shut up, you’re just a Jew. Shut up, Jew.’ A couple of my friends say that all the time to me.” I wanted to suggest that she find new friends.
At a Shabbat dinner I attended at one college, students went around the table sharing what they wished they could say to their non-Jewish friends: I wish I could say I want to spend a semester in Israel. I wish I could say I work at a Jewish preschool. I wish I could say I volunteered at a Jewish hospital. I sat at the table stupefied. They were in hiding.
It was during this ongoing nightmare that Harvard administrators recruited me for advice on the anti-Semitism problem on campus. Against my better judgment, I agreed to join the committee. The Jewish Harvard students who desperately shared their horror stories with me backed them up with piles of evidence. They knew they needed to prove it.
The problem at Harvard, it quickly became clear from the avalanche of documentation deposited at my feet, was not small. The night of the massacre, before the blood was dry, more than 30 Harvard student groups proudly announced that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The campus was almost instantly saturated with enthusiastic anti-Israel rallies, which many in the media depicted as the centerpiece of a free-speech debate.
But these protests were not merely outdoor public events that uninterested students could walk past. They also took place inside classroom buildings during lectures, inside the first-year dining hall and inside the largest campus library and other shared study spaces. Jewish students could no longer expect to be able to study in the library, eat in dining halls, or attend class without being repeatedly told by their classmates, sometimes through a bullhorn, that Jews are genocidal murderers deserving of perpetual intifada. (Civilian casualties in war, however horrific, aren’t genocide—but the demonization was the point. So was the vague romanticization of the intifada that targeted, maimed, and murdered Jewish civilians.) At the law school, hundreds of protesters marched through a classroom building during classes. Jewish students reported being targeted and chased through a building by their screaming peers. One video from the business school showed a Jewish student being physically harassed, accosted by protesters who surrounded him with their kaffiyehs.
This demonization of Jews, whether intentional or not, extended to Harvard’s teaching staff. Instructors who grade Jewish students used university-issued class lists to share information about events organized by pro-Palestine groups; at least one even canceled class so students could attend an anti-Israel rally. This pattern among Harvard instructors predated the current Israel-Hamas war. A third-party investigation conducted before the academic year began found that one professor had discriminated against several Israeli students; Harvard said it took action, but the professor rejected the findings and continued teaching. In a separate incident, one student claimed that a different professor asked her to leave his classroom in the spring of 2023 after learning that she was Israeli, because her Israeliness made people “uncomfortable.”
Jewish students who came to Harvard hoping to take courses in Arabic language or Middle Eastern studies told me they often ended up avoiding those courses entirely, wary of professors and peers who made their lack of welcome clear. One recent doctoral student in a field of study unrelated to the Middle East recounted to me that well before October 7, her fellow Ph.D.s in training (the supply pool for teaching assistants) seldom gathered socially without dropping references to “Zionist dirtbags” and “Israeli scum.” One Harvard student described how a classmate, after learning he was Jewish, told him that “there should be no more Jewish state and no more Jews.”
The mountain of proof at Harvard revealed a reality in which Jewish students’ access to their own university was directly compromised.
After October 7, social-media platforms exploded with unambiguous Jew hatred in comments such as “Harvard Hillel is burning in hell” and “Let ’em cook.” In this environment, many religious Jewish students stopped wearing kippahs on campus or swapped them for baseball hats; someone spat in the face of one kippah-wearing student as he walked down the street. In an echo of medieval disputations, one Jewish student was invited by a Harvard employee to “debate” him about whether Israel plotted the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to The Harvard Crimson. Later, the employee posted an online video featuring a screenshot from the student’s X account and the employee wielding a toy machete; the student reported the incident to the authorities and was told to file a restraining order.
Amazingly, Jewish students, whose numbers have dramatically declined at Harvard in recent years for reasons no one seems able to explain, did not respond to all this with their own hate-speech campaigns. Instead, both before and after October 7, Harvard Hillel’s students have reached out to their peers among Harvard’s anti-Israel activists—asking not for a cease-and-desist, but for a dialogue, or even just a cup of coffee. Let’s get to know each other, they offered. The anti-Israel activists refused to engage. Jewish students tried again; they were rebuffed again. And again. This was hardly surprising. For some anti-Israel activists, even merely talking to “Zionists” (a label applied to the 80 percent of American Jews who regard Israel as an essential or important part of their Jewish identity) counts as “normalization”—that is, treating Jews as if they were normal humans, rather than embodiments of evil.
Again we are obliged to prove that this matters. No one died; why complain? “Has there been actual violence against Jewish students at Harvard or on other campuses?” one tenured Harvard professor wrote to our advisory committee to inquire. (The answer was yes.) “If Jewish student worries about physical danger are, in fact, exaggerated,” the professor authoritatively continued, “then students that hold these fears should be advised to leave campus and go home.”
But a hostile environment emerges from pervasive minor incidents, even those that don’t target individuals. Imagine that you are a woman in an office where your male colleagues and bosses gather regularly by the photocopier to discuss their favorite strip clubs. You avoid the photocopier, but then they expand their discussions to the break room, the lobby, the watercooler, the conference room. You avoid those spaces too, avoid those colleagues, hide in your cubicle, and wind up not getting promoted. In such a situation, your company would be responsible for a hostile environment that discriminated against you. The company would not be absolved by pointing out that no one had raped you yet, or that these men weren’t talking to or about you. It could not defend itself by advising you that if these conversations bothered you, you should leave and go home. A hostile environment is precisely one where tenured professors advise students to leave and go home.
The mountain of proof at Harvard revealed a reality in which Jewish students’ access to their own university (classes, teachers, libraries, dining halls, public spaces, shared student experiences) was directly compromised. Compromised, that is, unless they agreed—or at least agreed to pretend, as many Jewish students who are neither religious nor Israeli now silently do—that there was nothing wrong with wallpapering America’s premier university with demonization of Jews. Coercing that silent agreement was the goal, and it was achieved not through arguments or evidence, but through the most laughably idiotic heckler’s veto: screaming at, chasing away, freezing out, or spitting on anyone who dared disagree with supporting the most successful Jew-killers since the Nazis. This left the great minds of Harvard debating the finer points of free speech for hecklers, instead of wondering why their campus was populated by hecklers. The question of why Harvard’s hecklers were heckling in favor of Hamas’s barbarism was too disturbing to consider, and so public discussions ignored it completely.
This heckling was not unrelated to the education that Harvard itself provided. Classes existed at Harvard, it turned out, that were premised on anti-Semitic lies. A course at the school of public health called “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health” looked at case studies from South Africa, the United States, and Israel; its premise—not a topic of discussion, but the premise on which the course was built—was that Israel is a settler-colonialist state. (A Jewish student who wrote to the professor questioning what they saw as the ideological slant of the readings was told that it was “insulting” to suggest that the course had an agenda.) The “Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights” proudly announced that it “utilizes a decolonial framework in program development, leadership, and engagement”—meaning, one might reasonably assume, the “decolonizing” of Israel through the removal of its 7 million Jews. (The program is a partnership between Harvard and Birzeit University, a Palestinian institution where an Israeli journalist was expelledfrom an event in 2014 just because she was Israeli and Jewish.)
An astonishing number of pop-up lectures, panels, and events at Harvard both before and after October 7 were centered on the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza—a worthy topic addressed with almost no mention of Hamas, even though Hamas has ruled Gaza for 17 years. Nor was there much mention of the fact that Hamas was founded in connection with the global Muslim Brotherhood, or of its comically wealthy sponsors in the Persian Gulf. Students had many opportunities to learn about Palestinian suffering from oppression by evil Jews, but far fewer opportunities to learn, for instance, about Hamas’s success in co-opting foreign aid and crushing dissent, or the intifada that students hoped to globalize. Outside of their engagements at Harvard, some guest speakers publicly endorsed extreme anti-Semitic lies, including the straight-up blood libel that Israelis are harvesting Palestinians’ organs or that the Israeli military uses Palestinian children for weapons testing. One could hardly blame students for repeating their educators’ claims.
Hillary Rodham Clinton: Hamas must go
Out of respect for Gay’s request that our committee’s discussions with administrators remain private, I won’t share here anything that we talked about in our many meetings. But I will say that one thing we did not discuss was Gay’s congressional testimony on this topic, for which she and other administrators never asked for the advisory committee’s advice. Instead, they consulted lawyers, a choice that backfired on national television.
The horror that the hearing laid bare was something far worse than a viral gaffe. Harvard was already being investigated by the Department of Education for allegations of violating Jewish students’ civil rights under Title VI, and perhaps the president was advised against admitting any institutional failure. (In January, a group of students sued Harvard, describing the university as a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment.”) Still, the only morally tenable position would have been to admit failure, to reveal that the problem was not all in Jews’ heads; that there truly was an anti-Semitic environment at these incubators of American leadership; that these universities, along with far too many other pockets of the country, had reverted, slowly and then all at once, into what they had been a century earlier: safe spaces for high-minded Jew hatred—not in spite of their aspiration that education should lead to a better world, but because of it.
It is fairly obvious what Harvard and other universities would need to do to turn this tide. None of it involves banning slogans or curtailing free speech. Instead it involves things like enforcing existing codes of conduct regarding harassment; protecting classroom buildings, libraries, and dining halls as zones free from advocacy campaigns (similar to rules for polling places); tracking and rejecting funding from entities supporting federally designated terror groups (a topic raised in recent congressional testimony regarding numerous American universities); gut-renovating diversity bureaucracies to address their obvious failure to tackle anti-Semitism; investigating and exposing the academic limitations of courses and programs premised on anti-Semitic lies; and expanding opportunities for students to understand Israeli and Jewish history and to engage with ideas and with one another. There are many ways to advocate for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence that honor the dignity and legitimacy of both indigenous groups and the need to build a shared future. The restoration of such a model of civil discourse, which has been decimated by heckling and harassment, would be a boon to all of higher education.
Harvard has already begun signaling change in this direction: The university recently reiterated and clarified rules regarding the time, place, and manner of student protests. For Harvard to take more of these steps would be huge, but I have struggled to understand why all of them still feel so small. Perhaps it’s because the problem is a multi-thousand-year fatal flaw in the ways our societies conceive of good and evil—and also because somewhere deep within me, I know what has been lost. There was a time, not so very long ago, when we didn’t have to prove our right to exist.
Among the mountains of evidence that Jewish students sent me, one image has stayed in my mind. There are videos of crowds chanting “Long live the intifada!” inside Harvard’s Science Center, and “There is only one solution: intifada revolution!” in Harvard Yard, along with other places equally familiar from my student days. But I keep coming back to the crowds marching and screaming in front of Harvard Law School’s Langdell library, because Langdell is a sacred place for me. On my 22nd birthday, in 1999, when I was a senior at Harvard, a law student I’d met at Hillel took me up through Langdell’s maintenance passageways to the library’s rooftop, where he asked me to marry him. I said yes.
