Anti-semitism & Jews

[G M]

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.

[rachelg]

http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/01/lincolnwood-synagogue-temple-vandalize-graffiti.html


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.

[ccp]

Many thanks to the perpetrators.

This just makes Jewish resolve even stronger.

[Crafty_Dog]

I am INFIDEL DOG OF THE NEVER AGAIN BRIGADES!!!

[G M]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[G M]

Anyone who doubts the fanaticism of Iran needs to read up on how they cleared minefields in the Iran-Iraq war.

[nonkosherdog]

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

[HUSS]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[G M]

http://hotair.com/archives/2009/01/27/pure-nazism-muslim-cleric-celebrates-the-holocaust-on-egyptian-tv/

No denial here.

[Crafty_Dog]

 

[nonkosherdog]

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.

[G M]

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.

[G M]

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

[rachelg]

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.

[G M]

So 20 years snuggled up to Wright was what for Barry-O? Who is he loyal to?

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[G M]

- 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

[rachelg]

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. 

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[G M]

- 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
722329

[Crafty_Dog]

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

           

[nonkosherdog]

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

[JDN]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

~~~~~~
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

[rachelg]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[rachelg]

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".

[rachelg]

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....”

[Crafty_Dog]

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

[rachelg]

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

[rachelg]

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

[Crafty_Dog]

 

[HUSS]

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.

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[JDN]

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.

[ccp]

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.   

[rachelg]

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.”

[rachelg]

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]

[Body-by-Guinness]

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

[JDN]

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.

[Crafty_Dog]

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.”

[Crafty_Dog]

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.

[G M]

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?

[G M]

http://www.bizzyblog.com/wp-images/TUCChamasColumn072207.jpg

Great reading for a future president.

[G M]

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". 

[rachelg]

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.   

[G M]

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.