I watched the video of the students marching and screaming in front of Langdell, and in an instant I remembered everything: studying in campus libraries for my Hebrew- and Yiddish-literature courses, talking for hours with Muslim and Christian and progressive and conservative classmates, inviting friends of all backgrounds to join me at Hillel, scrupulously following the Jewish tradition of “argument for the sake of heaven” in even the most heated debates, gathering for Shabbat dinners crowded with hundreds of students—and over those long and beautiful dinners, falling in love. My classmates and I often disagreed about the most important things. But no one screamed in our faces when we wore Hebrew T-shirts on campus. No one shunned us when we talked about our friends and family in Israel, or spat on us on our way to class. No crowds gathered to chant for our deaths. No one told us that there should be no more Jews. That night, my future husband and I worried only about getting in trouble for sneaking up to the library roof.
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One of the unsung hustles in the ed biz is recruiting out of state students, as they pay out of state tuition rates much higher than the in-state one, at least at public universities. Even if you are a private college inserting your hand deeply into the pockets of all students—and their parents, trust funds, etc.—locating particularly deep pockets can come in handy on the donation and endowment front.
Enter international students. By definition they have deep pockets attached, be they familial ones or the tax coffers of a foreign government. I’ve witnessed entire dorm rooms full of furniture shipped via UPS, IIRC, from a Middle East country. Imagine what that cost. Anyhoo, along with the money, furniture, cars et al these kids tote along also come some very unsavory beliefs now on full display at some schools:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/foreign-money-international-students-american-campuses
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https://www.jta.org/archive/in-rare-jewish-appearance-george-soros-says-jews-and-israel-cause-anti-semitism
Dissecting The Soros agenda :
https://www.israeltoday.co.il/read/dissecting-the-george-soros-agenda/
Weird guy for sure.
Lived through the Holocaust. Helped Nazis find Jews during the most "exciting" [I think was the word] time of his life
now is agnostic
supports anti Israel causes
hates the capitalism that made him rich.
foments division in US and elsewhere.
Even realizes he is the stereotype for the rich behind the scenes Jew .....
and continues doing it just the same for what end game I don't know.
one world government? open society
From a left wing author (I surmise):
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/06/the-george-soros-philosophy-and-its-fatal-flaw
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I’ve some folks that desperately need to be tossed out one:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/03/deaf-jewish-students-at-gallaudet-university-forced-to-hide-from-antisemitic-mob/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=deaf-jewish-students-at-gallaudet-university-forced-to-hide-from-antisemitic-mob
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The US and UK are demanding aid that will provide succor to Hamas and is frequently unneeded, assisting Hamas in its propaganda efforts along the way:
https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-scapegoating-of-israel?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR2uZEUOegeue7v-ty8wqe03WWDUamYRcxLX_6Ya-NtUxadaUNlfMJ5vYIE&triedRedirect=true
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https://www.newsbreak.com/news/3362034385033-israeli-born-columbia-professor-who-called-out-rampant-antisemitism-on-campus-being-investigated-in-clear-act-of-retaliation?_f=app_share&s=i1&pd=0DqmT5zR&lang=en_US&send_time=1710030410&trans_data=%7B%22platform%22%3A0%2C%22cv%22%3A%2224.10.0.35%22%2C%22languages%22%3A%22en%22%7D
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https://twitter.com/RabbiShmuley/status/1738946253612814729?s=20&fbclid=IwAR29LaHAw2aHD6X5VgxPivFrd0Gj-SahtpEUXwxNzePOV6t8uXVfnNY8gDY
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/us-anti-semitism-jewish-american-safety/677469/?gift=HcIvwN7vqIOoUYRFm4oX3eMP5zpta3QZ_wDsS474Pqo
THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICAN JEWS IS ENDING
Anti-Semitism on the right and the left threatens to bring to a close an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans—and demolish the liberal order they helped establish.
By Franklin Foer
MARCH 4, 2024
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photo-illustration with 18 photos of Jewish celebrities including Bob Dylan, Henry Winkler, Barbra Streisand, + more plus lines of text in red and blue
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stacey zolt hara was in her office in downtown San Francisco when a text from her 16-year-old daughter arrived: “I’m scared,” she wrote. Her classmates at Berkeley High School were preparing to leave their desks and file into the halls, part of a planned “walkout” to protest Israel. Like many Jewish students, she didn’t want to participate. It was October 18, 11 days after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel.
Zolt Hara told her daughter to wait in her classroom. She was trying to project calm. A public-relations executive, Zolt Hara had moved her family from Chicago to Berkeley six years earlier, hoping to find a community that shared her progressive values. Her family had developed a deep sense of belonging there.
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But a moral fervor was sweeping over Berkeley High that morning. Around 10:30, the walkout began. Jewish parents traded panicked reports from their children. Zolt Hara heard that kids were chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a slogan that suggests the elimination of Israel. Rumors spread about other, less coy phrases shouted in the hallways, carrying intimations of violence. Jewish students were said to be in tears. Parents were texting one another ideas about where in the school their children could hide. Zolt Hara placed a call to the dean of students. By her own admission, she was hysterical. She says the dean hung up on her.
By the early afternoon the walkout was over, but Zolt Hara and other Jewish parents worried that it was a prelude to something worse. They joined Google Groups and WhatsApp chains so they could share information. Zolt Hara organized a petition, pleading with the school district to take anti-Semitism more seriously. It quickly received more than 1,300 signatures.
Most worrying was what parents kept hearing about teachers, both in Berkeley and in the surrounding school districts. They seemed to be using their classrooms to mold students into advocates for a maximalist vision of Palestine. A group of activists within the Oakland Education Association, that city’s teachers’ union, sponsored a “teach-in.” A video trumpeting the event urged: “Apply your labor power to show solidarity with the Palestinian people.” An estimated 70 teachers set aside their normal curriculum to fix students’ attention on Gaza.
Even classes with no discernible connection to international affairs joined the teach-in. Its centerpiece was a webinar titled “From Gaza to Oakland: How Does the Issue Connect to Us?,” in which local activists implored the kids to join them on the streets. They told the students—in a predominantly Black and Latino school district—that the Israeli military works hand in glove with American police forces, sharing tips and tactics. “Repression there ends up cycling back to repression here,” an activist named Anton explained. Elementary-school teachers, whose students were too young for the webinar, were given a list of books to use in their classes. One of them, Handala’s Return, described how a “group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people.”
The same zeal was gripping schools in Berkeley. Zolt Hara learned from another parent about an ethnic-studies class in which the teacher had described the slaughter of some Israelis on October 7 as the result of friendly fire. She saw a disturbing image that another teacher had presented in an art class, of a fist breaking through a Star of David. (Officials at Berkeley High School did not respond to requests for comment.) In her son’s middle school, there were signs on classroom walls that read teach palestine.
Zolt Hara didn’t need to imagine how kids might respond to these lessons. After October 7, her son, who is 13, began coming home with stories about anti-Semitic jibes hurled in his direction. On his way to math class, a kid walked up to him playing what he called a “Nazi salute song” on his phone. Another said something in German and told him, “I don’t like your people.” A Manichaean view of the conflict even filtered down to the lowest grades in Berkeley. According to one parent complaint to the principal of Washington Elementary School, a second grader suggested that students divide into Israeli and Palestinian “teams,” and another announced that Palestinians couldn’t be friends with Jews.
On November 17, the middle school that Zolt Hara’s son attends staged its own walkout. Zolt Hara was relieved that her son was traveling for a family event that day. But she heard about video of the protest, recorded on a parent’s phone. I tracked down the footage and watched it myself. “Are you Jewish?” one mop-haired tween asks another, seemingly unaware of any adult presence. “No way,” the second kid replies. “I fucking hate them.” Another blurts, “Kill Israel.” A student laughingly attempts to start a chant of “KKK.”
photo of graffiti reading "Annihilate ISRAEL! stolen land"
Graffiti in Oakland, January 2024 (Franklin Foer)
On a damp morning this winter, I joined about 40 kids assembled in a classroom at a public high school in the East Bay for a meeting of the Jewish Student Union. I promised that I wouldn’t identify their school in the hopes that they might speak freely, without fear of retribution from teachers or peers. The first boy to raise his hand proudly announced that he supported a cease-fire. But as the conversation progressed, students began to recall how painful their school’s walkout had felt. Their classmates had left them alone with teachers, who they suspected would think less of them for having stayed put. At every stop in their education in this progressive community, they had learned about a world divided between oppressors and the oppressed—and now they felt that they were being accused of being the bad guys, despite having nothing to do with events on the other side of the world, and despite the fact that Hamas had initiated the current war by invading Israeli communities and murdering an estimated 1,200 people.
At the end of the session a student in a kippah, puffer jacket, and T-shirt pulled me aside. He said he wanted to speak privately, because he didn’t want to risk crying in front of his peers. After October 7, he said, his school life, as a visibly identifiable Jew, had become unbearable. Walking down the halls, kids would shout “Free Palestine” at him. They would make the sound of explosions, as if he were personally responsible for the bombardment of Gaza. They would tell him to pick up pennies. As he was walking into the gym to use one of its courts, a kid told him, “There goes the Jew, taking everyone’s land.” I asked if he’d ever told any of this to an administrator. “Nothing would change,” he said. Based on how other local authorities had responded to anti-Semitism, I didn’t doubt him.
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like many american jews, I once considered anti-Semitism a threat largely emanating from the right. It was Donald Trump who attracted the allegiance of white supremacists and freely borrowed their tropes. A closing ad of his 2016 presidential campaign flashed images of prominent Jews—Lloyd Blankfein, Janet Yellen, and George Soros—as it decried global special interests bleeding the people dry.
Trump’s victory inspired anti-Semitic hate groups, long consigned to the shadows, to strut with impunity. Less than two weeks after Trump’s election, the white nationalist Richard Spencer came to Washington, D.C., and proclaimed, “Hail Trump! Hail our people!” as supporters responded with Nazi salutes. In August 2017, angry men carried tiki torches through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” In 2018, the consequences of violent anti-Semitic rhetoric became tangible: At the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 11 people were fatally shot. The following year, on the last day of Passover, at a synagogue in a San Diego suburb, a gunman killed one and wounded three others, including a rabbi.
After each incident, my anxiety about the safety of my own family and synagogue would spike, but I consoled myself with the thought that once Trump disappeared from the scene, the explosion of Jew hatred would recede. America would revert to its essential self: the most comfortable homeland in the Jewish diaspora.
From the May 2023 issue: Is Holocaust education making anti-Semitism worse?
That reassuring thought required downplaying the anti-Semitism that had begun to appear on the left well before October 7—on college campuses, among progressive activists, even on the fringes of the Democratic Party. It required minimizing Representative Ilhan Omar’s insinuation about Jewish control of politics—“It’s all about the Benjamins baby”—as an ignorant gaffe. And it meant dismissing intense outbreaks of anti-Zionist harassment by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, which coincided with tensions in the Middle East, as a passing storm.
Part of the reason I failed to appreciate the extent of the anti-Semitism on the left is that I assumed its criticisms of the Israeli government were, at bottom, a harsher version of my own. I opposed the proliferation of settlements in the West Bank, the callousness that military occupation required, and the religious zealotry that had begun to infuse the country’s right wing, including its current ruling coalition.
photo of people hugging in street with uniformed police behind
In October 2018, a gunman killed 11 people and wounded six at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Brendan Smialowski / AFP/ Getty)
Such criticisms were not those of a dissident—the majority of American Jews share them. The Palestinian leadership has a long record of abject obstructionism, historical denialism, and violent irredentism, but American Jews heap blame on recalcitrant right-wing Israeli governments, too. Polling by the Pew Research Center in 2020 found that only one in three American Jews said they felt that the Israeli government was “sincere” in its pursuit of peace. But whatever criticism American Jews leveled against Israel, the anger was born of love. Eight in 10 described Israel as either “essential” or “important” to their Jewish identity. And they still held out hope for peace. In that same poll, 63 percent of American Jews said they considered a two-state solution plausible. Jews were, in fact, more likely than the overall U.S. population to believe in the possibility of peaceful coexistence with an independent Palestine.
Among the brutal epiphanies of October 7 was this: A disconcertingly large number of Israel’s critics on the left did not share that vision of peaceful coexistence, or believe Jews had a right to a nation of their own. After Hamas’s rampage of rape, kidnapping, and murder, a history professor at Cornell named Russell Rickford said Palestinians were understandably “exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence.” He added, “I was exhilarated.” A student at the same university was arrested and charged with posting online threats about slitting the throats of Jewish males and strafing the kosher dining hall with gunfire. In Philadelphia, a mob descended on a falafel restaurant, chanting about the Israeli American co-owner’s complicity in genocide. Over the three-month period following the Hamas attacks, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 56 episodes of physical violence targeting Jews and 1,347 incidents of harassment. That 13-week span contained more anti-Semitic incidents than the entirety of 2021—at the time the worst year since the ADL had begun keeping count, in 1979.
I don’t want to dismiss the anger that the left feels about the terrible human cost of the Israeli counterinvasion of Gaza, or denounce criticism of Israel as inherently anti-Semitic—especially because I share some of those criticisms. Nor do I believe that anti-Zionist is a term that should be considered axiomatically interchangeable with anti-Semite. The elimination of Israel, in my opinion, would be a profound catastrophe for the Jewish people. But I have read idealistic critics of Israel, such as the late historian Tony Judt, who imagined that it could be replaced by a binational state, where Jews and Palestinians live side by side under one democratic government. That strikes me as naive in the extreme—especially after the Hamas pogrom of October 7—and very likely the end of Jewish existence in the Levant. But not everything that is terrible for the Jews is anti-Semitic.
Anti-Semitism is a mental habit, deeply embedded in Christian and Muslim thinking, stretching back at least as far as the accusation that the Jews murdered the son of God. It’s a tendency to fixate on Jews, to place them at the center of the narrative, overstating their role in society and describing them as the root cause of any unwanted phenomena—a centrality that seems strange, given that Jews constitute about 0.2 percent of the global population. Though it shape-shifts over time, anti-Semitism returns to the same essential complaint: that Jews are cunning, bloodthirsty, and mad for power. Anti-Zionism often takes a similar form: the dehumanization, the unilateral casting of blame, and the fetishizing of Jewish villainy.
Liberal Jews once celebrated Israel as the lone democracy in a distinctly undemocratic region. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition of theocrats and messianists seems bent on shredding the basis for that claim. But many governments in the world share these undesirable traits. Still, no one calls for the eradication of Hungary or El Salvador or India. No one defaces Chinese restaurants in San Francisco because Beijing imprisons Uyghurs in concentration camps and occupies Tibet.
The anti-Zionism that has flourished on the left in recent years doesn’t stop with calls for an end to the occupation of the West Bank. It espouses a blithe desire to eliminate the world’s only Jewish-majority nation, valorizes the homicidal campaign against its existence, and seeks to hold members of the Jewish diaspora to account for the sins of a country they don’t live in and for a government they didn’t elect. In so doing, this faction of the left places itself in the terrible lineage of attempts to erase Jewry—and, in turn, stirs ancient and not-so-ancient existential fears.
Nowhere is this more fully on display than in the Bay Area. After October 7, protesters flooded city-council meetings, demanding cease-fire resolutions and rejecting any attempt to include clauses condemning Hamas for the rape and murder of Jews. One viral video compiled enraged citizen comments at an Oakland city-council meeting. These citizens weren’t just showing solidarity for the people of Gaza, but angrily amplifying wild conspiracy theories. One woman declared, in the style of a 9/11 truther, that “Israel murdered their own people on October 7.” Another, in the manner of a Holocaust denier, described the events of that day as a “fabricated narrative.”
For months, the Berkeley city council resisted the pressure to pass a cease-fire resolution; the mayor regarded foreign policy as far beyond its jurisdiction. But the pressure grew so intense that the council could hardly conduct any other business. Protesters disrupted official meetings, forcing the mayor to keep adjourning deliberations to another room where the public was not allowed. Police offered to escort council members to their cars after meetings. The mayor’s unwillingness to condemn Israel was anomalous, even in his own city. On December 4, the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board voted to endorse a cease-fire.
Impassioned support for the Palestinian cause metastasized into the hatred of Jews. Anti-Semitism has become part of the landscape. In 2021, a community space in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood, owned by a progressive gay Jewish activist, was defaced with messages including zionist pigz. After October 7, the windows of Smitten Ice Cream, owned by a Jewish woman, were smashed and spray-painted with the words out the mission.
photo of two people looking at debris from Oakland menorah on grass and sidewalk
In December 2023, a large menorah on public display in Oakland, California, was destroyed. (Jane Tyska / Digital First Media / East Bay Times / Getty)
During Hanukkah, a menorah sponsored by Chabad Oakland and perched on the shore of Lake Merritt, in the center of the city, was torn apart by its branches and hurled into the water, replaced by graffiti reading your org is dying, we’re gonna find you, you’re on fucking alert. Oakland Public Works quickly painted over the message and other anti-Semitic graffiti. But when I walked the trail around the lake several weeks after Hanukkah, I found a weathered metal box, built to display a work of public art. On its side was a laminated message titled “The World We Wish to See.” What followed was a lyrical vision of liberation that imagined a future in which “all beings are treated with dignity.” But whatever display had once existed in the box had been removed. What was left were the etched words zionist killer.
In the hatred that I witnessed in the Bay Area, and that has been evident on college campuses and in progressive activist circles nationwide, I’ve come to see left-wing anti-Semitism as characterized by many of the same violent delusions as the right-wing strain. This is not an accident of history. Though right- and left-wing anti-Semitism may have emerged in different ways, for different reasons, both are essentially attacks on an ideal that once dominated American politics, an ideal that American Jews championed and, in an important sense, co-authored. Over the course of the 20th century, Jews invested their faith in a distinct strain of liberalism that combined robust civil liberties, the protection of minority rights, and an ethos of cultural pluralism. They embraced this brand of liberalism because it was good for America—and good for the Jews. It was their fervent hope that liberalism would inoculate America against the world’s oldest hatred.
For several generations, it worked. Liberalism helped unleash a Golden Age of American Jewry, an unprecedented period of safety, prosperity, and political influence. Jews, who had once been excluded from the American establishment, became full-fledged members of it. And remarkably, they achieved power by and large without having to abandon their identity. In faculty lounges and television writers’ rooms, in small magazines and big publishing houses, they infused the wider culture with that identity. Their anxieties became American anxieties. Their dreams became American dreams.
But that era is drawing to a close. America’s ascendant political movements—MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other—would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish. They regard concepts such as tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism as pernicious shams. The Golden Age of American Jewry has given way to a golden age of conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence, all tendencies inimical to the democratic temperament. Extremist thought and mob behavior have never been good for Jews. And what’s bad for Jews, it can be argued, is bad for America.
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i grew up at the apex of the Golden Age. The nation’s sartorial aesthetic was the invention of Ralph Lifshitz, an alumnus of the Manhattan Talmudical Academy before he became the denim-clad Ralph Lauren. The national authority on sex was a diminutive bubbe, Dr. Ruth. Schoolkids in Indiana read Anne Frank’s diary. The Holocaust memoirist Elie Wiesel appeared on the nightly news as an arbiter of public morality. The most-watched television show was Seinfeld. Even Gentiles knew the words to Adam Sandler’s “The Chanukah Song,” which earned a place in the canon of festive music annually played on FM radio. Jews accounted for roughly 2 percent of the nation’s population at the time, but I’d estimate that my undergraduate class at Columbia University was one-third Jewish; soon, a third of the justices on the Supreme Court would be Jewish as well. In 2000, Joe Lieberman, a Shabbat-observant Jew with a wife named Hadassah, fell 537 votes short of becoming vice president. None of these occurrences sparked a backlash worthy of note.
photo of Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander walking and talking on set with cameras
Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander film the Seinfeld pilot, 1989. (NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal / Getty)
By the mid-’90s, experts had declared the end of anti-Semitism. It persisted, of course, in the dark corners of American political culture—in the wacky cosmology of the Nation of Islam and in the malevolent rantings of David Duke, the ubiquitous ex-Klansman—but that proved the point. The only Jew haters to be found were hopelessly fringe; anti-Semitism disappeared from polite conversation. Leonard Dinnerstein, a historian who devoted his life’s work to studying anti-Semitism, concluded his magnum opus, published in 1994, with the admission that his scholarly obsession was becoming a relic: “It has declined in potency and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.”
That last sentence was an expression of triumphalism, rendered in the spirit of the times. Like the end of history, the end of anti-Semitism was a post–Cold War reverie, a naive declaration of a golden age without end. American Jews now worried that they might become too accepted. The great anxiety of the fin de siècle was intermarriage.
The threat of assimilation had frightened the Orthodox Jews who came to the United States during the great wave of immigration in the last decades of the 19th century. Fathers who had fled the Pale of Settlement feared that their sons would trade ancestral traditions for the allure of American culture. (A quite popular, very American musical is energized by these anxieties.) One of those sons, however, made it his intellectual project to find a way for Jews to enjoy the bounties of American society without having to fully abandon their Jewishness.
Born in Silesia in 1882, the eldest of eight, Horace Kallen had a preordained calling: to become a rabbi like his father. But a Boston truant officer forced him, against his parents’ wishes, to attend a secular grammar school. This set him on the path to Harvard, where he paid his way by reading meters for the Dorchester Gaslight Company. Kallen never felt at ease with patrician classmates like Franklin D. Roosevelt, though the philosopher William James embraced him as a protégé.
Kallen’s breakthrough came in the course of an argument with another Jew. In 1908, the British-born playwright Israel Zangwill had a hit called The Melting-Pot, a melodrama about a pogrom survivor who sets out to marry a Christian woman in the hopes that he will no longer be haunted by his identity. This vision of assimilation was a warmed-over version of the devil’s bargain that Western Europeans had offered Jews ever since Napoleon: In exchange for the rights of citizenship, Jews would have to give up their distinctive identity.
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Kallen didn’t want to surrender his identity. He wasn’t religious, but he had read Spinoza and devoured the works of the early Zionist thinkers. At Harvard, he co-founded the Menorah Society, a Jewish affinity group. His rebuttal to Zangwill took the form of unabashed patriotism. In essays that were intellectual bombshells at the time, Kallen extolled the mongrel nature of American society, the phenomenon known as hyphenation. Harvard’s Brahmin elite believed that newcomers must assimilate in full, commit to what they called “100 percent Americanism.” But to Kallen, the hyphen was the essence of democracy. He described America as a “symphony of civilization,” an intermingling of cultures that resulted in a society far more dynamic than most of the countries back in the Old World. The genius of America was that it didn’t coerce any minority group into abandoning its marks of difference.
photo of man in glasses and bow tie
Horace Kallen, who encouraged American Jews to embrace their adopted country without sacrificing their Jewish identity (Courtesy of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio)
That argument was idealistic, though also self-interested. Kallen’s polemics implicitly targeted the Protestant monopoly controlling academia, politics, and every other corner of the establishment, which reverted to desperate measures to block the ascent of Jews, imposing quotas at universities and restrictive housing covenants in well-to-do neighborhoods. His ideas were emblematic of an emerging strain of Jewish political philosophy, a set of arguments that would define American Jewry for generations.
The sons and daughters of immigrants may have dabbled in socialism, but in the 1930s and ’40s, liberalism became the house politics of the Jewish people. Walter Lippmann, a descendant of German Jews, first used the term liberal in the American context, to describe a new center-left vision of the state that was neither socialist nor laissez-faire. Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, conceptualized a new, expansive vision of civil liberties. Lillian Wald and Henry Moskowitz co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in the belief that all minorities deserved the same protections. Jews became enthusiastic supporters of the New Deal, which staved off radical movements on the left and the right that tended to hunt for Jewish scapegoats. As a Yiddish joke went, Jewish theology consisted of die velt (“this world”), yene velt (“the world to come”), and Roosevelt.
The historian Marc Dollinger titled his 2000 narrative of Jewish liberalism Quest for Inclusion. Jews set out to achieve that goal procedurally—opposing prayer in public school, knocking down discriminatory housing laws, establishing new fair-employment rules. But it was also a project of mythmaking and dream-casting. Widely read mid-century intellectuals such as Louis Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, and Max Lerner wrote books reimagining America as the home of a benevolent centrism—tolerant, cosmopolitan, unique in the history of nations.
Reality began to resemble the myth: In the years following World War II—and especially as the world began to comprehend the extent of the Nazi genocide—a liberal consensus took hold, and anti-Semitism receded. After Auschwitz, even three-martini Jewish jokes at the country club felt tinged by the horrors. In 1937, the American edition of Roget’s Thesaurus had listed cunning, rich, extortioner, and heretic as synonyms for Jew. At that time, nearly half of Americans said Jews were less honest in business than others. By 1964, only 28 percent agreed with that assessment. It became cliché to refer to America as a “Judeo-Christian nation.” Quotas at universities fell to the side.
As anti-Semitism faded, American Jewish civilization exploded in a rush of creativity. For a time, the great Jewish novel—books by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, and Bernard Malamud, inflected with Yiddish and references to pickled herring—was the great American novel. Under the influence of Lenny Bruce, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Elaine May, Gilda Radner, Woody Allen, and many others, American comedy appropriated the Jewish joke, and the ironic sensibility contained within, as its own.
During the Golden Age, Jews created new genres of Americana, and in turn remade America’s image of itself, through the idealized vision of the heartland found in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!; the folk revival popularized by Bob Dylan, Art Garfunkel, and Paul Simon; the movies mythologizing the decency of the American Everyman produced by David O. Selznick, Louis B. Mayer, and Jack Warner. (To say that “the Jews” run Hollywood is conspiratorial; to say that Jews founded it is factual.) Only in America could Jews—Irving Berlin, George Wyle, Sammy Cahn—write the Christmas songbook.
It wasn’t just mass culture. The New York Intellectuals, a group with a name as euphemistic as it sounds, acquired a priestly authority in the realm of aesthetics and political ideas, and included the likes of Alfred Kazin, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, and Susan Sontag. Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg ushered second-wave feminism into the world. Jews became the prophetic face of American science (J. Robert Oppenheimer) and the salvific one of American medicine (Jonas Salk). The intellectual rewards of Jewish liberation could be measured in medals: Approximately 15 percent of all Nobel Prize winners are American Jews.
In the Golden Age, Jews in America embraced Israel. Enjoying their political and cultural ascendance, they looked to the new Jewish state not as a necessary refuge—they were more than comfortable on the Upper West Side and in Squirrel Hill and Brentwood—but as a powerful rebuttal to the old stereotypes about Jewish weakness, especially after the Israeli military’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. As The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman has put it, American Jews “said to themselves, ‘My God, look who we are! We have power! We do not fit the Shylock image, we are ace pilots; we are not the cowering timid Jews who get sand kicked in their faces, we are tank commanders.’ ”
A now-obscure cultural event captures, for me, this newfound sense of self and self-confidence. In 1978, ABC aired The Stars Salute Israel at 30, a kitschy prime-time variety show filmed in front of a full house at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, in Los Angeles, the same venue that hosted the Oscars. Like the Oscars, it featured an A-list slate: Barry Manilow in a white suit, surrounded by backup singers in sequins; Henry Winkler, the Fonz himself, playing a rough-hewn Israeli in a sketch; and, of course, Sammy Davis Jr. Near the conclusion, Barbra Streisand emerged in a white gown to talk via remote hookup with Golda Meir as a camera filmed the former prime minister in a book-filled room in Israel—the two most celebrated Jewish women of the century kibitzing on American TV.
photo of Barbra Streisand in white gown on stage singing into microphone with orchestra in background
Barbra Streisand performs during The Stars Salute Israel at 30 in 1978. (Wally Fong / AP)
In the early decades of Hollywood, Jewish stars had hidden behind stage names—Emanuel Goldenberg performed as Edward G. Robinson; Issur Danielovitch transformed himself into Kirk Douglas. Streisand had also changed her name, dropping the a from Barbara, but that was an instance of a diva’s bravado, not a sop to the goyim. What made her stardom so emblematic of the Golden Age was that she never allowed herself to be bullied into suppressing her Jewish identity. Her crowning achievement was Yentl, an adaptation of an Isaac Bashevis Singer short story. For the grand finale of the ABC telecast, Streisand sang “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, for 18.7 million viewers. “The good feelings and the love will always remain,” she told them.
4
the jewish vacation from history ended on September 11, 2001. It didn’t seem that way at the time. But the terror attacks opened an era of perpetual crisis, which became fertile soil where the hatred of Jews took root. Though Osama bin Laden claimed credit for the plot, that didn’t stop some people from trying to shift the blame. One theory explained in exquisitely absurd detail how Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, had toppled the Twin Towers.
But there was also a more sophisticated version of this conspiracy theory, one that had a patina of academic respectability. On the left, it became commonplace to fulminate against the neoconservatives, warmongering intellectuals said to be whispering in the ear of the American establishment, urging the invasion of Iraq and war against Iran.
This wasn’t fully untethered from reality: The neocons were a group of largely Jewish think-tank denizens and policy operatives, some of whom held top posts in President George W. Bush’s administration. But the angry talk about neocons also trafficked in dangerous old tropes. It inflated their role in world events and ascribed the worst motives to them. Men like Paul Wolfowitz, the second-highest-ranking official in Bush’s Pentagon, and William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, were portrayed by critics on the left as bamboozlers undermining the national interest in service of their stealth loyalty to Israel. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for one, took exception to the idea that Jews were pulling the strings of the United States government. “I suppose the implication of that is that the president and the vice president and myself and Colin Powell just fell off a turnip truck to take these jobs,” he said.
In 2007, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively, spelled out what others implied in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a book published by a venerable house, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, that soon arrived on the New York Times best-seller list. This was the opposite of the schmaltzy Streisand tribute—the Jewish state as not a friend but a villain surreptitiously manipulating American power to further its own ends.
One year later, Lehman Brothers, a bank founded in 1850 by the son of a Jewish cattle merchant from Bavaria, collapsed. That news was followed by the revelation that Bernie Madoff had masterminded the largest-known Ponzi scheme in history. Although politicians, on the whole, refrained from casting Jews as the primary culprits of the 2008 financial crisis—which was, in fact, systemic—a sizable portion of the public harbored this thought. Stanford University professors conducted a survey that found that nearly a quarter of the country blamed Jews for crashing the global economy. Another 38.4 percent ascribed at least some fault to “the Jews.”
In the era of perpetual crisis, a version of this narrative kept recurring: a small elite—sometimes bankers, sometimes lobbyists—maliciously exploiting the people. Such narratives helped propel Occupy Wall Street on the left and the Tea Party on the right. This brand of populist revolt had long been the stuff of Jewish nightmares. A fear of the mob suffused masterworks of the Golden Age—Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Haunted by the Holocaust and inherited memories of pogroms, these writers warned how a society might fall prey to a demagogue who tapped into prejudice.
After 2008, a version of their prophecy came to pass. The right settled on a Jewish billionaire as their villain of choice: George Soros. An idea took hold, and not just on extremist blogs. The mainstream of the Republican Party seeded the image of Soros as the “shadow puppet master,” in the words of the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. In elevating the figure of Soros and invoking him so frequently, Fox News and Republican politicians were also, intentionally or not, drawing on the deeply implanted imagery of the Jewish financier bankrolling the destruction of Christian civilization.
In 2018, Fox News began carrying images of migrant caravans headed from Central America toward Texas, a tide of humanity it described as an “invasion.” Though they had no evidence to bolster the charge, Republican politicians insinuated that the caravans were paid for by Soros. Representative Matt Gaetz tweeted a video of two men handing out cash to a line of Honduran migrants, accompanied by the question “Soros?” When President Trump was asked about Soros’s role in funding a caravan, a week after a pipe bomb was found in Soros’s mailbox, and days after the Tree of Life shooting, he told reporters, “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Soros was a central character in a new master narrative, much of it adapted from European sources. The spine of the story was borrowed from a French author named Renaud Camus, a socialist turned far-right reactionary who wrote a 2011 book called The Great Replacement, warning that elites intended to diminish the white Christian presence in Europe by flooding the continent with migrants. The Jews weren’t a central feature of Camus’ theory. But when elements of the American right embraced it, they inserted Soros and his fellow Jews as the masterminds of the elite plot. This became the basis for the chant “Jews will not replace us.”
Jews were the antagonists of the conspiracy theory because they occupied a special place in the bizarre racial hierarchy of American ethno-nationalism. Eric Ward, an activist who is among the most rigorous students of white supremacy, has put it this way: “At the bedrock of the movement is an explicit claim that Jews are a race of their own, and that their ostensible position as White folks in the U.S. represents the greatest trick the devil ever played.” That is, Jews were able to pass as white people, but they were really stealth agents working for the other side of the race war, using immigration to subvert white Christian hegemony.
This notion planted itself in the mind of Robert Bowers, a loner who lived in a suburb of Pittsburgh. He became obsessed with the work of HIAS, originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. It was formed in 1902 with the intention of easing the arrival of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms. The group’s evolution was emblematic of the trajectory of Jewish liberalism. As American Jews settled into a comfortable existence in their new land, HIAS’s mission expanded. It has field offices in more than 20 countries, including a branch on a Greek island to tend to Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan migrants. On October 19, 2018, the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh was participating in a National Refugee Shabbat, which was the brainchild of HIAS.
The event stoked Bowers’s rage. “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” he wrote on Gab, the Christian-nationalist social-media site. Just before he entered the synagogue’s sanctuary, armed with three semiautomatic pistols and an AR‑15 rifle, he posted, “Open you Eyes! It’s the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Country!!”
archival photo of room full of people sitting at tables paying attention to man lecturing and pointing to American flag
A citizenship class conducted by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, 1952 (Bettmann / Getty)
A faith in immigration—the idea of America as a sanctuary for the refugee, the belief that subsequent groups of arrivals would experience the same up-from-the-shtetl trajectory—was a core tenet of Jewish liberalism. A Jewish poet had written the lines about huddled masses inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. If America was a nation of immigrants, that made Jews quintessential Americans. But now this ideal was the basis for Jews’ vilification. At the Tree of Life synagogue, it was used to justify their slaughter.
5
in the old Jewish theory of American politics, the best defense against the anti-Semitism of the right was a united left: minorities and liberal activists locking arms. When I was young, rabbis and elders reverently told us about the earnest young Jews in chunky glasses who had jumped aboard the Freedom Rides; about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his unmissable kippah, marching right next to Martin Luther King Jr.; and about the martyrdom of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two Jews who had been murdered alongside James Chaney, a Black Mississippian, for their work registering Black Americans to vote. A coalition of the tolerant pressed the country to live up to its ideals.
Later, I would learn that those memories were a bit gauzy. In the late 1960s, former comrades began to quietly, then brusquely, discard this spirit of common cause. Younger activists in the civil-rights movement took a hard turn toward Black Power and dismissed the old liberal theory of change as a melioristic ruse. Anti-war protesters embraced the decolonization struggles of the developing world. After Israel captured the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1967, many came to view the Jewish state as a vile oppressor. (This was well before right-wing Israeli governments saturated the occupied territories with Jewish settlers.) Even as Israel’s shocking victory in the Six-Day War, 22 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, filled American Jews with pride and confidence, a meaningful portion of America’s left turned on Israel.
The turmoil of the late ’60s presaged the rupture that has occurred over the past decade or so. A new ideology has taken hold on the left, with a reordered hierarchy of concerns and an even greater skepticism of the old liberal ideals.
This rupture was propelled by the menace of Donald Trump. His election jolted his opponents to take emergency measures. The left began describing itself as the Resistance, which implied a more confrontational style than that of Nancy Pelosi floor speeches or Center for American Progress white papers.
Even before Trump took office, the Resistance announced a mass protest set to defiantly descend on the capital, what organizers called the Women’s March on Washington. In an early planning meeting, at a New York restaurant, an activist named Vanessa Wruble explained that her Judaism was the motivating force in her political engagement. But Wruble’s autobiographical statement of intent earned her a rebuke. According to Wruble, two members of the inner circle planning the march told her that Jews needed to confront their own history of exploiting Black and brown people. Tablet magazine later reported that Wruble was told that Jews needed to repent for their leading role in the slave trade—a fallacious charge long circulated by the Nation of Islam. (The two organizers denied making the reported statements.) That moment of tension never really subsided, either for Wruble or for the left.
When the march’s organizers published their “unity principles,” they emphasized the importance of intersectionality, a theory first introduced by the law professor Kimberlé W. Crenshaw. It would be insufficient, she argued, for courts to focus their efforts on one narrow target of discrimination when it takes so many forms—racism, sexism, homophobia—that tend to reinforce one another. Her analysis, incisive in the context of the law, was never intended to guide social movements. Transposed by activists to the gritty work of coalition-building, it became the basis for a new orthodoxy—one that was largely indifferent to Jews, and at times outwardly hostile.
When the Women’s March listed the various injustices it hoped to conquer on its way to a better world, anti-Semitism was absent. It was a curious omission, given the central role that Jews played in the conspiracies promoted by the MAGA right, and a telling one. Soon after the march, organizers pushed Wruble out of leadership. She later said that anti-Semitism was the reason for her ouster. (The organizers denied this charge.)
The intersectional left self-consciously rebelled against the liberalism that had animated so much of institutional Judaism, which fought to install civil liberties and civil rights enforced by a disinterested state that would protect every minority equally. This new iteration of the left considered the idea of neutrality—whether objectivity in journalism or color blindness in the courts—as a guise for white supremacy. Tolerance, the old keyword of cultural pluralism, was a form of complicity. What the world actually needed was intolerance, a more active confrontation with hatred. In the historian Ibram X. Kendi’s formulation, an individual could choose to be anti-racist or racist, an activist or a collaborator. Or as Linda Sarsour, an activist of Palestinian descent and a co-chair of the Women’s March, put it, “We are not here to be bystanders.” To be a member of this new left in good moral standing, it was necessary to challenge oppression in all its incarnations. And Israel was now definitively an oppressor.
photo of MLK in suit and tie holding up picture of three slain civil rights activists
Martin Luther King Jr. holds the photos of three civil-rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Mississippi, during 1964’s Freedom Summer. Two of them—Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman—were Jewish. (Bettmann / Getty)
The American left hadn’t always imposed such a litmus test. During the years of the Oslo peace process, groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine had no problem attending events with liberal Zionists. Back then, the debate was over the borders of Israel, not over the fact of its existence. But that peace process collapsed during the last days of the Clinton administration, and whatever good faith had existed in that brief era of summits and handshakes dissipated. Hamas unleashed a wave of suicide bombings in the Second Intifada. And in the aftermath of those deadly attacks, successive right-wing Israeli governments presided over repressive policies in the West Bank and an inhumane blockade of Gaza.
Palestinian activists and their allies began the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, pushing universities to divest from Israel. The new goal was no longer coexistence between Arabs and Jews. It was to turn Israel into an international pariah, to stop working with all Israeli institutions—not just the military, but also symphonies, theater groups, and universities. In that spirit, it became fashionable for critics of Israel to identify as “anti-Zionist.”
Within the Jewish establishment, there’s a tendency to impute anti-Semitism to anyone who describes themselves that way. That has always struck me as intellectually imprecise and, occasionally, as a rhetorical gambit to close down debate. But there’s a reason so many Jews bristle at the thought of anti-Zionism finding a home on the American left: Zionist can start to sound like a synonym for Jew. Zionists stand accused of the same crimes that anti-Semites have attached to Jews since the birth of Christianity; Jews are portrayed as omnipotent, bloodthirsty baby-killers. Knowing the historical echoes, it’s hard not to worry that the anger might fixate on the Jewish target closest at hand—which, indeed, it has.
In 2014, dorms at NYU where religiously observant Jews lived received mock eviction notices—“We reserve the right to destroy all remaining belongings,” read the flyer slipped under doors—as if intimidating college kids with unknown politics somehow represented a justifiable reprisal for Israeli-government action in the West Bank. The same notices appeared at Emory University, in Atlanta, in 2019. At the University of Vermont and SUNY New Paltz, groups that helped sexual-assault survivors were accused of purging pro-Israel students from their ranks. “If you don’t support Palestinian liberation you don’t support survivors,” the Vermont group exclaimed. Years before October 7, students at Tufts University, outside Boston, and the University of Southern California moved to impeach elected Jews in student government over their support for Israel’s existence. This wasn’t normal politics. It was evidence of bigotry.
Among the primary targets of the activists were the Hillel centers present on most college campuses. These centers occasionally coordinate trips to Israel and, on some campuses, sponsor student groups supportive of Israel. Those facts led pro-Palestinian activists to describe Hillel as an arm of the “Israeli war machine.” At SUNY Stony Brook, activists sought to expel Hillel from campus, arguing, “If there were Nazis, white nationalists, and KKK members on campus, would their identity have to be accepted and respected?” At Rice University, in Texas, an LGBTQ group severed ties with Hillel because it allegedly made students feel unsafe. What made this incident darkly comic is that Hillel couldn’t be more progressive on issues of sexual freedom. What made it so worrying is that Hillel’s practical purpose is not to defend Israel, but to provide Shabbat dinners and a space for ritual and prayer. To condemn Hillel is to condemn Jewish religious life on campus.
Gal Beckerman: The left abandoned me
As exclusion of Jews became a more regular occurrence, the leadership of the left, and of universities for that matter, had little to say about the problem. To give the most generous explanation: Jews simply didn’t fit the analytic framework of the new left.
At its core, the intersectional left wanted to smash power structures. In the American context, it would be hard to place Jews among the ranks of the oppressed; in the Israeli context, they can be cast as the oppressor. Nazi Germany definitively excluded Jews from a category we now call “whiteness.” Today, Jews are treated in sectors of the left as the epitome of whiteness. But any analysis that focuses so relentlessly on the role of privilege, as the left’s does, will be dangerously blind to anti-Semitism, because anti-Semitism itself entails an accusation of privilege. It’s a theory that regards the Jew as an all-powerful figure in society, a position acquired by underhanded means. In the annals of Jewish history, accusations of privilege are the basis for hate, the kindling for pogroms. But universities too often ignored this lesson from the past. Instead, they acted, as the British comedian David Baddiel put it in the title of his prescient book about progressive anti-Semitism, as if “Jews don’t count.”
6
in the death spiral of liberalism, extremism on the right begets extremism on the left, which begets further extremism on the right. To protest the censoriousness of the new progressives, right-wing edgelords and trolls attempted to seize the mantle of liberty.
The most powerful of the edgelords was Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter ostensibly to save discourse from the woke mob. To make good on his noble aims, he reversed bans that the platform’s previous regime had imposed on the most vile anti-Semites, including the white nationalist Patrick Howley, the comic Sam Hyde, and the Daily Stormer’s founder, Andrew Anglin. By restoring them to the site, Musk was, in essence, conceding that their words shouldn’t have been considered taboo in the first place. He legitimized their claims of victimhood, the sense that they had been excluded only because they’d offended the wrong people.
In fact, Musk hinted that he shared this conspiratorial view of censorship. In May 2023, he retweeted an aphorism that he attributed to Voltaire: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” Those words were actually uttered by a neo-Nazi named Kevin Alfred Strom, not the French philosopher. It shouldn’t have been hard to imagine that the words had dubious origins, because they captured a view of the world in which shadowy forces furtively censor their enemies.
Nor was it hard to imagine that those shadowy forces might include the Anti-Defamation League, which relentlessly called attention to the proliferation of Jew hatred on Twitter under Musk’s ownership. Musk threatened to sue the group, accusing it of trying to “kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.” The Jews, he all but spelled out, were those who couldn’t be criticized—which, by the logic of the Strom quote, made them society’s secret masters.
Musk wasn’t alone in this argument. In 2022, Dave Chappelle used the opening monologue of Saturday Night Live to muse about the cancellation of the hip-hop artist Ye (formerly Kanye West), who had lost a deal with Adidas after he promised, among other things, to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” Chappelle exuded empathy for Ye. “I don’t want a sneaker deal, because the minute I say something that makes those people mad, they’re going to take my sneakers away … I hope they don’t take anything away from me,” he said, adding with a smile and a conspiratorial whisper: “Whoever they are.” There was no mystery about his use of pronouns: “I’ve been to Hollywood … It’s a lot of Jews. Like, a lot.” He went on, “You could maybe adopt the delusion that the Jews run show business.”
photo of Dave Chapelle with microphone opening SNL with band in background
Dave Chappelle opens Saturday Night Live, November 2022. (Will Heath / NBC / Getty)
Chappelle practices shock comedy as a form of shock therapy: The authoritarian impositions of the left justify offensive comments, which are a form of defiance. He has taken a genuine problem—anti-liberalism on the left—and used it as a pretext for smuggling anti-Semitism into acceptable discourse.
That Chappelle and Musk see fit to indulge anti-Semitism in order to protect freedom of speech contains a dark irony. In the 20th century, starting with Louis Brandeis’s dissents on the Supreme Court, Jews stood at the vanguard of the movement to protect “subversive advocacy,” even when it came at their own expense. This could be understood as a defense of the Talmudic tradition of disagreement, what Rabbi David Wolpe calls the “Jewish sacrament” of debate. The movement culminated in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977, when the ACLU deployed the lawyer David Goldberger to sue to allow neo-Nazis to march through the Chicago suburb, which was filled with Holocaust survivors. The Jewish community was hardly unanimous on the Skokie question—unanimity would have been inconsistent with the tradition—but the ACLU position reflected a commitment to free speech officially espoused by major Jewish communal institutions in the postwar years.
In the Jewish vision of free speech, open interpretation and endless debate mark the path to knowledge; the proliferation of discourse is the antidote to bad ideas. But in the reality of social media, free speech also consists of Jew hatred that masquerades as comic entertainment, a way to capture the attention of young men eager to rebel against the strictures of what they decry as wokeness.
When I asked Oren Segal, who runs the ADL’s Center on Extremism, to point me to a state-of-the-art anti-Semitic hate group, he cited the Goyim Defense League. The spitefully silly name reflects its methods, which include pranks and stunts broadcast on its website, Goyim TV. Its leader sometimes dresses as an ultra-Orthodox Jew, calling himself the “Honest Rabbi.” In one demented piece of guerrilla theater, he apologizes on behalf of the Jewish people for fabricating stories about the Holocaust. The group has attempted to popularize the slogan “Kanye is right about the Jews,” hanging a banner proclaiming it on a freeway overpass in Los Angeles and projecting it on the side of a football stadium in Jacksonville, Florida, as 75,000 fans filed out. GDL hecklers have stood in front of Florida synagogues and Holocaust museums, shouting, “Leave our country. Go back to Israel” and “Heil Hitler.”
In a short span, as the edgelords successfully pushed the limits, American culture became permissive regarding what could be said about Jews. Anti-Semitism crept back into the realm of the acceptable.
7
for a brief moment, it felt as if the October 7 attacks might reverse the tide, because it should have been impossible not to recoil at the footage of Hamas’s pogrom. Israel had yet to launch its counterattack, so there was no war to condemn. Still, even in this moment of moral clarity, the campus left couldn’t muster compassion. At Harvard, more than 30 student groups signed a letter on October 7, holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Days later, the incoming head of NYU’s new Center for Indigenous Studies described the attacks as “affirming.” This sympathy for Hamas, when its crimes were freshest, was a glimpse of what was about to come.
On the afternoon of October 11, Rebecca Massel, a reporter at the Columbia Daily Spectator, received a tip. She was told that a woman, her face wrapped in a bandanna, had assaulted an Israeli student in front of Butler Library in a dispute over flyers depicting hostages held by Hamas. The woman’s alleged weapon was a broomstick. Her battle cry was said to be “Fuck all of you prick crackers.” After striking him with the broomstick, the man said, she attempted to punch him in the face. By the end of the fracas, she had bruised one of his hands and sprained a finger on the other.
Massel began to report out the story. She spoke with the victim, who told her, “Now, we have to handle the situation that campus is not a safe place for us anymore.” She spoke with the NYPD, which confirmed that it had arrested the woman, who was charged with hate crimes and has pleaded not guilty. Massel and her editors curbed their impulse to quickly score a scoop, double-checking every sentence. They didn’t publish the story until 3 a.m. on October 12.
Later that morning, Massel, a sophomore studying political science, was sitting in her Contemporary Civilization seminar when her phone lit up. It was her editor, calling her back. She had texted him to get his sense of the response her article had elicited, so she stepped out of class to hear what he had to say. She had already caught a glimpse of posts on social media, harping on her Jewishness and accusing her of having a “religious agenda.” She’d worried that these weren’t stray attacks. The editor told her the paper had been inundated. The messages it had received about the article were vitriolic, but he didn’t give her any specifics. Before returning to class, she checked her own email. A message read, “I hope you fucking get what you deserve … you racist freak.”
Read: The juvenile viciousness of campus anti-Semitism
For as long as she could remember, Massel had wanted to be a journalist. She’d founded the newspaper at her elementary school. During high school, she’d read She Said, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book about investigating Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults. The New York Times reporters insisted that they were journalists, not feminist journalists. Massel vowed to take the same approach. The accusations of bias, therefore, didn’t just feel anti-Semitic. They felt like an attack on the integrity that she hoped would define her work.
But anger was an emotion for another day. At that moment, she was overwhelmed by fear. She thought about what the Israeli student had told her the day before. A dean had apparently advised him to leave campus because the university couldn’t guarantee his safety. Now Massel felt unsure of her own physical well-being. She decided that she would stay with her parents until she could get a better sense of the fury directed at her.
In her unnerved state, Massel threw herself into her journalism. She decided to interview Jewish students, from all corners of the university, to gauge their mood. After the office of public safety assured her that she could return to campus, she parked herself in the second-floor lounge of Columbia’s Hillel center. When she overheard a student mention an incident, she would approach them and ask to talk.
Over the course of two weeks, Massel spoke with 54 students. What she amassed was a tally of fear. Thirteen told her that they had felt harassed or attacked, either virtually or in person. (One passerby had barked “Fuck the Jews” at a small group of students.) Thirty-four reported that they felt targeted or unsafe on campus. (At one precarious moment, the Hillel center went into lockdown, out of concern that protesters might descend on the building.) Twelve said that they had suppressed markers of their Jewish identity, wearing a baseball cap over a yarmulke or tucking a Star of David necklace into a sweatshirt. She learned that a group of students had created a group-chat system to arrange escorts, so that no Jew would have to walk across campus alone if they felt unsafe.
Perhaps even more ominously, Massel uncovered incidents in which teachers expressed hostility toward Jewish students. One Israeli student told Massel that a professor had once said to him, “It’s such a shame that your people survived just in order to perpetuate another genocide.” When I made my own calls to students and faculty, I heard similar stories, especially instances of teaching assistants seizing their bully pulpit to sermonize. One TA wrote to their students, “We are watching genocide unfold in real time, after a systematic 75+ years of oppression of the Palestinian people … It feels ridiculous to hold section today, but I’ll see you all on Zoom in a bit.” One student left class in the middle of a professor’s broadside against Israel in a required course in the Middle East–studies department. Afterward, he sent an email to the professor explaining his departure, to which the professor wrote back, saying they could discuss it in class later. When the student returned, the professor read his email aloud to the whole class, and invited everyone to discuss the exchange. It felt like an act of deliberate humiliation.
When I talked with Jewish students at Columbia, I was struck by how they, too, tended to speak in the language of the intersectional left. They described their “lived experience” and trauma: the pain they felt on October 7 as they learned of the attacks; the fear that consumed them when they heard protesters call for the annihilation of Israel. They sincerely expected their university to respond with unabashed empathy, because that’s how it had responded in the past to other terrible events. Instead, Columbia greeted their pain with the soon-to-be-infamous concept of “context,” including a panel discussion that explained the attacks as the product of a long struggle. This historicizing felt as if it not only discounted Jewish students’ suffering but also regarded it as a moral failing. (In early November, in response to criticism, Columbia announced that it would create a task force on anti-Semitism.)
photo from back of student in kippah and backpack facing protest and people in street
A Jewish Columbia student watches a pro-Palestine demonstration outside the gates of the university, November 2023. (Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis / Getty)
There are many reasons for the unusual intensity of events at Columbia, which is located in a city that is a traditional bastion of the American left; its campus is where the late Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said achieved legendary status. But Columbia is also a graphic example of the collapse of the liberalism that had insulated American Jews: It is a microcosm of a society that has lost its capacity to express disagreements without resorting to animus.
The events on campus that followed October 7 were a sad coda to the Golden Age. When I was a student at Columbia, in the ’90s, the Ivy League was a primary plot point in a triumphalist tale. During the first half of the 20th century, Columbia had deployed extraordinary institutional energy to limit the presence of Je
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVMbVTDF-NI
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Cohen added: "I just fundamentally disagree with Jonathan on this. The war and the continuation of the war is the responsibility of Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization, which continues to hold and abuse the hostages, which doesn't use its tunnels to protect the innocent civilians of Gaza but uses it to hide themselves and allow Palestinians to die. I think the war is tragic and awful, and the loss of civilian life is awful, but I blame Hamas for that."
But our partisan Sen. Schumer sells out Netanyahu for Muslim votes in Michigan.
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https://www.janglo.net/item/NeqcSuJBm1U?fbclid=IwAR25RsW15tW2bTJcyZnCkgtyOJpV6iwV3Y0nRCHEq6HjTsXBK2e_MYSOKNM
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https://www.foxnews.com/media/oscar-celebrities-accused-wearing-symbol-bloodlust-originating-palestinians-lynching-israelis?fbclid=IwAR2NVWiYkQAGs7EXE46b78M6LrD3_Oj_J29GCuqdayHqmTK4uhC2AnWAdGE
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Fascinating story about a little known Japanese gent that journeyed from Shinto and Bushido to Christianity and ultimately Judaism, saving many Jews from the pogroms the Gestapo sought to impose in Japan:
The Japanese Abraham
Jewish Commentary
by Meir Y. Soloveichik
There’s a bestselling book by the psychologist Robert Cialdini titled Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. In one point in this largely non-Jewish book, we are shown a photograph from 1941 of two rabbis from Eastern Europe who found themselves in front of the Japanese foreign ministry in Tokyo. They were two of the leaders from a group of thousands of yeshiva students who had been given transit visas by the Japanese consul in Kovno, Lithuania. His name was Chiune Sugihara. The visas allowed the students to flee across Europe and Asia and land in Kobe, Japan. Two of them were my maternal grandparents, Rabbi Shmuel Dovid and Nachama Warshavchik.
Germany was, of course, then allied with Japan. Cialdini writes, “The Nazis had sent Josef Meisinger, a colonel in the Gestapo known as ‘the Butcher of Warsaw’ for ordering the execution of 16,000 Poles, to Tokyo. Upon his arrival in April 1941, Meisinger began pressing for a policy of brutality toward the Jews under Japan’s rule—a policy he stated he would gladly help design and enact. Uncertain at first of how to respond and wanting to hear all sides, high-ranking members of Japan’s military government called upon the Jewish refugee community to send two leaders to a meeting that would influence their future significantly.”
Two rabbis came down from Kobe to Tokyo, and, in what must have seemed a surreal moment, met with the Japanese generals. The rabbis received an utterly unanswerable question: Tell us, why do the Nazis hate you so much? One of the rabbis was frozen, terrified, but the second, Shimon Kalisch, known as the Amshinover Rebbe, remained calm. Cialdini writes:
Rabbi Kalisch’s knowledge of human nature had equipped him to deliver the most impressive persuasive communication I have encountered in over thirty years of studying the process: “Because,” he said calmly, “we are Asian, like you.”
The older rabbi’s response had a powerful effect on the Japanese officers. After a silence, they conferred among themselves and announced a recess. When they returned, the most senior military official rose and granted the reassurance the rabbis had hoped to bring home to their community: “Go back to your people. Tell them we will provide for their safety and peace. You have nothing to fear while in Japanese territory.” And so it was.
The photograph featured in Cialdini’s book is (at least in my Kindle version) incomplete, cut off; in the original, there is a Japanese gentleman standing to one side of Rabbi Kalisch. This man’s name is Setsuzo Kotsuji, and his tale is told in his extraordinary 1962 autobiography, From Tokyo To Jerusalem, which is entirely out of print. Kotsuji’s obscurity is an enormous shame, because the book is much more than a memoir. It is, in a certain sense, a religious classic, the story of a man raised in the religion of his ancestors who turned to the Jewish faith while still retaining a deep respect for his own Japanese past. These elements merged together to form one of the great heroic personalities of the 20th century.
Kotsuji was truly an Asian Jew: From Tokyo to Jerusalem is not published under the name Setsuzo Kotsuji, but rather Abraham Kotsuji, the name he would ultimately adopt in converting to Judaism. This is apt, as one of the mesmerizing themes of the book is how his own life mirrors that of Abraham, and how his heroism allows for the Abrahamic journeys of so many others to come to fruition. Discovering Kotsuji’s story has given me a better understanding of my own Abrahamic familial identity.
Setsuzo Kotsuji was born in Kyoto in 1899 to a family that was bound up with the Shinto faith and with the Kamo Shinto shrine of Kyoto, where for many generations his own family had served as priests. “I was raised,” he tells us, “in that ancient religion of Shinto, a religion existing already at the dawn of the history of Japan.” He adds that the “Kotsuji family, according to tradition, dates back to 678 A.D., when the Kamo shrine in the Kamo section of Kyoto was dedicated.” By his generation, the Kotsujis were no longer priests, but his father did dedicate himself, and then train his son Setsuzo, to perform for the family one of the major rites of Shinto, the “lighting of the sacred fire.”
Writing about himself in third person, he describes one of the earliest and elemental memories of his life:
The first of these images is symbolic and prophetic. The baby Setschan is perhaps four. He sees two flickering lights—whether they are oil lamps or candles he cannot tell. He hears a voice reciting words unintelligible to his small mind, but it’s recognizable as the voice of his father. The image is a pair of oil lamps, wavering on the Shinto altar, and the voice is the short prayer of evening. The image will haunt Setschan for the rest of his life. He needs merely recall it to invoke a mood of solemnity, of awe, a deep religious feeling which neither teacher nor preacher could ever have taught him.
What this means is that even as Kotsuji would ultimately embrace a different faith, the experience of Shinto as a child, and his reverence for the past, would continue to guide him on his journey. The same can be said, he tells us, for the moral code he encountered in his community and his family: Bushido. This is “the way of the samurai,” and Kotsuji insists it is misunderstood as relating merely to military matters, for it is actually a code of honor and chivalry. Bushido is far more than a code of war,” he writes. “It is difficult not to love and respect the man who adheres to the genuine Bushido code.”
This, then, is the early life of Setsuzo Kotsuji. But suddenly an Abrahamic element introduced itself. Though Abraham was called by God at the age of 75, the rabbinic tradition describes how his own religious journey to monotheism began through his own questioning as a child. The same can be said for Kotsuji. He happened to come upon a Bible in a bookstore and started to read. He was, he tells us in his memoir, confused by its description of a single God creating the world, but then, he writes, one passage in particular suddenly moved him.
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” What God? I asked myself. What does the combination “Lord God” mean in the second chapter?… I skipped a few pages, turning at random, and stopped without plan or design at Chapter 12. There my eyes fell upon the words, “Now the Lord said unto Abram. Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto the land I will shew thee. And will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee. I will bless those that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee; and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.”
At that moment something great and deep took hold of my empty mind. I knew almost nothing about Israel and her destiny, nothing of the history of the Jewish people. Yet the pages of the book I read to that point seemed to culminate in this great call…. I did not understand it exactly, and I was not sure precisely what was meant by the blessing. Yet the notion of Abraham breaking away from his home to go on a journey from which he could not return, as the chosen instrument of the Lord, inspired me and moved me deeply.
Thus did Setsuzo Kotsuji discover the beginnings of the Jewish people, when Abram is asked in Mesopotamia to journey to a faraway land, to a holy land. While this Bible he had discovered contained both Jewish and Christian scripture, he was drawn particularly to the texts of the Old Testament, because “there was something familiar about it to my young Japanese mind.”
One of the most striking aspects of Kotsuji’s memoir is the fact that he was particularly inspired by the section of the Hebrew book that many modern Jews, let alone non-Jews, find irrelevant. That is Leviticus, which describes the ritual to be performed in the Tabernacle, and ultimately the Temple in Jerusalem. The rituals involve an altar, incense, and the kindling of the oil lamps in the temple candelabra. It is therefore not surprising, given his own past, that the book struck him. “Leviticus,” he writes, “reminded me of Shinto,” adding that in Shinto, “there is a distinction made between holy and unclean, equivalent to the Hebraic kodesh and tame. It is not an exaggeration to say that the religion is a kind of Hebrew Shinto.”
In discovering this Hebrew faith, he knew he wished to embrace it. Weeping, he told his mother that he could not participate in Shinto rituals because he found what he called “the Shinto of Israel.” While his mother had never heard of “Israel,” her response was striking. “Well,” she said, “whatever the name and whatever the religion I have faith in your good nature. You cannot grow up to be a bad man.” His father responded likewise. His mother told him: “Your father admits that you are doing well these days. He thinks it may be due to the book you are so eagerly reading. He says that if this is so, it must be an excellent book, and the religion in it is good. And if God is only One, he would have it only that way. You may go ahead with your new faith, only remember your ancestors, and be proud of your great heritage.”
This, in turn, had an impact on Setsuzo for the rest of his life: “My parting from the Shinto ritual was a grave loss for both her and my father; yet out of love for me they found the goodness to make it a peaceful one, one which did not rupture our relationship. Their intelligent attitude left me forever with a good feeling about Shinto.”
Kostsuji originally embraced Christianity, the only biblically based faith he found in Japan. In 1916, he went to Kyoto, where he studied in an American Presbyterian college for seven years. There he learned English, Latin, German, and Greek—but not the language of the people with whom he had been for so long fascinated. He then journeyed to Hokkaido, the northernmost of the four islands of Japan, and met and married a woman of the Christian community there, Mineko Iwane.
As a Christian, Kotsuji embraced the role of a minister of the Gospel in Gifu, a town in central Japan, but his ultimate dreams led him to America, where he felt he could find someone qualified to teach him Hebrew. And here another amazing parallel to the original Abraham emerges. The original covenantal Abraham, as we know, had a covenantal partner, Sarah; and Kotsuji’s own wife Mineko sought to support his journey with her one source of wealth: exquisite kimonos that her father had given her through the years. He describes the conversation with his wife:
I will sell my kimonos.
No, I said, I can’t allow you to give up anything so important to you.
Did Abraham’s wife carry many kimonos with her when she followed her husband from Ur? she demanded.
No, I admitted.
Then I will follow the example of Sarah, she said.
Thus, just as Abram in Genesis went with Sarai his wife far away from his father’s home in Mesopotamia to the other end of the known earth, Setsuzo and Mineko went far away from the land of their forefathers.
In 1927, they sailed for San Francisco, where he first learned of Judaism existing in communal form. “To me, this simple fact was a stirring piece of news,” he writes. “It was confirmation that the religion of the Old Testament was alive, was immediate, and was practiced in some measure at least as it had been thousands of years before.” He then went on to Auburn Theological Seminary in New York. Hebrew was not part of the required curriculum, so he had to take that as an addition, or as he put it, “I resolved to study my Hebrew from eight at night until two in the morning.”
He finished all Auburn had to offer in a year and a half, and then chose to study with a Semitics scholar at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. He learned to drive and bought an old Oldsmobile for forty bucks. It could barely move, and driving with his wife through Gallup, New Mexico—known in American musical lore as one of the places you can stop if you want to “get your kicks on Route 66”—with only 16 cents left to their name, the car died on the main street. And then, as with Abraham, a miracle occurred:
Despair in my heart, I looked around and saw that I had been vouchsafed a miracle. The car had given up the ghost directly in front of a Japanese restaurant. During the several days we spent in Gallup, waiting for money to come from a friend in Berkeley, the townspeople received us cordially and took good care of us. If they still live, my gratitude goes out to Mr. Yoshimi and Mr. Hayashi, of Gallup.
Thus were they saved by two Japanese Americans living in Gallup, and another biblical parallel was made manifest. For if there is any element that appears in the biblical tale of Abraham’s family, it is that angels, literal angels or human messengers of the Divine, present themselves at various moments to help figures on their journey.
In Berkeley, Kotsuji finished his thesis on Semitics. He and his wife returned to Japan in 1931 and taught Old Testament and Semitic languages at Ayoma Gakuin University in Tokyo. Soon, however, he was struck with typhoid, which led him to lose his job. In 1934, he founded his own institute in Tokyo, the Institute of Biblical Research. In 1937, he published what was the first Hebrew grammar in Japanese and set the stage for his becoming the greatest Hebrew authority in Japan—or in a certain sense, the only Hebrew authority in Japan.
Then, at the end of the 1930s, he was offered a job by a man by the name of Yosuke Matsuoka, who was the head of the South Manchuria Railway. Knowing that there was a substantial Jewish presence in Manchuria, Matsuoka felt he needed a guide to Jewish issues. Of course, Kotsuji didn’t know any Jews at the time, but in Manchuria he actually found himself among a vibrant Jewish community. Soon after, however, he lost his job, when Yosuke Matsuoka became the foreign minister of wartime Japan; because Matsuoka had hired him, he writes, he was bound by tradition to depart as well. Again, we might have thought this would have been a professional setback for Kotsuji, but the fact that he had gotten to know the future foreign minister of Japan would prove providential.
Kotsuji moved to Kamakura, a town in Tokyo Bay. It was then that he heard of the arrival of the Jews in Kobe: Jews who, having received the visas from Sugihara in Kovno in the beginning of the 1940s, suddenly found themselves on an Abrahamic journey of their own. They, too, had been called to leave their home and to make their way across the ends of the earth to a place Providence had prepared. Jews who had never been anywhere in their lives boarded the trans-Siberian railway, crossed Europe and Asia to Vladivostok, and then for three days took a ferry across the Sea of Japan.
We have to imagine what it was for these Jewish rabbinical students and rabbis to discover Japan, how different from Poland it was. And perhaps one difference stood out above all: In Japan, trains left and arrived on schedule. The ferry arrived at the coastal city of Tsuruga on Friday afternoon, with the Sabbath only several hours away. As Marvin Tokayer describes in his book The Fugu Plan, the Amshinover Rebbe refused to board. Tokayer tells us of one of the Jews who had come to greet him: “Rebbe,” he said, “you needn’t worry about not being safely in Kobe by 5:23. Japanese trains are extremely punctual. We will arrive at 4:15, in plenty of time.” Tokayer adds, “The old man had no experience with Japanese trains, but he had had a great deal of experience with Polish trains.” They never went anywhere on time.
As the train began pulling out at exactly the time for which departure had been called, the Rebbe changed his mind:
With more hope in his heart than confidence, he stepped aboard the train as it inched forward. As if suddenly released from an invisible force, the refugees raced for the train, jumping through the doors, scrambling through the windows, clinging to the railings as it slowly gathered momentum. By the time the final car had passed the end of the platform, even the slowest had managed to get aboard. The engineer shook his head in amazement at the customs of these strange foreigners and accelerated to normal departure speed.
Thus did these Jews arrive in Kobe. But they faced a terrible problem. Sugihara’s visas were transit visas, officially given for those traveling to Curaçao (in the Eastern Caribbean, off the coast of Venezuela) as an ultimate destination. But these transit visas would expire after 10 days. Of course, they had nowhere to go. Thus it was that in desperation these Jews, arriving in Japan, turned to a Japanese person who had had experience with Jews.
Kotsuji tells us that “the Kobe Jewish committee had heard of me through my work in Manchuria…was it possible, they asked, for me to intervene.” To represent foreigners in Japan was at this point dangerous. But in perhaps the most important passage in his memoir, one that reveals profoundly who this remarkable man was, Kotsuji tells us his two sources of inspiration in deciding to take action. First, the Bushido, the samurai moral code his parents had taught him; and second, the Hebrew Bible: “There is a Bushido saying which goes ‘it is cowardice not to do, seeing one ought’; running way from the trouble went against the grain of my youthful samurai trained notions of honor. Further supporting me were words of the Old Testament: ‘the grass withereth, but the word of God shall stand forever.’”
We must pause to ponder the passage, to marvel at the merging of two different cultures and traditions in this act of heroism, the small boy merging with the profound moral adult.
Kotsuji went to the foreign ministry and met everyone, but in vain. Then he met his former boss, the foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, and said, “Now I have come to the minister himself, to tell him of my sorrow.” Matsuoka asked to meet for lunch, far away from the foreign ministry. During this meeting, he advised Kotsuji that if he really wanted to extend the Jewish visitors’ visas, he should seek instead the approval of local authorities in Kobe, the police there. Thus, for a period of several months, Kotsuji became the most unusual of commuters, traveling from the Tokyo suburbs every 10 days, wining and dining the local officials. In so doing, he became an intimate of the Eastern European Jews who had arrived there. As he tells us, “I traveled from Kamakura to Kobe—a trip of twelve hours—once or twice a week….The police became most cooperative. They allowed the refugees to open a Talmud Torah [a Jewish school] and were as helpful as they dared to be.”
Thus did Kotsuji help ensure the well-being of my grandparents and so many others, until, later in the year, when they were moved by Japan to occupied Shanghai. Throughout, he tended to their needs, including when the lay leaders of the Jewish community were telephoned in Tokyo and asked to send some of their most prominent figures to meet with the department of military affairs. Incredibly, Kotsuji then chose to publish a book in Japan during the war, a book responding to Nazi calumnies against the Jews. He titled his book The True Character of the Jewish People—which led to much hardship and great risk to his life during the war.
At the end of the 1950s, he chose to convert to Judaism, journeying to Jerusalem to do so:
Some of my Jewish friends questioned my decision. Why adopt a religion which is so likely to bring troubles and sorrow? My response was that I would come to Judaism with joy and pride. From my suffering for the Jewish cause, my attachment to Judaism had grown and grown, and with it had grown my affection for the Jewish people. My unshaken belief in One God lived together in my heart with the love of his people. It seemed only natural for me to become one of them.
Kotsuji was circumcised when he was almost 60, taking the Jewish name of Abraham. As documented by David Mandelbaum in his book From Lublin to Shanghai, after his conversion, Kotsuji was welcomed as a Jew by one of the most famous rabbis in Israel, whom he had first met in Kobe, Chaim Shmuelevitz. Then Kotsuji delivered a speech in Hebrew, the Hebrew he loved, citing Ruth: “My people shall be your people, and your God my God.”
When he passed away 50 years ago, Kotsuji was buried on a mountain in Jerusalem, known as Har HaMenuchot. On another mountain in Jerusalem lies the grave of my grandfather, who after the war went from Shanghai to America and then Israel. Both of them—Kotsuji and my grandfather—had made journeys of faith around the world, journeys from their original home, just like the original Abraham. And just like the original Abraham, both their journeys ended in the Holy Land. And the intersection of these Abrahamic journeys had a direct effect on my own life.
Here we have a man raised to honor his ancestral heritage but who cherished the scripture of Israel; a man who knew Japanese and Hebrew; a man who loved Abraham’s journey and suddenly found Jews on a miraculous journey of their own; a man inspired to act by the combination of samurai sayings and Semitic scripture; a man who paved his own unique path and suddenly was providentially positioned to help thousands of others in one precise moment.
Do I not owe Kotsuji the gratitude, as a descendant of those Jews, to include him in the picture that is my own life, my own sense of self? If Kotsuji is cut out of the picture of Cialdini’s book, if he is largely unknown, does that not make me all the more obligated to include him in the picture that is my own family history?
The story of Kotsuji, interestingly, has been recently more publicized in Japan than in America, thanks to the gifted Japanese actor Jundai Yamada, who recently wrote a book about him. And in 2022, a member of the Israeli Knesset traveled to Japan to bestow a letter of recognition upon Kotsuji’s then 91-year-old daughter.
But we in America need to remember Kotsuji again, especially in the difficult time facing the Jewish people, when the anti-Semitism that Kotsuji stood against is rearing its ugly head around the world. We also know that Kotsuji would have seen, in the Jewish resiliency and unity now reflected in the Holy Land, in Israel, and around the world, what he called in his book the “true character of the Jewish people.” Thanks to his book, I will remember Abraham Kotsuji, a beacon of moral clarity in a dark time, illustrating how, then as now, we Jews remember who stood against anti-Semitism, who stood with us at difficult moments.
It is reported that when Setsuzo Kotsuji passed away he recognized the complexity of his story by leaving this final statement to his family: “Perhaps in a hundred years, someone will understand me.” It is now 50 years since his death. Let us seek to understand, and commemorate Kotsuji’s life with gratitude and reverence.
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What a wonderful find!
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https://www.foxnews.com/media/michael-rapaport-debra-messing-denounce-oscar-winners-speech-450-jewish-entertainers
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https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2024/03/19/trump-jews-who-vote-democratic-after-schumer-hate-their-religion/
I am thinking
some jews with regards to Gaza may truly be sympathic to the images of so many people dying, but ignoring the reality there is no choice (IMO)
but I think Trump also misses this point:
for the liberal American Jews their religion is not Judaism as much as it is love of the Democrat party.
for them the party is first foremost.
for me this is beyond frustration.
look at CD's recent post about scum Weissman. He is a front and center example of the Jews who live breath and die for the DNC.
I find it difficult to understand them and can only conclude it is self righteous virtue signaling and also definitely a from of narsicissm
" I am a better human being, a better citizen then thou"
since I vote with the poor the downtrodden those with less means ...blah blah blah
the fact the DNC does far more harm then good they refuse to see . like a race horse with side blinders.